A co-worker of mine at SoundCloud forwarded a contact to me. A student reached out to send over an S360 Strategic Product design collaboration proposal. This is a group of students from the Strategic Product Design course at Delft University of Technology who self-run this program facilitated by their professor. The student sent over a proposal and previous student examples:
After a few email exchanges and Skype calls, we finalized on the contracts. At the same time, I shared the effort with my design team and the rest of product teams plus my peer exec team. Together the team and I came up with a great plan!
25 of their students in the program showed up to do a half day workshop with us. We shared this presentation with each discipline presenting their craft. Large parts are cut out so if you do this make sure you include user data, user personas, investments ideas, and more. (see picture of plan above for ideas of content)
Photos of the presentation portion. The students were engaged and our product teams really enjoyed sharing their approach to products.
The students then broke into groups and started preparing their strategies alongside one SoundCloud product member. There were 5 groups all chose very different directions and approaches. Photos below are midway in each group’s efforts.
Group 1 Group 1 Group 2 Group 2 Group 2 Group 3 Group 3 Group 4 Group 4 Group 5 Group 5 Group 5
The energy was exciting. Here are the presentations from each group.
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4
Group 5
Below is the students video of their 5 day studio tours in Berlin.
The presentations don’t appear as much but they were well worth the experience. We bridged our product team over a common cause. Overall I’d recommend this for any group. This effort re-invigorated the product teams and helped us look at our product with a fresh perspective. Post effort, the team did a deep dive of their work and took insights to inform our SoundCloud products.