Introducing the 5-week Product & Experience Strategy Sprint

For the last three and a half years we’ve employed our unique Product & Experience Strategy Sprint with every single client we’ve worked with. Some sprints have been longer, some shorter. We've tweaked and tailored along the way, and we've experimented with what works and what doesn't to find the perfect mix of inquiries and activities to get to the root information, data and insights tension needs to create products, services and experiences for our clients that work, resonate with their target customers, and drive customer acquisition and growth while reducing attrition -- and bring better, stronger products to market faster.

I don't think it can be understated how much this could be company-making. This is awesome. This is really, really good. I think the work you guys have put together is fantastic, and I can at least speak for myself that this has really reinvigorated where I believe our company can go. - Head of product at one our fabulous clients

Tension's Product & Experience Strategy Sprint helps our clients:

1. Create cross-departmental visibility and alignment around your most important initiatives
2. Establish common goals and flag posts your entire organisation can rally towards
3. Reconnect with your organisation's "why"
4. Tie your strategy to the actual pains and challenges your ideal customers face everyday
5. Drive innovation, strategy, experience and design from the core of your business to deliver authentic solutions to your customers
6. Outline a manageable and attainable roadmap to drive your product or service forward, focussing on foundational capabilities while keeping the end state in mind reducing fractured directions and experiences

We do this by focussing on the root of your business, your target audience needs, and the brilliant ways you can provide meaning, value and authentic solutions to your customers. Our process involves the following:

• Who you are as a business, a service provider and / or a product, digging deep into the soul of your business, and why the company or product / service was started in the first place
• Who your target customers are, and why they should care about you at a deeply emotional and logical level
• What their current state looks like without your product or service, and how your current product or service is addressing the pains they face
• How your product or service fills a need worth paying for, and how you can do it from a position of authenticity and authority
• Identifying your ideal customers’ top challenges and obstacles, and prioritising them into the Problems Most Worth Solving through business casing
• Envisioning the ideal future state for your customers, and how your business can realize it for your customers
• Selectively identifying and prioritizing the best future state into the Solutions Most Worth Building
• Defining what you should build, and should not build through comprehensive business casing. Why you should build it, and in what order, leveraging a tiered Crawl, Walk, Run roadmap
• Our proprietary "War Room" experience design workshops through which we visualise your future state in an iterative and collaborative manner

We’ve used this model with clients from wildly different industries such as Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Mining Technology, Crypto & NFTs, Mortgage Underwriting, Chocolates, Sales Technology, and Pet Food. We’ve used the same model for startups, established companies, and industry heavyweights. All without veering from the core of the sprint, which has always stayed true to finding a business core meaning and purpose to drive innovation.

Our 5 week Product & Experience Strategy Sprint is one of the most powerful exercises I’ve personally seen employed in digital. Ever.

Our clients agree. From “this is company-making” to “I feel reconnected with the reason I started this business” to “I haven’t been this excited about the possibilities for months”, every client who’s gone through our sprint emerges with a better understanding of who they are, who their customers are, how to communicate with their audiences the way they need to be spoken to, and what their product or service should actually be and do in order to accelerate growth.

The Product & Experience Strategy Sprint is the most effective and responsible activity companies of any size can take before beginning any digital endeavour — in fact, at tension , we don’t start a project for our clients if we don’t kick it off with a Product & Experience Strategy Sprint. It's the only way we can learn what we need to learn to do our best work for our clients.

For the last two months, tension has gone back through all the Product & Experience Strategy Sprints we’ve executed for our clients over the years, and taken a long hard look at what worked, what didn’t, and what we wished we had known while executing projects or fractional engagements with our clients. We analysed the traceability of information and inputs from one activity to another, the quality of the data and insights we were gathering, and the engagement level of clients at various points in the sprint. We threw out the wasteful, doubled down on the powerful, added in some missing pieces, and killed things that weren’t adding value — and rebuilt the entire model from the ground up to be a concentrated, meaningful and purposeful exercise that results in measurable, tangible and actionable outcomes. We've productised the entire sprint so that we can offer the same level of value and benefit, over and over, to each new client. It's magical.

We built a better wheel.

From our custom business purpose, customer archetypes, current and future state journeys, problems worth solving and solutions worth building workshops, to our iterative design War Rooms, and ultimately our product and service roadmap development — our Product & Experience Strategy Sprint can take a business from “we need to do something…” to “this is exactly what will make our company” in a matter of a mere 5 weeks.

Bold, I know. You may be wondering how this is possible in 5 weeks. You may doubt that we can understand and innovate that quickly. You may think we’re crazy (which we are). We know we can, and stand behind it because we’ve done it, over and over, and seen the same outcomes time and again. We’ve seen clients re-energised and excited about their future again. We’ve seen clients readjust their long term strategies to reflect the outputs of our 5 week sprint. We’ve had teams that were once disparate and disconnected work together towards a common goal for the first time in years, if ever. And we’ve seen our clients become their own greatest advocates and champions for the future of their business throughout the rest of their organisation after experiencing our Product & Experience Strategy Sprint.

Have a big digital initiative on the horizon? Want to make sure you establish a solid foundation? Want to make sure you are doing the right things for the right reasons? Need to have organisational alignment for your initiative to work? Reach out and let’s have a chat to see if the Product & Experience Strategy Sprint is right for your startup, company or enterprise.

Get in touch:

Adam R.T. Smith President / Founder / Chief Creative Officer

Tension Consulting Inc.

[email protected]

https://wearetension.com