W07: Turning Human Understanding into Validated Business Opportunities

Turning Human Understanding into Validated Business Opportunities

If your product is the answer, what’s the question? Meeting human needs is central for creating successful products, yet too often the tech industry becomes so focused on solutions that they lose sight of the actual problems they are solving for people. Intentional or not, such an approach can create problems in several steps along your business journey.

In this workshop, we will engage your professional experiences as well as our case studies to guide you through the process of identifying the human problem behind the business problem thereby avoiding some of the common pitfalls of a product-centred approach.

This hands-on-experience will help you understand how to:

• Mitigate risk by ensuring that you are meeting an actual user need. Without a deep understanding of your consumers needs at the beginning of a product’s journey, no fine- tuning later can help you ensure that your product creates real value for real people.
• Make qualified design decisions when adjusting and developing your solution. An in- depth understanding of the human problem you are solving can be a central tool in guiding the design process.
• Ensure your company stays relevant way into the future. Once you’ve identified the human need(s) at the core, you can always return to the problem and ask – how might we solve this problem differently/better/quicker?

Attendees will learn:

• How to reframe their business problem into a human problem to be investigated
• How to design user research that takes humans seriously, not just literally
• Why early and in-depth user research is their best chance of risk mitigation when developing new products with real value for real people

Who should attend this workshop

Workshop Leaders

Helena Linde Pedersen, Senior Anthropologist
Helena Linde Pedersen is a Senior Anthropologist with IS IT A BIRD. Her background in business and organisational anthropology has equipped her with a commercial mindset and great respect for the fact that user insights only create value if they’re identified and communicated with an understanding of the client’s culture and strategy.

Lea Møller Svendsen, Anthropologist
Lea Møller Svendsen uses her skills as an empathic, curious and creative anthropologist to uncover motivations and barriers underlying human behaviour and turn them into new opportunities for clients. This has led her to help both local and international clients to streamline workflows, support work motivation and spark innovation in their organisations.

IS IT A BIRD is a strategic innovation agency specialised in turning deep human understanding into new business opportunities. We are a curious group of innovation geeks, original thinkers, and committed practitioners, all passionate about human-centred innovation. We work globally from a former garage in Copenhagen.