Asana VP on Product Design (Part 3)
Have you ever worked on a product design team that struggles with priorities? If you don’t have a standardized process for workflow, it’s easy to alignment across your product team. Providing your team with a toolkit of what’s expected on a daily basis is a great way to improve productivity. As a result, this makes on-boarding much easier and prevents creating more “work about work.”
One process that I’ve used through the years is the “double diamond” method. The goal is to handle divergent thinking before convergent thinking. In other words, it illustrates the “pain” before you get to the “solution.” This is the foundation for creating flow within the product design process.
For example, if your goal is to save money for your customers, you start with a very broad discovery process. The first step is figuring out all the ways to save money before zeroing in on a very specific pain point. Ultimately, you make the right choice by experimenting with several versions of a particular solution.
At Asana, I try to make this process as clear as possible by “printing the answer key.” For example, we hold product forums that follow the double-diamond shape. In the discovery process, I provide a template to the team with customer questions that they need to answer. This helps get to the specific pain point that we are going to solve for in the design process.
Finally, this work sets up your solution kickoff which establishes the terms for your product build. Similar to the discovery approach, you should present a vision for your product that starts way out in your imagination. From there, you can scale it back to arrive at an attainable solution that brings your product to life.
About the speaker
Alex Hood is the VP of Product at Asana – leading the company’s product management, design & UX research. Prior to joining Asana, Alex led product teams at Intuit / Quickbooks, TubeMogul (now Adobe Advertising Cloud) and Nasdaq.