This is the part where you do what you do best – make products and services. Yet defining what is to be built often slows down development teams because there are too many unknowns and no clear path to answering them. Contrary to popular belief, you can schedule the process to take the concept and move it to a design. We’ll show you how.

Once the opportunity areas are determined and prioritized, the next step is to sketch out ways to solve these unmet user needs. Some organizations stumble during conceptualization because they have bought into their own marketing hype. We can help remove these artificial barriers and get the creative juices flowing. In order to validate that they still solve the problem, the concepts need to be vetted by the very customers that had the original need. We’ll help you get into the field and quickly test the concepts so you can iterate rapidly.

Now comes the most powerful part – turning your customer insights into business opportunities. Your customers face barriers every day that they want to overcome. By providing solutions to overcome those barriers, even a few of them, you can dramatically change your business and make it more profitable.

Once you have observed your customers, interpreting those observations and finding the insights can be confusing. You might see this “fuzzy front end” as difficult to do, but it is actually straightforward. Through some simple techniques, we can help you make sense of the information and develop key insights that will help you find product opportunities.

The path to successful design starts with a discovery phase. We observe customers by watching them in their environments, or through more formal methods that allow us understand the process they go through to complete choose a product or complete a task. The examples below list some of the techniques we use to understand what your customer does, thinks, or values.

Our process is a simple five-step approach.