In product development, I've realized that we can take many lessons from how we make products, and transfer them to to how we empower our teams. At Airspace, we encountered a challenge where team members had difficulty selecting appropriate research or design methods because the work could come to them in so many different forms. To overcome this, I developed a solution that offered a straightforward guide, empowering individual designers to make autonomous decisions to determine impactful next steps, whatever the stage of their project.
The Problem Playbook helped team members by breaking our process down into a sort of "choose your own adventure" within a fresh Notion board. The Notion contained many of our most successful approaches to sizing problems, leading innovation sprints, planning, testing, and prioritizing new work.
In the weeks after we launched the Problem Playbook we were able to move from teams often choosing sub-optimal methods without a clear way to discuss what might have been a better method to teams discussing which stage or method they thought would be most appropriate based on the playbook.
We've since moved on to even more specific playbooks around research and design methodologies thanks to the expansion of the team, but the problem playbook is still available for early stage startups to make use of.