Process Steps | Overview
- Intake
- Plan
- Report
Create an artifact/report for each step.
Intake
The Intake Process
- Objectives & Questions
- Goals - Research
- Goals - Business
- Transfer the above to the plan draft
Have an intake conversation
- Harvest the questions that stakeholders hope you will answer
- Discover the user problem they want to solve
- Help them explain the larger business problem they want to solve
- Capture the questions and what's behind them
The Intake Conversation
1. What Problem Are We Solving?
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- Who are we solving this for?
- What is it your stakeholders ultimately want to get?
- What is our desired outcome? What do we hope will happen?
2. Stakeholders
- Who is asking you to deliver something?
- Business, development, leadership
- Are there other stakeholders?
- Who are the designers?
- Who is the researcher?
3. Constraints
- Are there any technical or business constraints?
- What are they?
- To what extent are they flexible/negotiable?
4. Risks
- What are potential risks? What bad things might happen?
- What is the likelihood?
- What is the possible impact?
- How can we mitigate this?
5. What Do We Know?
- Are there applicable designs or capabilities already?
- Are there examples or best practices?
- Do we have existing findings or knowledge?
6. Timeline
- Is this a short-term project for a planned release? Or a long-term, iterative?
- Are there known dependencies that affect this?
Research Plan
Write a research plan and use it
- Use the intake insights to derive a research plan draft
- Develop and write out goals, questions, and methods from the insights
- Review and get agreement on how you wrote and plan to study it
- Apply the goals and questions throughout the process, from recruit to report
The Product Research Plan
- Goals for the business
- Goals for the research
- Objectives and questions
- Methods (and participants)
- Session or instrument overview (tasks that map to goals)
- Script or instrument questions to ask
Research Report
- It’s all about our Stakeholder
- Purpose is to spark faster, more confident decisions
- The report you write is not the report you will deliver
- What stakeholders want to know is what to DO (and why)
- Present the data
- Share the risk - classical risk management
- Risk - What bad thing can happen
- Impact - What is the result of that bad thing - High, Med, Low
- Likelihood - High, Med, Low
- Mitigation - What are we going to do if the bad thing happens
- Give them the courtesy to make the decision
- Hold the data to help them later, if needed
- Three helpful things
- Always state your goal
- Always have a hypothesis
- Always have a plan
- Best Practices
- Be bold!
- Make action recommendations
- Make recommendations from the data and your own expertise
- Immediately support recommendations with the data
- Use the words, "The data says this…"
- Hold your recommendations lightly, or even let them go
Research Report TOC
- Title
- author names, month/year
- Question or Hypothesis
- 1, maybe 2
- comes from goal
- Recommendations
- Top 3 - Research POV
- start with verbs
- Top 3 Findings
- Detailed Findings
- Good
- Bad, Catastrophic
- Quick Wins
- Q & A
- Next Steps - Action Items
- Up to 7 or 8
- Who we learned it from and how we learned it
- How to find Us
References
credit: Dr. Laura Faulkner