Design Sprint Workshop Series (Ninja Van, 2019)
I conceptualized and spearheaded the first series of Design Sprint workshops across 5 months for 100 participants, to build on the Ninja Van's outreach efforts in Singapore.
Workshop Design
The aim of the workshops was to increase awareness of product management (PM) among university students, and encourage more students to pursue PM roles at Ninja Van as well. In order to achieve this, I led the design of workshop materials in a team with 2 other PM interns, by adapting the GV 5-day design sprint format.
The takeaways we hoped participants would gain included: experience with adopting a user-centered design process, practicing agile methodology, and remaining outcome-oriented. Focusing on these desired outcomes, we posed the following challenge statement for participants to work on in groups of 5.
2 key aspects of poor driver performance have been identified: a high proportion of delivery stop failures and unsatisfactory timeslot adherence. This resulted in a per parcel premium loss of S$0.50 in the previous quarter.
Propose a solution that focuses on improving these metrics.
We then designed the following activities to help participants explore the problem space and potential solutions. Accompanied by a facilitator (a member of the Ninja Van Product team), the participants worked on these in their teams:
1. Stakeholder Interviews
To understand the problem context
2. Writing of HMWs, Journey Mapping and OKRs
To define and scope the Problem To Be Solved (PTBS)
3. Crazy 8's sketching, Wireframing and Paper Prototyping
To get participants comfortable with practicing iterative quickfire ideation
The workshop culminated in participants presenting their ideas and lo-fi wireframes/paper prototypes in teams, with judges from the Ninja Van Product team eventually choosing the winning team based on the criteria of Usability, Desirability, Viability and Feasibility.
The Usability criterion was used to assess whether participants' solutions were effectively designed to help users achieve desired goals, while the other 3 criteria were incorporated to encourage participants to adopt a business-oriented perspective towards innovation.
Design Process
I adopted an iterative process while designing the workshop format and materials, including running a trial workshop for participants who signed up early. These participants were invited to completed a short survey comprising quantitative (to assess key success metrics) and qualitative questions (to better understand the experience) at the end of the trial workshop.
These were several key themes and comments which emerged from the feedback received.
With the feedback from the dry run, we removed several activities from the lineup and refined our challenge statement to ensure a smaller problem scope. These were done to facilitate a better learning experience and present a more manageable problem for participants to tackle.
Further, I gathered feedback from members of the Ninja Van Product team who helped as workshop facilitators via another survey. The survey questions were designed to identify potential gaps in the workshop content (judged by the most frequent questions facilitators had to clarify) and estimate the amount of effort the team could realistically put into conducting these workshops, to ensure feasibility and sustainability of the initiative.
Several content changes were implemented with the feedback collected, including the creation of several handouts (such as the Driver Journey Map, to facilitate more user empathy and enable a better understanding of the problem context).
Other handouts prepared for participants are pictured below.
With the refined format, 5 workshops were conducted for over 100 university students in Singapore.
Post-Workshop Reflections
It was rewarding to see that all participants found the workshop to be a great introduction into the field of Product Management, with most appreciating the behind-the-scenes look into how a Product Manager typically collaborates with other stakeholders to solve problems. Further, the Ninja Van Product team also found the workshops to be a good opportunity for spotting talent and potential PM candidates.
Not to mention, designing a workshop to help more university students gain exposure to Product Management helped me develop a greater understanding and appreciation of various aspects of the discipline as well!
Product managers truly are challenged to put on a variety of hats on a daily basis, but I find that working on so many moving parts of different product builds is part of what makes the work intrinsically rewarding.
