I’ve been thinking about the civic space a bit lately, spurred most recently by reading “Cognitive Surplus” from Clay Shirky and connecting with Josh Walsh over at the Civic Commons project.

Problems We Encounter

The biggest impediment I’ve seen to making meaningful progress on significant social issues is our inability to accept that seemingly opposing viewpoints have real substance. That is, going beyond “I’m right & you’re wrong” to seeing that “In this situation my solution has some good points and in this other scenario, your solution also has merit.”

I think part of this situation is due to our mono-party system (let’s face it: they’re pretty much the same) that encourages constituents to make decisions based on sound bites. The oversimplification of today’s issues dilutes any real context to the arguments and results in a polarization of viewpoints. We can’t have compassion for another’s viewpoint because we can’t really imagine that it legitimately exists.

Crux of the Issue

I would like for all of us to have a clear picture of the issues and the factors that frame those issues from the multitude of perspectives. This would enable real empathy for each other’s perspectives to emerge, allowing us to begin to work towards solutions that integrate each other’s viewpoints. Not just “live & let live” but “live & help live.”

Whoever Frames the Debate, Sets Policy

For myself, I know that it would help to know what the actual different perspectives are around a given topic. Too often the media presents issues as having only 2 sides: either you’re for happy babies and licking puppies or you’re against them. But typically the real issues have multiple factors that someone directly involved needs to consider and weigh, often placing a value assessment on one factor over another. We’re often not even discussing the actual issue: we’re talking about the symptoms. Until the underlying root cause is addressed, no real healing can take place.

My Vision

Here’s what I’m envisioning as a possible conversation tool to enable visibility into these factors:

1. Let’s all get everything out in the open. If you have a beef about something: say it. Let’s it it out of our systems and be heard.
2. Let’s evaluate these conversations in relative terms. We can tag what an issue is and the factors that frame it.
3. Some issues and factors will be very different and some will be nearly identical-let’s identify a thesaurus.
4. Let’s also say for a given issues which factors have a higher relative impact.

From all of this data, we should begin to see patterns emerge: what the most significant factors are that surround a given issue, not just the 2 that the MSM presents us with but a really holistic pattern.

Passionate Product Ownership

If you are like me, your mind is full of ideas and glimpses of “the way things should be” but aren’t. You’re frustrated by the way products & projects around you offer the sun, moon and stars but fail to deliver the most rudimentary solutions. Over the last 6 months I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to explore using Agile Development & Scrum concepts to design products that engage user needs.

Looking for solutions to delivering the experiences I sought, Jon Stahl & Doc Norton recommended I take Jeff Patton’s “Passionate Product Ownership” Scrum Certification course at LeanDog (@leandog) in Cleveland, OH. This course is based on Lean development principles and has helped me concentrate my efforts toward practical solutions instead of pie-in-the-sky ideas. It teaches pragmatic design in a way that focuses feature ideas into cohesive & tangible products with realistic users and markets. I highly recommend this course for any product visionaries who feel this passion.

Course Focus

Jeff began the class giving an overview of how products, in particular software, have been traditionally developed and where, even in Agile environments, those efforts have gone awry. The discussion quickly shifted to how this course is different. Although this covers processes such as Scrum to facilitate better development, the focus here is toward the product, its benefits rather than features, customer experience, design thinking and collaboration. The amount of reference material Jeff provided spoke to his own depth and passion on the topic: although this was a two day course, we could easily fill a week-long course with his handouts!

Agile & Scrum

Scrum is an iterative process framework that seeks to shorten the feedback loop, thus responding to change as quickly as possible. There are daily Scum cycles of Plan & Design –> Perform –> Evaluate as well as Sprints lasting 1-4 weeks. Rather than focusing on features, work is tracked with stories that describe user experiences. This breath-first approach complements the user focus and avoids making expensive commitments too early.

Tools for Discovery

Identify Measurable Goals

For many of us pie-in-the-sky types, this step is the most challenging: what are the measurable goals for this product? What can we measure that will tell us if we are progressing toward our goal? This can be revenue or market related but I’ve found that my product types tend to be grounded best by statements around user’s motivations for wanting the product’s experiences. Additionally, I found these goals were refined as I developed my personas.

Create Pragmatic Personas

I’ve been familiar with the persona since Alan Cooper’s “About Face” but Patton’s “Pragmatic” persona simplifies some of the extraneous details and correlates what we know about a user to implications on how we can better serve these users with our product.

Model User Tasks & Activities

Modeling documents the existing value stream (stories for what a user does to accomplish an objective) using post-its or index cards. Next we correct workflows and add stories that add value or streamline the user’s experience. I find my self drawing heavily on my persona’s needs and situations to describe experiences that would delight that persona.

Envision High-Level User Experiences

Patton presents a handful of tools that can be used to visualize solutions. These include Solution Scenario, Design Comic, UI Story Board, UI Screen Ideation, UI Screen Exploration and the collaborative Design Studio. The emphasis here is to make the solution concrete, drawing on the best parts of multiple solution concepts. You never come up with the best design the first time around: plan on that “failure” and make the most of it.

Plan Incremental Product Releases

Although we might have a good idea of what we think our client’s will love, there’s no way we have the resources to build this entire nirvana in one fell swoop. Instead, identify the simplest value stream or story that can possibly deliver on the premise of your concept or product goal: this is version 1. Rinse and repeat for each product goal, identifying a map for future releases.

Since we’re identifying the story first and supporting those with features, no work is wasted on activities that don’t correlate to the value stream. This helps keep your team focused and enables them to understand how they are driving the user experience. After all, there’s nothing more disheartening than working on something that never gets used.

Embrace Change

You’ll probably find that throughout this entire process, what you’ve identified & documented keeps changing. This is a good thing and is very much like the scientific method: if all of our experiments pass, we aren’t learning too much. So here too, expect to rewrite product goals, personas, user tasks and release plans. It’s not so much that our product is changing but that our understanding of that creation changes. It’s kind of like carving a sculpture, we’re slowly cutting away what doesn’t belong and adding details until the creation we always saw in our mind’s eye is finally revealed.

References

I’m sure I missed many things in this overview but you can go to Jeff’s site at www.AgileProductDesign.com and get resources straight from the man. I’ve also ad libbed a bit with concepts from Mary & Tom Popendieck’s “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit”

Upcoming

I’ve seen Jeff come through Cleveland a couple times this year to teach the course. Connect with LeanDog to find out the next time he’s teaching in the neighborhood. I feel this course provides invaluable tools and direction to focus efforts towards the most important thing you can be doing, right now.

Personally, I’ve been practicing these concepts on my own product designs. It takes a pretty big dose of humility to broadcast your work to humanity but you’ll start to see additional blog posts with some of these projects being described by the documentation & design tools discussed here.