As all the aspects of your own world – your worklife, your family, your leisure time – are radically changing, so are those of your customers. Social distancing and stay-at-home requirements are driving significant behavior shifts to online experiences, and the same time, the needs and motivations of your customers are being steered by their situations. Now is not the time to distance yourself from your customers by cutting back on your customer insights activities!
The good news?
I am not an artist, but I am a designer. It took me a long time to get over my imposter syndrome -- for far too long, I thought that to truly be a designer, I had to be a better artist, but I was wrong. In the words of economist Herb Simon, “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Yes. That.
Sometimes, when I am working with other people to create those preferred situations, we are unfortunately separated by distance. That used to be less frequent, but today it is our everyday, as we are forced to work remotely to keep people safe and healthy. Does that mean that our quest to design new solutions to problems should stop? Of course not!
A few years ago, a group of product leaders that I convene periodically suggested that we start using Slack for communicating between meetings. As a solopreneur, it sounded like the perfect opportunity for me to tap into using one of the “cool kids” tools I had heard a lot about but hadn’t had a chance to experience first-hand.