Present Prototype Findings

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Identify best practices for packaging prototype findings.
• Describe the key assets needed to present prototype findings.

Cloud Kicks Recommendations

After several rounds of prototyping, the Cloud Kicks team is confident in packaging their findings and recommendations. The team gathered evidence through user feedback on low-fidelity sketches, a splash page mock up, and clickable wireframes. And they iterated in between sessions until they produced a prototype that gave them the confidence and evidence they needed. 

The next step is to present their concepts to their stakeholders, complete with their learnings from prototyping. For each of their concepts, they’re able to talk about why they drive value for customers, what features are absolute requirements in a launchable version, and what features are nice-to-haves. They also partnered with a developer to do some early estimation of difficulty for implementation of each concept, so they can speak to both the effort and impact of the various parts of their concepts.

Most important for the strategy designer is to ensure that the recommendation demonstrates quickly and succinctly how these solutions align to the Cloud Kicks business goals of improving customer satisfaction and reducing calls to customer service during the waiting period between order and delivery.  

Best Practices

Here are the best practices the Cloud Kicks strategy designer uses to convey their findings and recommendations in a compelling way. 

• Create a one-page executive summary: What are the top-line takeaways that everyone needs to know in order to understand and align with your team’s decisions going forward?
• Give analytical and emotional highlights: Both types of evidence are valuable, so be sure to share a mix of impassioned quotes or anecdotes and logical conclusions.
• Consider your audience: Your stakeholders may just want the insights you gleaned, or they may wonder about the details of your question, your process, who you talked to, and why you made specific choices. Don’t overwhelm them with too much information. Instead find out if they want to use the documentation you’re producing beyond the ways in which the core team will use it. By understanding their needs, you’ll deliver succinct and sufficient documentation that has true meaning and provides value.
• Make the document tell the story: Make sure the read-out you create does a good job of telling the story of your prototype and testing without you presenting it. It should be clear, compelling, easily shareable, and visual when possible. We recommend using the format most widely used in your organization: Google Slides™, PowerPoint®, or Keynote® slide decks. You can even embed audio if you have short clips.
• Keep it lean: Make sure your full report deck is around 10 slides long, and ends with the name of the strategy designer or project leader to contact if readers want more information.

What’s Next?

Throughout this module, you’ve learned how to build and test different types of prototypes. Now that you’ve packaged and presented your prototype findings, it’s time for your team to design your product or service with the benefit of everything you’ve learned, and get ready to work with your PM and developer to figure out how to build it. But your job as the strategy designer isn’t over yet! In the next module, Go-to-Market Planning, you learn how to bring your idea to market and keep the team aligned on the vision as the launch date looms.