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.

Video

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:

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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.

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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?