Continuous discovery
Continuous discovery
Embedded Files
About
About
This initiative began with the design team's drive to solve big problems that matter. As a group, we weren't fully aligned on the meaning of discovery which, we believed, led us to delivering work that wasn't fully satisfactory. We also wanted to improve our ability of sharing and promoting our work as designers which spanned beyond user experience.
Objective:
All team members are aligned on the definition of discovery and our learnings are shared in an optimal format for company wide use.
Outcome:
Alignment on what the discovery output is;
Weekly reporting on discovery learnings;
Transparency in discovery activities and how they support in achieving the cross-functional OKRs.
Main project leanings:
How to write a narrative Jef Bezos style;
Getting to a point of clarity is not always a linear path.
Artefacts:
Presentation deck;
Narrative document.
Process overview:
1. Uncovering the problem space
2. Writing the narrative
3. Silent meeting & discussion
4. Outcomes
Process
Process
1. Uncovering the problem space
1. Uncovering the problem space
In our weekly design team meetings, which we treated as a "discovery standup", there were a couple of recurring themes:
How discovery is perceived differently by different people across the product development group (designers, engineers, product managers);
Our discovery learnings weren't always taken into consideration towards the development of the product;
Based on these conversations, it was easy to assert that we weren't fully aligned and we all thought there was some room for improvement in our process.
I used this as an opportunity to validate this assertion by reaching out to different members of the team and asking them for their own definition of discovery and what they believe our biggest obstacles to be in our day-to-day work.
2. Writing the narrative
2. Writing the narrative
The output of this enquiry, as well as resources we'd previously used to introduce the topic of discovery, gave me enough information to begin writing the narrative in the following format:
Introduction
The past - how was the topic of discovery first introduced
The present - how we perceive discovery now
Constraints - what are the constraints in the present
Recommendation - what to improve to minimise our constraints
The future - what would the future look like if we follow the recommendation
To support the narrative, I created a visualisation of our discovery process, with a current and future state (see fig. 1 below)
Fig. 1
3. Silent meeting & discussion
3. Silent meeting & discussion
After the narrative was completed, I set up a silent meeting where the group read and commented on the document together. Then, we discussed our points of disagreement, with each eventually reaching a point of common understanding and agreement on a way forward.
4. Outcomes
4. Outcomes
Next, I captured the summary of our discussion in a presentation and used that as a starting point of ideation on how we can move forward from current to future state, being supported by our new realignment on the definition and output of discovery.
As a result of that, we found a way of reporting our discovery learnings weekly in a format that was transparent and widely accessible. We observed the engagement with the report and saw that the learnings were organically spread and shared across the business. This led to stakeholders becoming more engaged in conversations on improving the user experience of our service overall and in specific areas.
Notes
Notes
Feel free to request access to the narrative document or additional information on the artefacts and outcomes.
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