Reflection on Visualization Tool

Challenge  In my previous job position I worked as facilitator and product innovation manager for a  multinational credit card company. My role was very client facing and essentially consisted  in working with senior stakeholders from the client side who had a business challenge to  solve. This challenge could be anything, generally it remained in the digital payment field,  for example how to streamline digital payments thru new mobile app, adding new features,  facilitating the onboarding processes for new users, splitting transactions in installments  and so on. Initially I would talk to the client and the account manager discussing the scope  of work and decide if it was a good candidate for a Design Sprint workshop or not. If the  business challenge was short enough in scope and could be prototyped quickly, we would  then proceed by filling up an innovation brief to start collecting assumptions and  preliminary information. This document formed the base structure for me and my  multidisciplinary team to start designing the workshop.    Selection and Application  During the 5 days of the design sprint workshop I would take the senior stakeholders from  the client side thru a series of exercise to explore, ideate, refine and prototype.   After spending Monday and Tuesday mainly on exploring and ideating, we would use the  third day focusing on visualization exercises to start refining our ideas. Usually I’d split the  group in 4 teams and ask them to storyboard the idea they previously came up with. The  purpose of this exercise was to show and reflect how this new product/feature would  impact the daily routine of a user persona. These stories would also serve as inspiration to  create a script for the advertorial video for the new product. Other visualization exercises  the teams would face were the landing page and the billboard. As the name suggests, the  landing page consists in a minimal sketch for the website home page for the new product or  feature. This pushes the stakeholders to get out of their comfort zones and communicate  the new benefits and features in the simplest and most concise way possible. During this  task they were also forced to abandon banking lingo (always overused) to adopt a simple  language to communicate with the user persona. The billboard would serve the same  purpose, differing only for the fact that it needed to be even more synthetic.    Insight  What I learned by facilitating this workshop with many different clients and banks is that  these visualization techniques are essential while refining ideas. After the exercises, each  team would present their output to clarify what is on paper, this sharing aspect often  created positive discussion that allowed different teams, composed by different people and  expertise, to build on each other ideas, dramatically increasing the quality of creative  solutions. In addition to this, these presentations often offered hilarious moments that help  the stakeholders release the tension accumulated in such intense and long workshop  experience.  Another thing that I noticed is that the quality of the output is definitely related to how  variegated the team composition is. Generally, I’d recommend to have at least one  department representative in each team. In other words, even before the design sprint  starts, I’d stress the client to send people from all the different areas so that in each team  we would later have a marketing person, an IT, a finance manager, a product guy and so on.

This aspect will help the teams to stay focused and innovate consciously, satisfying a design  thinking mantra I learned while working in the filed: “we are here to innovate and to do  something that is Design viable, Technically viable, and Financially viable.    Approach  A 5 days design sprints workshop is quite intense. The commitment from the stakeholders is  not always consistent due to schedule conflicts. For these reasons, I have been reflecting  and refining on the choice of the visual exercises since after my early sessions as facilitator.  The exercise set should always be tailored up to the specific business challenge we are  trying to solve and to the level of familiarity the participants have with design thinking  methodologies. Some sessions are easy, everyone is engaged and the result is sharp, other  times it takes quite long for the momentum to kick in and for the people in the room to  start working together. I think the best visualization exercises during these sessions are the  ones the build alignment: ranking activities, wireframing together (even if low quality).  These activities have the power of channeling the creativity from the participants and  holding them “on-track” preventing them to innovate too “sky-high” but rather focus on  feasibility.

