Tools

Enterprise Design Thinking: 

The Principles guide your day-to-day work.

They ensure you’re keeping your user in mind, collaborating with a diverse team, and continuously trying to improve your solutions.

A focus on user outcomes

Drive business by helping users achieve their goals.

Restless reinvention

Stay essential by treating everything as a prototype.

Diverse Empowered Teams

Move faster by working together and embracing diversity.

The Loop

Understand the present and envision the future in a continuous cycle of observing, reflecting, and making.

Observe

Immerse yourself in the real world with design research. Interview users, watch them work, and test your ideas with the people who matter most to inform your decision-making and understanding.

Reflect

Come together and look within to synchronize your movements, synthesize what you’ve learned, and share your “aha” moments with each other. Decide together and move forward with confidence.

Make

Give concrete form to abstract ideas. The earlier you make the faster you learn. Put your ideas out there before they’re complete and improve them as you go.

The Keys

Scalable practices for enterprise team alignment.

Hills

Align your team around the meaningful user outcomes you want to achieve. Hills are statements of intent written as user enablements. They follow a format of Who, What, and Wow.

Who: Who is your user? Refer to them by name.

What: What will your user be able to do that they couldn’t before? Start with a verb and avoid solutions.

Wow: What differentiates you from the competition? This is measurable.

Playbacks

Stay aligned by regularly exchanging feedback. Playbacks are story-based presentations that share insights, ideas, and updates to a user experience.

Sponsor Users

Invite users into the work and stay true to real-world needs. Sponsor Users are external clients, future clients, or end users that represent your target user, who regularly contribute domain expertise to your team. Relationships with Sponsor Users are typically formalized with an agreement that covers confidentiality and our right to use their feedback.

Toolkit: Guidance to hone your design thinking skills:

• As-is Scenario Map: Build a better understanding of your users’ current experience.
• Assumptions and Questions: When your team needs a “reality check,” identify your assumptions and the best ways to address them.
• Big Idea Vignettes: Rapidly diverge on a breadth of possible solutions to meet your users’ needs.
• Empathy Map: Build empathy for your users through a conversation informed by your team’s observations.
• Experience-based Roadmap: Break down your long-term experience into the most essential near-term outcomes for your user.
• Feedback Grid: Gather and organize feedback from users, team members, or stakeholders.
• Hills: If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there. Use Hills to clearly state your intent in terms of user and market value.
• Hopes and Fears: Learn and discuss each others’ hopes and fears before starting a project or on-boarding new team members.
• Needs Statements: Outline what users need in order to achieve their goals.
• Playbacks: Tell stories to share your work and exchange feedback.
• Prioritization Grid: Decide your next move by focusing on the intersection of importance and feasibility.
• Stakeholder Map: Identify project stakeholders, their expectations, and their relationship to each other.