the Empowered Team Approach to Product Development
An empowered team is one with shared ownership of the resulting software product or experience. Each discipline has a part to play in the process, and each role is vital to the success of the team. Collaboration, a focus on the end user, and data-driven decision-making are the key elements of an empowered team.
The double-Diamond methodology
One of many iterative product design processes, I typically lean on this established “double-diamond” approach to product design.
SCOPING: Scope your problem space with insights from research, stakeholders, business partners, and colleagues.
KICKOFF: Bring cross-functional teams together to discuss how this process will work, define goals and anti-goals, and understand any critical needs. Create a problem statement that will be used by your team as you move forward.
DISCOVERY: Go wide! Utilize primary and secondary research & discovery methods to understand the pain points of your current (and even potential) users. Prioritize those pain points down to the most critical, and the most impactful. Be sure you have defined your product’s success metrics and KPIs, both financial and user-centered. How might this product fail? What risks are there from each of the disciplines’ perspectives? How will you know if it succeeds?
FRAMING: Utilize your balanced teammates in product management and engineering to frame problem-solving ideas, using “how might we…?” exercises or lean experiments. Build an outcome-based product roadmap with your teammates that prioritizes what you’ll be working on, and share that roadmap early and often with your stakeholders and leadership.
ITERATE: Create wireframes and prototypes that can be tested with your users in quick feedback loops. Test, learn, experiment, iterate…and repeat these steps until you’re ready to build an MVP.
MVP: Build and launch an MVP (minimum viable product), the leanest amount of work that will allow you to launch, test with your users, validate or invalidate your design choices, and iterate.
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT: Never stop improving on your initial ideas (and don’t be afraid to start over if they don’t solve the problem). Your users are always growing and evolving, why shouldn’t your product?
I’m not a “process purist”. I recommend using the most helpful process elements for the current moment in time. What’s the best way to explore the problem space with the knowledge you have right now? What can you learn that will help you feel more confident in your decision-making?
