How do you design programs for diversity?

TechLadies founder, Elisha Tan, describes how to apply design thinking to creating developer programmes in this opening keynote from DevRelCon London 2019.

Summary:

  • Design thinking - Programme Design Thinking

  • Vision

  • Understanding

    • Knowing why you are doing something.

    • Understand what problem you are solving

    • What context in which the problem exists.

  • Define

    • Who is the target audience?

  • Ideate

    • Finding the best idea.

  • Test

    • Testing the idea.

  • Leverage

    • How can we maximise benefits?

  • This process helps in becoming a better organizer, and helps to be a better leader then eventually leads to the creation of something meaningful.

Scribbles:

Design Thinking Framework

  • Brings you through to integrate the needs of the users, understand the possibilities of technology, and the requirements of business need to come to a solution that can meet all of that.

  • How can we use this, how can we copy this, and apply it to the programs?

  • Mistakes many people make is to jump straight from ideation straight to execution.

  • Without a very mindful approach to understanding why we are doing this and what problem we are solving, it is very easy to be pulled in a different direction like I was.

Vision

  • Questions to ask …

    • Why are you doing this?

    • What are your goals?

    • What are the desired outcomes?

  • Vision helps with understanding if we’re solving the right problem.

  • DevRels can solve a lot of all the problems - not all problems are the right problems to solve.

  • Having a strong vision sets the foundation, helps set the right direction

  • Understand what sort of metrics will be important for you.

Understand

  • Questions to ask…

    • What is the problem?

    • How are people solving the problem now?

    • Why are the current solutions inadequate?

  • Not everyone learns how to code to become a software engineer. Some of them just want to learn because it’s fun.

    • Some of them want to learn to enhance their current role.

Define

  • It's between the more abstract research and vision with the very tangible execution strategy.

  • Define is understanding who our audience is, what are their hopes and dreams and fears, and how can we reach out to them.

  • Helps in focusing on who exactly I’m helping.

User Persona

  • User Persona is related to your vision and also what problem you’re solving.

IDEATE

  • Questions to ask

    • What are all the possible ideas?

    • Which is the “best” idea?

    • What idea gives you the shortest feedback loop?

  • Find out what is the best idea to pursue given the constraints and the resources you have.

  • Learning is to prioritize ideas before a short feedback loop.

    • A feedback loop is a time taken to plan, execute and learn from that experience.

  • So ideas for a short feedback loop helps you learn more faster.

  • Talk to different people to help me refine the idea.

Test

  • Questions to ask..

    • What is the best way to test this?

    • What are the risks involved?

    • What did you learn?

Testing Methods

  • Feedback from users

  • Run a small event

  • Creating prototype

Leverage

  • Leverage is simply to squeeze any ounce of, in fact, other things that you are already doing.

  • What are some other goals that you can achieve?

  • What are some of the momentum that you can create from the things that you are already doing?

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