The Journey of Product Discovery and Exploration

There and Back

About Me- BFA in Drawing and Painting (Minor in Humanities

and Art History)

- Not a developer, but I love making things

- Enjoys traveling and learning from those experiences

- Favorite iPhone is still the 4S

- I’m not a developer, but have always been in love with making things and building them- I don’t care about the headphone jack because I still listen to music on my iPod classic

This is my nephew Oliver. He loves playing with magna tiles - http://www.magnatiles.com

- I thought about what inspired me as a kid such as erector sets and legos

- HyperCard was the first moment where I found joy in putting something together digitally and make it work

- I LOVE Quartz Composer and still use it to this day

Present

Product Design at One Medical Studio Manager at The Rock Tumbler Collective

Black Pixel, HTC, ExactTargetPast

• Run the design team • Product definition • Build prototypes for user testing • Pitch concepts • Work with teams to ship it • Use Xcode the wrong way* • Write terrible Swift code (but I love it!)

*OMG, everything is a Table View

What I Do

Our Product Design Team

A designer speaking at a Cocoa Conf? !

"People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing."

—Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture & Design as well as the Director of R&D

- Everyone in this room gets to experience this, and it’s wonderful

Strategy in words

- Often strategy in words can feel like this. You know A and Z but need the rest of the alphabet.

Product Discovery is strategy in action

- Strategy is constantly shifting so we need to comfortably adjust as we go along

So…what exactly is Product Discovery?

An intensive time-boxed exploration session to define your product roadmap

Why is it Important?

Unveils what is important in your product (and what is not)

“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.”

— Herb Kelleher, Co-Founder of Southwest Airlines

• Information Architecture • Rapid Prototyping • User Testing • User Interviews • Technology Explorations

• Drawing/Sketching • Wireframes • Competitive Analysis • Live Data Prototyping • Bodystorming

Examples of Discovery Exercises

2. Explore Ideas

3. Share and Learn

4. Connecting the Dots

1. Understand

Understand

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

—Albert Einstein

- - Our cross-disciplinary team of product manager, doctor, and engineers ideating together.

How Might We? !

- This exercise can help you unearth some ideas - http://www.designkit.org/methods/3

• How Might We make waiting for a doctor a pleasant experience?

• How Might We make the rain in Seattle a compelling tourist attraction?

• How Might We re-purpose Sea World to become a wildlife refuge?

• How Might We get Gus Mueller to write an iOS app

- This exercise can help you unearth some ideas- (Gus is a friend and I like to tease!)

- This is what a HMW exercise output looks like

What If?

- We also like to hypothesize “What if?”

• What if getting care with a doctor was as easy as ordering food from Sprig?

• What if patient onboarding was as easy as setting up your dating app profile?

• What if we could file a radar from a tweet? (Sometimes we think we do)

Explore Ideas

Alan CannistraroFormerly Apple and Facebook

(Remote, iBooks, and much more)

- Likes to tell the story of Picasso’s Guernica

-An anti-war piece done in protest of the bombing of a village during the Spanish civil war-Immediately after the bombing, Picasso started sketching- 1645 people died that day

- Picasso produced more than 40 sketches and created a visual timeline of the decisions that led to the mural

- Isolated studies to focus on one aspect to get it right

The final product

Lateral ThinkingThink more. Think differently. Think laterally.

- Vertical - dig deeper / lateral thinking - dig somewhere else- Edward de Bono - https://www.edwdebono.com/

Small experiments you can quickly learn from.

Make a lot of mistakes

- - It is better to make hundreds of small mistakes instead of one big one

Constraints Enable Creativity

Lembas

- - A Rock Tumbler project for a friend’s company. We talked about how we might get someone to see a fit of a piece of jewelry without being there - http://shoplembas.com

- Prototype using Form

- Designing with Xcode to build native prototypes

Inspirato

Landon TuckerAngel Investor

DemographicsAge: 51Gender: MaleAnnual Household Income: $50m+Location: Palo Alto, CAEducation: MBAFamily: Divorced with 3 children

MotivationsLandon is an extremely busy person and never has time to plan trips. He is also a single father and does all of the planning himself. He has to keep in mind the schedule of his three children who can only go during school breaks.

GoalMake booking as easy as possible by allowing Landon to browse properties and communicate with his PVA from his iPad between meetings.

Feature PitchVacation Finder, Placing Holds

“I don’t have a lot of free time to spend looking for vacation spots with my kids. I need something that can help me book a trip while I’m in a boring business meeting.”

Jeanne GreenHomemaker

DemographicsAge: 32Gender: FemaleAnnual Household Income: $4.7mLocation: Minneapolis, MNEducation: Some CollegeFamily: Husband and 0 children

MotivationsI really want the perfect vacation for us. We have some time to plan so ideally I’d be able to build a collection of different trips. We probably book about 5-6 trips a year and I like to plan them all out at once.

GoalJeanne does not work but does all of the vacation planning for her and her husband. She plans multiple trips at once for the entire year.

Feature PitchGrocery List, Trip Folio

“I would like to plan trips for Michael and I for the entire year. It’s important for me to curate and see different options.”

Charles DavisAttorney

DemographicsAge: 41Gender: MaleAnnual Household Income: $300kLocation: Chicago, ILEducation: JDFamily: Single

MotivationsCharles has been a member of Inspirato for three years but has never booked a trip before. He is considering canceling his membership and could use some convincing to finally book that trip.

GoalCharles needs incentives and some inspiration to book his first Inspirato trip.

Feature PitchConcierge Picks, Vacation Finder

“I’ve been a member for several years but actually never booked a trip.”

Louis FernandezHedge Fund Portfolio Manager

DemographicsAge: 34Gender: MaleAnnual Household Income: $410kLocation: New York, NYEducation: MBAFamily: Single

MotivationsLouis is an inactive Inspirato member and ended up booking a getaway trip with his girlfriend to Cabo. What he did not realize is that there are Inspirato destinations at the location he booked.

GoalHave Louis book his next trip on Inspirato and remind him that destinations are available where he is traveling.

Feature PitchAlerts/Notifications

“I use a lot of sites to book trips and sometimes forget what is even available with my memberships.”

Nicole RolandDirector of Sales, Global Accounts

DemographicsAge: 30Gender: FemaleAnnual Household Income: $180kLocation: Los Gatos, CA Education: MBAFamily: Single

MotivationsNicole is trying to establish herself in her career and is hoping to make some key connections with some influential people. She is considering an Inspirato membership in order to do so.

GoalGet Nicole to become a member by showing the premiere value of being an Inspirato member.

Feature PitchMembership Marketing Content, Launch Content

“It’s all about relationships in my field of work. I’d like to become a member as a networking tool.”

- This client was a specific demographic, so we created personas to guide us

Inspirato

- We went really wide with simple and fast sketches

I want to _____

- Throughout discovery, we heard this statement “I want to…” a lot and ran with it

Inspirato

- - Use visuals to frame (literally) the concept. This one we wanted to show that the iPad app should act as the window to the experience

- We mocked the flow roughly in Omnigraffle to communicate intent with engineers

- Example of the first prototype build by our engineer Michael to demo the direction. - Depict the functionality and pair it with the visual shell

- From there we started building high fidelity

What if getting care with a doctor was as easy as ordering food from Sprig?

A prototype is finishedwhen you learn what you need from it

Share and Learn

“If Ernest Hemingway, James Mitchener, Neil Simon, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pablo Picasso could not get it right the first time, what makes you think that you will?”

—Paul Heckel, author of The Elements of Friendly Software Design

- - Capture all the feedback you get from users, and find out what is the highest priority

- Example of our user testing set up- Have real patients come in to get their feedback on future concepts

- Our team observing the patients (who knew people were watching)- Designers, engineers, product managers, testers. Everyone involved watched

Capture everything you learned

Validate as you go along

Connecting the Dots

“Creativity is just having enough dots to connect.”

—Steve Jobs

- Example of what a roadmap could look like. All of these can have discovery projects to inform- We try to focus on key moments we need to go deep in. Ex: We don’t do product exploration for

something like forgot password b/c we already have assertions of the functionality

Bring it all together

- Break it down, build it up

Discovery is ContinuousThere and back (again)

Learning From Discovery

Product Release Cycle

Dual Track

- http://svpg.com/continuous-discovery/- http://svpg.com/dual-track-scrum/

"The only true voyage of discovery is not to go to new places, but to have other eyes."

—Marcel Proust

davidhoang.com david@davidhoang.com twitter.com/davidhoang github.com/davidhoang

Happy Exploring