Tiny list of resources for discovery led design 🔭
From one of my discovery workshops
A good designer friend is at a very interesting stage in his design career. After having worked at some great startups as an individual contributor he now leads design teams. Natural next step in his leadership trajectory is to start co-innovating with product and tech leaders using his design chops. With all his humble curiosity he reached out to me looking for resources to get started with visioning & discovery led design exercises.
Whenever I am working on putting together a new product vision or setting up design strategy or collaborating with business leaders to solve a new problem, this tiny list of references has always helped.
For thought leadership in product thinking and visioning I end up reading SVPG's insights blog. Especially Marty Cagan tends to write about well about front loaded discovery practices. He also runs some good IRL courses which don't think we can consider anytime soon.
Testing business ideas by strategyzer
When I need to prep for a discovery that's heavy on experiments I would use something like this book by strategyzer. They have a couple of more books on teams and value props which I am yet to actually check out. XPlane has some underrated collection of methods on strategic visual thinking/facilitation too which I have referred to in the past.
I find case-studies on strategic innovation/visioning etc by BusinessModelsInc quite interesting. (You might have to filter out the consulting noise though.)
Shape up by Ryan, is another great reference when your problems are closer to shipping/development.
Gaming ideas by Seeds for change
If I have to plan fun exercises to facilitate workshops with non-design leaders then there is this really cool set of methods.
Also, gamestorming has some canvases for collaborative design thinking to use. Methods like Futurespective (also called 'future press release') have been really been effective conversation starters with non-design partners for visioning.
That’s all for now! Try them out next time when you are on the onset of a visioning or discovery exercise and let me know if they helped.