How to achieve the Desired State..

What exactly is a Desired State? Any improvement made towards the Efficiency for better results on top of the Current State. That's it, and it requires key artefacts to be followed so that you can reach your Desired State all the time.

Happy to share with you all, my two weeks of experience in transforming a 'Problem Statement' from 'Current to Desired' state, along with my Problem Solvers Cohort

• First, choose a Problem Statement from a Problem Area you are aware of and it should have scope for improvement which is going to bring in Monetization benefits or improve Usability to increase the customer base
• Start with the Hypothesis; Do a Mind Map - believe me, thinking is one toughest activity to do. Don't just keep thinking, pen it down - you will be amazed by the number of points you are able to think/write around your Problem Statement
• How to validate your Hypothesis? Pick relevant participants, and do a User Research. Create Personas for each of the Participants, and come up with Empathy Map capturing what the participants Feel-Think-Say-Do. By now you might have got ample Customer Insights to understand the actual challenges faced by the end-users
• Now with the Customer Insights from the User Research, Revise your Hypothesis which will take you much closer to the Problem Statement and the Challenges to work upon
• Next is to write as much How Might We (HMWs) statements as possible for the chosen Problem Statement. Now define Tenets, based on the weightage pick the best HMW statement which closely matches the Problem Statement
• Now create Problem Brief for the chosen HMW statement. Understand Your Strategic Intent:

Imitate/ Incrementally Evolve/ Integrate & Remix/ Innovate 

Come up with points for the below sections to elaborate the Problem Statement further:

1. Target Audience
2. Pain Points
3. Desired Benefits
4. Opportunity
5. Competition/ Substitutes
6. Objective & Insights

• Its finally time to build the Idea Bank, If you timebox your thinking time to a couple of Pomodoro's - you can get at least 100 Ideas to start with on how-to solutionize the chosen HMW statement. Now define Tenets, and it will give you the best of the Idea, which will create that AHA Moment you have been looking for
• Once you have your Aha moment, work towards listing down the Features List; come up with User Stories; create Low/ Medium/ High fidelity Prototyping and then the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is ready to move the Problem Statement from Current to Desired State
• Continue to reflect upon the MVPs delivered, keep expanding your Features List and build the RoadMap for the subsequent versions

These are all some of the key artefacts on how to achieve the Desired State for the chosen Problem Statement. Cheers to all the Problem Solvers