UXPA Boston Conference 2016

Once upon a time, we had ‘Discovery’, ‘Define’, and ‘Design’. These phases let us explore the problem and the audience, while conceiving a holistic solution. Now we have sprints, complete with a backlog that seems like it appears overnight and a development team that is going to build with or without design to guide it. How do we continue to create great products?

Introducing the Fast Foundation Workshop. This 3-day workshop enables you to engage your clients and stakeholders to quickly define the key elements of your product or project, aligns the team, and identifies critical risks. When it is complete, everyone has a good idea of what is going to be built as well as what it will take to get there. It has been tested with companies of all sizes, from founders looking to conceptualize their first product, to large companies redesigning existing products, as well as across verticals. Its general enough to be used in a wide variety of circumstances while specific enough to ensure that you get specific, usable results.

The Fast Foundation Workshop consists of 4 exercises, each one designed to pivot the team’s perspective on the product, while drilling down to greater levels of detail. Anyone involved in the definition of a product can lead this workshop.

The first exercise defines the goals and priorities. Many teams think they are aligned on these, until they find themselves in a room and are forced to be explicit. Getting clear here first will act as a guide for everything that comes later.

The second exercise pivots from a business perspective to a customer perspective by defining assumptive user profiles. Who are the people who would help us reach our goals? This is a lightweight exercise based on the combined assumptions of the team. It starts to guide the team towards user empathy.

The third pivot is to a task perspective. What will these people have to do to accomplish their goals? We express these tasks using a story map, a visual tool that allows us to see the entirety of the proposed product at a high level.

Finally, we pivot to an interface perspective by using a collaborative sketching exercise to explore different ways to visualize key elements of the product.

You may be familiar with some of the individual exercises, but the magic is in how each is conducted and in how they fit together. Each stage of the Fast Foundation Workshop balances democratic content generation with collaborative consensus.

In this presentation, you’ll learn about the 4 key exercises in the Fast Foundation Workshop, how they work together and tips for facilitating them.

For a limited time, you’ll also get a bonus 5th exercise. This bonus exercise will help you take what was created in the Fast Foundation Workshop and use it as a springboard for filling in gaps and addressing critical risks. By identifying critical risks, such as uncertainties in key user assumptions, or technical risk in the story map, you can plan to address those risks immediately so that they can be mitigated.