The Problem and the vision
Raiffeisen bank is a big corporation with many teams throughout multiple countries. Developers from Central and Eastern Europe constantly work on new banking APIs, without being aware of what other developers have built or are building. This obviously is a problems, as efforts are being wasted. Developers could reuse if not entire APIs, at least parts of APIs, which could save time and efforts = money.
So the vision of this new product was set: Build a product that would facilitate the reusability and standardisation of APIs across the organisation.
The process
Our process started with a 2 day Design Thinking Workshop with the entire team, so we can all gather information and understanding about the problem and the users. An important part of the process was the "Test - Improve" loop, which steered the team and the product in the right direction.
Behaviour types, Feature ideas and user journey
In the process of a team building an API, there are multiple roles involved, so it was important to have a clear understanding what are these roles and which group of people's problems we will be solving. In a group exercise the team explored the users' Motivations, Pains and Situations. As none of the team members could've been considers a "future user", this exercise was the teams hypothesis, which was to be tested later on.
In a team exercise all members had to roughly sketch the entire "happy" flow of the product. All participants got to explain their thoughts and ideas and after voting deciding on one single flow.
Prototyping
After all team members created their versions of the product in a rough sketch version and some more voting, we had a rough idea of how the product would look like and function. At that stage I changed my role from a facilitator into a designer and worked on a higher fidelity prototype that can actually be presented and tested with users for first round of feedback.
User testing
User testing was done during the pandemic and therefore it was done online. We invited eight developers from different teams and countries, for a one hour session each, to test the prototype. The results came in - we received validation for many of the issues we assumed developers have and the users found the product valuable. However, there were still some issues to be solved and received good ideas for improvements.
In another team workshop all user feedback was shared with the team and more work into improving the product was done, after which another user testing was organised with a new group of users.
The final user testing was done on the developed product and as anticipated, the feedback from all participants was very positive. The multiple loops of "Testing - Improving" increased the team's knowledge about the user's pains and were able to build a product that targets them directly.
A challenge during the entire process was to keep the team focused on the user's issues and not drift into a different direction, or start building "innovation" for the sake of building innovation and miss the pain points of the users.
I also used the opportunity to present the project and the process in front of a large Raiffeisen audience in order to inspire other teams to follow the process and build truly valuable products.