Strategize phase
In the Strategize phase, reflect on findings from research as you begin to think about the right opportunities to focus on. Begin by brainstorming a range of solution ideas before you narrow in on which ones to prioritize for experimentation.
Outcomes
Brainstorming
Generate solutions that will meet the needs of the stakeholders and customers.
Prioritization
Filter the opportunity areas according to what will provide value and what’s feasible.
Plan of action
Make prioritized ideas concrete to move towards a plan for testing and iterating.
Methods
After you’ve collected data about your service, it’s time to hone in on where to focus solutions. Start by delving further into the insights your research uncovered. Revisiting the service blueprint, highlight the problems that customers and staff experience with the service (pain points) and where there are possibilities for improvement (opportunity areas).
Artifacts like the blueprint and customer journey map can also facilitate conversations around findings and alignment around possible solutions. Consider the organization where you’re working and how the people within it consume information. Aim to create and socialize documents that stakeholders rely on and revisit throughout the process, contributing to a shared language around a service and the humans on the other side of it.
These artifacts set the stage for the main activity during this phase: brainstorming solution ideas and starting to hone in on the best path forward. Solutions can range from product updates to an entire system redesign, which can make them challenging to compare and choose. Focusing on project objectives and weighing which ideas provide the most value can help you prioritize solutions alongside project stakeholders. Activities such as the Impact/Feasibility Matrix can help you prioritize during a prioritization workshop.
Before moving on from this phase, you should narrow down and expand on opportunity ideas. These will form the concepts that you prototype in the next phase.
Case study: Deciding where to focus
U.S. Air Force Weather Systems Office (WxPO)
After presenting areas of opportunities for improvements, we naturally arrived at several key recommendations. We then presented these recommendations to the WxPO for consideration.
Afterwards, we held brainstorming sessions with the WxPO to build on these recommendations and generate a variety of solutions to address these areas of opportunity. Since there were several potential solutions, prioritization workshops helped the WxPO align on which solutions to explore next and which they could revisit later.
Methods and other activities
Brainstorming
Brainstorming sessions allowed the group to creatively discuss ideas to address the problems that the WxPO wanted to resolve.
Prioritization workshop
During a prioritization workshop, stakeholders and users were asked to align on which solutions to focus on by mapping the solutions on an Impact/Feasibility Matrix.
Scoping exercises
After we prioritized solutions, the WxPO walked through a scoping exercise to understand what value each of the solutions would add, what problems it would address for the users, and illustrate and define key goals for each of the solutions. We also held high-level discussions about what would and would not be in scope during these sessions.