Whether you're bringing me in on a fixed-term basis, or looking for a more permanent addition to your team, this is the process I bring with me. It scales up or down, depending on the size of the challenge at hand. 

Discover

What do you know about your customers? There are many ways you can find out more about them. Customer interviews, website analytics, support queries, sales team interviews, independent research, to name a few. Here, you want to find out: 

• What competitors are doing
  
• What your business needs are
  
• What your customers needs are

Define

It’s one thing to have research at your fingertips. It’s another to make sense of it. This is why ‘artifacts’ exist. An artifact is a framework or tool to capture an aspect of your customers or business. Things like service blueprints and customer journeys. The goal here is to:

• Spot the patterns
  
• Cluster and organise similar things
  
• Synthesize down into simple statements or observations

Decide

Making perfect artifacts is not the point. And the goal is not to solve everything either. The goal is to find out: what is one thing, that if fixed, would have the greatest impact? You’ll need to decide: 

• Prioritised business opportunities
  
• Prioritised customer opportunities
  
• Prioritised roadmap

Design

You’ve zoomed in on the opportunity that has the potential to give the most impact. Now you need to translate this into ideas. Sketch the ideas loosely. Ideas don’t break because of the ‘design’. They break because someone either gets it, or doesn't.

• What it is (name that thing)
• How it works (the steps in the flow)
• What it looks like (what the component pieces are)
• Who it’s for (how it’s dialled in for them in particular)

Prototype and test

What really matters most here is the ‘hypothesis’ (the thing you are trying to prove or disprove), so go make the prototype genuinely easy for people to use, understand, or act on. Then keep what works, discard what doesn’t.

• Setting (where does the test take place)
• Prototyping (how does someone interact with it)
• Success criteria (how are we measuring what happens)

Build

Shaping something is only half of it. The other half is making sure it actually lands. This is where planning across people, process, governance, and technology has to hold up against everything people have been expecting so far.

• People (the right roles and responsibilities in place)
• Processes (establish ‘who gives what’ and ‘who gets what’)
  
• Governance (who decides, and what they need in order to decide)
• Technology (the right tools for the job)