Recently, I have been doing some tiling and found working out where to start tiling a wall actually quite difficult. There are indeed 'apps for that' I had a look around and nothing really did what I wanted so I thought I would build something for fun.
Instead of pile straight into some code I stopped and took some of my own advice. I recently wrote a little about using experiences to help discover product features, so this seems like a good opportunity to show how this works.
So after about 7 minutes of 'work' I came up with this comic strip which is explains my experience of tiling a wall in my kitchen:
As product developers we can dig a little into this dialog and find extra detail in the conversation. In a problem story, this is all about what has happened so we can expect to find some observations and assumptions. The difference between the 2 is simple - one is observable, something we know is happening and the other is something we think might be happening.
For each cell of the comic strip we quickly extract some key words or maybe phrases (1 word definitely, may be 2):
Cell 1: pride, amateur, mistake, research
Cell 2: ignorance, questions, previous work
Cell 3: lesson, impact, planning, difficult
Cell 4: surprise, assumption, simplistic
Next I would create some statements for each cell which would describe our keywords in a little more detail. Some statements might cover several keywords and that's fine. I also categorise what I find as an assumption or observation:
Cell 1
"People like to take pride in their work" - Assumption
"Some jobs take a considerable amount of effort" - Observation
"People look up things if they don't know how to do them" - Assumption
"People want to learn from our previous mistakes" - Assumption
Cell 2
"Some people might not know what a good job looks like" - Assumption
"Given different jobs some people will still not be able spot the problems" - Assumption
Cell 3
"Starting correctly helps ensure the job goes well" - Assumption
"Specific problems can be avoided through forward planning" - Observation
"Knowing what to look for is not obvious to everyone" - Assumption
"Even when you know what to do, it might not be easy to do in practice" - Observation
Cell 4
"People might think they know what to do when they don't" - Assumption
I am doing this solo and I would recommend doing this in a group so there is a conversation around these experiences. By doing this by myself I am subject to my own biases but you should get an idea of how this works.
As someone building a product, a probably spending a while doing so, I am particularly interested in the assumptions I have listed. I can zero in on the one that bothers me most and tackle just that or I could list them out in order and tackle all of them. At this point it's all about visibility - given what we know now, is there anything we should test before we proceed?
As someone thinking about making something to solve a specific problem, a couple of these are troubling:
"People look up things if they don't know how to do them"
If people don't they will never know there is something that might help them! I would want to be pretty sure that people will research about how to tile rather than just doing it. If they won't seek out information they will never find something that could help them.
"People might think they know what to do when they don't"
Similar to above. Often called "unknowns, unknowns" these are things have complete ignorance about and would not think of getting outside knowledge about.
"People want to learn from our previous mistakes"
If people don't want to then any amount of information that might help them wont make any difference. They won't find out how to do it properly because they simply don't want to!
As product team just starting I would look at these as elements of risk. By proceeding without testing these assumptions, we risk our product not being fit for purpose. If we think the risk is small enough - or we feel confident about our market experience etc etc - we could proceed and convert these into risks.
The observations might help us target anything we build at our target audience a little better:
"Some jobs take a considerable amount of effort"
Helping people to not waste time or materials doing the wrong thing could help us sell our product.
"Specific problems can be avoided through forward planning"
Offering something that helps avoid common issues could also help us sell our product. "Canning" expertise and providing this knowledge in an easy to use format is something people find useful.
"Even when you know what to do, it might not be easy to do in practice"
There are some things that are just difficult. If we can solve that problem, we have something that people might want to use.
I have done this exercise with several groups of people and I am always surprised by the insight that is generated by this - we always find something interesting. It's also very fast - doing this including writing this blog has taken about 45 minutes.
You can scale this with larger groups by using a technique called "diverge and merge". Multiple, smaller groups do the same exercise and then you merge these together. Similar comic strips represent similar thinking, which is valuable since everyone is thinking the same thing. Divergent comic strips give allow us to explore our scope - we can ask if these are valid and maybe spend some time on them or we can ignore them depending on what they represent.
So far we have explored the problem, how about the solution. Comic strip conversations can be used for that to.
This time we put ourselves in the future and describe the experience we want our customers to have once we have built our product.
As I mentioned in my previous blog, asking people to imagine what they would want to hear people talking about is a great way of thinking about the experience we want to create for our customers. In NPR speak - "What would turn our customers into advocates?"
This time, we have an additional thing we can extract from the conversation: features.
Features are things we need to build in order to bring about this experience. We still have observations and assumptions but the assumptions are slightly different - these could be assumptions that are based on us building our features. So assumptions could be present now or they could be assumptions that we will only realise once we have built our feature.
Since we have already done this in some detail, I will call out the features only which are all in Cell 4:
"There is an app that someone can use"
"We can calculate the number of tiles you will need for a specific job"
"We can predict the best place to start tiling"
"Different size tiles mean different calculations"
"Different tiling patterns mean different calculations"
"Common planning problems are avoided"
All of these are features that support the experience we are describing. There could well be more but by just looking at the experience we want to create, we can focus on what will directly support or generate it.
Done in a larger group you will end up with several types of experience. You can then order these however you wish, allowing you to focus on the ones that create the impact you want to have with your customers.
As a product team, look at what we have to kick our project with:
- Assumptions we might want to test or convert into risks if we decide we want to continue
- Observations that support our product idea and help us find customers that will benefit from it
- Features that generate experiences that we want to create for our customers
Next steps are up to you but you could take the scope from this and go straight into a story mapping session. The advantage of focusing on the experience means that the scope you have will directly contribute to what you need to build for your customer.
Did I mention it's fast?
I would love to hear your experience of using this. I have documented the method I have been using and provided templates for creating your own comic strips which you can download from here. Let me know how it goes.
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