I've learned more in 2 days than I have in 4 months
Testing concepts with the target customers will do that
This week, we had an ideation workshop for our circular business model product, created two prototypes, and tested them with actual H&M customers. It's helped answer a lot of questions we were speculating about like will people be able to find our product, will they understand what it is, what expectations will they have.
The wrong approach
This makes me wonder why I didn't do this earlier. The only explanation I have was that I wanted the designer in each team to still feel like they owned their product. I didn't want to design and test their part of the product for them - but now I think that was the wrong approach.
For sure, the final decision will be theirs because they will be developing it, but since I am the only product designer that works full time on this product, I will be able to design, test, and learn faster than them. It's a no-brainer in hindsight; we should optimize for learning and taking action.
Next steps
So what can I do to keep up the speed? Here's my idea; once every four weeks I will be running usability tests with 3 people (per the recommendation in Don't make me think). I'll test the entire journey on the website based on the latest work by the product teams and new ideas from my team. Anyone is free to observe the sessions, and I'll go over the results in our demo. All the teams will be in the loop and can make decisions based on my findings.
Can’t wait to try this out!