Discovery & Framing
Purpose
In the D&F, we aimed to:
Gain empathy for our users
Understand opportunities and pain points
Brainstorm solutions
Narrow scope
Specifically, we wanted to answer these questions:
What’s working and not working about how customers are currently using Tracker?
How does an idea or a business-level outcome become shipped code?
How can we support customers who return home after a Pivotal Labs engagement?
Alignment & Scoping
Because this was a long overdue endeavor, the greater Tracker team had varying expectations about what we were doing. To gain alignment, create a common language, and empathize with different perspectives, we led the following activities with the whole Tracker team:
Story writing: In small groups, team members imagined what both success and failure of the product would look like.
Creation of alignment principles: Using the stories, we led activities to agree upon alignment principles.
Scoping: As a large group we brainstormed who our target users should be and narrowed our problem space.
Kick-off
Part I of Kick-off
To officially kick off the D&F, we gathered stakeholders for:
Assumptions brainstorming: The group did a dump & sort (and synthesis) of what was working well in legacy Tracker and what was not working (or was an opportunity).
Initial problem prioritization: Using the grouped assumptions, we completed a prioritization exercise. This gave our team a “jumping off point” for what to test against.
Risks & mitigations: Finally, we did a dump & sort of perceived product, business, and technical risks. We then heat-mapped them and brainstormed mitigations for the top risks.
Discovery
Using our output from Kick-off, we launched into a Discovery phase with the aim of (in)validating our assumed problem spaces through generative research, and then prioritizing the final problem spaces. To reach this goal, we did:
User “baseball cards”
Observations: Armed with high-level questions we wanted answered, we split into two teams to observe onsite with our target users. I flew to Boston and spent two days observing teams as they built software, overseeing stakeholder meetings, and learning how teams were collaborating towards shared goals.
Synthesis of observations: Back at home we converged on the observed problems/opportunities and created org charts and “baseball cards” of our users.
Final problem prioritization: We compared our initial assumptions to the observed problems and opportunities. The observed problems were much more specific and nuanced, for example:
“Teams have to rely heavily on Trello to organize PM & design work to be done.”
“Releasing & deploying to production is painful and manual.”
Framing
Using our research-based problems and opportunities, we began ideating and sketching solutions to launch the Framing phase of the D&F. However, because the goal was to replace the legacy product, we wanted to step back and think about the system from a higher level, and then dig into the details. To do so, we did:
User flow visualization: We mapped out the PDLC (product development lifecycle) to ensure that we were thinking in systems and aligned on the entire user journey.
Scenario sketching: After viewing the product from a higher-level perspective, we wrote a few key scenarios and led sketching sessions to begin solutioning.
Sketches
Inception
Coming out of the D&F, we had:
A shared understanding of our users
A shared understanding of how work goes from an outcome or idea to shipped code
Shared terminology
Prioritized problems and possible solutions
Decisions about the tech stack
We also had several research-based goals for the app:
Help turn teams’ ideas into work in a backlog
Be “consultants” for teams using Pivotal practices
Help teams collaborate towards shared goals
After our formal inception, we set off to begin designing and building New Tracker.