Argos app future outcomes
In October 2020, I was asked by the Senior PO of my division to join a series of recurring sessions which aimed to shape the future goals and outcomes for the Argos app. We did three workshops (and had several conversations) to finalise something that would be used to influence the future roadmap.
The ask: To help lead the conversation around the future of the Argos app through a series of workshops.
My role: Be the “voice of the customer” and the UX representative.
Stakeholders I worked with: Senior Product owner of the Apps department, Senior Product owner of the Argos app, Lead engineer of the Apps department and Lead engineer of the Argos app.
The impact: Influence the app’s future outcomes and roadmap.
First workshop
Our first workshop was all about understanding what we needed to achieve at the end of the recurring sessions and gather all the information we could about the Argos app. The Senior PO talked through the broader business goals and outcomes for the next financial year, explaining that we had to come up with our own and eventually create a roadmap.
After the introduction, I took the lead and we jumped on the main activity which I called “knowledge gathering”. Everyone would write down any known facts and thoughts around these questions:
What’s valuable to the Argos customer?
What are we (Argos) the best at, or want to be?
What do we (business) want to improve?
What do we (app) want to improve?
We spent a few minutes per question writing down what we knew and, by the end of the workshop we had gathered quite a few insights.
The next step was for me to take all that information away and identify the main themes. It soon became clear that from a customers perspective, the predominant themes were around improving messaging stock & fulfilment, being able to pay quickly with a variety of payment methods, being able to see what they’ve ordered and having a hassle-free returns journey. From engineering, being innovative and making sure we offer a frictionless experience and have powerful, stable code. From a broader business perspective customers engagement and perception were leading alongside pushing the best selling categories.
Second workshop
The second workshop was split into three activities, which combined would lead to the creation of a few “how might we questions” that would be used as a starting point for ideas generation in the third and last workshop.
This is what happened:
First activity: I walked everyone through the themes I identified. We then discussed all of them one by one and together we came up with a few insight statements. The statements would frame the challenges identified in each theme and help point the way forward.
Second activity: We converted each statement into “How might we questions” so that we could turn those challenges into opportunities for design.
Third activity: We selected the most important HMW questions through dot voting (we had three votes each). At the end of this exercise, each one of us explained what they had chosen and why.
Third workshop
This last workshop was about generating ideas. After I briefed the team, we spent 15 minutes writing down ideas from the four HMW questions we had voted for. Each one of us then presented what they wrote.
Discussing every idea together was very helpful. We would debate whether that idea would be beneficial for our customers and align to the broader business goals. At the end of this process, we had selected a bunch of ideas that could be grouped under three overarching hypotheses.
We had finally reached our goal and defined what we thought we should work on to improve our customers experience. The overarching hypotheses and ideas were later shared with more senior members in the business and prioritised to create the roadmap for this year.