Design Thinking for the Enterprise

Andy Bassiri: This is Design Thinking for the Enterprise. If you remember from our last video, the design sprint is a five day process meant to help us solve big problems. We're going to take you through the entire design sprint process from start to finish in just three videos. Think I can't do it? Watch me.

Andy Bassiri: Monday. Monday is huge. Monday is when we get your team together to solve our big problem. Who knows the most about your problem? Who deals with it most? Who's dealing with it day to day? I'm talking people from IT, marketing, sales. Consider this whole thing, research. We want to get as close to the data as possible, so together we're going to interview these experts and we're going to listen for challenges, we're going to listen for obstacles and we're going to rephrase them as how might we questions.

Andy Bassiri: For example, problem. I have so many different files that I'm sending back and forth via email, I don't know how to keep track of which one's which. Oh, how might we reduce the amount of files being sent back and forth? How might we? Then we're going to vote on those how might we questions to surface our best opportunities and then we're going to stick those on the shelf and come back to them later.

Andy Bassiri: Next, we're going to define a two year goal as a team. This will be our optimistic vision of what our solution's going to be and what it's going to do. For instance, in two years, all departments use the same platform to get work done. Sound simple, but we all know it's not.

Andy Bassiri: The pessimistic questions, the questions we need to ask, are things like, how might this go wrong? What are obstacles to success? Basically, what might cause our prototype to not be successful? These are what we call sprint questions. They're questions that we need to answer by the end of our sprint. Sounds normal. Sounds, duh. Okay. I don't know. Sounds duh.

Andy Bassiri: We're almost done with Monday. Just a few more things. Together we're going to make a map. Director: You know what? Make it much bigger. No, what map looks like this? It's got to go past your shoulders, down, cross.

Andy Bassiri: Now I see. Next we're going to make a map. Director: That's, I don't know what the hell that is.

Andy Bassiri: I don't even know what this is. This map shows us the problem space so we can see the actors and actions that make up our problem space. It's a high level picture of our process with key milestones. Once we draw our map, we're going to take those how might we questions from earlier and we're going to place them on the map where they make the most sense.

Andy Bassiri: Then and only then can we pick our target, the target being the point on the map that we want to focus our prototype and along with it all the opportunities that we can explore.

Andy Bassiri: Boom, that's Monday. Director: Why are you yelling?

Andy Bassiri: I don't know. Here's what we've done in as little as six hours. We got stakeholders from multiple departments to align on a strategic goal, barriers to success identified, the problem space got mapped, and we've agreed on a target for the best opportunity for improvement, which will now be the focus of the next couple of days, and of course, the next couple of videos.

Andy Bassiri: In those videos we're going to talk about Tuesday and Wednesday where ideas start coming together. So stay tuned or watch that video or join us.