How do we identify what matters to our customer and more specifically how do we identify them distinctly and find out what's on their A list. This is critical to doing good work in continuous design. In fact it is the easiest way to minimize waste in the product pipeline. We're going to look at how to do that in this video here. Now one question I get a lot is especially we look at this double diamond and people say I think I've seen that this question of what's important, what might be good in the context of design thinking, is this design thinking? And I would say yeah, it is just looking at agile in this fashion is an act of design thinking. The basic idea with design thinking is that we're pairing empathy and understanding of our subject with creative solutions. For example, back when somebody identified that the regular scissors that people who do a lot of sewing we're using sewing and cutting and making clothes were not very good or they could be better. There was this opportunity to create sewing scissors which if you've ever used they're really terrific, they work a lot better than regular scissors. One of my colleagues here at UVA dart and Jean Lincoln does a lot of work in this space and design thinking specifically has to do with taking the tools of product design and applying them to a more general set of business problems. And it works really great for that. And so, her approach is to find out what it is, which is very much what we're going out and doing when we do customer discovery. Test what might be and then kind of find out generally what solutions are sort of tenable for the situation. This works really well if you're interested in that, she has a excellent course on Coursera here and that is a body of work that you may have heard about if you're in the tech space or business innovation space. What we're doing here is almost really just a little bit simpler in a sense of more of a straight line. We're doing just product design, which is kind of the antecedent. The thing that was before this idea of design thinking of how do we take those tools and upon them to more general problems were have a relatively specific set of problems that we've zeroed in on. Because we're saying hey, how do we build digital products better as product managers? And so, we're specifically looking at this question of continuous design, how we do this well, and within this. How do we get this? What does this thing look like here? This persona hypothesis and job to be done hypothesis and the instrument we use to get these answers to test these hypotheses, to texture them, explore them are single subject interviews. We just go out and screen customers and talk to them. Let's talk a little bit about what the outputs of that process look like and how we get to them. Well, the persona itself as we discussed a really good way to keep these focused and marry them with the hypothesis driven approaches that there's a screener. So, not everybody is somebody that we would interview. Have a factual question like you saw for Miguel the music lover, where we say we can walk up to anybody in the street. Anybody in the world and say yes, this is a subject who is pertinent to this persona we're exploring or no they are not. That's really important, otherwise you'll go out talk to a bunch of people getting much of stuff that just doesn't really converge and it's hard to drive to specifics. From there one popular way of describing these personas is with think, see, feel, and do what is our subject. Think about our area of interest be that streaming music or fixing a check systems whatever. What do they see? How do they come to that opinion? What are their sources of information whether they're social, or written, or news, or whatever? And how does the area make them feel? And then kind of factually, what do they do? Now this is not the only way to write up personas but the main thing is you're telling a story. It's vivid, photos are really good and it's a great way in that sense to humanize your user which sounds just like something the designer would say is intrinsically good to do which is fair enough. But the reality is without doing that even though if it may feel too specific, you're going to end up with something very arbitrary. And still that really doesn't help you focus and get to something that is either specifically right or specifically wrong for the user where you can literally get to something that matters. So, you're going to probably end up with something that's so general that nobody really cares about it. From there with the same instrument of going out and talking to subjects and asking non leading questions like hey, what are the top three hardest things about getting the song that you want? Or what are the top three hardest things about going out and fixing H-Vac systems. When the air conditioning breaks we get from them. Kind of their a list of things that are difficult where there's tension between the current jobs to be done and the alternatives. And these are something we pair with these personas. The idea with the job to be done is to answer these questions regardless of what solution the customers using. What is the underlying job, be that habit, desire, whatever, what existing needs, or behavioral fulfilling. And I really find that being able to identify the prevalent existing alternatives, even if they are very well may not be things that look and act like your product direct competitors in the traditional sense. If you can't do that with a job to be done, you probably created a kind of solution focused job to be done. That could get more fundamental. So, this is making sure that you exit these interviews with a point of view on each job to be done and what its alternative is, is an extremely useful way to make sure you're asking the right questions and accruing the right kind of evidence. And so, for example in my last company we build enterprise software for telecom companies and a lot of like most enterprise software things, a lot of the time we were replacing a whole bunch of spreadsheets that they were using. And I would always tell our teams that were there working with the accounts get those spreadsheets. We're not going to design our product to look like those spreadsheets but they tell us a ton of things about what information the customers actually tracking and paying attention to the words and the terms they use. Who does what, who creates what data there, who uses that data? You can learn a lot from the existing alternatives and help you drive to a better proposition. The nice thing about this is that if we put together our personas and our jobs to be done this way we've immediately stitched this whole thing into a nice self contained testable package where we can ask questions that are really a hypothesis oriented. For this particular person that we can screen for, what is on their A list? What are their current alternatives? And crucially closing the loop is our proposition better enough than those current alternatives that they're going to prefer alternative. And maybe more crucially as we move towards the lean startup, how might we test for that. So, as we get into this and we answer these questions, it's really nice to be able to thread them very tightly to these demand hypotheses so that we get a nice tight closed loop here. This again is the easiest way to minimize waste. My friend and sometimes collaborator Laura Klein who does a lot of work on lean uX has this example in her talks and books of jobs for pets. This is a job board for pets. And the interesting thing about it as a kind of thought experiment is it doesn't make any sense. No significant segment of users wants to employ their pet to do actual work. How could we eliminate this? For example, by going out and talking to subjects. Hey, what are the top three hardest things about owning a pet? You're never going to hear that it's employing them. And the interesting thing about that is we can eliminate that right here and then we can save ourselves time on doing these things, let alone going out and building codes. And so, that's the half full version that have empty version, negative version is if you don't have strong work here, you're only going to succeed by accident. If you're not operating on a strong foundation of this is this person that exists and these are the things on their A list and we know how to test whether our proposition is better enough than the alternatives. You'll always be at risk for building something, you'll always be at, I would say inordinate risk of building something that nobody wants. So, if you're joining me for the specialization will look more specifically how to do this. If this is the thing that you think is just the thing to go out and do, there are resources templates tutorials. We can absolutely get started with this in the course resources
