Ascendion’s Post

Deciphering Stakeholder Speak: How to Navigate Unclear Requirements as a Product Designer Communicating with stakeholders can be a juggling act, especially when requirements are fuzzy! But fear not, design champions! Here's how to navigate unclear waters and emerge with crystal-clear understanding: 1. Ask Open-Ended Questions: Ditch yes/no and delve deeper. Ask "why" behind the requirement, explore pain points, and uncover the core objective. #clarifyingquestions #activelistening 2. Visualize It!: Sketch quick wireframes or user flows to translate verbal descriptions into tangible concepts. This fosters shared understanding and identifies discrepancies early. #visualcommunication #rapidprototyping 3. Prioritize Together: Use collaborative tools like dot voting or matrix prioritization to rank features based on importance and effort. This helps set expectations and manage scope. #stakeholderalignment #decisionmaking 4. Iterate & Document: Refine requirements through iterative discussions and document everything! Use collaborative documents to track decisions and avoid misunderstandings later. #versioncontrol #transparency Bonus Tip: Frame unclear requirements as opportunities for exploration and discovery. This reframes the challenge and promotes positive collaboration. #designthinking #opportunitymindset #productdesign #stakeholdercommunication #requirementsgathering #uxui #collaboration

Level Up Your Design Impact with User Stories! User stories are short, user-centric descriptions of desired functionalities or features in a product or service. They are written from the perspective of the user and explain what the user wants to achieve and why. User stories aren't just static descriptions; they're living documents that let us: 1. Embrace feedback loops: Adapt designs based on ongoing user & stakeholder input. 2. Break down the monolith: Easily experiment & iterate with modular stories. 3. Prioritize with power: Focus on stories with the most immediate user impact. 4. Collaborate transparently: Everyone understands goals & purpose behind designs. 5. Make data-driven decisions: Update stories as we gather more user insights. User stories make a team agile & adaptable, ensuring designs stay relevant & user-centric! #UXDesign #UserExperience #ProductDesign #AgileDevelopment #UserStories #UserCentricDesign #Collaboration #Communication #DesignProcess #AgileMethodology

🙏 A moment of gratitude for 2,400 (!) Product & UX professionals 🙏 🗺 Our Journey with the *Features Prioritization Tool* by Yuval Eitan, on #Miroverse 🗺 As we reflect on the journey of the Features Prioritization Tool, developed here at YE and featured on Miro, we're humbled by how it has resonated within the community. With over 2,400 professionals now leveraging it to enhance their product management processes, it's a testament to the collaborative spirit that drives innovation. Why It Stands Out: ▶ Optimizes #Product #development: #prioritize with confidence. ▶ Boosts #collaboration: Unites teams around shared goals. ▶ Drives #results: Focus efforts on impactful #features. We're deeply thankful for the opportunity to contribute a tool that supports so many in achieving their project goals. 👉 If you're yet to discover how it can simplify and streamline your prioritization process, we invite you to explore it (*link in 1st comment*) For insights on integrating this tool into your workflow, or to explore bespoke product management solutions, YE is here to help. #ProductManagement #UXDesign #Collaboration #prioritization

🚀 Design Thinking Process #uiux #uiuxdesign #designthinking

👥 Collaboration chaos is a term used to describe how difficult it can be for people in large groups to come to a decision and be aligned with a vision. I recently did a design thinking workshop with the team at McAnderson Institute of Technology. The team, while working on a project, needed some clarity around their PRD document and their current UX vision. 🖼 Facilitating this workshop helped everyone come to a consensus and decide on concrete next steps. I really had fun doing this! #uxstrategy #workshops #facilitation #uxdesign

"User-Centric Design Thinking" is a human-centered approach to product development that emphasizes understanding user needs, empathy, and iterative prototyping to create innovative solutions that resonate with users and deliver meaningful experiences. By putting users at the core of the design process, product teams can empathize with user perspectives, uncover insights, and co-create solutions that address real user problems, drive adoption, and foster user loyalty effectively. User-centric design thinking involves empathizing with users, defining problems, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing with users. Empathizing with users entails observing, listening, and engaging with users to understand their motivations, behaviors, and pain points, enabling product managers to gain deep insights into user experiences, preferences, and aspirations that inform design decisions and solution development effectively. Defining problems from a user perspective involves synthesizing user research, mapping user journeys, and identifying user needs, goals, and constraints to frame design challenges and opportunities that drive innovation and user satisfaction. By defining problems through a user-centric lens, product teams can align efforts, prioritize features, and design solutions that address critical user needs, deliver value, and differentiate the product in the market successfully. Ideating solutions encourages product teams to brainstorm, generate ideas, and explore creative concepts that address user needs, challenge assumptions, and inspire innovative design solutions through collaborative ideation sessions, design sprints, or workshops that foster creativity, diversity, and experimentation in the design process. Prototyping and testing with users involve creating low-fidelity prototypes, conducting usability tests, and gathering feedback from users to iterate, refine, and validate design solutions, ensuring that the final product aligns with user expectations, preferences, and behaviors effectively. By prototyping and testing with users iteratively, product teams can minimize design risks, validate assumptions, and optimize user experiences, enhancing usability, desirability, and satisfaction with the product over time. By embracing user-centric design thinking principles, product managers can foster innovation, drive user engagement, and create products that delight users, align with market demands, and differentiate themselves effectively in today's experience-driven and competitive business landscape. #ProductManagement #DesignThinking #UserCentric #Empathy #Prototyping #UserExperience #Innovation #UsabilityTesting

🚀 Solve Business Problems with Design Sprints! 💼✨ 🧠 Rapid ideation, prototyping, and testing. 🔍💡🔥 💡 Make informed decisions, drive innovation, and tackle challenges head-on. 💼💻 💼 Revolutionize your problem-solving game with our latest blog: "How to Use Design Sprints to Solve Business Problems." 🎉 Blog 🔗 https://loom.ly/qwOfPM8 #DesignSprints #ProblemSolving #Innovation #BusinessSuccess

In today's business environment, Design Thinking has emerged as a vital strategy for fostering innovation and driving business success. This approach, rooted in understanding user needs and rapid prototyping, offers several key benefits for businesses: Enhanced Problem-Solving: Design Thinking starts with empathy for the user, leading to a deeper understanding of their needs and challenges. This user-centric focus allows businesses to develop more effective and innovative solutions. Promoting Innovation: By encouraging ideation and creative thinking, Design Thinking helps businesses break free from traditional models and explore new and innovative solutions. Increased Agility: The iterative nature of Design Thinking – with its cycles of prototyping, testing, and refining – enables businesses to be more agile. This adaptability is crucial in responding to market changes and user feedback effectively. Improved Customer Experience: Design Thinking leads to products and services that truly resonate with users, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Cross-functional Collaboration: This approach fosters collaboration across different departments, bringing diverse perspectives together and leading to more holistic solutions. Risk Mitigation: Through rapid prototyping and continuous feedback, Design Thinking helps in identifying potential issues early, reducing the risk and cost associated with bringing new products to market. In conclusion, incorporating Design Thinking into business strategies not only fosters innovation and creativity but also drives tangible results in customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. #DesignThinking #BusinessStrategy #Innovation #ProblemSolving #productdesign #uxdesign #uiux

Zooming out to understand holistic UX and product design reveals some key common layers and about strategy, sequence, and how to stay customer-focused across teams. Remember that agile-based break downs for sizing and estimation are essential to production, but first, concept synthesis is needed for context, coherence, and alignment. That’s a building UP composition process: comp before decomp. Current and future customers with the same problem set and unsolved needs make up addressable markets (TAM/SAM/SOM: total, serviceable, and serviceable/obtainable). Product teams, including both Product Managers & Product Designers, can match customers from each market segment (who) to problems (why), problems to solutions (what), and solutions to experiences (how). Research and data-driven insights solve for “right problem, done right.” Roadmaps, playbooks, and release plans begin to answer questions of sequence and time horizon—and a question that is always pressing: when? #userexperience #productmanagement