The Product Strategy Elevator: Our User-Centered Design Event

What is the Product Strategy Elevator?

Through the many projects and years at our UX agency, we’ve found that product teams often focus too little on in-depth product and user research. Instead of having conversations with the target audience, they make product decisions based on gut instinct, which can backfire big time.

That is why we offer a new type of UX design event: the Product Strategy Elevator. This unique event brings together product teams from different companies to analyze their individual products from a user perspective. Combining both feedback from our UX experts and observations from real users, each team leaves the event with a concrete action plan for how to take their product development to the next level.

What is particularly unique about the Product Strategy Elevator is that it brings together different teams from a single industry. This gives participants an awareness of the ecosystem in which they are operating, as well as creating plenty of opportunities for networking.

How does the event work?

The event is divided into three phases: preparation, event and follow-up. Each phase is specifically tailored to the companies involved in the event, to ensure each team has an experience that is unique and relevant to them.

The format is divided into three phases:

Preparation:
We evaluate the product in advance from a UX expert perspective.
Event:
We conduct interviews and tests with your potential users during the event.
Follow-up:
Based on the evaluation of the results, we give you concrete and strategic recommendations for action to improve user-centered design.

Preparation

From the UX agency side, we start with an onboarding session with the product team. Using in-depth interviews, we learn about the product, its background and the challenges the team are experiencing with it. This enables us to determine not only the current issues with the product but also the team’s motivation for participating in the event.

After that, the product team can sit back and relax while we get to work. Our UX design experts analyze the product from a human-centered design perspective in a rapid expert review. This involves examining the current solution in terms of usability and user experience, to identify both potential weaknesses and areas for improvement.

Based on this research, we then collectively develop user interview guidelines – these form the basis for the user testing at the event. We also use the preparation phase to recruit users based on the target groups of the participating team(s). This part of the process is particularly important, as it is often the users who provide the most valuable insights into how to further develop the product.

Arbeitsweise beim Product Strategy Elevator

Event

Finally, all the individual product teams come together for the main event. We start by introducing the participating companies and giving a short motivation talk from our side. Then our UX research experts conduct the prepared user interviews, observed by the respective product team. Afterwards, we evaluate the results together with each team, before coming together as a group for exchange and networking.

Follow-up

After the event, we combine the team’s business strategy with the UX audit and results from the user testing to provide concrete next steps and strategic recommendations. At the end of the process, each product team receives a personalized product document that details these insights in depth, as well as providing an overview of how the product team reached them.

What do the participants take away from the event?

What each team receives depends on their specific challenge(s). We provide individualized recommendations, based on design thinking, user-centered design and user testing, to help the team take their product or idea to the next stage of development. By synthesizing our expert UX audit with the findings from user testing and the goals of your product team, we produce recommendations that are based on user research, not gut instinct, and provide a concrete action plan for successful future development.

Our design process goes from the messy research and exploratory stages, to focused and directed development and testing.

But crucially, the Product Strategy Elevator also gives participants first-hand experience of the human-centered design process. They get to experience user testing with their own eyes and see how quickly valuable user insights can be gained by talking to users. Most importantly, the participants come away with an understanding of just how essential user research is for the design process—something that benefits not just the product team involved, but the whole company too.