Part 1: Product Agility and Product Ownership

1. Expectations, curiosities, and the selection of product idea for the course
2. Product ownership
3. What is it?
4. What’s in it for you?
5. Why work this way? How did we get here?
6. Steering the bus
7. Visibility, control, flexibility, and maneuverability
8. Getting buy in

Part 2: Product Over Progress

1. Traditional, agile, and product-centered processes overview
2. Product centered thinking and principles (blending discovery & delivery)
3. Avoid being overly certain
4. Validate ideas early and fast
5. Develop customer insights
6. Practice product-driven architecture
7. Embrace responsive engineering
8. Building product communities, product owners, users, and markets

Part 3: Early Product Discovery

1. Framing design targets and your guess at their needs
2. Introduction to story mapping, story splitting, and customer journeys
3. Pragmatic sketching, prototyping, and other tools for early validation
4. Stories, acceptance tests, and learning from building

Part 4: Roadmaps and Planning

1. Making product choices
2. Iteratively delivering value
3. Sizing and planning across iterations

Part 5: Blending Product Discovery with Product Delivery

1. Establishing a sustainable discovery cadence
2. Establishing a blended cadence
3. Constraints
4. Adjusting to delivery constraints
5. Blending with operations and support
6. Losing “product” in delivery tools
7. Investing in analytics

Part 6: Measuring Product Impact

Part 1: Aligning product strategy to corporate strategy

1. Importance of knowing the corporate strategy and not just thinking you do
2. Top-down definition of product strategy that supports and clarifies company direction

Part 2: Market research and validation

1. Define the target market and the opportunity
2. Growth in your current market
3. Growth by identifying and executing in other market segments

Part 3: The other "M" in "PM": Marketing

1. A product that can’t tell its story is unfound
2. Product Marketing and Messaging
3. Marketing deliverable stories
4. Write a press release for your proposed release – before you start

Part 4: Creating roadmaps authored for the audience

1. Thematic business strategy roadmap
2. Partner and distribution roadmap
3. Product feature roadmap
4. Business product strategy

Part 5: Delivering customer value not just features

1. Alignment of training – what have they learned, how do they train
2. Alignment with marketing – what should they update, how do they message
3. Alignment with sales – enable them, what are they pitching

Part 6: How to tell the market your story

1. What business metrics a product manager should be tracking and why no one else is
2. How to work with influencers to gain reputable, 3rd party validation
3. The power of customer testimonials and how that starts with involving them during discovery and delivery
4. Pricing strategies and what to consider when balancing short-term and long-term revenue

Part 7: Monitoring the value of the product

1. Churn
2. CAC
3. NPS
4. Know the counter effects of metrics
5. Know your customer type and their limitations on providing feedback

Introduction: What are the ways to use Human-Centered Design if I’m not a Designer?

1. HCD Overview and Origination
2. Different models
3. Why the user is so important
4. Exercise: Identify current company problems that could be addressed with an HCD approach.

Step 1: Inspiration

1. The beginner's mindset is key
2. Learning from users
3. Throwing away assumptions
4. Staying open to the possibilities
5. Cultivating curiosity
6. What people think, say, and do.
7. Interview techniques
8. Sitting with your ideas
9. Exercise: Identifying your user
10. Exercise: The discovery process

Step 2: Ideation

1. Collecting your ideas
2. Removing the limits
3. Why “ridiculous” is a good thing
4. Brainstorming has a bad rap
5. Keeping it simple
6. Building on ideas
7. Establishing a shared framework
8. Solution-focused, not problem-focused
9. How to “see” an idea
10. Keeping the users involved
11. When to cut your loss
12. Exercise: How to build on ideas

Stage 3: Implementation

1. Delivery
2. Pilot testing
3. Iteration
4. Continued feedback
5. Determining long-term impact
6. Measuring the impact
7. Exercise: Tips to evaluate and measure

Practical Application

1. Getting starting with a micro project
2. Evaluating a menu of ideas
3. Getting buy-in
4. Tips for testing
5. Exercise: How to have better meetings

Why HCD Matters

1. Reduce Risk
2. Create what people truly need
3. Stay User Focused
4. Think outside YOUR box
5. Minimize confusion

Part 1: Introduction – What do we mean by design…and what are we thinking?

1. Design thinking overview
2. How structure and process apply to creativity
3. The need to solve problems
4. Types of problems, types of solutions
5. Components of design thinking
6. Human centrism: The importance of your users, customers, & consumers

Exercise: Who has the problem? Defining the user or customer

Part 2: Framing Problems

1. What’s the problem, really?
2. Discovering problems
3. Technology problems and products
4. OODA loops and backlogs
5. Distinguishing symptoms, problems, and root causes
6. Refining problem definition
7. Repeatably finding “a-ha” moments

Exercise: Select a problem candidate

Exercise: Root cause analysis for isolating and defining a specific problem

Part 3: Divergent Ideation

1. What is divergent thinking?
2. Generating raw material
3. Iterating on divergence
4. Your north star: Human-centric solutions
5. Using divergence to refine the problem space

Group exercise: Rapid ideation

Part 4: Convergent Ideation

1. What is convergent thinking?
2. Refinement and synthesis
3. Defining a future state for solution paths
4. Selecting solution candidates

Exercise: Revisiting your user persona and choosing the solution

Part 5: Testing Solution Candidates

1. Agility overview
2. Advice on prototyping
3. How to prototype rapidly
4. Collecting data
5. Variables
6. Rapid testing
7. Iterating on tests

Exercise: Modeling a testing cycle and group critique

Part 6: Iterating on Solutions

1. The feedback cycle
2. Agile practices for iteration
3. Measuring value
4. OODA loops again
5. Evolving solutions

Exercise: Walking through the iteration

Part 7: Teaming for Design and Solution Building

1. Applying design thinking in the typical enterprise
2. Product, service, system, or solution?
3. Teams in the problem space
4. Design collaboration
5. Prioritizing the design portfolio

Part 8: Obstacles to Design Thinking in Organizations

1. Cultural obstacles
2. Overcoming silos
3. Defining value correctly
4. Keeping human qualities at the center of the design
5. Applying design thinking to non-traditional roles
6. Engineering hurdles
7. The challenge of scale

Exercise: Preparing for scalability challenges and transitioning from discovery to delivery

Part 9: Class Conclusion – Charting Your Course

1. Expert Q&A
2. Discussion: Is your solution useful?
3. Your action items when the class is over

Section I. Review of Requirements Development with Use Cases
Use cases are one of the best approaches for developing requirements. In this section of the workshop, we will review key definitions and terms, overview a requirements management framework, and review how use cases fit into the development life cycle. We’ll refresh your knowledge of how to find requirements from use cases, and we’ll conclude with a discussion of use cases and Agile methods.

• Definitions of terms
• Levels and types of requirements
• Characteristics of effective requirements
• Requirements, use cases, and the development life cycle
• Review and assess use case quality
• Identify requirements associated with a use case
• Use cases and Agile methods

Practice Session
With your instructor, revisit key concepts of requirements engineering and then review poorly written requirements to discover characteristics of effective requirements. Work with your team to review and analyze several use cases and then extract possible requirements from those sample use cases.
 

Section II. IT Project Initiation and Use Cases
To exploit the full advantages of use cases, seasoned analysts plan for them from the very beginning of each project. This section explores project initiation and its relationship to use cases, particularly how to identify and capture them early in the project life cycle. In particular, you'll review whether use cases are appropriate for a specific project. You'll strengthen your understanding of the connection between project scope and use cases. We'll conclude this module with an exploration of other methods for identifying the use cases that comprise a system, and a chance for you to practice constructing a use case diagram.

• Project scope and stakeholders: how they relate to use cases
• Actor/goal definition and use cases
• Event identification
• User stories for agile development
• Use case briefs and usage narratives
• The use case diagram

Practice Session
Examine a hypothetical but realistic business and one of its emergent projects. You'll work in a small group to practice determining whether the use case approach is appropriate, identifying the use cases using the actor/goal identification method, and writing user stories and use case briefs for the case project. You will also practice diagramming the actors and the use cases.
 

Section III. Documenting Requirements with Use Cases
At some point, we must document the use cases and requirements discovered during the requirements elicitation process. This section of the workshop focuses on how to apply the knowledge you already have to writing better use cases. It also examines more complex aspects of uses cases, including includes and extends relationships and use case linking on larger systems.

• The use case preamble: the big picture
• Describing the normal course (i.e., main success scenario)
• Identifying and describing extension scenarios
• Identifying includes (sub-function use cases) and extends relationships (extension use cases)
• Linking uses cases for larger or more complex systems

Practice Session
You'll work with your team to write a fully dressed use case for our case project, including a preamble, the main success scenario, and the extension scenarios. You'll also have a chance to write an included (or sub-function) use case and an extension use case.

Section IV. Improving Use Case Quality
As with most aspects of system development, the quality of downstream work products (design elements, test plans, etc.) depends directly upon the quality of the use cases. During this part of the workshop, we will apply standards for quality to our use cases and requirements and look at some proven ways to prevent common problems. We'll also explore how to derive maximum benefit from reviews throughout the life cycle.

• Characteristics of well-written use cases
• Recognizing common problems with use cases
• Avoiding use case traps and pitfalls: advice and examples
• Validating use cases through reviews and inspections

Practice Session
Your team will review another team's use case using a quality checklist. You'll then have the opportunity to refine your own team's use case based on feedback from another team.

Section V. Use Cases and Other Requirements
Merely writing use cases is not sufficient for capturing all project requirements. While desired user functionality yields a major set of project requirements, experienced analysts know there are also non-functional aspects of the desired system that must be identified and captured. In this section, we will examine ways to derive other typical requirements from use cases and how to identify constraints on the solution design. In addition, we'll explore how use cases not only trace back to one or more business requirements, but also how they trace forward through the development life cycle to design and testing.

• Deriving non-functional requirements: business rules, data definitions, interfaces, and quality attributes
• Relating use cases to other requirements
• Identifying design constraints
• Documenting requirements and use case traceability

Practice Session
Your team will work together to derive and capture non-functional requirements from the use case your team has already refined. Then your instructor will work with the class to develop and document traceability between the requirements and the use cases for our course project.
 

Section VI. Use Cases and Testing
One of the most powerful aspects of the use case approach is its improvement in test procedure development. Well-written use cases directly impact the outcome of the very portion of the life cycle most likely to suffer when time is of the essence. Here, we'll look at how use cases can help identify test cases early in the life cycle. Next, we'll examine an example use case and its associated test plan side-by-side. Finally, we'll discuss how use of automated tools can reduce not only testing time, but also the time required to produce the test procedures.

• Benefits of early test case development
• Relating use cases to test cases
• Automated tools: reducing test procedure development time and testing time

Demonstration
Your instructor will demonstrate the use of a popular automated use case documentation tool and will then use it to develop a partial set of test procedures for our case project.
 

Section VII. Use Cases and Design Elements
Once we have the use cases developed, we can use them as a basis for discovering the elements needed for the design and development of the solution. In this section, we'll learn how to find typical design elements such as screens, messages, and dialog boxes, creating another layer of detail (sometimes called a "system use case").

• What are design elements?
• The relationship between a use case and design elements
• Functional decomposition for finding design elements
• Specifying design elements from a use case
• Validating requirements from user stories, use cases, and interface design

Practice Session
With your team, you'll analyze the use case you've already written to identify and specify required design elements. With your instructor, prototype an interface design for a use case from our case project and use it to validate the requirements.