Design a Better Business

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PREPARE HOW YOU WORK (TOGETHER)

You’ve put together a team and secured an environment to work together in. Now it’s time to actually work together, efficiently and effectively. To achieve the best results as a team while continually staying on the same page, you’ll need some design tools.

THE DESIGNER’S ESSENTIALS

There’s a very good reason designers and creative types carry around sticky notes and big permanent markers. Sticky notes are expendable, additive, stick to anything, and have the added value of being constrained by size, while permanent markers are, well, permanent, and make what’s represented on each sticky note more readable. Hand stacks of each of these tools to everyone and let the ideas fly. By the end of the day you should have a wall of ideas and a floor piled high with half-starts. You get bonus points for getting everyone to draw their points of view (visually) on sticky notes. For some simple sketching tips, check out the profile on Dan Roam, in the prototyping chapter.

More about sketching and visual thinking PAGE 172

FRAME DISCUSSIONS USING A CANVAS

In just about every chapter of this book you’ll find canvases, like the Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, as well as others that can used for visioning, storytelling, validating, etc. These visual artifacts will help spark interesting conversations while framing the ensuing discussions.

These tools are not tools to be filled out and put away. As essential design tools, the canvases provided ...