Samba was panicked and falling behind competitors, wanting to leapfrog rather than fix today's problems. We convinced them to first understand how customers actually did their jobs—not what Samba Safety thought users wanted.
We had two months to deliver a concept that was mature enough that development could start the very next day.
We made sure to interview users from a variety of domains - Samba Safety is used by everyone from Fedex to school districts, and while the domains are different, clear workflows emerged.
We taught their team contextual inquiry, synthesis, and ruthless prioritization, using lean principles to make an MVP that was useful and a foundation for future states.
We made sure to include the Samba Safety team in all of our design workshops - showing them 'behind the curtain' helped them understand the constraints we were balancing, and feeling a part of the design process helped them feel invested in the features we were proposing.
We put prototypes in front of users, embraced being wrong, and shifted them from a state of fear to one of excitement. Knowing beats guessing.
