Today I had the privilege of experiencing a mentorship session with Vincent Wong via ADPlist #alwayslearning and I felt inspired to share my learnings in this blogpost.
During the session we discussed about how I could go about defining the roadmap for the product. This is not typically a job for the designer but in a startup and also playing the role of a design strategist, I find it empowering to bring to the team a perspective that would eventually inform my designs.
To share some context, I am at a stage where the prototype on Figma has been tested with users and validation has been done till that point. We could have created the product with no-code tools but we since we were confident on the design direction, we decided to handover the prototype to the developers to build. Since development took quite some time before I could do user testing, I had the time to work ahead. Having clarity of only the MVP scope, I felt stuck and needed guidance on how I can find inspiration to chart the roadmap.
I realised my blocker was that I was over-reliant on user feedback on the prototype (when I had a ton of data in my head from previous interviews in research phase), and could actually lean on Product i.e. business goals and the product north star to inform my ideation process.
Here are some tips that helped me get unstuck.
#1 Revisit the problem statement
I went back to the very first project slides and refreshed my memory of all the target segments we discovered through our initial reasearch. I also had new information from meetings my teammate had with potential partners who had the network of people who could be our users. We had started with multiple problem statements and today was a great opportunity to hone in on a focus, narrowing down on the segments and defining that one problem we want to tackle for the next 12 months.
I had simplified our problem statement to be
"Foreign financial institutions and new financial institution entrants in Singapore find navigating Singapore's regulatory information like a maze".
#2 Define the objective
After stating the problem, the objective came easy. I now know why we exist and the how can be derived from what we do best, and what has been synthesised from uncovering the needs of the users through the initial research as well as new ideas that came along through developing the MVP.
I have simplified our objective to be
Aggregating information from multiple regulatory sources, organising them according to interest topics and processing them for easy consumption.
#3 Visualise the solution conceptually
I'll do my show and tell here, since I've written only words - heh.
I've visualised the relationship between what we saw as the current state when we started, what we are doing now, and what we aim to do going forward. Also, what we are NOT doing moving forward. As a designer, you have the creative talent to convey ideas and plans in visuals, take that lead!
#4 Ideate solutions (even if they are assumptions)
I haven't gone far with this step but I can share the Kanban headers I use for my own design digital workspace which I plan to take my managers through. This helps keep my design world organised.
References - this could be anything from decks, chat exchanges on Slack, whiteboard drawings, anything you need to refresh your memory on for context
User Feedback - I keep all my transcripts and raw notes on Notion, so only selected quotes will land here along with the team's download notes that's relevant.
Ideas - Some ideas that I get, I don't immediately mock up till I get some bouncing with the team
Design in Progress - Ideas that I have mocked up what it will actually look to users. I'm prepared to thrash them int he extreme of not getting prioritised.
Validating - Already got buy in from team and being presented to clients/users but not yet shared with the wider team.
Good to develop - Ready to brief developers.
To conclude...
I'm heartened to see that companies are starting to see the value of design's perspective in product and how designers today can also choose to be stretched to consider business goals in their thinking. Really grateful to got out of my tunnel-vision of relying only on user feedback but rather, hold sight of business goals while trusting intuition from gathered insights to keep ideating.