Solutions are the death of a product design. Learn how Tami Evnin helped to disrupt a large, product-focused organization with design, through not only educating product owners, but including them in the exploration to define problems instead of solutions.
A small but growing internal design team within a large product-focused organization has had a strong voice in the development process of our company’s client-facing products. As with any change in process, growing pains were inevitable. Instead of making cosmetic changes to old, unvetted solutions, we challenged our team to find problems that needed solving in order to create a better overall product. We introduced research methods, design studio, and rapid prototyping into our colleagues’ vocabularies early and often. Even through a series of discouraging review sessions and a multitude of poorly worded email critiques, our team came to trust and understand that our design strategy got us to the heart of our users’ needs.
I will talk *process* - the team, communication, and validating big questions and ideas; *failures* - mismanaged agile processes and unactionable critique; and *how we are moving onward and upward* - team sketching sessions and other design studio methods, communication improvements, and productive sprint planning.
