Approach

To effectively facilitate the Summit, we needed to guide the group with appropriate and meaningful activities, keep the discussions on track, empower the participants to think about the users and shift the focus away from technical minutia. With all of these factors in mind, we began planning with the knowledge that many unknown variables could change how we facilitated. We chose, edited, and appropriated various Design Thinking and Gamestorming activities with the knowledge that the agenda could easily change, or those particular activities may not be effective.

For each day of the Summit, we meticulously planned a schedule of activities, presentations, and open discussions. We knew the group was brimming with ideas and that ultimately, the conversations that would occur during the Summit were equally as valuable as the activities we were preparing, so we padded all of the activities to include discussion time.

Hopes & Fears

We asked the group to participate in a Hope & Fears activity, where each participant wrote down their hopes and fears about the Summit. The goal of this activity was to gain a shared understanding of the participant's expected outcomes and an understanding of the failings of previous Summits. The participants were encouraged to speak candidly, and in doing so the design team gained an understanding of how to guide the participants to avoid the pitfalls of years past. This alignment on expectations confirmed some of our assumptions and allowed us as facilitators to confidently move forward with the rest of the Summit's activities.

Team Formations

To kick off the creative thinking activities, we decided to break the participants into teams. The use case at the center of the Summit was a rather large end-to-end use case. To help focus the participants on the right parts of this large use case, we divided them into four teams. Each team was given a persona, needs statement, and an as-is workflow map for a small section of the end-to-end use case to discuss. The goal of this activity was to allow each team to build empathy and begin to identify pain points for their users. By the end of the activity, participants had begun to mark their workflow maps with lightning bolts to indicate poor experiences, and map their users’ feelings to steps in the process.

Big Idea Vignettes

Once our teams had gained some empathy for their users, it was time to begin brainstorming. Each team member was asked to generate 3–5 big ideas that could solve their user’s pain points. However, the caveat for this activity was that the ideas could not be technical. This presented the teams with a challenge — they had to think of solutions, without thinking about the technical feasibility or implementation of those solutions. The teams faced this challenge head-on and began engaging in animated conversation and generating a gamut of ideas from the practical to the absurd.

Post-Up Activity

Following on the heels of the Big Idea Vignettes activity was the Post-Up Activity. The goal of the Post-Up activity was to allow the participants to switch from creative thinking to technical thinking, and begin brainstorming methods and techniques to actualize their Big Ideas in the product. The teams were also given supplementary technical prompts that were meant to narrow their focus and ease this switch in thinking. The supplementary prompts were universally abandoned by all the teams, but the team members were able to successfully switch to focused technical thinking on their own. Given the background of the participants, the conversation around technical methods was particularly spirited and pushed the activity over its allotted time.

The $100 Test

After brainstorming both big and technical ideas, the teams moved on to the $100 Test activity. For this activity, the goal was for the teams to identify the most valuable ideas from each group by assigning each idea a relative dollar value when weighed against all of a given team's ideas. The teams quickly moved from room to room evaluating ideas- with a pitch team member left behind to “sell” ideas to the visiting teams. By the end of the $100 Test, each team had a come to a consensus over which ideas were of the highest value.

The Innovation Generator

Once each team had “spent” their allotted $100, all of the teams converged together again to evaluate the high-value ideas and plot them on the Innovation Generator matrix. The goal of the Innovation Generator matrix was two-fold: 1.) to ensure that all ideas could be mapped back to a real user need and 2.) to encourage discussion as to what innovations could make a given idea more novel. As a whole, this particular activity failed. While all of the ideas could be mapped back to a real user need, no innovations were generated. However, this activity did spur productive group conversations that allowed us to combine, eliminate, and modify ideas.

Prioritization Grid & Questions & Assumptions

We chose to close the Summit with a hybrid activity. We asked the participants as a group to help us plot the ideas from the Innovation Generator into a grid-based on value to the user, and level of effort to develop. While the participants were debating how to plot each idea, the facilitators recorded outstanding questions and assumptions to be used for estimating risk when aligning the new ideas with the product roadmap after the Summit. The group was able to effectively plot each idea, and even delineate between ideas that required experimentation and those that did not.

A majority of our activities were drivers for conversations. Engagement in the activities themselves wasn’t always optimal, but all of the activities led to a fruitful discussion among the participants. As facilitators, it was important for us to remember that the goal of the workshop wasn’t to simply perform activities, but rather it was to enable different ways of thinking and give focus and direction to these important conversations. When these discussions would veer off-topic, or away from a real user need, we were there to redirect the conversation.