product strategy

Discover how your customers tick with the Decision Factors sketch

26/10/2020 by Ben Crothers

It can be really hard getting a handle on what factors affect your customers’ decisions, or how to get buy-in from your stakeholders. The Decision Factors sketch can make it easier.

Why do we buy the products and services we buy? Why do we choose one brand over another? Why do some factors influence us more than others? Or why is it so hard to get teams to use a new system, as part of change management?

If you’re a researcher, designer, marketing professional, product manager, or change manager, you probably spend a lot of your time thinking about these sorts of questions. There’s an incredibly complicated soup of factors and biases going on in the way we make decisions, large and small, as well as various forces that play on those factors and biases. There’s also a huge body of ongoing research into the cognitive psychology and behavioural economics involved in decision-making.

I want to show you a simple framework that has helped me apply the essence of this research: the Decision Factors sketch. It helps you visualise the various factors going on as we make decisions for behaviour change, whether that change is to make a purchase, to join a meeting, to approve a design… anything at all.

What’s in the Decision Factors sketch?

As you can see in the sketch below, there are four main elements going on:

SUBJECT – Your customer, persona, stakeholder, staff-member… the person who you want to make a decision for change
OFFERING – The thing (idea, solution, product, proposal) that you want the subject to buy, or buy into
ATTRACTORS – The factors that attract this person to your offering
INHIBITORS – The factors that inhibit, distract, or otherwise prevent this person from making the decision to buy/buy into your offering

By mapping out the factors in this way, you can really put yourself into the mind and shoes of that person, spot gaps in your understanding, and enrich your own thinking about the relationship between your offering and your customers/stakeholders. Let’s take a closer look…

Attractors

By using this sketch to list out the factors that encourage someone to make a decision in favour of your offering, you pull the focus of the offering from its features (usually what we think about the most) to what those features are for. These tend to do with things like:

GOAL – What would this person achieve with your offering? This is the main factor that everyone thinks about, and is at the foundation of user-centred design and jobs-to-be-done theory. A decision cannot take place without the recognition of a need of some sort, to help solve their specific problem.
OBJECTIVE BENEFITS – What is better about your offering than the competition, or what the person is doing already? You should be able to list some differences your offering affords them, e.g. to do some task easier/ faster/ cheaper, to do better, gain more, save more.
SUBJECTIVE BENEFITS – What emotional need lies on the other side of the goal (above)? This is the factor we like to think drives everyone else except us… but we know that’s not really true. This is the factor at play in marketing messages and advertising. These are the ’emotional jobs’ in JTBD theory. Things like: make me look good in front of others, make me more popular, make me feel smarter/ sexier/ cooler/ more powerful. Make me more…complete.
TRUST – How much would the person rely on your offering? Past experience of something is our best predictor of the future performance of something similar. The trust earned from a previous positive experience is a strong attractor in itself.

Inhibitors

Inhibitors are the forces that turn us off, hold us back, or get in the way of deciding to buy or change, things like:

HABIT – People’s habits — their regular entrenched way of thinking and/or doing things — can be a powerful thing to have to overcome.
OBJECTIVE DRAWBACKS – There may well be specific disadvantages that are worth highlighting in the array of factors affecting the person, such as increased cost of time and resources. But sometimes behind these objective drawbacks, lie factors that actually affect that person more…
SUBJECTIVE DRAWBACKS – These factors don’t apply to all buying or behaviour change decisions of course, but they can still be powerful deterrents. What might the person be afraid of, if they decide to do/buy/use your offering? Is there a fear of change? Fear of loss of control? Or any limiting beliefs in the way, e.g. “I don’t know if I actually deserve this”, “I’m not worthy of it”, “It’s out of my reach”…?

Visualise the factors at play with different-sized arrows

I hope you can see that the Decision Factors sketch is more than just listing pros and cons for the subject. This is a visual, so we can map how big/small each of the factors are, with different-sized arrows. This helps you (and others you show it to) understand how these various factors might work together, or counteract each other, more quickly, accurately, and comprehensively.

What do I use the Decision Factors sketch for?

You can use this to:

Help explore how to make your product/service more desirable to your customers
Help analyse research results about customers’ needs and buying habits
Help dig into why people are/aren’t adopting a new product/service/way of doing things in your organisation
Help yourself prepare for a pitch to stakeholders, to attune your communications to what they care about the most
Have a more productive discussion in any 1:1s with staff or stakeholders

How do I do the Decision Factors sketch?

1. Draw up the framework

Start by drawing the basic framework of the Decision Factors sketch on a whiteboard, flipchart, or even just a piece of office paper. You can even put these elements together in an online collaboration space like Miro or Mural.

2. Use the areas as prompts for discussion

Now, use each area to help structure your thinking and prompt group discussions, all with the aim of gaining a deeper understanding of how to maximise the likelihood of a particular subject adopting your offering. You can ask yourself or your group questions like:

What’s in it for this person to buy/use our offering / solution?
What is holding them back from buying it/using it?
What might distract them from making this decision?

Note! You don’t have to solve anything right now. Resist the temptation to justify your offering, or falsely ‘jack up’ the power of some attractors over others, or to rationalise any of the inhibitors away.

3. Capture and visualise the factors

Capture what you’re thinking, or what others are saying, on the sketch as you go. Messy is totally OK; this is definitely a case where the process of using this sketch is often better than the final product. remember to play with the size of the arrows, to indicate what factors are greater than others, or what factors you know you need to focus on. This can also expose some blind spots that you or your group might not have thought about.

4. Discuss next actions

Once you or your group have laid out and assessed the array of various attractors and inhibitors, now you can switch to ‘solution mode’, and think about what you need to do, to increase the chances of this person adopting your offering.

Is there something about your offering that needs to be introduced? Or dialled up? Or taken out?
Is there a benefit of your offering that just isn’t clear enough?
How might you change any marketing or communications to help people decide?
Are there any specific messages you need to put out there, to help people deal with the inhibitors?
Is there something you can do to help with a specific inhibitor, that would tip the balance in your offering’s direction?

Try it yourself

As I hope you can see, the Decision Factors sketch can be a powerful analysis and re-framing device. It can be fast and light – like using it right before you go into a pitching presentation – or it can be thorough and in-depth, like in a product strategy workshop.

However you use it, I hope it brings you might insight and success!

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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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.