Strategizing to Help Team Focus

I joined a team to help understand prioritize a customer. For me, creating an artifact of the customer is bitter sweet. I feel continuous research and understanding of customers is important. Printed artifacts tend to be difficult to live on or evolve.

This team, though, struggled to identify which need to prioritize. They had an internal product, so the customer could be… everyone in the organization! The biggest question I had was - if we prioritize people within the business, what are they actually motivated by? Unlike some personas, developed based on job role, I took the approach to attack this problem with human goals.

With the help of the collective team, I interviewed several associates to gain empathy and understand their motivations. We synthesized the findings. Some discoveries were surprising, for example one product owner prioritizing empathy over data, while some weren’t at all surprising, like the head of product in one division not having enough time. These interviews opened the team’s eyes into why we were straying from role-based personas.

After empathy research, I began segmenting the different goals across a handful of continuums. After a first pass, I worked with my product partners to refine. At that point, the only thing left was to design & share out to the team!