Boost your team using the UX Maturity Assessment & Opp Solution Tree | UXDX Community

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where in the world you're tuning in from. I'm based in Stockholm, Sweden. So for me, it is evening. It's very dark outside, but at least I'm happy to be here with you for a couple of minutes or almost an hour and a half. And today I would like to share an approach that I use in a product design team to set up a long-term goal and stay focused on what's important to level up the team. My name is Danwe and I work in a cybersecurity company called Detectify. It was founded by Swedish people that are ethical hackers and together with our users we're on a mission to make the internet more secure. I have worked with Design for the past 15 years wearing slightly different hats but I took a pause with Design around 2021. to try out the role as a product manager. And that was before I went into a formal manager role as head of product design in March 2022. And what I want to share with you today is something that I learned from these three different roles. And the biggest change that I faced during these three changes in my timeline was not when I went from an individual contributor to a manager role, but it was actually between going from design to product. If anyone thinks design is abstract and fluffy, let me tell you, it's nothing compared to product. When I first started as a product manager, I was a bit shocked at how my days got filled with meetings, meetings and meetings. And I was sitting there wondering, when am I going to have that heads down, focus time and do my actual work? And then it hit me, being in meetings was my work. It was in meetings when I was doing what I was supposed to do as a product manager. The meetings were when I got the time to communicate. and create alignment between different people. And that was a big part of my role as a product manager. It was to make sure we were aligned, we stayed focused on what was most important, and made sure that we provided value to our users and customers. So I need to make sure that we knew what we were doing, that everybody was focused, and communicating that also broadly, and make sure that we're continuously moving toward the same goal. And one tool that I learned to use as a product manager was something called an opportunity solution tree. An opportunity solution tree is something that is supposed to help out to map out product discovery and an attempt at approaching that in a structured and systematic way. I like it because it starts with why. So at the top of your opportunity solution tree, you're supposed to define your desired outcome. So what's the purpose of you being there together as a team? Below it, you start defining all the different opportunities that you could pursue in order to try to reach that desired outcome. If we were to take an example, if a desired outcome is to, let's say, increase revenue as a product manager, we take the business side of things. One way to increase revenue could be to An opportunity could be to raise prices. Another opportunity could be increase customers. Another opportunity could be to make sure customers stay longer. So there's different kinds of opportunity in order to be able to reach a desired outcome. So you sort of map out your tree starting from the top going downwards. And then the idea with an opportunity solution tree is to do continuous discovery by understanding more about your intended users, you will start being able to populate this opportunity solution tree with more things and start coming up with potential solution, turning user pain points into how might we. So if you hear a pain point, you turn it into how might we solve it in a way and define it as a possible solution or as an opportunity. And for each opportunity, you break down that even further and start listing potential experiments, something that you can try out quickly together with a team and sort of measure the impact to understand if this is a promising experiment or solution that you should iterate further, or if it's time to leave it on the side and move on to another solution or potentially another opportunity branch. So this is a... the basic of an opportunity solution tree. And if you're interested in learning more, I know that Teresa Torres has written a book called Continuous Discovery that goes through this a little bit more in detail. She also has a website that I can share a link to where she sort of writes articles and blog posts about this approach. Yeah, so I like this tree because I meant, like I mentioned, it starts with Y and then you can sort of go downwards in the tree. to get into something specific. It's also a nice way to use as a communication tool with stakeholders and also within the team to explain why you're focusing on a specific experiment, on a specific part that you're working on at the moment, because you can always traverse upwards to explain why. And if you're at a higher level, you can traverse downwards to explain and give examples of how and what you're doing in order to try to reach that desired outcome. The strongest use case that I see with an opportunity solution tree is when you're using it collaboratively in the team, when you sort of explore the different kinds of opportunity, when you try to link the solution and experiment to really map out your opportunity tree where you should spend your time and focus. I'll get back to this in a moment. back to this personal timeline of mine so an opportunity solution tree was what i learned during my time as a product manager that i used together with the team and looking again at this timeline i i also wanted to exemplify that i i worked as a designer a lot longer before i started head of product side i've only been in a manager type of role for the past two years so I still have a lot to learn. But when I started in a manager role people started asking me, oh don't you miss doing design? And the answer I gave them was that I still see myself as a designer. Sure, I'm no longer designing our intended users' experiences of using our product or our services, but I'm still designing experiences. Although right now I'm trying to design the best experience for our product designers working at Detectify. So I approached it the same way that I would with any design, by trying to understand their pain points, their needs, their wishes, trying to understand where should we focus our time to improve it better, to make it nicer to be a product designer at Detectify. And as a designer, we're trained to spot these areas of improvement. And we all have our toolkit of methods that we prefer to use. Personally, I really like interviews. And I used to see our one-on-ones as sort of a form of interviews where I could sort of dig deeper and try to unpack long-term goals and dreams and things that's even beyond their time here at Detectify. But another tool that I learned to use as a designer was something called a sailboat, sailboat exercise. So sailboat exercise is supposed to be done in collaboration in a team. So we did this as a kickoff in the product design team back when I started. And we had these three areas for our sailboat exercise. The boat that you see represents the team and the island to the right. represents the goal where we want to reach, where we want to sail towards. So the first thing we did when we did a sailor exercise was to think, what are our team's goals? And the approach we took was to start off by having some individual thinking time, which is the way I like to start things with, even though it's a collaborative setting. So we each had a stack of post-its, pens, and time boxed it for each and everyone to write down what are our team's goals. When the time was up, we shared it and put the post-its up in this area. The second step in the exercise is to think about what is the wind driving us closer to the goal? What are the things that are already in place that are already helping us move closer to our team's goals? Again, same approach, individual thinking time, write down on post-its, and then when the time's up, we shared and put it up in that area. And the third step in this exercise is to think about what are the anchors that are weighing us down? What are the things that we're missing or what are the things that are making it more difficult for us to reach our team's goals? Why aren't we there yet? So again, time box it, individual thinking time and writing down on post-its. When the time was up... we shared what we've written on the post-it and then post it up in the third area and now we had these three groups of different types of post-its focusing on answering these three questions so what we did then was we started off looking at the post-its in area one we sort of agreed on okay what are our team's goals what is it that we all see is the most important desired outcome that we wanted it to have And we started creating alignment on that. And then we moved on to the second area. What are the wins that are driving us close to the goals? Now, this is mainly like a pat in the back, giving us a little bit of yay and cheers of things that we're already having in our disposal and things that we're already great at and doing well. And I think it's important to have these moments of celebration so we don't just stare blindly at the long, distant, far away goal and only focus on trying to reach that because reaching a goal is an extremely fleeting moment. We got to make sure that the journey towards the goal is also enjoyable and something that we should appreciate. It's moments of learning and moments of improvements that are things that we should be happy about, not just reaching a far away goal. I appreciate that we take time to give ourselves and each other a pat on the back. But there's no action point more than that for the post-its in the second area. Now the post-it in the third areas, the pain points, that's where we should focus and take action on. And I love this. I love hearing about everything that is not working, about problems and issues. And it's sort of... gives me a little kick about trying to figuring things out. I think it comes from when I used to do UX research and gather customer data and sort of getting it ready to create some sort of insights. It's like having puzzle pieces and being faced with a puzzle that's ready to be solved. It's super exciting. So yeah, so this sailboat exercise was something that I used. in my role as head of product design, but it was something that I already learned in my role as a designer. And we thought we could bring all those pain points, sort of map it out in an opportunist solution tree, and then figure out, okay, where should we focus our attention on and try to make it better? But here's when we sort of struggled. Here's where we hit a blocker in our approach. It was really hard for us to create a structure. of all our pain points in a way that made sense. And this is the tricky part about opportunity solution trees. Depending on how you formulate the desired outcome, of course it will sort of define how you structure the rest and how you sort of slice the different opportunities again affects what kind of experiments you will come up with. And we didn't manage to come up with a structure where one post-it didn't feel like it sort of fit in all places or none at all. So we didn't manage to put these two together at this moment in time. But we had lots of pain points on post-its. So at least we had that part. But we didn't know how to proceed at that moment. So we paused for a bit. On a parallel track, because I just entered the head of product design role, I also wanted to get a better sense of the UX maturity in the team. So during one of our team time, I asked everyone to take a UX mature self-assessment test. And we took the one that's available on the NN Group's website. And the purpose of this was not just to get the result, but also use it as a discussion point and sort of get everybody to talk about what they experienced and see, okay, from this point of view are there more things that we could identify as areas of improvements and this is the different levels or different stages of ux maturity according to nn group and you can see the link there at the bottom that will take you to that ux maturity self-assessment and after you've answered that quiz you'll get the result and that says that you're either in stage one, two, three, four, five, or six. But it's also important to know that, okay, don't just stare and get fixated at stage number six. There are really great things happening in all of these stages. And also, when there's an organization change, you might change stage as well. So again, not just focusing on the end goal, but appreciate them. focus on the incremental improvements as well. So we took this assessment and just to understand where we are, we were, and try to figure out, okay, what are the things that we could try to make better depending on where we were at that moment. And our results came back. We all agreed that we were in stage three at that time. And that meant that we were in an emergent state. We had some functional and promising things in place when it comes to design. But design work was done inconsistently and a little bit inefficiently because we didn't have some of the basic processes and basic things in place yet. So with that, you also get some more details on things to consider depending on which stage you end up in. So for us, because we were in stage four, stage three, sorry. we were reading more about how to level up to stage four. And included in that description, there were seven bullet points describing efforts to consider. So for us, it suggested to provide professional development for UX staff, creating UX training for cross-functional roles, establish centralized UX resources, creating unified design principles, document and share standardized processes. enhance collaboration, and have standardized design metrics to track and communicate improvements. So I decided I was going to take this and look into these seven areas further. But then when I started reading this, something hit me again. This, if just looking at the top part, how to level up to stage four, that sounded to me very much like a potential desired outcome. Reaching UX material level four could be a potential desired outcome. And then those seven bullet points sounded to me like they could be potential opportunities. So it could be formulated like how might we upscale UX staff? How might we educate other roles? How might we centralize UX resources? How might we unify design principle? How might we standardize design process? And how might we enhance collaboration? How might we set quality metrics? So I decided to try this out. How about we take all the pain points coming from the saleable exercise, try to, again, map out an opportunist solution tree to help us focus on what's important, but use the UX maturity assessment as the format or the structure of the tree. And then maybe we could put it all together to level up the team. So we did it together as a product design team. We put ReacherX maturity at the top of the tree, the seven bullet points as possible solutions, opportunities, sorry. And then we dumped all our pain points in there. But to be honest, it was more like this amount of pain points. It was quite a lot. And this is a tip when you're doing an opportunity solution tree, don't do it on your own, because a tree that you create by yourself is usually only usable by yourself. So approaching this collaboratively is also the purpose of creating an opportunity solution tree. So that's why we also gathered together as a team, started sorting it into the columns they belong to, sort of grouped them, and then created labels as possible solutions, turning the pain points into how might we kind of phrasing. And this is where we sort of hit another celebratory moment, because we'd struggle so... for so long to find a structure of this opportunity solution tree that would make sense with our pain points. And this actually did. And we were able to fit all the pain points into one of those categories and make sure that everything made sense for us. And if I were to go through how we continuously worked with this, it would probably take another session. But I still want to describe some broad strokes how we move forward after this. So we gathered on a weekly basis to look at our opportunity solution tree together. We looked at any new pain points that we might have stumbled across and then turned them into ideas or experiments where they belong in this solution and opportunity and desired outcome. And then we would together as a team decide, okay, what is the most important things that we want to focus on now? And then we will mark them, create JIRA tickets. So whenever a product designer had some extra time to pick up something from this kind of work, they could go on ahead because we had already agreed that this was something we wanted to focus on as a team. And as time went on, we could check them off as done, and we decided to keep them in the tree, also as a visual representation, as a pat on the back to see that, hey, we are actually making progress. So we don't only have an opportunity solution tree that it's a forever growing to-do list. So this is where we got at one point in time. And I would love to say that we've reached material level four, but we didn't when we stopped because it takes time. And also, to be honest, since July last year, I've been working as a VP of product. So this hasn't been my main focus. in a while but this is actually the snapshot of where we got to after a year of working with this opportunity solution tree so this represents our actual progress in the product design team up to july last year so this is what i wanted to share with you how we used a ux maturity assessment result as a base for an opportunity solution tree in order to map out all the pain points that we got from our sailor exercise in order to approach something that was important for us all, but focus on what was important for us collectively and sort of make progress towards a desired outcome, which for us was to level up to stage four, which is still something out there in the horizon. But we're happy that we made progress up until July last year, at least. And yeah, if this is something you think is interesting, I'll be happy to bounce ideas or I'll be happy to hear if you've done something similar or something completely different, just to hear how you make sure that your team stays focused and continuously make improvements towards a shared long-term goal. And with that, I will say thank you for listening and for your time, and I will hand it back to you. That was amazing. Thank you so much. There are a few questions I want to try and get through quickly because I really like all of them. Nice intro. For someone looking to move into a product management role, what advice would you give me? Where to start? Oh, wow. That's difficult without knowing more about your personal journey. Let me reflect on your personal journey of how you did it. Yeah, I guess. I slipped on a banana peel. I worked as a product designer at the Techify to start off with. And then I wanted to try something new. And then there was a product manager role available within the company. So I moved within the company to try the product manager role. But I think it goes without saying that I was showing things that was desired in the product manager role. So I would say informal leadership is something that you could try to exemplify in your current role even without you know formal leadership training is not needed it's to be able to show how you influence other people in different ways and you just have to find your personal way of exemplifying that because that's something that's very desirable in a product manager at least that was here at detectify yeah love it yeah um you obviously teresa tor is is a central part and you've mentioned her like from my perspective she was she's effect people think of Teresa Torres what they think of product they think of Teresa Torres whereas in fact it's all about UX and research yeah yeah so it's kind of similar to your angle and people kind of forget that that there's so much synergies so another question that's really great can you use opportunity solution trees at all levels like c-suite to junior Yeah, I mean, I guess you could use it on a personal level as well. I think Teresa Torres has an example either on her blog or in the book where she takes a personal example. Like if you want to have fun, if the desired outcome is to have fun, what could you possibly do? Or if you want to experience something new during your vacation, I make that up. That could also be something that you... You can hash out either by yourself if it's only something that affects you or even with your partners or family could be a fun exercise. Yeah, definitely. And how do you define the anchors? How should you define the anchors? So you had a pink notepad and the anchors in terms of, yeah, sorry, continue. No, no, thanks for clarifying. No, I think I don't. do those things extremely structured as in you have to write it in this way or that way and I'd rather keep it very open because that sort of opens up new ways and opens up discussion because the point is to for everyone to share and if you give two two structured instructions you might miss out all those other pain points that somebody might be experiencing but it doesn't fit into that that way you're formulating it So I'm just keeping it very open. Those questions, that's pretty much the only instructions I share when I do the sailboat exercise. Yeah, fantastic. And what blogs or resources do you use to keep connected with everything? What do you like? Oh, what do I like? I read a lot of books, but I mean books... takes time before they get written and published. So I haven't found my venue where I really, really get heads down. And I mean, also for the past year, I've been working with product. So I try to listen to podcasts, I try to read medium, and also I subscribe to different kinds of newsletters. And I'm really bad at remembering any of those names, but there's one TLDR. kind of newsletters like too long didn't read and it has different kinds of topics that you can subscribe to like product design ai that's that's that's one of my go-to really great well fantastic um thank you for that we're out of time that was really amazing danway really really valuable and logical in terms of the flow um for how people can execute so thank you so much for that thank you we'll talk to you soon

Struggling to improve your product's user experience (UX)? Join Danwei who shares the journey she and her team undertook to redefine Product Design within a distributed setup. Discover the strategic fusion of UX maturity assessments and Opportunity Solution Trees that paved the way for monumental strides in design thinking and user satisfaction.

Danwei walks you through the step-by-step process they employed to diagnose critical pain points, brainstorm collaborative solutions, and maintain an unwavering focus on pivotal elements that propel a Product Design team to new heights.

What you'll learn:

*Master the art of uncovering hidden user needs with effective collaborative brainstorming techniques.

*Navigate the nuances of UX improvements leveraging the renowned NN/g UX (Nielsen Norman Group) Maturity Assessment.

*Forge actionable strategies to alleviate user pain points, significantly enhancing your product's UX.

Like this content? Find more by following UXDX on:

📚 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/uxdx/

👉 Subscribe to our newsletter for curated Product, UX, Design & Dev news: https://www.uxdx.com/subscribe/

🌍 Discover the UXDX community: https://www.uxdx.com/