- The "Get Started" Proposal
- The Pitch
- Your Product Vision A-Team
- Team Contract
- A Laboratory Environment
- Working Together as a Team
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
A Laboratory Environment
If possible, request a sizable, dedicated team room for the duration of the product vision engagement. Equip this space with comfy chairs, whiteboards, a big monitor, and video/audio conferencing. For added ambience, include posters, snacks and refreshments, a coffee machine, thinking putty that you hold and squish, and a Bluetooth speaker to pump out the team’s shared playlist. Nothing like some fresh coffee and inspirational music to keep the team motivated.
Co-Location
Product vision work requires a very close design–business alliance. It will be up to you, as the strategic designer, to stamp out the barriers that persist between business associates and creatives. Achieving this can only be done when you are physically in the same place. Make the effor to work co-located at least part of the time. When co-located, you’ll learn to speak one another’s language, collaboratively make decisions, and be wiser at choosing battles. At some point, between working lunches and trust falls, watch the business convert to this new way of doing things. Gaining carte blanch visibility over the business wall—revealing the motivations and intricacies of the respective business strategy that is shaping your product vision. The realization of how to work with your strategic business counterparts is success in itself.
Digital Vs. Analog
Your project space is a physical (or part-time virtual) space where the team meets on a regular basis to collaborate, brainstorm, debate, and share research findings. The space should be equipped with a large whiteboard and plenty of room to hang critical information that will guide your team’s decisions. The idea is to curate an environment where the team can work without distraction and be immersed in their understanding of the target audience, product space, and business goals.
Transparency
Transparency will serve any team well—especially those working on a product vision. Not only will it help build team members’ skill to connect the dots gathered through their research, but it will also give stakeholders the ability to understand how the team is conducting their work. The more your team can be open with their process and how they arrive at decisions they’re making, the more they can build trust with upper management who gave the green light to do the work in the first place. Your team room is a safe space for your team to work and share ideas. It’s also a lab where people can observe experiments taking place in real time.
Try It This Way
Do to foster transparency:
Transparency works in our favor. Have an open-door policy to share work in progress.
Schedule stand-ups (see the next section) in the room, schedule core hours, and the rest is revolving door. Carve out your own quiet time each day, somewhere else. Maybe at your own desk, a coffee shop, or at home?
Maintain regular coffee breaks and lunch with coworkers outside the vision project.
Keep a simple written whiteboard with weekly to-do’s current. Tape up high-level accomplishments to a wall for at-a-glance progress that anyone can read.
Don’t undermine transparency:
Make the team room a closed-door clubhouse. When you find yourself working in large groups, alongside hundreds of people, it can give off a vibe of exclusivity.
Spend the whole day in the team room.
Spend the whole working day with just the product vision or Visioneering team.
Give selected coworkers the inside scoop. The game of telephone will quickly get word back to a stakeholder before they’ve been updated themselves.