Discovery Cards
2019
During my time in FinancialForce I facilitated many workshops and enjoyed trying out different ideation and creative data gathering methods. After reading about products such as Method Cards from IDEO and MethodKit Cards, I was inspired to try something similar. After browsing the cards, none fitted my scenario quite right so I decided to create my own cards which could be used by the rest of the Product Management team at FinancialForce. I called them Discovery Cards as their purpose was to facilitate and aid in the discovery part of the development process.
I created the cards by gathering existing valuable discovery artefacts such as the Lean UX Canvas and the Opportunity Canvas. I then collated a list of additional information I felt would be useful to discover at this stage which was missing from these resources. I then grouped these questions into four categories: User, Journey, Organisation and Functionality.
My Product Manager agreed that this would be a valuable activity to run as we began to prepare for new upcoming work. We selected around 10 questions we felt we needed to find out more about from our selected participants and printed out the cards.
The workshop was run with a mixed group of people from different function areas. This ranged from stakeholders in the higher Product Management organisation, developers, engineering managers and implementation consultants.
To begin the workshop, the group were introduced the problem statement and relevant background leading to us needing their input. I then explained the card activity and agenda. After setting the scene, participants were then asked to use post-its to add their input to each of the questions on the table. Once everyone felt they had nothing more to add, the participants were split into two teams to work their way down each side of the table grouping similar post-its into themes. We then joined together as a collective to bring each category and themes onto the wall to discuss before then voting on the top theme which should be prioritised as the top issue in the product to be worked on.