Exit MEASURE YOUR TEAM: Are You an Outcome Engineering Organization? Question Title * What's your email address? UNDERSTANDING THE USER Question Title * What would you say is your starting point to innovation product development? My company always has an idea for the technology we want to build. Upfront consumer research isn’t typically done on a per project basis. We define loosely end user segments and the design team builds our products. We rigorously work to understand and gain user empathy to help define the vision for all of our products. Question Title * How does your team utilize journey mapping? We’ve partnered with an outside company years ago to create one or some of these, but they’ve not been updated recently. We annually do some journey mapping, but it’s usually a marketing initiative focused on various engagement metrics. Journey mapping is a critical component to understanding what motivates, engages and satisfies our targeted consumers. THE ROLE OF DESIGN AND USABILITY Question Title * When designing a new product, my company: Prototypes early in conception, only to envision the eventual product and get team buy-in. Prototypes after development and before final production to showcase progress. Prototypes throughout the entire development process, getting frequent user feedback on functionality and features. We ‘kill or fill’ ideas and create the perfect end-product through constant user input. Question Title * When do product designers get brought into the planning stage of a new product? We bring designers in after we have built the functional code and laid out specifics on how we want the product to perform. We bring designers in once the engineering team has scoped out the project, passing it off to the design team to make sense of user flow and cross the finish line. Designers are involved in every stage, helping to understand the user journey, define new products we want to build, consider improvements and ensuring that the end vision matches the goal. Question Title * How does negative product feedback from users affect a new product concept? We look at the ratings, but we don’t let them influence us in meaningful ways. Typically the executive team dictates priorities. Not quite what we want, but a good lesson learned in defining and understanding the user demand to build a better product. Any feedback (negative or positive!) is useful and is incorporated into our roadmap and our product must be updated in an agile way that allows for continuous improvement. Question Title * ENGINEERING BASED ON BUSINESS IMPACTHow does your company approach a new digital product? We weigh out what that means from a competitive and innovative standpoint and begin to build the product in order to remain innovative. We figure out what we are trying to solve and how we can build the answer successfully either by building ourselves or hiring a company to build for us. We align cross-functionally and assess what we are trying to solve, but with a heavy emphasis on what type of business impact the new product can have on our company bringing in a partner that can help us grow and benefit from combined strengths. Question Title * CURRENT TECHNOLOGY ENVIRONMENT How does your legacy technology environment impact your team to build new products? We build based on our current capabilities and bandwidth. We build and invest with the newest technology without consideration for legacy infrastructure. As a digitally transformed organization, we’re agile in our approach while not breaking architecture, building with existing technology in mind, but always open to new investments validated by user demand. Question Title * TEAM AND CULTUREHow does your team build and enable digital teams to succeed? We build our teams from within the company pushing them to learn new digital capabilities. We build our teams with the standard project manager role delegating out digital responsibilities based on workload in an effort to make duties fair and manageable for the existing team. We bring in new digital expertise, through partners, to provide the necessary with the right skillset and structure to design and product engineer at speed. Show Me How I Rank