Dear reader,
This 2-part series is for anyone who’s feeling uncertain, scared, fearful of the future and is looking for some useful, practical tips on how to proceed. It comes from years of working in Human-Centered Design (HCD). We borrow different theories, practices, and activities from a variety of sources like Agile, Design Thinking, and Lean Startup.
Not to worry if the last 3 or 4 words don’t mean anything to you, we’ve distilled everything on this page based on three key points for easy reference:
1. What problem does it solve?
2. What is the concept about?
3. Actionable steps
You can easily skip through by looking for a problem to solve that matches one you have.
For this second article, we’ve focused on Actions or, activities that can be done for problem-solving purposes in very specific situations.
In our previous article, we dove into Mindset or, concepts that are more like, general principles or ways of looking at the world. You can find that here.
We will add to this as time goes on, if you feel that anything is missing, or if you found something useful, let us know in the comments.
Let’s get started.
What problem does it solve?
Problem: We’ve been thrust into doing online meetings and we waste so much time running bad meetings.
What is it?
Meetings in the offline world can be bad enough but taking virtual meetings that don’t have a focused agenda, bring together the wrong people in the room, don’t make use of tangible conversations in the digital world are in a class of its own. There’s nothing quite as jarring as a group video call meeting in the early morning with 15 or more attendees and zero agenda. To these bad meetings we ask: “Why?”
As Design Thinkers, we love asking “Why?”. We’re genuinely interested in understanding the world around us and love nothing more than to remain curious, and ask “Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?”
If there’s one thing we tend to question, it’s the necessity of a meeting— especially when the agenda is unclear. We’re not afraid to ask why and you shouldn’t be either.
Design Thinker: You want to run a meeting? How exciting! So uh, why do you want to run a meeting?
Your typical manager: Well... so I can... err... I need to give an update to the team! Let’s block out an hour or so to discuss.
DT: Alright, so how will you know when the meeting has been a success?
Manager: Well... uh... I don’t know.. when everyone knows the update from the client?
DT: Right okay! Is there any other way of achieving this goal? Will an email or a 5-minute call do?
Manager: Well, yes maybe it might, thank you!
Questioning the norm, especially when it’s set by your boss, is scary but we do expect people to really, truly think about why they need to call a 2 hour meeting for 10 people and waste a combined 20 hours of time.
Just because almost everyone is at home during this time, it doesn’t mean that their time is free to use at your disposal. Maximizing the way time is spent can keep teams motivated and happy even as they’re working from home.
Pro tip: If you’re asking why this meeting is set, make sure you do it with a smile and curiosity rather than a tone of judgement. Be interested to genuinely understand and not blame.
Actionable Steps
What problem does it solve?
Problem: I’ve been asked to find a brand-new solution for “Problem XYZ” and I don’t know how to handle it.
What is it?
The biggest single issue we see across client is that when they’re trying to solve problems, they usually have a bunch of great ideas but a serious lack of action. It’s a common reaction. Often when we come across complex problems, we are paralyzed in our fear of it— to the point of inaction.
This is a story that Ceej, our Marketing Manager, shared with me earlier this week:
My 11 year old sister, Bella, is homeschooled now and I’m in charge of making sure that she gets all her work done. So I ask her, “What assignment are you working on?”.
She shyly tells me that she was doing Math homework but then, she switched to Science because “it’s too hard”. I ask her when she plans to continue Math and she turns her eyes back to her digital textbook.
And so it became clear to me that because she doesn’t understand the topic or perhaps it’s too difficult for her to figure out on her own, she won’t do the work at all.
I thought to myself, “Huh. Aren’t we all like that?”
But then I went on to explain to her how difficulties are a part of learning and that she needs to do the work, like the good sister I’m trying to be.
For us, taking action is progress because it means that you’re going in the direction of the solution. Even if you don’t have it quite figured out. For us, action means learning even when that means failing at first.
Because it’s no different from how it is for Bella. Not understanding her math homework yet continuing to take action is part of learning. It’s the only way to learn. In her case, it’s quite literally solving the problem.
Whether you’re an individual trying to get a side hustle going or a Product Manager in a large organization trying to get a project off the ground, the biggest thing that will hold you back is not getting started. You can make sure you’re starting in the right way by actually building your idea.
Sometimes, we get started getting busy preparing to build things, like a Terms of Reference document to send to a vendor or writing a detailed project specification. These things often delay meaningful project action. They delay building things and showing things to customers. They delay learning.
If I’m a Product Manager working on a project in a company and we haven’t had user/customer feedback on this idea in 6 months, alarm bells are most likely ringing in my head and I’m asking myself, “OMG, what if we’re building the wrong thing?! How do we know we’re building the right thing? What evidence do we have?”.
To combat this anxiety, we like to think in terms of what’s called a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) — the fastest, most efficient way to validate your development. Here’s a great story I love that illustrates how the MVP came to be.
It’s about a tech company many many years ago who wanted to build some voice-to-text hardware and software but they didn’t know how people would respond to it. Engineering said it would cost millions of dollars to build before they could show it to customers so the Product Team sat down and asked themselves, “What’s the fastest, most efficient way to learn if this thing could work?”
They came up with a test where customers went to the office, were given a microphone and a laptop, and told to speak into the microphone and words would appear on the screen. It worked. People came in and were amazed to see their words appearing. What the customers didn’t know was that their microphone was hooked up to a computer next door where someone was listening and that person was just typing the words on the screen!
The team had taken a simple action to validate how customers reacted and used their product without having to find a vendor, or even build anything at all. That’s how the MVP gained its fame.
Pro tip: See everything you create as a hypothesis that absolutely needs validating because it does — either you validate it early or you build it, launch it, and validate it live.
Actionable Steps
What problem does it solve?
Problem: I don’t know how to track my team’s progress and make sure they’re on track.
What is it?
There’s nothing like a crisis to surface some organizational improvement opportunities and we had our fair share. Quite quickly after lockdown, we realized that we’d been overly reliant on face-to-face communication to keep teams synchronized. We needed a new way to gain transparency on who was doing what at a strategic level.
We decided to switch to a soft implementation of Scrum across all of our teams and the transition has been quite smooth (this is easier when the CEO is a Certified ScrumMaster) all run through a simple Google Docs spreadsheet per team. There are quite a number of moving parts in Scrum but it has given us clarity like never before across the whole organization. The teams are more engaged and feel like they’re working on something worthwhile while the cross-team collaboration has been incredible to watch.
It’s beyond the scope of this article, perhaps, to teach you everything there is to know about scrum but here are the basics. You’ll find in the actionable steps of the item a simple scrum dashboard that you can copy for your own team. If you need help getting started, feel free to get in touch and we’ll happily give you some advice over the phone. Free of charge.
Definition of Scrum: Scrum is a framework for getting work done in teams. A team works in “Sprints” - short cycles of work 1, 2, 3, or 4 weeks in length and delivers completed work at the end of the sprint. The completed work should be done to a standard that means customers or users can immediately use it.
Roles:
Product Owner — Understands and represents the business-side. Makes sure that the team is working on high business- value work.
ScrumMaster — Makes sure the scrum process is being followed properly, through sprint planning and short daily meetings.
Team — The people who do the work. They should be a cross-functional team of 3 - 9 people. Any skill they need to do the work should be contained within the team.
Artefacts:
Product Backlog is a high level list of all the work you want the team to work. The work will take several sprints to complete. The team will deliver another chunk of valuable work every sprint. The list is prioritized and even explained in terms of business value. The specific business metric we’re trying to improve by doing this work should be listed for each item. Customer engagement? Lead generation? Increase conversion rate? Reduce time to complete task? Etc.
Sprint Backlog is a list of work the team forecasts to do in the sprint. The high level items from the product backlog are broken down into tasks. The tasks are given hourly estimates. The estimated time remaining per task is updated before the daily scrum. The total number of estimated hours of work remaining is plotted on the burndown chart every day.
Burndown chart is a chart that shows the team whether they are on track or not.
Definition of done is a written down definition of what it means when work will be accepted as “done” by the Product Owner. Any work we take into the sprint should be “done” to a point where it could be used by users or customers so if you’re making a sales brochure, it should be ready for the Sales team to present to clients at the end of the sprint.
Meetings:
Daily Scrum is a short meeting (15 minutes max!) to help the team synchronize work with each other. It is not a meeting for the “management” to come down and check on the progress though they are welcome to join the meeting (it shows they’re interested!) but not allowed to interfere in it. Each team member answers 3 questions:
Sprint Review is a meeting where the Product Owner reviews the work done by the team.
Sprint Retrospective is a meeting where everyone sits down and reviews the previous sprint and asks:
Action points must be generated for use in the next sprint.
Sprint Planning is a meeting where the team breaks down the Product Backlog items into actual pieces of work. Anything that the team will spend time on should be in the scope of a task. Team will discuss with the Product Owner and ask clarifying questions as they break down into tasks.
Pro tip: Read the Scrum Guide.
Actionable Steps
What problem does it solve?
Problem: I’m not sure how my teammates are feeling— are they okay?
What is it?
This is complex issue because it has a few layers:
These three issues are top of mind for most of us right now so we try to be aware of them and make sure everyone has the support they need to overcome them.
For the first one, at the very beginning of lockdown, and recognizing that everyone already has 100 sources of news on coronavirus we made a separate group chat in the company for COVID-19 updates. It’s a channel that anyone can leave - the group name is literally “COVID Updates (FEEL FREE TO LEAVE THIS GROUP)” - and has the effect of keeping the main group chat free for everyday conversation and dank memes.
For the second issue, we run twice-monthly 1-to-1 conversations with everyone in the company to ask each person how they are, how they’re coping, what’s good/bad for them right now. Mostly we just listen and sometimes we try to offer solutions and suggestions. Constant nudges and check-ins on people like this go a long way and sometimes people just need to talk about a problem to realize the solution e.g. this week we helped one of the staff realize there was a grocery store nearby that he could go to and combine it with some cardio.
The third one we solved by switching the whole company to Scrum in the first month of lockdown. It gave everyone an incredibly clear and systematic framework to use to improve the rhythm of their work (See number 3 of this list): 15 minute meetings every day, 1 big meeting per week where we review the work done, retrospect on what went well/didn’t go well, and plan the next week’s work. Rinse and repeat.
Pro tip: Care.
Actionable Steps:
Problem: I have some ideas but I don’t know how to make them more concrete.
How do we do it?
When you encounter a problem or an opportunity, it can be hard figuring out the next step or thinking about all the different aspects of your idea. All you know is that you woke up one morning with a new idea and a burning feeling in the pit of your stomach, like you need to take action. Then some time later, the feeling fades away and the idea is gone. It never even had a chance.
The same problem can happen to the projects that your organization works on. It’s amazingly sad how far some companies can go down the project timeline without nailing down the nuts and bolts of why they’re doing the project and who it’s for. It’s why most initiatives, despite how innovative the concept can be, never continue until execution.
We believe that ideas are only as good as the work you put into them. We’ve found in our workshops that having a template that participants can fill in — to explain the thinking behind their idea — goes a long way.
Once you’ve settled the details, there’s only one thing left to do— execute. Go and do the thing. Enjoy the process.
Pro tip: Combine this with a Minimum Viable Product to test it out.
Actionable Steps:
