Many businesses struggle to get their ‘horses out of the gate.’
Often times, it’s not the vision of the product you have trouble with, rather it’s the prioritizing and strategizing the execution to follow through on that vision. Product planning can be a daunting task to facilitate, manage, and execute. We, at Alliance, provide services that tackle these issues head on in a pragmatic approach that drives the success of your product. Our methodologies help your business get the ‘horses out of the gate’ to build great products and deliver to market on time.
Agile Jumpstarts
We put together a strategic plan with activities to facilitate cross-team collaboration and get an understanding of the business goals and objectives for our customers’ products. These Agile Jumpstarts are a great way to elicit those all important needs that will make your product a success.
The following activities help define success for the product’s vision:
- KJ prioritization workshops – A collaborative technique to help organize subjective ideas, build consensus, and set priorities across key stakeholders and decision makers. These workshops have helped us prioritize at all levels: corporate, product, and feature levels. And a workshop only takes an hour! Learn more about KJ workshops.
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Product research and strategy – We use a variety of collaborative techniques and activities to strategize and learn everything about the users and the products they will interact with.
- Identify key ROIs – We’ll make a strategic plan that identifies key measureable business objectives such as improve adoption rate, reduce time on task, increase speed to market, provide ease of use, and reduce support costs, just to name a few!
- Ethnographic interviews – A technique used to study users on a personal level and how they would interact with a product in their own natural environment(s). We commonly use this technique to build personas and/or experience maps. It helps us understand all the touch points in and out of a product while learning how and when a user will interact.
- Experience maps – Deliver a visual diagram to identify all of the touch points a user will have while experiencing the product or application. Experience maps are meant to be a catalyst to inform a product’s design, not quite a conclusion or solution just yet!
- Ideation workshops – A sketch boarding technique to help capture as many ideas as possible with key stakeholders and decision makers to inform a product design. Sketching is a great way to collaborate ideas and identify scenarios and use cases. Within a few hours, we can get fantastic results.
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User experience design – This is where the rubber meets the road. Everything we strategized and learned from above helps inform the user experience design. UX design brings the vision to life with activities and tools that will not only provide excellent product experiences, but also validate them through usability testing.
- Rapid prototyping (paper or interactive – An efficient wireframing activity that can quickly demonstrate user touch points and interactions with the variety of tasks presented in a product. We’ll apply heuristic design principles and let the use cases and scenarios drive our prototype designs to allow for a tighter concept among the masses. Reviewing and revising during this activity is crucial to gain consensus in a collaborative way!
- Usability testing – This activity is absolutely essential to the success of product design and development. By facilitating a qualitative moderated usability test on the proposed designs, we acquire enlightening insights into knowing if we are hitting the mark on key ROIs and heuristic interaction principles as well as learning what the problems are and why they exist prior to the development of the product or feature. If we want to gain insight from the masses on specific aspects of a design concept, we’ll do quantitative un-moderated usability testing by getting tons of feedback in a short period of time. User data is collected by the use of heat maps and mouse clicks through a survey sent to the user base.
- Design pattern development – Annotated mock up designs are a thing of the past! Interactive prototypes combined with design patterns are developed to build components that are reusable across a product. This significantly increases time to market by speeding up the development efforts. Development teams love the design pattern libraries because they reduce confusion of heuristic interaction principles that have already been usability tested.
- Iterative planning – We play a huge role in eliciting epics and user stories from UX designs to allow our development teams to gear up for sprint planning in an Agile development life cycle. We’ll consult and collaborate throughout the Agile sprints to ensure product development goes smoothly and clearly. Assisting with prioritizing the backlog and helping to manage feedback, we bring our consulting collaboration full circle, allowing development teams to deliver well researched, extremely informed products in a streamlined, iterative manner.
So, as you are envisioning the success of your products and how you plan to attack, remember our Agile Jumpstarts. Make sure your vision incorporates the interactions your users will encounter and the research needed to provide excellent product experiences. Decide whether you just want to keep up with your competition or exceed your users’ expectations and leave your competition at the gates!