Leveraging a T Shaped skillset in an ever-growing industry

In this ever-growing landscape of the design industry, the gap between things like AI and Product Design are shortening.

Which is why a T-Shaped skill set, that influences team growth and culture is becoming more and more prevalent in 2023. To meet the needs of broadening business objectives, there is more value in multiplying your knowledge by growing the skill set and ability of a teammate or stakeholder, than addressing the task yourself.

A product lens and facilitation toolkit is vital to draw upon in this context. This powerful combination will support you in gaining an understanding into themes such as the intrinsic why, assumptions, hypotheses, perceived value and success metrics for any business problem from planning and service design to leveraging AI into product features.

Uncovering how to solve for these themes can be addressed with 4 key principles:

Be visionary

Designers should facilitate stakeholder workshops aiming for a target of uncovering customer/business objectives, results and outcomes. Address any lagging indicators that support leading indicators. (a leading indicator can influence future change, a lagging indicator indicates past results or metrics.)

Be strategic

Use intended outcomes as the basis for uncovering assumptions and finding a critical hypothesis to test through prototyping, monitoring and iterating. UX research and content methods should be leveraged in this phase.

Be a scientist

Gear your experiment for success. The experiment needs to be geared toward achieving a success metric like an intended OKR for the business or an intended outcome for a user, that ties back to a leading indicator or outcome.

Instil Culture

Ensure a psychologically safe place. The purpose of a workshop is to encourage active listening, alignment, questions and suggestions to surface business or user needs. Setting this expectation through a fun ice breaker activity can do the trick that setups a sequence of successful sessions.

As the spectrum of our industry continues to broaden, draw upon your creativity to continually add breadth and depth to the roles of others to share success together. Channel product and facilitation methods that align your team, assess lagging indicators and produce actionable leading indicators that encourage testable hypotheses. Share, promote and showcase results that circle back to the objective and it’s congruency with business value.