Solution development with TheyDo
Depending on the size of an idea and the delivery process your organization has in place, the tracking becomes key to deliver a consistent customer experience. Tracking can be a tedious process around meetings, checking different systems and management tools to stay in the know.
TheyDo solves this by linking the design and development efforts back to the solution, the opportunity and the journeys they impact. For service designers or CX managers, having overview in one place allows the entire organization to get aligned, and maintain alignment for to come.
1. Integrate your Product management tools
To keep your problem discovery, solution discovery and delivery work in sync, TheyDo brings all teams together in the journey. Using the deep integrations with Jira or DevOps you never have to switch between tabs, or worse: chase your product managers with updates all the time.
Once set up, you can either create new Epics or Stories on the backlog or link existing items to the solutions in TheyDo.
In this guide, we’ll use Jira to explain how it works
2. Creating new Epics or stories
Every solution idea that made it past customer validation is a good candidate for further development. Where designs live in Figma or Sketch, in Agile organizations the PI event (or QBR) determines what gets funded and what gets built.
Let’s get on the agenda.
For every solution in TheyDo that was discovered for the Opportunities in the problem discovery stage, we’re going to create an Epic
Open the solution canvas and click link to Jira
A modal opens with the Push as new tab selected
Select Jira project: make sure you end up on the right backlog
Push as: you can decide what you are creating. In this case we choose Epic
2-way sync: if you have this setting enabled, TheyDo and Jira will sync the name, description and status when linked.
3. Linking existing Epics or stories
In great product teams, collaboration is already underway and while validation and experimentation are done, the product managers already make the right Epics and Stories for the coming cycles.
In that case let’s link an existing Epic:
In the modal, go to the Link to existing tab
Find the right Jira project
Select the Epic or story that you want to link
If 2-way sync is enabled: choose if you want Jira or TheyDo to be the lead source for the content when linked
Click Link
Save your Solution
And voila! From now on things are synced. You can repeat this for all solutions that will be developed in the future.
By the way, in the Solution Repository it’s pretty easy to see what is currently being developed. Once integrated, your product management tool will be visible for all linked solutions.
4. Stay in sync during development
From now on, you and your team can stay in sync across all different solution development efforts and track progress right back in TheyDo. No more back and forth, guessing, or miscommunication around a launch.
Not only will your product team be happy to build things that are going to improve the customer experience, they too can now see exactly where their work is going to have an impact.
5. Bring the customer outcome back to the journey
Ultimately, when things go live you want to know how the customer experience is impacted. Solution owners in TheyDo get notified about the status. Opportunity owners see the status change and know what journeys to check.
With the Jira integration, you can sync TheyDo solutions with Jira projects. The two-way synchronization means no more back and forth, no more misalignment but a synchronized roadmap that everyone is ready to collaborate around.
What’s next?
Once everything gets going, the corporate learning starts growing and the source of truth for CX gets bigger and bigger. Tying the entire triple diamond together using TheyDo, you can start answering more interesting questions:
What are the solutions currently in progress in a stage of the lifecycle? → seeing everything in context makes it easy to work as one
Who’s working on what opportunities? → often people don’t know this beyond their own team
What didn’t work before? → having context and tracking what was invalidated creates a tremendous shared brain
And last but not least: are we even considering building the right things for the right reasons? Having a single source of truth that covers the customer experience, not just the product or marketing channels, allows the entire organization to have a single place to align against.