In a previous post of this series, we brainstormed to create hypotheses about User Personas, Problem Scenarios and Value Proposition. We also created User Stories to drive narrative collaboration about our product.

Here, I’m going to show you how to get out of the building to understand what problems, desires or needs do your users care about. And I’m going to use user personas, which are ways of describing those users, and problem scenarios, which are ways of describing what is actually important to them.

This activity must be time-boxed so we constraint the time we have to push ourselves to focus and experiment and not go astray on extraneous details. Usually these experimentation exercises are called Design Sprints and they are limited to 5 days each. Does this remind you of agile practices?! Before committing to any expensive investment, you take your idea to the market and start experimenting with your hypotheses and creating refined user stories, if not pivoting the whole idea if users show no interest! Continue reading →