If we didn't enjoy talking about our projects, how could we expect our stakeholders to enjoy discussing them? Our project planning team quickly realized we not only needed to introduce the movie posters for the wider teams' and stakeholders' best interests, but for our own sense of enjoyment in our roles, too. Stakeholders weren't really buying into what our planning team was half-heartedly selling.
But that information had begun to feel like it was just text on a page or screen. It's crucial for a product owner or a manager (or whoever is planning a development team's work) to present information about what their team could potentially deliver to stakeholders so that the best decision on where to invest time and resources can be made. Product owners and planning teams have to do this four times a year, and the cycle was starting to feel heavy and burdensome to us. We had imposed requirements on ourselves of needing to write up documents, transpose that information into a spreadsheet, and then (yes, a third time) into a slide deck. It was at this point that we began to realize how we created this arduous and quite frankly boring way of planning our team's work.
Our planning team was loving the reaction and engagement we were getting from our stakeholders and wider team from using the movie posters instead of documents. "If you love what you do, then you’ll never work a day in your life" was the angle we were going for when we decided to break our self-imposed ceiling of needing to be formal and business-like to be able to both plan and deliver work. In this article, we're going to review the many lessons we've learned from Design Thinking. In our previous article, we discussed how we used movie posters to "pitch" our projects to stakeholders. Welcome to the communityįor the past several years, Design Thinking has been providing a way to enhance problem solving within teams, to ensure learning goals are met, and to increase team engagement.