It’s not about your craft

Digital strategists, user researchers, product managers, business owners, experience designers and developers certainly have diverse skills and approaches to solving problems, many preferring to be left alone to apply their craft then toss it over the wall to the next. If you are trying to create consumer focused experiences that deliver high business value this simply doesn’t work.

All in, for a better consumer outcome

Four Modes Take Digital Strategies to Consumer Reality - Hedrington

To create leading edge digital experiences we need to forget about the dividing lines and hand-offs between our roles and instead focus on how we collaborate and bring our skills to bear outside of our own comfortable “phase” and across the entire digital product life cycle. We need to refocus on how we work together. Defining critical skills and input each role must bring to the table across all four critical modes will help us better focus on consumer needs, fuel us with breakthrough thinking and the build the collective resolve to get through the trials of execution landing on that right customer informed experience in the end.

Four Modes

#1 User Research & Discovery - Focused, collaborative, firsthand discovery for everyone. Information gathered directly from our users by all individuals who will touch the experience keeps what really matters in focus. Continue reading…

#2 Workshopping - Workshop methods that leverage the skills of the entire team to uncover business needs from new angles, define guideposts for our work and helping envision the future we re aiming for. Post coming soon…

#3 Guide & Shape - A smart and structured way for all roles to tie the vision we’ve created to our current state work keeping the team on track and moving forward. Diverse roles, rather than one product manager or business owner, checking in on progress and steering towards the best final outcome. Post coming soon…

#4 Execute - A fast and focused delivery method that checks its work with real users as often as possible. Emphasizing getting to something we can all see and interact with as soon as possible giving all roles real feedback to shape their next steps. Post coming soon…

Over the next series of posts I will outline interesting examples of this new way of working, best practices, other readings from key individuals and share my general experience across the variety of roles that all need to come together across the four modes to deliver digital for consumers and your business.

-Ben