Scenario-Focused Engineering: A toolbox for innovation and customer-centricity

Great technology alone is rarely sufficient today to ensure a product’s success. At Microsoft, scenario-focused engineering is a customer-centric, iterative approach used to design and deliver the deeper experiences and emotional engagement customers demand in new products. In this book, you’ll discover the proven practices and lessons learned from real-world implementations of this approach, including:

• Why design matters: Understand a competitive landscape where customers are no longer satisfied by products that are merely useful, but respond instead to products they crave using.
• What it means to be customer focused: Recognize that you are not the customer, understand customers can have difficulty articulating what they want, and apply techniques that uncover their unspoken needs.
• How to iterate effectively: Implement a development system that is flexible enough to respond to early and continuous feedback, and enables experimentation with multiple ideas and feedback loops simultaneously.
• How to bridge the culture gap: In an engineering environment traditionally rooted in strong analytics, the ideas and practices for scenario-focused engineering may not be intuitive. Learn how to change team mindset from deciding what a product, service, or device will do, to discovering what customers actually want and what will work for them in real-life scenarios.
• Connections with Lean and Agile approaches: See the connections, gaps, and overlaps among the Lean, Agile, and Scenario-Focused Engineering methodologies, and achieve a more holistic view of software development.

Table of Contents

Part I Overview
Chapter 1 Why Delight Matters
Chapter 2 End-To-End Experiences, Not Features
Chapter 3 Take An Experimental Approach

Part II The Fast Feedback Cycle
Chapter 4 Identifying Your Target Customer
Chapter 5 Observing Customers: Building Empathy
Chapter 6 Framing The Problem
Chapter 7 Brainstorming Alternatives
Chapter 8 Building Prototypes And Coding
Chapter 9 Observing Customers: Getting Feedback
Chapter 10 The Importance Of Iteration

Part III The Day After
Chapter 11 The Way You Work
Chapter 12 Lessons Learned

Appendix A Sfe Capabilities Roadmap
Appendix B The Fast Feedback Cycle
Appendix C Further Reading
Appendix D Selected Case Studies
Appendix E Desirability Toolkit