Are your product teams running in the wrong direction? - Meet Marie

Uncertainty has dominated our lives over the last couple of years. Organisations have been forced to throw everything into question - from their business strategies to their ways of working.?When there are a lot of moving parts, shifting priorities, and deep complexity, people feel uncertain and hesitant to take a step in any direction. Marie is a designer and partner at Topp. She thrives in the unknown and believes that designers should work smarter to make the organization benefit more from design. In her role, she has continuously been looking for ways to solve challenges in the most impactful way. Throughout her 12 years as a designer, she has seen that progressing by doing, evaluating and facilitating helps companies move forward with certainty.

Learning by doing in uncertainty

Marie has broad design experience. She has been forming learning programs at Arduino, teaching UX design at Malmo University, and has worked with prototyping, service design, research, UI design, product strategy for products and services globally. No matter the context, she is driven by “figuring things out”, and when there is uncertainty she excels in building bridges from the unknown to the known.?

Designers are great at shaping things, visualizing the abstract, and making concepts tangible. At the start of the product and service design process, many things are unstructured and vague. Often, Marie is part of these early stages, when there are many unknowns. ?Many times she finds internal teams, designers, product leaders, and managers alike getting stuck defining strategies and goals by discussing theoretical arguments.

“While everyone else feels lost and look for answers from others, designers can support by fusing business goals, company vision, and identifying user needs. This provides a great basis for conducting design work, but also a great starting point for the rest of the involved stakeholders.”

Marie believes these early phases are moments where designers can make a real difference for the organization by making things concrete and visible. She means that designers find ways to move forward by taking the existing knowledge like business goals, identified challenges, market research and internal knowledge, and shaping it into concrete ideas. By visualizing what the product, service or process can be, the rest of the team can take leaps.?

“At this early phases is not about coming up with the right thing, but forming perspectives that might be close to where we want to go. It helps teams to share visions and enables product teams to align.”?

Considerations: What does your design team do in the earlier phases??

Are you doing the right?thing?

Many companies today have a goals driven approach, where they set goals and evaluate the impact based on whether or not the goals have been achieved. This structure helps teams work in the same direction and create synergies -which is great. However, Marie thinks that when working with complexity and uncertainty, relying on a set direction is not enough. She means that as we progress, we get new insights that impacts the understanding of the problem we are trying to solve.?

“As we progress and evolve, we learn new things. Valuable insights that we should use to challenge what we are doing, and ensure that we are working towards the right goal.”

The core of design lies in asking if we are doing the right thing throughout the process. This can be applied across the organization. Marie means that if you stay curious and eager to learn, in a way that enables you to question set goals, directions and complement strategy, you’ll end up creating really valuable products and services.

“The problem is that many companies and teams set goals and strategy at the start, and leave them unchallenged. It doesn’t matter how efficient or fast your product teams run if they are running in the wrong direction.”

Marie means that designers should take it upon them to add checkpoints to the process where the problem/solution is evaluated and questioned. Ask the questions: What problems are we solving? What opportunities are we seeing? And based on what we have learned so far - what could be the solution be, and how can we get there?

To consider: Do you have a process for evaluating if you are doing the right thing along the way?

Use your facilitation skills

The third thing that has a big potential impact yet should be utilized more is the role of the facilitator. Designers in leadership roles often work with stakeholders who has domain expertise but are not designers. In those setups, designers often need to translate observations into something concrete. For example, take business goals and trends and turn them into tangible concepts.?

Marie believes that this creative capacity of observing, taking an observation and turning it into something tangible is exactly the skills a good facilitator and problem solver has. The benefit of having facilitation skills in the company is that it helps teams make progress more efficiently. Through facilitating decision making, alignment, evaluation and direction, cross-functional groups and teams are able to progress faster with buy-in and alignment from multiple stakeholders.?

“Facilitation for me is a lot about gathering perspectives and aligning them, resulting in people working in the same direction. A lot of the value I bring today is better and faster alignment which improves products while saving time for organizations.”

Marie wants to encourage more designers to step into the facilitation and problem-solving role, especially in complex situations and where there is uncertainty. This will not only help designers?work smarter, but benefits the whole organization across functions and roles. And in this way, designers can contribute at a larger scale.?

“Working smarter should be on the top of every designer’s mind. And it’s not only about saving time and money, but primarily about working with teams to shape products that connect to user needs, and taking the time to shape experiences that have a wow-effect of people.”

Consideration: How do you use facilitation skills today?

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About Marie

Where does she live? In Copenhagen

What does she like to do on “non working” time? Hang out with her partner and two kids - doing everything from electronics to ice cream in the sun.

What is she passionate about? Playful design and creating experiences that make an impression on people

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Interested in understanding how you can work smarter?

Or how to get more value of design? Or how to setup your external partnership??

Reach out and we’ll help you to figure out your next step

[email protected] & [email protected]