As a service designer, a large part of my job is making sure everyone on the project sees and understands the same picture.
We all need to have a shared understanding of:
- why we’re here
- what we’re trying to do
- the outcomes (changes in the real world) we want to see
That sounds easy, but in reality it’s not. Everyone has their own perspective: designers, developers, content designers, architects, security people, product owners … everybody comes at the problem with their own priorities and experiences, their own preferences, language, biases and assumptions.
We can have hours of discussions and endless workshops to thrash these conflicting worldviews and languages out. Thousands of unmourned post-its may be lost in the process.
So one day, back in 2019, when I was working on the very early days of findbusinesssupport.gov.scot I decided we needed an authoritative way to describe and demonstrate our purpose.
In my experience at that time, it really helps to have a big reminder of “this is why you’re here” every time you enter the workplace. (It was ‘real’ then, it’s (mostly) virtual now.)
So I came up with this:
Continue reading “Joining the dots from intent to outcome”