Any customer-centric company is going to have a lot of customer requests to triage. When I started at Aunt Bertha, the requested features (as described by the customer) were being haphazardly thrown over the fence to the product team to understand and triage.
Designers need to help businesses build the right features for the right people, which means understanding the problems and pain points first, and evaluating the scope and impact (and cost) of possible solutions. Our customers didn’t know what was possible, so they often asked for additional work-arounds to make their existing work-arounds easier. Shuffling through stacks of pre-defined solutions wasn’t going to get us where we needed to be as a company.
To help other teams understand what kind of information we used when we designed a feature, and to get teams thinking critically about which requests were more impactful, I started the practice of holding quarterly co-design sessions with the teams at Aunt Bertha. I wanted to help other teams internalize the sort of design-thinking that exemplifies great products.
Sessions ranged from an hour to several hours, and included phases for information gathering, synthesis, reframing, ideation, and refinement. I led teams in exercises like 4-by-4s, brainstorming, Crazy 8s, affinity diagrams, whiteboarding sessions, how might we, challenge mapping, empathy exercises, and journey mapping.
The sessions were a quarterly highlight for the people who got to participate. Besides instilling design-thinking, it also helped teams feel heard by the product team, and empowered them to rethink habits and solve their own problems.