Building strong teams

Did you know that there are actual studies confirming the different phases a new team experiences over time?
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At the beginning important topics in a newly formed group are safety, inclusion and likability. After a bonding phase, the foundation for trust is being laid leading to the next stage of group development which is characterized by conflict. To resolve these conflicts, it is important for the team to have developed a set of common goals, define roles, values, and agree upon processes.

What we have realized working with multi-diverse teams in different kinds of companies is that most times the on-boarding process is skipped in favor of getting into some sort of "production mode" immediately. Teamleaders often forget to lay the groundwork for a successful collaboration.

That is why we created our Team Resort Workshop. The outcomes which help you build strong teams from Day One:

• Creating a mutual understanding by defining a common team language
• Providing psychological safety: A space where people feel safe to take risk and be vulnerable in front of each other
• Defining common goals and gain a clear understanding of how each team member understands these goals
• Getting to know your team mates: What is important for them to be their best self at work? What do they care about? Where do they need support?
• Guidelines and etiquette: How do we work together? When, where and how often do we meet? How do we handle our new hybrid work lives? How can we provide an inclusive environment?

So, if you want to make sure your team can do its best work, then come join us for our Team Resort!

Building the right product for your users and your business

Too often projects fail because we start talking about solutions too early. We dive right into talking tech and features before we have either matched our goals and expectations. So many times we haven't even asked: Are we solving the right problem or are we just doing something for the sake of getting active?

In our Project Discovery session we put your users first and match their needs with your business goals. We collect all the relevant information and expectations from all the different stakeholders within and outside of your organization. We make sure everyone knows what we are aiming for and gets a mutual understanding of "an online shop" or "an app". Believe me, there can be so many different views on something like "a website" when you ask people with diverse backgrounds. For the success of your project it is essential to hear them out and get them aligned.

Together we find out what it is that really brings you closer to reaching your business goals and responding to your users' needs: How can we create a better experience for them and solve a real pain point in their lives?

What is in it for you taking this Discovery Session, you ask? You avoid spending extra costs by shifting these questions to a later stage in the process, by changing direction or paths months after your project's kickoff. Or the worst case: Bringing a product to market no one needs nor uses in the end.

Our main goal is help you develop digital products such as websites, online shops, apps or business platforms with a focus on your users to successfully sell your services or products, gain loyal customers and provide them with meaningful experiences.

Complex problems are best solved collaboratively

Successful products are not built by siloed teams. How often have you seen a great Social Media campaign and then been sent to a one-size-fits-all (that never works out) Wordpress-theme-like Landing Page where no one has taken care about the actual goal of the customer at that point, who that customer is, why he landed here and what he is up to?

We firmly believe successful products result from multi-diverse teams bringing together their different perspectives and ideas. Using the power of the crowd we also succeed in giving everyone involved a voice. Team members become an active contributor which makes it easier to get their buy-in. People are energized and enjoy their work more because it suddenly becomes much more meaningful. Everyone has good ideas, everyone can be creative.

In our Co-Creation Jams we encourage this inter-disciplinary exchange. We guide you and your team through diverging and converging exercises to come up with the most promising and innovative ideas. Your team experiences high levels of motivation as they not only always value working with new colleagues from different departments and backgrounds but also realize how speed and boundaries can improve creativity.

The outcomes of a Co-Creation Jam usually are the following:

• Definition of the most important challenges we need to solve for your users and your business
• Tons of solution ideas
• Scribbles and storyboards describing these ideas
• A definition of user flows through your product - website, app, online shop, you name it - which can afterwards be further developed by your or our UX team and can be used as a starting point for a prototype or a real (minimal viable) product

Building the product right

A recent McKinsey studied proved what we preach: Using a design-led approach by emphasizing user-centricity and gathering customer insights constantly throughout the product development process has proven to increase revenue growth and product success.

As designers, we have been trained to iterate very quickly which means we involve our customers throughout the design process, prototype and get stuff out there. We talk to our customers and respond to how users work with our prototypes to refine and optimize them.

Great design starts with great research — We need to gain empathy and understanding to identify common themes and patterns and discover insights. We want to see the world through our users' eyes and capture the essence of their experiences. Only this inspires new possibilities for change, improvement and innovation.

In order to support you introducing this new mindset to your team which can be scary at first, we have created our GOOTB Bootcamp. Together we define our most critical assumptions related to your challenge and build a prototype or use your existing product to find answers to your questions. Be our guest during our user interviews or come over for a "Movie Night" where we put together our most surprising and intense moments of user research.

We bring your multi-diverse team together for an inspiring workshop where we synthesize our research results and make sense of our findings together. We support you finding solutions to improve the experience for your users and iterate the whole process a second time. We take the results from our user test and use these as a starting point to improve our solution which we then put in front of your customers another time. With your whole team we sit down again and sort out what we have learnt.

Why should you invest in our GOOTB Bootcamp?

• Save time and money across your project lifetime because early-stage changes can be incorporated quickly before having invested too much
• Seeing real users interacting with a product challenges everyone's mental models about how the world works and helps overcome biases
• Testing always surfaces user requirements that have not been identified before and help identify real user needs
• Improve user satisfaction and conversion rates
• Last but now least: Our Bootcamp helps to bring your team closer together and ensures a common alignment  your user's goals.