Our product design process helps us improve the odds of making something people want by focusing on the idea/validation feedback loop. We apply this process to most of what we do; it helps us design marketing experiments, write business proposals, shape our company strategy…
We took inspiration from Google Ventures’ Design Sprint, going iteratively through 5 steps;
- Understand: establish the context and problem (e.g. “What data do we have?”, “What pain are we solving?”), list our assumptions and define how we intend to validate them.
- Diverge: generate multiple (potentially conflictual) solutions to solve the problem at hand.
- Converge: align the team around one approach (e.g. a single user flow/storyboard).
- Prototype: quickly build a prototype we can test.
- Validate: test the prototype, usually with actual users outside of our team, to learn what works and what doesn’t.
Each cycle helps us validate and invalidate our assumptions, and get us one step closer to understanding what works.