You’ll split up into teams and each team will try to come up with a profile for your product’s user. By the end of this, you should have a clear profile for the users you’re building for.
In this step, you’re going to come up with the jobs/tasks that your user needs to complete to be successful.
Split into groups of 2-3 people here and write all of our ideas on sticky notes for the first 10 minutes. Then, we come together, go over our notes, and group common themes for the last 10 minutes
Depending on the number of job groups you came up with above, you can split into teams and focus on one or two of them, or split and conquer all of the groups.
Whatever you decide, the next thing to do is take our trusty sticky notes and come up with the actions our users take to complete these jobs. These steps should be not too detailed, but you should try to include what tools they’re using.
By the end of this, you’ll have a bunch of actions and tools written out for your user’s most important jobs.
Once you have all of your actions written down for your user’s job(s), you’ll go through them as a team and talk about the things that suck in this current workflow (a.k.a. painpoints).
After this exercise, you should have a list of the biggest painpoints that your users run into in completing their jobs and you should know at which steps they’re running into these.
As a team, you’re going to split up your painpoints between “ones we could improve” vs. “ones were not going to try to improve”.