Product Lifecycle
Special credit for this process goes to Liz Rutz and the "Avengers" team at WW!
Process Introduction
When it comes to process, I am a firm believer in following Design Thinking Methodologies that put the customer at the center of all we do.
Customer insights and data feed into each stage of the process. Using ideation, rapid prototyping, qualitative concept validation, A/B testing, and other experimentation techniques, we put ideas in front of customers quickly to get feedback and use this to inform each stage as we move through the process.
This allows us to build confidence that our solutions are meeting customer needs as we go through the process, and reduce risk of missing the mark and wasting valuable time and development effort.
Step 1: Product Strategy
Working with Product and Tech leadership, I am accustomed to translating business priorities, customer data, qual & quant insights, and market research in order to define a robust product strategy and vision that can serve as the north star inspiration for our team.
From there, we kickoff any necessary workstreams (epics) that will allow us to action on this vision, breaking projects (stories) down as necessary to score & prioritize. This kickoff is where the cross functional team reviews each project and agrees which phase the project will fall into:
Problem Definition: Undefined Problem, Undefined Solution
Solution Exploration: Defined Problem, Undefined (or partially defined) Solution
Launch & Learn: Defined Problem, Defined Solution
Step 2: Design Thinking
Special credit to Stephen Gates, who introduced us to this cycle of Design Thinking.
Depending on which stage a project is in, Design Thinking might be very fast, or a bit slower. Problem definition will always take more time, so it needs to be worked into the project schedule... (I'm accustomed to helping to manage stakeholder expectations in these types of cases).
Problem Definition
You're in this phase if you know you've got a problem, but you're not really sure WHY the problem exists. This stage most often requires research and analytics to help put the pieces together. The outcome of this stage is a solid hypothesis statement to take into solution exploration. In some cases, clearly defining the problem may also require refining the product strategy or vision.
I partner with cross-functional leaders and peers in Product, Analytics, and Research to help define the problem and ensure our challenge statement is written in such a way that the user problems are clearly defined and design is able to action on them.
Solution Exploration
Using the defined hypothesis (challenge) statement, I will lead (or let a senior designer on my team lead) cross-functional ideation workshops, where the team brainstorms HMW (How Might We) statements to ideate, prototype, test, and refine against, moving from low to high fidelity with each cycle. This process can continue to be repeated until the team feels confident they have a well defined solution (design). This phase is often coupled with rapid user testing in order to increase our confidence in the solution.
Launch & Learn
I work with product, tech, and our analytics team to ensure that my design team provides them everything they need in order to build the designs for A/B testing. In some cases conversations will happen about how we will introduce the designs over time on a sprint schedule so we can quantify the impact of the changes we are making to the control (if one exists). If results come back unsatisfactory, I will either lead the research (or work with a researcher) to understand why. In this way, the cycle can continue until the project meets the criteria for success.