2 – Innovation & design thinking processes

The second session saw us looking to ultimately define a ‘problem statement’ and to begin to consider some solutions to the problem. Ultimately this seemed to me to be like a different and more collaborative way of coming up with a ‘user story’ or ‘business requirement’. We started by looking at the concept of gift giving. We were divided into groups and then initially into yet smaller groups and asked to take take notes on what we felt was the gift givers motivation, we were encouraged to ask yet more probing questions and then to come up with a ‘problem statement’ my problem statement ended up being “As a gift giver I want to be able to provide an experience to my close friends that will help us to bond more closely over an activity that we all / both enjoy” later we all spent 5 minutes sketching 5 possible solutions to our problem, and then as a group review the sketches and problem statements to determine which of the the statement offered the best definition of the problem that applied as universally as possible. (The group did settle on mine) and then as a group we were asked to come up with a prototype that would solve this problem, and to choose one of the sketched solutions, wee settled on the gift of a ‘weekend away with friends’ Effectively we came up with an app, that you could enter details about your friends and it would also ‘scrape’ their social media accounts for things they had liked, read, or watched, places they had been and things like that. This app would then recommend tailored trips away and connect you to service providers who could offer the perfect solution. I suspect we will be iterating this over the coming days. For me this was a quick and easy process to generate a sense of what kinds of things applied universally and tor rapidly generate ideas from a larger group, then just say and individual BA might consider.

A link to the Miro board we created is here.