This week marked the beginning of Sprint 2 and it was all about client meetings and preparations for them. We had our first playback session on Tuesday late afternoon, which was super exciting as it sparked up conversations around differences. These can sometimes lead to very positive results, if the discussion is done respectfully. For us, it turned out to be really useful for clearing out any misunderstandings we had about processes at Predictiv. The rest of the week revolved around the sketching session we had on Thursday and complaining about the hot, sticky air on the mezzanine in the office ;).

Things we did

Prepared the slide deck summarising our research. On Monday, we found ourselves trying to condense all our findings into a presentable slide deck. Thanks to lots of help from Neethu, Kristof and Tom W, this was a very enjoyable process that involved lots of checkins. We ended up with a really good presentation (thanks Jon for the visuals! 👀).

Delivered the playback to the client. On Tuesday afternoon, we made our way to the BIT office in Westminster, where we presented our playback to Stakeholders and the wider BIT/BIV team. We got really positive feedback on our presentation and had a bit of brainstorming on how to move on with our findings.

We then celebrated our first playback with a drink at a pub nearby with Tom W and Kristof 🍻!

Had our first retrospective. As week 3 marked the end of our first Sprint, we had our first Retro on a sunny Wednesday afternoon this week. It was made possible by Jo (thanks!) and we imagined for an hour that we were sailors on a ship, making our way through troubled (not really, it’s been great!) waters called Challenge RCT!

Through this journey, we discussed our strengths, had lots of positive feedback to each other and shared what motivates us to keep on going! It was a really good session for figuring out what we still need to improve in our teamwork, too.

Prepared and conducted a sketching session. On Wednesday, we turned our insights and opportunities into “How might we…?” questions and planned our sketching session for Thursday. This turned out to be the most tricky meeting we’d had so far, because of people having to dial in. This definitely did not make it easier for us to coordinate everyone and make it as engaging as possible. Nevertheless, we were able to come up with many good ideas and provoke a great discussion, which is an awesome outcome!

Things we learned

Feedback is super important. It’s really useful to have a retrospective and have some time allocated to discussing stuff. We can definitely get too busy or too invested in something to properly reflect on it on a day-to-day basis.

Sometimes it’s about quantity not quality. It’s not always that “less is more.” Getting ideas out quickly but in a form of very rough sketches was amazing for getting our client to think about their processes differently and creatively.

Order of presenting information matters. Aaaand…. here’s your rock, Captain Obvious… But really, it isn’t as obvious as you might think. The order in which we processed the information we’re about to present to the client is not always the best order for them to ingest it. You really need to think about how to make your convoluted process seem like a logical A to B journey.