Session Overview

Christine Perfetti dives into the concept of "Strategic Rallying" as a team-based, collaborative approach aimed at setting and executing a strategy and product vision with a focus on understanding and involving both external users/customers and internal team members of an organization. She shares insights from her experience, particularly a successful implementation at Aquia, where a one-day workshop with cross-functional teams led to significant alignment on product vision and strategy. Perfetti emphasizes the importance of involving the team in the process to foster ownership and execution on the vision. Additionally, she provides steps for organizations to shift towards a problem-space ideation culture and highlights the role of Strategic Rallying in bridging the gap between research insights and actionable outcomes. Moreover, she discusses recalibrating organizational culture to celebrate team success beyond traditional metrics and addresses how her approach tackles team chemistry within product development.

Strategic Rallying Defined:

• Emphasizes a collaborative approach for setting and executing strategy and vision.
• Involves internal teams in the process, fostering a sense of ownership.
• Utilizes workshops to gather and prioritize ideas towards a long-term product direction.

Shifting Towards Problem-Space Ideation:

• Recommends a preparatory process involving stakeholder engagement, user research, and strategic planning.
• Advocates for involving cross-functional teams early and throughout the process.

Bridging Research and Action Gaps:

• Identifies common gaps where research insights do not lead to actionable outcomes.
• Suggests that involving stakeholders in the research and visioning process increases investment in and execution on insights.

Fostering Collaborative Culture:

• Advises on shifting focus from solely measurable outcomes to also valuing relationships and team successes.
• Emphasizes the importance of prioritizing relationships and celebrating collective achievements to foster a collaborative culture.

Tackling Team Chemistry:

• Outlines four internal pillars essential for product success, including team chemistry.
• Discusses how Strategic Rallying can improve team chemistry by promoting partnership and collaboration.

Notable Quotes

• "Involving your teams in setting the vision and strategy for your company and product is crucial."
• "Strategic Rallying is about bringing together cross-functional teams to collect their brilliant ideas."
• "It's not enough for your team to understand the vision; they need to contribute to it and evangelize around it."
• "Shifting from a solution-focused mindset to a problem space ideation culture involves preparing through stakeholder engagement and user research."
• "The key to bridging research and action gaps is to involve stakeholders in the process, making them more invested in the outcomes."

Reference Materials

• Jared Spool's articles on connecting research to actionable outcomes and celebrating team wins.
• Todd Zaki Warfel's work on the design studio method for ideation and convergence.

About Tent Talks

Chicago Camps hosts irregularly scheduled Tent Talks with people from all across the User Experience Design community, and beyond. Who really likes limits, anyway--If it's a cool idea, we'd love to hear about it and share it!

What is a Tent Talk? That's a great question, we'd love to tell you.

Tent Talks are short-form in nature, generally lasting from 10-20 minutes (ish) in a recorded format--we like to think of them as "S'mores-sized content" because that's pretty on-brand. Tent Talks can be a presentation on a topic, a live Q&A session about the work we do, or the work around the work we do, or really just about anything--we don't want to limit ourselves, or you.

You should send along an idea or topic of your own so we can learn from you, as well! You don't have to be a published author or a professional speaker on a circuit to be good at your job, so please, put yourself forward, and let's have some fun, talk, and share your experience with others!