Team read outs

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What it is: a regular (quarterly, half year, annual) share out of what the team has collectively achieved. This includes both the things we did to improve the customer experience and deliver value to the company we work for, and also how we’ve worked together as a team and improved our ops.

When to use it:

• A moment to reflect on the bigger picture of how work ladders up

• A recognition that feedback given has led to changes in how we work

How to use it:

• This is one of those “you get out of it what you put into it” - it relies on getting a report out of data about how our customers are doing, and collecting data regularly on what’s working for your team (and what folks are trying differently)

• Take stock and synthesize up into larger themes - this can too easily become a long listicle. There’s a “just right” balance that will be unique to each team on amount of information and type of take away that will resonate. In general, start high level and then create a candid environment for folks to react and let you know if it’s providing the impact you’re hoping for

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This works great with

• Design Strategy Check ins - a placemat for leadership teams to look at the state of design strategy craft across teams, and where effort is being focused to scale, improve, and change how teams deliver great work.

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Requirements deep dives

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What it is: A read-me for partners as you transition from the idea to the execution.

When to use it:

• When your are working through the details of how an idea is going to become real

• As you go from rough examples to more detailed, high fidelity versions, this can help document the decisions

How to use it:

• You can use this as early in the process as makes sense for you.

• Use this as a place to brain dump as you have meetings and team work sessions

• Bring others into it; this is not a single authorship undertaking

I’ve used these pages as “read me” pages as the first page in a hand off file.

This works great with

• Assumption maps

• Design Decision placemat

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Design strategy check in

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What it is: A placemat that helps you keep the bigger picture in mind, while you look at the specific things you’re working on across the team.

When to use it:

• To keep team leadership focused on bigger goals at a craft

• To find a balance between the urgent and the meaningful

• To support identify the 80/20

How to use it:

• Establish the organizational signals of what good design strategy looks like

• Set up a baseline - initially, it can be a gut sense (or the read out from a round of internal interviews)

• The more you actively use it in your reflections, the more powerful this tool becomes

Great for check ins, team retros, and inputs to use as you put together bigger organizational visions.

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This works great with

• Department wide objectives

• 1:1 placemats

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Experience impact mapping

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What it is: a view of the changes you’re making, and what that means around the flow in scope.

When to use it:

• When you want to know who else to inform, to collaborate with

• As a way to catch edge cases and scenarios that might live on the fringe of stakeholder awareness

• As a way to build healthy cross-team roadmaps and backlogs

How to use it:

• Map out a generic user flow that captures your project’s scope

• Lay out your project’s channel(s) and the actions a user takes

• As you go through your flow, think about what other touchpoints might happen at this same moment - and how do they relate.

• Can a user take the same action in different ways (parity)? If the user takes the action in your project’s scope, is there something that you’d expect to change elsewhere (consequence)? In order for a moment to be successful, does something else have to happen (dependency)?

As in all things maps and stickies - the point here is not to lose yourself in the weeds. The key success factor for this template is that it helps you realize opportunities that might have been taken for granted, or catch relations between silos that could use some bridge building.

Maps like this can become great facilitation tools when you work with back-end architects. A way to ask questions, document hypotheses, and tie your storyboards, wireframes, and prototyping to specific pieces of an architecture diagram.

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This works great with

• Service blueprints - as part of an intake workshop, this map is the 5,000 ft view to a service blueprint’s 10 ft view

• Cross-project views - once you have a general sense of how your project impact the user’s experience, it is easier to have “ears to the ground” and pick up on work that is meaningful

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Design decisions

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What it is: Gaining a clear distinction of what we are choosing to do

When to use it:

• When working in larger groups with many perspectives (or throughout your own individual process to feel clear-headed)

• When you have leadership reviews

• When there are multiple good options (and so you’re at risk of second-guessing yourself later)

How to use it:

• Document what it is you are deciding between, and why it is you are choosing one option over another

• Capture the alternatives for future reference

• Include the types of signals that would make you reconsider / go with a different direction

This works great with

• Assumptions map - as you make design decisions, it will help unearth assumptions and hypotheses you are making in choosing specific design details

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Design principles

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What it is: Like all good strategy, it points to a goal or a what, does not dictate or preclude a certain how. The example that makes me go “ooooh I get it” is the principle “something that gets better with time”: one clear answer being leather. Principles do not dictate a solution - they characterize what about the solution must be true for it to work. They are underpinned by strong insights about how people live life today, think about life today.

How to use principles (once we have them):

• Bring qual insights into actionable starting points

• Be ruthless in culling ideas to hew to closest to principle

• Select metrics that signal we were on the right track

Principles can take many shapes... they can be short pithy statements, they can be large posters capturing the essence of moments, they could be succinct adjectives the team rallies around.

This works great with

• Brainstorming - Principles give you an anchor point to ideate around

• Design decisions - Principles become the measuring stick you can use to gain confidence in choosing one option over another

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Affinity mapping

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What it is: a way to synthesize information

When to use it:

• Explore qualitative user interview questions

• Synthesize data from current state, segment personas

• Finding patterns in business anecdotes, ideas and design directions

How to use it:

• A free for all, throw it all down in stickies

• You can approach in deductively (building a hypothesis): scan the data you have gathered and write out the themes you notice as it emerges, build your categories and take-aways

• Or, you can approach it inductively (validating a hypothesis): Start by defining expected categories and sorting your data to see if patterns emerge

This works great with

• Brainstorming - Brainstorming can feel satisfying in the moment - and then it can be unclear how it’s going to move forward. Affinity mapping can help give direction to the next question to dive into more, or the seed of an idea to flesh out

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Service blueprint

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What it is: a view of how the internal company teams and processes act together to create the experience customers, clients, and others have.

When to use it:

• Service blueprints help highlight how teams two or more degrees removed from the user action still influence the outcome

• Seeing the relationship between the workstreams can help uncover dependencies and details of a requirement that are key to success

How to use it:

• Start broad, gather all the pieces you know

• Document gaps in knowledge so we don’t forget we don’t know

• As the project progresses, or in dedicated workshops, add details and questions

• As project decisions are made, use this as a tool to identify knock on effects

This works great with

• Cross-project views - service blueprints gives you a cross-section snapshot of your flow and who is involved in making it happen. Cross-project views give you a way to catch which of those back-end processes you need to pay attention to

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Journey maps

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What it is: a view of how the humans in your experience go through life

When to use it:

• When you want to share out research insights on how the current state is or the future state could be

• As a tool during ideation to stay grounded in the needs and mental models of the humans involved

How to use it:

• You can start filling out whichever swim lanes feel you know most clearly

• Be open to adjusting what is considered a “step” or a “phase” based on what you learn about how the humans involved think about an experience - it can sometimes be different than how a team internally breaks down a process

• Gaps are ok! It gives you a clearer sense of prioritization for what to go and learn next

This works great with

• Service blueprints - service blueprints gives you a cross-section snapshot of your flow and who is involved in making it happen. Journey maps give

• Assumption maps - assumption maps put your consumer sentiment / persona / end user stories into conversation with internal business motivations

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Cross project view

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What it is: a view of your project in context with other efforts underway

When to use it:

• When you want to know who else to inform, to collaborate with

• When there is a lot of work going on and you don’t want designers to be doing overlapping work (or developers make changes that will have an unintended knock-on effect)

How to use it:

• Map out a generic user flow that captures your project’s scope

• Add projects as you come across them - current or future planned work

• Try getting a sense of how your project relates to this other work - this will let you know what type of involvement you need

This works great with

• Service blueprints - service blueprints gives you a cross-section snapshot of your flow and who is involved in making it happen. The cross-project view gives you a way to catch which of those back-end processes you need to pay attention to

• Experience impact mapping - when you want to see what projects should be underway

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Assumptions map

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What it is: a design artifact to build out over the course of a project to flag how big of a risk it is for an assumption to be wrong

When to use it:

• Understanding the problem to solve

• Getting everyone on the same page

How to use it

• Fill out as many hypotheses as you can based on the information you have so far

• Write out the questions that remain

• Use this as a guide to prioritize work that can fill gaps in knowledge, that can test the riskiest assumptions or hypotheses

Set this up as a placemat and fill out as a team workshop

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