Identify risks and uncover opportunities to successfully grow your business
As a team, Identify what’s holding your business back
Whether your business has 1 stakeholder or 5, it’s important to get alignment on the highest priority problem to be solved.
Creating a Problem Statement helps get everyone on the same page about what to tackle next as a business. Once you’ve defined a problem, you can start thinking about success.
Defining success requires thinking about the ideal state, but also all the granular steps you’ll need to take to get there. Relevant, measurable goals and metrics will help you to achieve successful outcomes and avoid major roadblocks along the way.
Check out how we helped the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority uncover innovation
Defining and prioritizing problems can be intimidating. There are often many areas you could focus on, from adding customer value to optimizing internal processes.
Again, aligning on the most critical problem to solve first with your stakeholders is important, and will often be determined by financial risks or opportunity costs.
Identifying opportunities to optimize internal processes are similar to customer research–once you’ve got your problem, and your target audience (e.g. your product team vs sales team), you can start conducting interviews and collecting feedback from the group experiencing the biggest pains.
Use Design-thinking to uncover opportunities to successfully grow your business
Now that you’ve identified your problem and critical path to success, you can build a hypothesis to test out your new solution(s).
Building and deploying new software solutions is very time-consuming and expensive. It’s also an inefficient way to test new ideas. Instead, use design-thinking and design methodologies like the Product Design Sprint to test new solutions early.
The Product Design Sprint process is designed to help you rapidly identify assumptions and risks and validate your assumptions through user interviews and usability testing. This process pulls together everything you’ve learned about uncovering customer insights, making a plan of action, and then implementing that plan and seeing results.
After conducting a Product Design Sprint, there are a few key questions that remain before moving forward:
- What have you learned from the process?
- What have you learned from your customers?
- What patterns or gaps are you seeing?
Once you can answer these questions, you’re ready to take what you’ve learned and apply it to the next iteration of validation.
Maybe you’ve gotten positive feedback from customers about a particular solution and your team feels much more confident about implementing that solution, and that’s a great outcome! Maybe your idea didn’t resonate so well and you need to go back to the drawing board–another great outcome because you’ve just saved a lot of time and money.
This process is not just reserved for early-stage discovery and validation, in fact, the more you incorporate strategic research and design thinking into your workflows, the more you’ll see the positive impact it has on many areas of your business.
Foster growth by using this process consistently and continuously throughout your business and product’s lifecycle.
Check out how we worked with Relias to validate a market and grow their business