product design

Volume 2 of Journey Mapping Icons out now!

04/09/2024 by Ben Crothers

I’ve just released a second volume of journey mapping sketched icons, containing 120 more icons. All images are in 300dpi PNG format, with transparent backgrounds, available for you to use in any way you like.

You’ll find some additions to existing categories found in the Volume 1 set of icons, including expressions, people, devices, technology, and buildings:

You’ll also find icons for some new categories, like weather, artificial intelligence, and digital lifestyle:

Who are these icons for?

This set is for anyone who likes to use drawing and visualisation in their work, to help themselves and others think better and communicate better when it comes to explaining problems and plans, and generating ideas and solutions. This includes:

Designers and Researchers – User Experience (UX) Designers, Visual Designers, User Interface Designers, Service Designers, Product Researchers
Product Managers, including Product Owners and Feature Leads
Project Managers, including Scrum Masters, Program Managers and Studio Coordinators
Marketing Managers, Community Managers, PR and Communications Managers

The icons not only come in handy for UX design (e.g. journey maps, user flows, task flows, storyboards), but also for business communication and generally spicing up any presentation slides.

You can use these PNG files in your favourite design software (Figma, Canva, Photoshop, Illustrator), presentation software (PowerPoint, Keynote), or even in online collaboration spaces like Miro and Mural.

Go check out the Journey Mapping Icons Volume 2

Why your project needs storyboarding

31/05/2023 by Ben Crothers

There’s that fantastic time in any product or service design project where an idea is just starting to take shape, and spread its wings. Will it be The Next Big Thing? Will it be able to stand up to the barrage of oncoming questions, like: will it resonate with your target audience? How will it work? Is it even feasible?

That’s where storyboards are your friend, and the best way to help your idea spread those wings, and be ready for those questions.

A hand-drawn image showing how ideas can flow between people with storyboards — *Storyboards are the ideal method to help you and your team hash out problems and directions early on*

Storyboards are sets of frames with pictures and narrative text, organised as a sequence to be read as a story. They’re very useful for when an idea is too hard or conceptual or expensive to prototype. You can sketch out your idea using a sequence of simple pictures arranged like a comic, to show the context of that idea: who is experiencing the idea, what they do, how they do it, when they do it, and why.

Why storyboarding is so effective for any team project

As far as design asset bang for buck goes, it’s hard to go past storyboards. They not only capture and communicate an experience so fast and so well, they also double as a prototyping tool; the act of drawing a storyboard helps you to understand and test your own ideas.

Storyboards came from the world of film. They bring the various elements of the craft of cinema – such as script, characters, location, and of course the plot – to life in a unified way that others can start to see how it all comes together.

An example of a storyboard I drew to bring an early mobile experience to life — A storyboard I drew to bring an early mobile experience to life

Storyboards are an important way to visualise stories involved in user experience design:

Illustrating an existing experience, often showing a particular problem in the experience, and its negative impact on people
Illustrating an envisioned experience, showing a solution and the benefits of that solution
Showing state differences in products and services where interface designs wouldn’t be enough, such as showing differences based on different times of the day, different locations, or different personas/archetypes

They are also very handy when it comes to envisioning, prototyping and planning other kinds of experiences, like:

Change management envisioning and roll-outs
E-learning content and training videos
Explainer videos and promotion videos
Games
Video advertisements

What storyboards are not

Here’s how storyboards differ from other assets created in the world of product and service design:

Journey maps – journey maps offer a schematic view of an experience from a single user’s perspective, showing how a string of actions leads (or in some cases doesn’t lead) to a goal, and often how that journey feels. Journey maps are useful for visually summarising many different aspects of an experience – such as pain points, opportunities, sentiment – as a single map, in a way that just wouldn’t fit on a storyboard.

Service blueprints – service blueprints are similar to journey maps, but usually replace indications of how the journey feels, with much more information about what the journey includes from a system perspective, covering all user types. This means that what happens behind the scenes (or off-stage) is visually captured as well as what happens from the user’s perspective (on-stage). This can include internal teams, processes and systems, such as customer support resources and approval processes.

User flows – user flows are a schematic view of the experience from a task perspective. They typically show a flowchart of the sequence of actions and decision points linked together, usually outside of time. They capture what happens, rather than how, or how long.

Screenflows – screenflows and user flows are often interchangeable, but screenflows show the experience from the interface perspective. They tend to be sets of simplified screen designs or wireframes. They are useful for understanding how a given task/s is/are achieved across various screens and interface elements on a website, application, or other product, rather than who is doing the actions, or when.

What makes a great storyboard for your project?

Storyboards are best used as instruments of process, not product. In other words, they are best used to stimulate discussion, not seek approval. They are best used as prototypes, sketches only, made to inform others and get feedback about how an idea works, rather than being a fully-formed aesthetically-pleasing product about what the idea is.

A photo of a team at Pixar discussing a movie, surrounded by storyboards — *Director Pete Docter during a meeting for Pixar’s Inside Out. Note the various storyboards around.*

Storyboards should focus on being:

Quick – they take hours – rather than days or weeks – to create

An example of a simple but effective storyboard — *This is a simple storyboard from a team at BBC. Note how rough and ready it is, and yet conveys the story it needs to.*

Cheap – they are created using simple tools like pencil, sticky notes and paper, possibly some pre-made templated elements (rather than needing sophisticated software and training), before needing to spend any great amounts of money.

Another example of a simple storyboard — *A simple storyboard by Bryant Hodson*

Evocative – they should capture your audience’s attention, and help anchor discussion to how to improve the experience, not how to make the solution. In a now-famous move, Airbnb hired Pixar animator Nick Sung to bring specific moments in their customers’ experiences to life (code-named “Snow White”), and posted them around the organisation’s office walls.

An example of a storyboard used in UX strategy at Airbnb — *A single frame and a look at some of the other storyboard frames from Nick Sung, for Airbnb*

Unifying – storyboards are great at giving everyone – from designers to developers to customer support agents to managers – a common language to use, to discuss and improve customer experiences or employee experiences.

An example storyboard with added UX details under each panel — *A storyboard for a fictitious startup called You’re In, by Jordan Husney. Notice how you can arrange other information (in this case potential projects to prioritise) under each frame.*

Minimal – they should focus on the essence of what needs to be communicated and validated. This includes the level of detail and draughtsmanship finesse; when it comes to communicating the idea of a house, a simple blocky rendering of a house is the same as a professionally-drawn house, or a computer-generated image of a house. In cases like these, simple drawings are usually better, because extraneous distracting details can be omitted, e.g. age and style, size, materials.

As author Scott McCloud says, they focus on amplification through simplification.

What you need to create a storyboard

I’ll get into how to draw storyboards in another post, but for now, it’s good to know that you need the following elements to set yourself – and the idea that you want to communicate – up for success:

A user type – Who is your main character?
A goal – Why is the character doing what they’re doing?
An audience – Who will read this storyboard, and what do you want from them? Are you wanting to persuade them about fixing a particular problem? Or for them to provide feedback on a particular solution? Or to empathise with customers in a particular way?
A story – All of these elements come together and are brought to life through the story itself, or a sequence of events that is usually meant to engage your audience’s head (how does it relate to their knowledge and experience), heart (what does it mean to them) and hands (what do you want them to do).

That last element – crafting your story – is the subject of another post too.

Mapping your user’s day with the User Clock Sketch

28/06/2019 by Ben Crothers

See your user’s experience of their day through their eyes with the User Clock Sketch.

The power of mapping user experiences

Are you involved in making products and services for customers and communities? If so, you’ll know how important it is to make sure your offering matches what they need. A standard way of connecting user research to making products and services is to visually map out the journeys that they go through, using techniques like journey mapping, user story mapping, and service blueprinting.

The synthesis stage in the Double Diamond of design, showing where journey mapping usually happens

These visual tools are really effective. They’re a great way to – quite literally – get people from various parts of the business ‘on the same page’. They help everyone to see where the pain points are in a user journey, and where opportunities might be, too. Often more importantly, they help everyone to get a shared understanding of how all the various individual parts (from their perspective) relate as a whole, according to a common reference point. The user’s perspective.

A user journey map (or customer journey map), for example, is more than just boxes and arrows. It can show what a particular persona/user type is doing (tasks), thinking (expectations, decisions) and feeling, as they use one or more of your products and services. This is a bit different to user story maps and Indi Young’s mental model diagrams, which are usually independent of your product.

User journey mapping is versatile

User journey maps, and the act of mapping as a team, can be applied in different ways. You can map out existing experiences, along with pain points, workarounds that the user type is doing, and opportunities for improvement. You can also map out envisioned experiences, where you have redesigned the experience to fix those pain points and take hold of those opportunities. In fact, an envisioned user journey map is like a new prototype, to show all the benefits of the new experience before going ahead and building anything.

Limitations with some mapping

As great as these patterns are, though, the way the information is arranged is still often according to your particular product or service. This means that there are some limitations:

Hard to scope – It’s sometimes hard to know where the journey map should start and stop, and can seem somewhat contrived
Susceptible to bias – The nature of scoping a map to show a particular type of user achieving a particular goal in a particular ‘happy’ scenario means we’re making lots of decisions to keep it convenient for us to map. This can open the door to unconscious bias.
They don’t take external factors into account – It’s usually too hard to visualise all the other factors contributing to that journey (e.g. other products and services that the user type interacts with), to achieve the user type’s goal you are focused on
Branching, cycles, multi-tasking, oh my! – Some journeys just aren’t linear (i.e. this action then that action then the next action and stop), or there may be multiple tasks going on at the same time. This can sometimes be excruciating to try to map!

Try adding the User Clock Sketch to visualise the ‘customer journey’

I remember trying to do journey mapping for some scenarios where people use Confluence, Atlassian’s wiki/documentation software. It got super-complicated really quickly, because people tend not to just do one linear this-then-that task. Instead, people tend to read several pages in different web browser tabs, search for some page in some other tab, and edit another page in yet another tab… all for different tasks and different goals! And then the following day, they do it all over again! Agh!

So, I asked: “What if we changed the perspective we’re taking, from Confluence’s point-of-view to the user’s point-of-view? What if we mapped a day in the life of the user type we are focused on (in that case it was project managers), to see what that looked like?”

And that’s how the User Clock Sketch was born. And it looks like this:

The User Clock Sketch – mapping an experience around the face of a ‘clock’

This is particularly useful for journeys that are pretty much the same, day after day (ergh, that sounds so depressing, but it’s not meant to!). It maps the actions of a particular user type from the point where they wake up in the morning, to the point where they go to sleep. Rather than getting into the nitty gritty of each task they do, it groups actions according to significant chunks of the day that matter to them, according to their context. AND it quite literally puts the ‘user at the centre’ of the picture, how good’s that? 😉

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Draw your user type in the centre of a big circle

Whether you’re using one sheet of paper or a large whiteboard, draw a large circle, and then draw a simple figure in the centre. You can label the figure as a role, persona, or whatever way you are identifying that particular user type.

Step 2: Draw a line up to the ‘12’ position

Draw a vertical line from the user type up to where the ‘12’ would normally go on a clock. This is the point where your user type wakes up.

Step 3: Section the ‘clock’ into significant sections

I tend to draw a line radiating up from the centre to about the ‘9’ position, to show the time where the user type would be asleep. After you’ve done that, draw radiating lines around the face of your ‘clock’. Each line will separate a particular ‘stage of the day’ that matters to that user type and their role. If it’s an office worker, it’ll tend to include commuting time and a lunch time. It might be important that you include small but significant moments, like a daily stand-up with the team, or an important meeting with executives.

Label each of the slices of the clock. Dress up the labels with some simple drawings that show real things going on: the type(s) of devices being used, their location and environment, and other significant factors.

Step 4: Overlay your product’s/service’s context

Notice that so far you haven’t included your product or service at all; this has been all about them and their goal, their tasks, their job, and so on. Now, you can grab a different colour, go back over the ‘clock’, and add in significant information according to your product/service context.

This might include particular product tasks that the user type needs to get done using your product at that particular time of the day. Or it might include specific features that get used a lot at specific times, or specific parts of your service that get hammered more than others.

Step 5: Explore, explain, enrich

Now is the point where you can start to ‘see’ your product being used in a new ‘re-framed’ way. Either individually or as a group, you can explore the ‘clock’ you have drawn as a map of time, to provoke more insightful questions and enrich your understanding of your users.

I’ve seen this visual pattern come in handy for anyone in a multi-disciplinary team, but as a start:

Researchers can share insights from research and tell a story according to this ‘day in the life of’ picture, so that others can relate to it from the user type’s point of view more easily, and empathise more easily
Product managers can gain a deeper sense of what features the user type depends on more often and why (and if there are gaps), and where the moments of greatest value to the user are, so that you can align strategy, plans and roadmaps to real value metrics
Designers and content writers can make connections from feature usage (or lack of a feature) to importance and urgency, from a user point-of view, so that you can prioritise where you want to spend the most creative energy

Adapting the User Clock Sketch

Every time I demonstrate this sketch to others, there always seem to be more uses for it… which is a good sign! Since the pattern relies on a journey being cyclical, it can come in handy in a way that a strictly linear map might not. You can also change the ‘resolution’ of the time, too. It could show a typical week for a user type, or a financial year, or for as long as it takes to order a meal and have it delivered… it’s up to you and your context. Here are a couple of variations:

Two User Clock Sketch usage alternatives

Enrich the way you ‘see’ your customers

What I’m really getting at here is this: we have to see our customers as real people, not just consumers of our products. We have to see the world through their eyes, not just through the eyes of our products. And we have to use multiple various ‘frames’ on how we see them, by visualising them and describing them in different ways, and not just reducing them to conceptual abstractions using one familiar pattern or the other.

According to Capgemini research (back in 2017, at least), 75 percent of companies considered themselves to be customer-centric, but only a measly 30 percent of customers agreed. I suspect this gap is because a lot of companies mentally and physically engage with customers on a pretty superficial level, and view them as replaceable parts of the whole (as seen on a chart), rather than as individuals with genuine goals and needs to fulfil.

But I’m hoping that using patterns like the User Clock Sketch (along with other mapping tools) can help this! By changing up the way we visualise customers, I think we can inoculate ourselves against this superficial kind of thinking, and enrich our mental models of our customers and users.

This will not only improve the quality of what we offer our customers, but will ultimately make our own businesses more successful.

…

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Better visual brainstorming with the Concept Canvas

27/01/2019 by Ben Crothers

Making big decisions about which idea or option to invest in amongst a group is really hard. Using the Concept Canvas to visually compare apples to apples makes it a bit easier (includes free PDF).

I was in a brainstorming session from hell once. I was part of a team to help a telecommunications company redesign several of its systems into a seamless customer experience. The stakes were high, and the salaries in the room were pretty high too. The facilitator (a project manager from another agency) started us off by describing the state of the existing systems. Then with whiteboard marker in hand, asked us for ideas.

My heart sank.

I love brainstorming, I really do. I know some people will gnash their teeth and tell you that brainstorming never works, but it can and does work really well, if you ask the right questions, and have just a bit of structure. But alas, we didn’t have the right questions or structure in that session. And the only thing I remember that vaguely sounded like an idea that was written on the whiteboard was QR codes.

That was it, really. QR codes.

The problem with picking out one idea from many… will everyone else understand what it is and why?

I’m sure it made perfect sense to the regional manager that kept clanking on about it, but that’s all we had by the end of the session. I remember thinking that QR codes weren’t connected to the problem we were there to solve (nor to the customers and their situations) at all.

The problem with ideas

Ideas are awesome. An idea can be as vague and unrelated to anything as — yes — QR codes, or as grand and bold as democracy itself. A great idea can come from anywhere as they say, and the more ideas we have, the more chance we have of striking the right idea that will become the right solution.

But as great as ideas are, they can wither and die a premature death if others can’t ‘get it’ the way you do. An idea might seem clear and actionable to you, but it’s usually very tricky for everyone else to ‘see’ what you ‘see’ in your head. How is it connected to the original challenge? How does it work? What’s the risk? What’s in it for me?

Stakeholders may not understand your idea (let alone get onboard), but framing it as a concept helps!

Ideas usually need to be combined and refined into concepts. A concepts is what links one or more ideas into a structured actionable solution. It contains a lot more information that fleshes things out in such a way that you and a team could then execute on it. If you only ever go as far as generating ideas, it can be hard trying to refine and combine them, and it gets really hard to then make any decisions based on them, such as comparing one over another, or estimating how long it might take to make, or which market to take that idea into.

Refine and combine your ideas into concepts

The Concept Canvas

That’s where the Concept Canvas comes in. The Concept Canvas gives you and your team a way to add enough structure to your ideas, so that you can evaluate them more confidently. Like all canvases used in design and business strategy, you can draw it up on a whiteboard for a group to use, or draw it on single sheets of paper for individuals to use. And it looks like this:

The Presto Sketching Concept Canvas: This is an easy template to use to turn several vague ideas into a consistently structured set that you can then compare for value, risk, or any other factor you need

(By the way, you can also read about this canvas in Presto Sketching, the book).

Here’s a free PDF of the Concept Canvas for you to download and use yourself. 🙂

The Concept Canvas helps you to keep a ‘line of sight’ from the original problem you’re trying to solve and/or value proposition, to the solution you set up, through to the shipped product, service or process.

How to use the Concept Canvas

For the purposes of explanation, let’s assume you’re doing some sort of brainstorming session with a group to generate ideas on how to solve a particular problem, or meet a certain customer need.

Start your session with a clear problem statement or design challenge that the group must tackle.

Example: “We believe that people under 25 want to invest in property, but id it too expensive to even begin. We can help them by selling them small pieces of existing properties and then giving them the proportional share of any net rental income. We’ll know we’re right when first-time buyers of one piece return to buy more pieces.”

Ask everyone to individually come up with as many ideas as possible, on any particular aspect of this challenge. Wild and random; boring and expected; big, little… it doesn’t matter. Help get them started with more focused creative “How…?” questions, like these:

How can we attract prospective customers who have never considered this as a service?
How can we encourage existing customers to buy more pieces?
How do existing customers sell their pieces?

Now, of course people will (hopefully) come up with all sorts of ideas early on, and it’s great to capture those as phrases on sticky notes, whiteboard scrawls and sketches on paper. But watch out for ideas that are just one word. For example, I can just imagine my QR Code Guy blurting out “Referrals!” If this does happen, ask the person to add a bit more detail according to the “How…?” question, the audience and its goal.

Ask everyone to refine and combine all those ‘small’ ideas into their strongest three ideas, and fill in a Concept Canvas (above) to flesh out each of those ideas into a more realised concept.

Begin by copying the hypothesis into the Hypothesis section of the canvas.
Write in which particular audience type each idea is suited to in the Audience section (e.g. “Cynical evaluator, Brand new customer, Champion regular customer).
In the Goal section, write what that audience type’s goal is. It should be specific to the audience, and not a business or product goal. This helps everyone to really think hard about connecting their idea properly to the initial challenge.
In the Channels section, write in what channels are involved in the concept. How does the customer actually experience/use this concept? Is it through the existing company website? A new app on her mobile phone? On her laptop at work?
Now, use the main area of the canvas (Experience section) to describe and illustrate what the actual experience is. This could be a bulleted list, a flowchart, a storyboard, a set of wireframes… whatever helps to really bring this concept to life, and add rigour to your group’s thinking.
Finally, put a mark on each of the sliding scales in the Scope Sliders section for how ‘big’ the concept is. Just rough guesses is fine at this stage. You can use the existing sliders (risk, effort, value, resourcing, timing), or replace them with your own factors that would be important to you and your project.

Because everyone is using a common structure, the Concept Canvas now makes it easier for everyone to read and understand everyone else’s concepts. As a way of refining the output of the group, you can get each person to briefly pitch their concepts to everyone, and then them give them all three sticky dots to ‘vote’ on the concepts that they think are the strongest.

What you should now have is a refined ‘gallery’ of Concept Canvases. Even though the contents of each main Experience section might visually vary, you’ve given everyone just enough structure to help you sort through them and start sizing them for risk, effort, value, resourcing, and timing (or any other factors that you might have used).

Give it a try

As with all the canvases and whiteboard patterns that I share, why not download the free PDF of the Concept Canvas and try it yourself? There’s no harm in trying it out on paper yourself first, and then with your team on the whiteboard; I guarantee that visually structuring your ideas as fleshed out concepts will help everyone ‘get’ your ideas a whole lot more.

…

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Solve the right problem with the Problem Pyramid

23/10/2018 by Ben Crothers

Get clarity on a problem to be solved – either by yourself or as a team – by exploring it, reframing it and articulating it in a more insightful way using this simple visual pattern.

Ambiguity and confusion? You probably don’t have a proper problem statement

Have you ever had those times where you’re lying awake at night, with your mind gnawing on a problem, and you just can’t seem to think it through properly? You toss and turn, and as much as you want to turn your brain off, you can’t!

Or, you might have a project at work where you (and probably others too) can’t really say why you’re doing it. The project might have a goal, but still there’s no clear purpose. Sometimes people might even say smart things like “We need to know what problem this project is solving” (very true!) but still, nobody can actually articulate what the problem is.

Or you might even have a problem statement – or inherited a problem statement from somebody else – but it still just sounds like a goal.

*If this is a problem statement, what’s the actual problem*?

A proper problem statement – and I can’t believe I have to say this – should contain a problem. Something that is in the way of someone (or a business, or a system) achieving a goal. Yes, the statement itself can contain the goal, and yes it should say something about who has the problem, and no it should definitely not already contain the solution. Here’s a good guide that has always helped me:

[Persona / Customer type] wants to [Goal] but [Problem]. This is unacceptable because [Impact].

Note how adding the impact of the problem helps to say why we need to solve this particular problem, and maybe why we need to solve it now.

Is it hard to come up with such a succinct, insightful problem statement? Usually, yes. Do you come up with it just by getting a group of people to talk? Probably not. Problem framing by definition is all about describing a problem from a specific point of view, and we all know how likely it is that everyone is going to have a different point of view!

That’s why it makes so much more sense to visually map out the problem space, to get clarity and alignment first, before being able to distill it all into a problem statement. And that’s where the Problem Pyramid comes in!

What is the Problem Pyramid?

The Problem Pyramid is a visual pattern you can draw to help you explore and clarify a particular problem space, especially if that problem space is complex, ambiguous or misunderstood. You use it give more structure and meaning to any conversation about the problem space, so that you have a better chance of distilling a more insightful problem statement.

When do I use the Problem Pyramid?

You can apply this to all sorts of problems and in different situations, such as:

You have a problem, you’ve tried one or more solutions, but you can’t crack it yet
A team is struggling with the scope and purpose of a project, and needs a shared clear understanding of its intent
You’ve been given a problem statement, but it’s not helping to point the way to a solution
You’re ‘selling a solution’ about a particular problem to management, and you want to check your thinking by asking yourself the hard questions up front

What is the Problem Pyramid made up of?

Take a look at the sketch below:

In the triangle you write whatever you think is the problem you need to solve (this is the existing problem statement). The triangle (or pyramid) has 3 sides, which symbolise 3 different ways to explore that problem:

5 Whys – root cause analysis
5 Whos – perspective analysis
5 So whats – impact analysis

How do you do the Problem Pyramid?

You can draw this Problem Pyramid on a whiteboard, paper, even in an online collaboration space (like Miro or Mural). You can do it with your team as a session on its own, or as part of an existing meeting.

Let’s take a look at how you and your team can tackle a problem by visually exploring each of these ‘sides’ together. Be sure to share some markers and sticky notes around for different people to add what they want to, at different points throughout this activity.

Start by drawing a large triangle in the centre of a whiteboard, and write what you think is the problem you’re trying to solve so far inside the triangle. This may well change… but you have to start somewhere!

5 Whys

Problems are usually tackled more effectively when they’re addressed at the source, rather than tackling just a symptom of the problem. The ‘5 Whys’ activity is well known in the design and product innovation domains, and helps us do root cause analysis. For more information about 5 Whys, see the Gamestorming 5 Whys activity or IDEO.org’s 5 Whys activity.

Ask everyone why the problem written in the large triangle is happening (or what is causing the problem), get them to write their responses on sticky notes, and stick them in the area below the large triangle. For example: if the problem is “We didn’t reach our quarterly target of selling 15 thousand shinklebots“, ask them “Why didn’t we sell 15 thousand shinklebots?”

There’ll probably be several different answers to this question that you can read on the sticky notes that people wrote, and you may need to group any duplicates. Now, take each response, and ask why again. For example, if one of the responses was “The factory couldn’t make the shinklebots fast enough“, ask “Why isn’t the factory making shinklebots fast enough?”, and so on. The ‘5’ in the ‘5 Whys’ is to get you and your team to really push your thinking beyond the default top-of-mind cause. The deeper you dig, the better insights you’ll get.

Before long, you’ll unearth some juicy root causes to the original problem that as a team you’ll want to focus on more than others. It’s tempting to now race off and solve one of those causes, but hold up! We have to explore the other two sides first…

5 Whos

Next, ask everyone who is affected by this problem, and get them to write on sticky notes (one per sticky note) who they think is most involved, and group as necessary. Depending on the nature of the problem, it’ll be a mix of particular types of customers, or types of staff members, or partners…maybe even you and your team.

If the team come up with more than 5 (there usually are more than 5), ask them: who is most affected by or involved in this problem?

Why do we do this? Because it’s important to get everyone out of their own mental bubble, and thinking of others. This isn’t a blame game at all; it’s about seeing who’s who in the whole system of the problem space. Identifying different kind of people affected by the problem then leads to helping to see and describe the problem through each of their perspectives, which is what re-framing is all about.

5 So whats

Thirdly, it’s good to do some impact analysis. Looking at the causes of the problem and types people who are most involved in the problem you have generated so far, ask “So what?” I don’t mean “So what?” in a glib, negative way, I mean: “What happens next for the people we identified? What’s the impact of that problem on each of them?”. Whatever the answer to that question is, ask “So what?” again, and so on.

For example: if the problem is “We didn’t reach our quarterly target of selling 15 thousand shinklebots“, asking “So what?” generates answers like:

Quarterly revenue will be less than expected (business impact)
We’ll need to work out why (action to take)
There are too many shinklebots taking up space in the warehouse (business impact)

…and asking “So what?” again generates answers like:

We don’t get the capital needed to open the new branch yet (business impact)
We’ll need to temporarily divert some resources to do customer research (action to take)
We need to find more warehouse space for the incoming products (business impact)

You can visually capture these in the same way as the other two ‘sides’ of the problem area, using a mix of writing, sticky notes and simple drawing on a whiteboard. You might like to ask “So what?” for each type of person you have isolated, too. Doing this impact analysis helps you and your team get a keener sense of urgency about the problem, as well as a sense of the impact if you delay action, or don’t do anything at all.

Step back and see the story

Now’s a great time to step back and get a sense of the whole problem space you and your team have generated. You now have a ‘map’ of the problem. It’s bound to contain some areas that are more tightly defined than other areas, as well as areas that may be completely new and insightful for you and others in the team.

You can use this ‘map’ to join up some elements that stick out as being more important. For example, there might be a specific customer type affected more than others, and the impact on them leads to more negative impacts on others. Or there might be an underlying cause that the team needs to focus on and fix, which will alleviate most of the impact for most of the people affected.

This is how the Problem Pyramid has visual storytelling power, as well as analytical power!

Here’s what a Problem Pyramid looks like in action. Note, it’s normal for it to get messy first, before you can ‘join the dots’ and home in on a particular story to distill into a problem statement.

Try it yourself

As with all of the visual patterns I share, do let me know if you try it out, and what worked well, and what didn’t work so well. I hope this Problem Pyramid helps you see your problems better, so that you can solve them better!

Nail your product strategy with the Product Pyramid

04/05/2018 by Ben Crothers

Features! Story points! Sprints! UIs! It’s all too easy to let the detail of product management drown out the actual product strategy. The Product Pyramid can help.

Strategy is a tricky game. The more complicated the product(s), service(s) and business(es), and the more people involved, the trickier things get. Trying to get shared understanding about vision, direction, risk, priority, and so on is hard enough, let alone getting shared alignment, decision, and execution.

But so often I find that it’s all about connecting the various pieces of product management into a cohesive product strategy story. This usually involves visual framing, and getting everyone involved using a shared perspective and vocabulary that describes where we want to play and how we want to win.

Lots of product managers, designers and entrepreneurs struggle with strategy, because they jump into details too soon, or find it hard to separate what they know from what they believe/suspect/assume. Japanese master swordsman, author, philosopher and all round legend Miyamoto Musashi put it well: “Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things“.

What is the Product Pyramid sketch?

With that in mind, the Product Pyramid sketch is a way for product managers, designers and founders to visually relate the detail of any product (or service) to the rest of what’s important about that product: the experience it provides, the benefits it gives to customers, and the value it creates for customers and the business.

It’s a simple pattern that you can draw on a whiteboard in a strategy meeting, and it looks like this:

How does it work?

The Product Pyramid is a visual guide to remind you and others how all of the parts of your product are related.

P = PURPOSE of the product, usually to increase some value to your business and your customers; the change your product is trying to make in the world
B = BENEFITS to your customers; what they talk about to others that’s so good about your product
J = JOURNEY people go through when evaluating, buying, using, getting help and sharing your product
F = FEATURES of the product; what people use in the journey
P = PERSONAS that interact with the product; the different types of people that go through different parts of the journey. JTBD and needs (i.e. the jobs-to-be-done framework) fit in here.
C = COMPETITION that also attracts the same personas with the same needs

When should I use the Product Pyramid sketch?

Use this sketch (or visual framework) if these sorts of scenarios happen:

You can’t seem to focus product conversation at the right ‘level’ (i.e. people get bogged down in talking about user interfaces, bugs or features when you actually need to talk about benefits)
You don’t have a shared understanding of the product’s strategy across the team
You need to come up with good research questions
You can’t remember all your user stories

How do I use the Product Pyramid sketch?

Make sure you have a whiteboard. If any of the symptoms above start to happen in a meeting:

Draw a nice big triangle
Draw in some horizontal lines to separate the triangle into the different zones (Benefits, Journey, etc)
Make some notes in the zone (or beside the zone) that reflect the conversation you’re hearing. It could be questions, assumptions, or things you’re trying to understand better
Listen for connections in what’s being talking about, and visually reflect this with arrows from one zone to another

The Product Pyramid is a map

The Product Pyramid is a map. It’s there to help you know where you’re at in a product discussion, and where you want to be. It’s not meant to contain lots of detail, but it does serve to point the way to that detail (that would live elsewhere). For example, the Journey layer should ‘link’ to any customer journey maps you have created.

It’s also there to highlight any gaps, vagueness, or disagreement in your product strategy.

The Product Pyramid is a story

Because the Product Pyramid ‘connects the dots’ of your product’s purpose, benefits, journey and features, it also doubles as a great way to tell your product strategy as a cohesive logical story. Two examples:

Pitch to leaders (top-to-bottom) – “The most important change we want to make in this business is [Purpose]. To do that, we need to help [Persona(s)] with [Benefits]. As they use our product, they [Journey], and they way they experience [Benefit] is through [Features]. If we invest in [Feature], this will unlock greater [Benefit].”

Rationale for a feature improvement sprint to engineering (bottom-to-top) – “This particular [Feature] in our product might be small, but it’s the source of a disproportionate amount of support requests. At the moment, it gets in the way of [Journey], and stops too many customers from realising [Benefit]. That’s why we need to focus on improving it this quarter, so that [Purpose].”

Try it yourself

So, the next time any of your product team meetings include even a bit of product strategy – e.g. sprint planning, feature brainstorming, business review meeting – your team can now have a way to keep all the various parts of the product related, and optimise discussion for business benefit and customer benefit.

Use the Product Box sketch to improve any product or service

10/07/2017 by Ben Crothers

Picture yourself strolling down the aisle of your local supermarket, looking at the various products on the shelves. What catches your eye? What is it about the boxes, packaging and labels that gets that product into your trolley?

Not many of us get to design those boxes and packaging, but imagine if you got to do exactly that for your business, product or service?

Or imagine if you got to design a box for you?

That’s exactly what this Product Box sketch trick is all about. It’s a way to help you think about whatever it is that you’re selling, from a fresh point of view. You use the visual ‘language’ of boxed product design (like a box of cereal) as a way to express your product’s value to customers. And it goes a bit like this:

Decide on what it is that you want to sell. As an example, I’m going to use ‘Project Manager’ (I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about how she’s trying to help her team understand how a project manager can help them).

1. Start the box

Sketch a nice big rectangle. This is going to be the front of your boxed product.

2. Sketch the front of the box

Now it’s time to start getting creative! Write the name of the ‘product’ at the top of the box in nice big letters (in my case it\’s ‘Project Manager’), and sketch whatever your product is. Make sure you leave some area blank for the next step. Note how I\’m keeping my sketching really simple:

3. Add the benefits

Next, think about the benefits of your product. What’s your product going to do for your customers? Why should they care? Write those benefits on the front of the box, too (up to 3 benefits is fine). Try not to agonise over the benefits (or your sketching) too much. Progress is better than perfection at this point!

4. Add the ‘ingredients’

Now, let’s get 3D: draw a bit of a parallelogram on one side of your ‘box’. This is the side of the box where your ‘ingredients’ go. This can be the main features of your product; the sort of things that customers want to check that your product includes, when they’re comparing your product with others. Go ahead and write whatever those ‘ingredients’ are.

5. ‘Open here’

Finish off the box by drawing the top (like you can see below). Add in something about how customers start using your product. Do they just open the box and away they go? Or do you want to add the price?

6. Refine your design

As you sketch this ‘product box’, you may well have more ideas about how to make it better. You might also get into the metaphor of the product box a bit more too, and you might want to riff off product-y things like ‘batteries not included’, or ‘assembly instructions’, and so on. Go ahead and do another sketch, and work in your refinements. Here’s mine:

And there you have it! It’s amazing how often we forget to think about our business, our product, our service — whatever it is — from a customer’s point of view, and the product box is a great metaphor for getting us thinking differently. Here are some ways you can use this Product Box sketch as an activity:

Help you and your team get a shared understanding about what your product/service is now
Help you and your team think in a fresh way about what it could become
Galvanize your team, and get them thinking about their internal value to your organization in a new way
Help you think about yourself. What value do you want to be in the world? Why should people ‘buy’ you?
Sharpen up your resume: what are the benefits to your new employer if they were to give you the job?

So, give the Product Box sketch a go, first by yourself and then with your team. As always, let me know if you try it out, and how it went.

Make your transformation happen with the Superhero Booth visual framework

20/03/2017 by Ben Crothers

It’s well known that visualisation helps us achieve the success we want to go after. This has been documented especially in sports performance, but visualisation – imagining your intended goals and how it feels to achieve them – is a skill available to anyone. I was at a meetup the other night, and I had a great conversation about how drawing is a really effective way to visualise goals (d’uh!).

And it reminded me of this great visual framework that you can use to clarify exactly what would turn ‘Regular You’ into a ‘Super You’. And it goes a little bit like this.

Step 1: Draw ‘Regular You’

Like other visual frameworks I write about, this is all about using a 2-dimensional space to organise and connect your thoughts, to explore a challenge or solve a problem. Grab a sheet of paper and a pen, or a whiteboard and a whiteboard marker, and draw the following simple pattern:

Draw a picture of you on the left, as you are now. You can draw a simple figure like I have here, or something that looks more like you… that’s completely up to you.

Step 2: Draw ‘Super You’

Now, ask yourself: if you were a superhero, what would your super-powers be? Have fun with it, and let your imagination go wild. Here are a few that tend to come up with groups I’ve done this with. Super strength? Maybe. Flying? Being invisible? Being able to clone yourself? Now you’re talking.

On the right, draw a ‘Super’ version of you (another way to think about it is ‘Future You’):

The Super You can be showing the super-powers you’re thinking of, but if that’s too complicated, just a simple figure that looks a bit super-ish is perfectly fine. Feel free to copy my one (above). It helps to put your initials on the chest, too. Example: I remember one guy in a workshop just wanted to be super PUNCTUAL, because he was late all the time, and it frustrated him. So when he drew the Super Him, he just drew himself with a massive clock hanging around his neck!

Write your super-power(s) above the ‘Super You’ figure, and now think about why you want those powers. Why would you want to clone yourself (for example)? This can be really insightful for you, because it shows what you truly value. We can never be invisible*, but maybe if we dig into why we want to be invisible, there might be something that we could do to achieve some benefit of being invisible. But let’s get to the next step first…

These super-powers are a bit of a metaphor for how we really want to be, and you may well see how they could become goals for you to pursue.

Step 3: Draw the Superhero Booth

Now, draw a big box in between the two figures, and draw an arrow to show how ‘Regular You’ stepping into that Superhero Booth, and another arrow out the other side, showing how you come out as Super You:

Can you see how this ‘Superhero Booth’ works as a visual metaphor? It makes you think: “what goes on in this booth that turns me from Regular Me into Super Me?”

Step 4: Stop I Start | Continue

Here’s where it gets interesting. Draw 2 horizontal lines in your Superhero Booth (see mine below), and write STOP, START and CONTINUE, like this:

Now, jot down what you think you need to (you guessed it) stop, start and continue, to become that Super You. Remember how I said to think about why you would want each of those super-powers? Think about the benefits of those powers that appeal to you, and what you could stop, start, and continue in your life and work, to achieve those benefits.

Be bold and set yourself challenges, and let this Superhero Booth be your map, to remind you of what you need to do. Improving yourself is hard, and there are sure to be some challenges in your way… but never fear; there’s a visual framework to help you with that, too. 😉

Try it as a team

Discussing (and sketching) what your super-powers are as a team is really insightful, too. What needs to happen inside that Superhero Booth, to take your team to the next level?

Here are some other ideas about how to use this visual framework:

Are you a designer or product manager? Try envisioning the Super Version of your customers (i.e. what would make them better), and let the Superhero Booth be a catalyst for connecting their needs with your offering.
Are you a project manager or scrum master? Try it with your team to help everyone improve each others’ performance
Are you in change management? Try it with different parts of your organisation, to see where they’re at, where they want to be, and what is going to resonate with them to get them there.