Opportunity Assessment Review Review the Product Opportunity Assessment with the team and stakeholders to ensure that everyone understands the problem, the context, and how we will measure success.
⏰ 1 hour and more
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Business Model Canvas Visualize a new business model idea—or rethink your company’s current business model—to highlight key drivers and create a shared understanding.
⏰ 15 minutes to several days
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Lightning Demos Take a look at how competitors’ products are solving similar problems.
⏰ 10 minutes
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Review Industry & Macro Research Know your markets, competitors, customer wants and needs, and what it takes to be competitive in your market.
⏰ 10 minutes
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Proto-Personas Develop a set of quick, ad hoc personas that depict your customers (or those who are encountering this situation or problem).
⏰ 1 hour
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Empathy Map Understand your customers within a given context by creating their profile based on what they think and feel, see and hear, and say and do.
⏰ 15-20 minutes
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Pain-Gain Map Capture your users’ pains and gains to understand what motivates and influences their decisions.
⏰ 10-15 minutes
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Value Proposition Canvas Map, think though, and discuss your value propositions and how they match your customers’ needs.
⏰ 45-90 minutes
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Customer Journey Map Illustrate the steps your customers go through when engaging with your product or the company, and how they feel at various points along the way.
⏰ 10-15 minutes
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Job Stories Identify opportunities for growth by deconstructing a job that customers are trying to get done.
⏰ 1 hour
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Ethnographic Field Studies Sit back and silently observe customers use your product in their natural environment.
⏰ weeks
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Contextual Inquiry Interviews Observe users interacting with your product or prototype, asking probing questions into the how and why of their actions.
⏰ weeks
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Diary Studies Ask customers to keep a daily diary of not just how they use your product, but also their digital lives and habits.
⏰ weeks
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Focus Groups Have a conversation between you and a group of your customers to understand their attitudes toward your product.
⏰ days
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Site Intercept Surveys Present customers in the midst of using your product with a short, engaging survey.
⏰ hours
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On-the-Street Surveys Hit the streets as a team and ask passers-by to take a moment out of their day to fill out a short survey.
⏰ hours
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Moderated Usability Study Pose tasks and questions to your users to see how successfully they can interact with your product or prototype.
⏰ days
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Unmoderated Usability Study Record users interacting with your product or prototype through webcam or screen recording to see how well they can perform tasks.
⏰ days
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Problem Hypotheses Determine and state your most important assumptions about the user problem.
⏰ 45-60 minutes
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5 W’s Answer the key questions of who, what, where, when, and why to understand the context of the problem you’re trying to solve.
⏰ 30- 90 minutes
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Draw the Problem Do quick drawings to define the problem in a simple, clear, and compelling way.
⏰ 20-30 minutes
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Fishbowl Focus on listening to have a more meaningful conversation—one group discusses the problem, while the other group listens and observes.
⏰ 40-45 minutes
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The Five Whys Discover the root cause of a problem by drilling down below the surface to relate it to its context.
⏰ 1 hour and more
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Challenge Cards Identify and think through challenges, problems, and potential pitfalls in a product, service, or strategy, then match them with solutions.
⏰ 30-60 minutes
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Poster Session Communicate ideas and core concepts using images in a poster format to summarize a challenge or larger topic for further discussion.
⏰ 20 minutes
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SWOT Analysis Evaluate your team’s likelihood of success relative to an objective by examining strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, dangers, and conditions that may affect your future.
⏰ 1-2 hours
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Post the Path Define your group’s existing process at a high level and get a better understanding of the current process.
⏰ 30-60 minutes
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Value Proposition Canvas Map, think though, and discuss your value propositions and how they match your customers’ needs.
⏰ 45-90 minutes
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Tree Testing Find gaps between your product’s current navigation and what your users actually expect.
⏰ days
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Stakeholder Interviews Reach out to stakeholders to uncover the varied business needs and motivations involving your product.
⏰ days
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Go/No-Go Decision Discuss and decide whether the problem is a valid one to pursue further.
⏰ 1 hour
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Mind Mapping Take your ideas, mix them with notes you’ve taken, and loosely organize them on paper.
⏰ 10-15 minutes
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Post-Up Generate ideas individually about a given topic on sticky notes, then quickly present them to the group.
⏰ 10-60 minutes
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6-8-5 Sketching Create 6 to 8 sketches in 5 minutes to get down initial ideas, generate many ideas, and iterate on the best ones.
⏰ 30-60 minutes
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Brainwriting Generate multiple ideas individually, share them with each other, and then build on them together.
⏰ 30-45 minutes
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Start, Stop, Continue Examine the current situation, goal, or product by brainstorming what you want to start doing, what should be stopped, and what works well now.
⏰ 10-60 minutes
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The Anti-Problem When the team is running out of ideas for solutions for a problem, get unstuck by identifying ways to solve the opposite problem.
⏰ 30-45 minutes
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Storyboarding Take the ideas you’ve generated so far, and sketch how a user would move through part of a user story.
⏰ 10-20 minutes
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Elevator Pitch Use mad libs to create a compelling elevator pitch for your product, service, or idea.
⏰ 90 minutes
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The VC Pitch Imagine you’re entrepreneurs pitching your idea to venture capitalists—present your key selling points, how the idea can make money, and why people will buy it.
⏰ 30-90 minutes
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Participatory Design Bring your customers into the building to collaboratively build their perfect product with the team.
⏰ weeks
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Silent/3-Min Critique Converge on the most promising storyboards using an individual critique followed by voting.
⏰ 5-10 minutes
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Identify Conflicts Comb through your storyboards and look for conflicts—where there are two or more different approaches to solving the same problem.
⏰ 30-60 minutes
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Design the Box Make focused decisions to design the package for an idea, which communicates information about its important features.
⏰ 1 hour plus
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Affinity Map Discover embedded patterns of thinking by sorting and clustering information into relationships and similar categories.
⏰ 45-90 minutes
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Impact & Effort Matrix Map and evaluate possible actions based on: 1) effort and cost required to implement, 2) potential impact (long-term vs. short-term payoff).
⏰ 30-60 minutes
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Planning Poker Planning Poker is an estimating technique to quickly gain team-consensus as to which possible solutions to prototype and which to toss out.
⏰ 15-30 minutes
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Forced Ranking Make decisions as a group to determine a prioritized list, by ranking items relative to each other.
⏰ 30-60 minutes
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20/20 Vision Get clarity around which projects or initiatives should have higher priority based on their perceived benefits.
⏰ 30-90 minutes
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Dot Voting Agree on ideas that resonate most within the group to narrow down and prioritize a large amount of possibilities.
⏰ 15-30 minutes
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Fists-to-Five Voting Quickly determine what each person’s opinion is when a group is discussing a possible solution.
⏰ 15-30 minutes
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New-Useful-Feasible Test Evaluate the reality of proposed ideas by having everyone rate them on how New, Useful, and Feasible they are.
⏰ 15-30 minutes
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Stakeholder Interviews Reach out to stakeholders to uncover the varied business needs and motivations involving your product.
⏰ Days
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Contextual Inquiry Interviews Observe users interacting with your product or prototype, asking probing questions into the how and why of their actions.
⏰ Weeks
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Define Assumptions The solution to be tested contains implicit assumptions about users that must be accounted for before testing commences.
⏰ 45-60 minutes
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Operational Definition After defining assumptions about your solution or your users, quantify how your team will prove or disprove those assumptions.
⏰ 45-60 minutes
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Live-Data Prototypes Create a prototype to test with live users at a statistically significant scale.
⏰ 30 minutes or days
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Contextual Inquiry Interviews Observe users interacting with your product or prototype, asking probing questions into the how and why of their actions.
⏰ weeks
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Concierge Testing Guide potential customers through a proposed product and determine their willingness to adopt it.
⏰ days
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Concept Testing Leverage concept sketches and interface designs to judge how well a product direction attracts your potential users.
⏰ days
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Desirability Study Put your prototype’s visual design and layout to the test with potential users and their preferences.
⏰ days
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Card Sorting Let your potential users group and organise the building blocks of your product to validate navigation and taxonomy.
⏰ days
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A/B Testing Test different solutions against each other in your product’s production environment to see which performs the best.
⏰ weeks
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Demand Validation Tests Determine whether there is a desire among users for your feature or product.
⏰ weeks
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Wizard-of-Oz Tests User test a complicated product or feature without actually building it by pulling strings behind the curtain.
⏰ 1-2 hours
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Moderated Usability Study Pose tasks and questions to your users to see how successfully they can interact with your product or prototype.
⏰ days
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Unmoderated Usability Study Record users interacting with your product or prototype through webcam or screen recording to see how well they can perform tasks.
⏰ days
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Synthesize Results Synthesise your user testing results to draw conclusions about the prototype you tested.
⏰ 1 hour plus
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The Five Whys Discover the root cause of a problem by drilling down below the surface to relate it to its context.
⏰ 1 hour plus
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Dot Voting Agree on ideas that resonate most within the group to narrow down and prioritise a large amount of possibilities.
⏰ 15-30 minutes
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Pain-Gain Map Capture your users’ pains and gains to understand what motivates and influences their decisions.
⏰ 10-15 minutes
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Brown Bag Sharing Session A short, informal group discussion designed to promote learnings and shared understanding among other teams and colleagues.
⏰ 30-60 minutes
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Go/No-Go Decision Discuss and decide whether to move a solution to production, pivot, or scrap the idea altogether.
⏰ 1 hour
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