 Hi, this is Dr. Nancy Lee, Director of Product. I help engineers and international professionals transition from worker B to a product manager and business leader. To learn the most effective way to land a product manager job, you can subscribe to my channel and hit the bell button so that every time you will be notified when I post a new video every Monday. So today, we had the pleasure to invite Vivia from Vivia Design to teach us the Google design sprint. Hi, Vivia, do you want to introduce yourself? Hello, everyone, I'm Vivia. Currently, I'm a UX designer working on Google Assistant, which is a multi-model interaction product based of AI and with 500 million users across the world. Before that, I was a UX designer on Gmail and Chat, which has two billion users. Before Gmail, I was a lead designer on Google Keep. Also, I'm a certificated Google Design Spray Master. I've run a lot of Google Design Spray across different product areas. I'm also a mentor, meaning I'm being mentoring and training new Google Design Spray Master within Google. Great, thank you for joining us. So let's cut through the chase today. Vivia, the reason we have you today is that there's a buzzword called Google Design Sprint. And all lots of audience today, they are interested in becoming a product manager. Today, we're interested in learning about how Google designed their product. And would you please tell us the framework of how Google designed product? What's the relationship between Google Design Sprint and their framework? Usually, we have five steps for designing products at Google. But every team has its own design culture, so it might be different. The first step is understanding your users. So there is a company philosophy of Google. Focus on users, and all will come. So that means understanding your user is really important to Google. A lot of people might think Google is really good at technology. So you might think we are an engineering-driven company. But actually, for a lot of products, especially for consumer products, or even for enterprise products, understanding user is very important. So as a designer, I will work with UX researcher in the beginning to understand our user's behavior, their intent, and try to dig through some user insights, which help us to understand what problem we're trying to solve. Yeah, great. I do believe that a lot of companies will always need to focus on the design part from the customers. So after you understand the needs of the customer, what's next? Yeah, so the next one is actually identify the opportunity areas. Because there are so many areas you can improve. But what are the really important ones that will bring the biggest value to our user? So in this step, we're going to bring our understanding of user to the team and really discuss with the team members, like PM, engineer, lead, marketing, or sales, the characteristic of your product, and try to figure out what are the priorities, whether the priorities match with the strategy or match with the company branding. Let me ask you this question. So when you talk about all the strategies and you brought in internal stakeholders, different stakeholders have different priorities, I bet. So who is one driving the prioritizations of different stakeholders' needs? So at Google, it's very collaborative. And usually we have three partners. One is like UX, and one is engineer, and one is PM. So we are like the triangle that kind of defining the product direction. So sometimes this product direction or feature can initiate by PM or sometimes by engineer if they have like a new technology. They want to introduce to the world. And sometimes it can be a designer who identify some really unique user needs. And we can also propose this direction or this feature to our team. That's why sometimes we will have some design sprain. This is a really useful and effective methodology within Google to help all the partner kind of discuss and open to idea and finally make a decision and align on the direction that we all agree on. Very cool. So after you hear the needs and prioritization from internal stakeholders, what do you do next? As a designer, I will first try to understand like the intent of this priority and see if that kind of match the UX priority. If there's a mismatching, we might have to push back. If that's really important to user, we might fight for something that works more priority. And then like once we are all aligned on the priority, we'll try to determine like the actionable items and make sure we have enough resources to support that and make sure mapping out the timeline, et cetera. Very cool. And after you map out your timeline, what's the fourth step? I'm gonna go ahead and bring some a lot of ideas. So this step will help us to make sure we thought about all the possibilities and a lot of time innovation happens from here. This stage is more like a diverge step where you kind of diverge your ideas. But then we're gonna converge again because we're gonna validate our solution. So we need to make a design decision on which one we wanna move forward. So that will lead to the fourth step which is the validation and design iteration. So we're gonna make a design decision and test that with our users. So usually as a designer, I work with a researcher to do some, for example, concept testing to understand, hey, this direction is correct. It's appropriate. And during this process, I'm also building more deep understanding of my user and try to iterate on my design. So it's a very iterative process. I might do this several runs before I land on the final solution. At the end, I will have high-fidelity prototype with conduct this usability testing with the user so they can actually try on the devices and provide a feedback that are closer to the real world. After that, we're gonna have like a final design proposal where I'm gonna present to my team or sometimes leadership to get their buying or incorporating more feedbacks. The last one is actually implementation stage. This is a very important stage. Usually we'll work with a group of engineers to deliver the design. This is actually very important. And there are a lot of back and forths with engineer on the feasibility. For example, an engineer can bring up a technical constraint so then you have to consider this constraint and iterate on your design again. But for me, I'm trying to make this process less waterfall style, but more collaborative style so engineer can investigate on the early stage to provide more innovative technology and they can also feel the sense of ownership. Thus my design can get more buying. I have more potential to be innovative. I actually really like the style of collaboration even in the implementation stage. Vivienne, let me ask you this question. We heard the buzz word Google design sprint. Is what you describe the same as the Google design sprint? Design sprint is actually not like the whole process of product development. It could be one step in the early stage where you are defining the direction. The design sprint can help you to kick off the project with your teammates or it can be in the middle stage where you want more innovation ideas. Yeah, it's like one part of the framework. We always say design sprint is not the end of the sprint, it's the kickoff of the projects. I see. So can I make assumption design sprint actually happened in the phase one and two, right? Or it happened in all the phases, all the five steps? Usually most times design sprint happened in the early stage. It's very useful for the stage where you just initiate a project and you want more directional guidance or more buy-in within your team. But you can apply on different stages as well. So we see some larger product. If you see the decrease of growth speed, then some team will bring design sprint to jumpstart their design. Very cool. So let me ask you the final question. What's the difference between the Google design framework or Google design sprint versus design thinking? I think there's also a lot of overlapping process, right? Actually, that's a really great question. If you look at a framework of design thinking, you also have five steps. Emphasize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. And if you look at Google design sprint, it's also a five-phrase framework including understand, sketch, decision, validate, and test. So the last three steps are very similar. If you look at a history of design sprint and design thinking, actually design thinking happens a lot earlier than design sprint and it's proposed by a professor from this school at Stanford and also a founder of IDEO, which is a design agency. I think design thinking is very great for actually enhance the design influence across industry because a long time ago, a lot of people still are not very familiar with design. He bring up this design thinking idea is actually help people to see the value of design across so many different industries. Google design sprint is actually proposed by a Google designer who is from Google Venture. So at that time, it's a bunch of startups who got bought by Google and they need to rethink about their direction as a startup and how could they continue grow. And usually they are digital products. So I would say design sprint is kind of based off design thinking and also expand beyond design thinking. It includes design thinking but have other things like business strategy. So a lot of other things are all incorporated within design sprint. And it's very useful for technology company, especially those who are focusing on building digital products. This methodology has been spread out so broadly. So not only Google has been using this, the other tech company has adopted Google design sprint in their design culture and I saw other industries start to use this methodology as well. Very cool. Thank you for sharing with us today and we're looking forward to see more of our videos. And Vivian, I also know that you have a YouTube channel as well, right? Yes, I have a YouTube channel called Vivian Design and this channel is to introduce some knowledge on how to get into the UX space and how to find a job and all kinds of useful tips. So please subscribe my channel and share to folks who might be benefit from this. We're gonna put Vivian's channel on the link of this description and feel free to check it out about UI UX design. And if you want to learn more about how to become a product manager and a support management interview, feel free to click the link down below and let me know what's the biggest challenge sitting in front of you to land your dream product manager job. Great, I'm gonna see you next time. This is Dr. Nancy Lee. Vivian, you wanna say bye to everyone? Bye, everyone. I'm Vivian. Nice to meet you. All right, see you guys soon. Have a safe day. Bye.