Product Research Rules

Chapter 7. The Team That Analyzes Together Thrives Together

When he was chief design strategist at Fresh Tilled Soil, C. Todd led an engagement with global delivery powerhouse Federal Express (FedEx). As you can imagine, FedEx is a large company with a lot of stakeholders involved in any new product initiative. At the beginning of the engagement, he arranged to hold a design sprint at their Memphis, Tennessee, headquarters. In the lead-up to the sprint, he invited key executives to participate in specific parts of the design sprint activities: the initial kickoff, the assumption storming, and the final day, when the team would review the test results and decide what to do next. It was this final day that cemented the project’s success at FedEx because the executives helped analyze the prototype results together with the team. Because the executives had to listen to the users’ voices and watch them struggle with the prototype, they had a firsthand view; what’s more, collaborating in analyzing the results together helped the team get the executive buy-in needed for the project to continue. Had the team just sent a report, the impact would not have been as powerful.

If product research is the process of creating and developing products based on an understanding of users’ experiences, needs, and behaviors, then perhaps the most fundamental part of that process is understanding. That understanding comes from the analysis of the data you’ve received through the qualitative and quantitative ...