Product Strategy and Planning Tools

Successful user experience design requires planning and strategic thinking. What are the new design methods that will ensure success in your work?

Join Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path as he shares proven steps instrumental in the development of designs. In this in-depth seminar, Peter will share tools for developing the strategy and planning for your organisation’s sites and web applications. Drawn from time-tested techniques of product strategy, the design experts at Adaptive Path have evolved these approaches to suit the expedited pace of web application development.

You will learn:

• Business problem prioritisation. You’ll see how to focus your designs on the factors that truly matter to your organisation. Business prioritisation will prevent the development team from building unnecessary functionality, and provide guidance as to the metrics worth measuring within your organisation.
• How to make a solution with stakeholders. Too often, internal discussions with stakeholders lead to conflicting priorities within an organisation. Peter will show you different ways to quickly prototype solutions that allow you to get on the same page with stakeholders; identifying their presumptions and desires for your sites. By bringing these latent ideas out into the open, you can get all of your organisation’s stakeholders oriented around the same goals.
• How to create and articulate an elevator pitch. Many development teams build applications without a clear understanding of the problems they will solve, or the competitive landscape they live in. This can lead to the development of tools with a lot of functionality, but no real focus. In other words, tools that go unused. To combat this, you’ll learn how to develop a strong elevator pitch for your designs. A successful pitch provides a clear direction for the product’s development, and a vision that guides every design decision.
• Scope Planning. Information-rich web sites and web applications often involve an increase in complexity and development time for the team. These factors call for an even tighter control over the scope of functionality, and greater alignment with the product strategy. You’ll practice methods for controlling the scope of your designs, including concept mapping and road mapping.
• Conversion modelling. Every web site is intended to change the behaviour of its end users. For example, the target audience may need to change from non-users to regular users, from call-centre users to online-channel users, or from passive viewers to active participants. Identifying, planning, and designing around these conversions is a powerful way to connect your design with meaningful business outcomes. You’ll learn to model and generate design ideas and metrics to improve these customer conversions.

Peter will end the day with demonstrations of how the insights gained in strategy can lead directly to design solutions.