The 6Ds Collaboration Framework is an innovative approach designed to enhance collaboration and stabilize the digital product creation process. It is structured around three key lenses that define the problem space —Institution, Design, and Technology with focus on the activities needed to understand and execute within these domains. These three lenses align to Zones of Engagement and are associated with specific skill: Strategic, Envisioning, and Making.
This structure not only promotes specialized focus and expertise on roles, but also fosters interconnectivity and feedback loops among the phases, ensuring a holistic and adaptive approach to digital product creation.
3 Zones of Engagement
1. Strategic
Responsible Party: Product Experience Manager
Key Activity: Manage and communicate Institutional Rules and Objectives
- Direct: Establishes the product strategy and roadmap, taking into account market trends, user needs, and the competitive landscape. This phase sets the direction for the project, providing a strategic framework for subsequent phases.
- Define: Involves clearly defining the problem or design challenge by synthesizing information from research, creating a problem statement or design brief that outlines the project’s scope and objectives.
2. Envisioning
Responsible Parties: Content Strategy and Product Design
Key Activity: Advocate Human Wants and Needs
- Discover: Conducts design research to gather insights about users, their needs, and the context of use. This phase employs various research methods to deeply understand users’ pain points and preferences.
- Detail (Previously Design): Focuses on creating concepts and solutions based on insights gathered during the Discover phase. This involves exploring and illustrating varying content and visual design approaches through sketching, wireframing, or creating mock-ups.
3. Making
Responsible Party: Engineering/Coders
Key Activity: Set Expectations for Technical Feasibility
- Develop: Collaborates closely with designers and content writer to bring design concepts to life. This phase encompasses coding, testing, and refining the solution, ensuring a seamless integration of design and functionality.
- Deploy (previously Deliver): Launches the finished product into production, coordinating with marketing, sales, and support teams to ensure a successful launch and ongoing performance monitoring.
Interconnected Infinite Loops
Each zone within the 6Ds Collaboration Framework can be understood as an infinite loop that feeds into itself and links to the other loops, creating a dynamic, interconnected system. This emphasizes the iterative nature of the creation process, allowing for continuous improvement and adaptation:
- Strategy Loop: The Define phase feeds back into the Direct phase, allowing for the refinement of the product strategy as new insights and requirements emerge. This loop is influenced by the Discover phase of the Design area, ensuring that design research informs strategic adjustments.
- Envision Loop: The Detail phase leads back into the Discover phase for ongoing research and iteration based on feedback from design concepts and prototypes. This loop is connected to both the Business and Technology areas, allowing design insights to influence business strategies and technological feasibility.
- Make Loop: The Deploy phase connects back to the Develop phase, as the launch of the product provides insights into its performance and areas for improvement. The output of this loop is the product itself. There are monitoring technologies implemented that feed data into the The Well-Informed space. Which then influences the Direct phase of the Strategy Loop completing the macro-level loop.
Visualizing the Macro-Level Loop
The entire process is visualized as a macro-level, cyclical process (Direction -> Define -> Discover -> Detail -> Develop -> Deploy -> Direction…), highlighting the continuous, cyclical nature of digital product creation. This model underscores the importance of learning from each phase and applying these insights to enhance future projects, fostering a culture of innovation and adaptability.
Embracing the 6Ds Collaboration Framework
The 6Ds Collaboration Framework is more than just a methodology; it’s a mindset shift in how we approach digital product development. It calls for breaking down silos, fostering collaboration, and putting the user at the center of every decision. As we delve deeper into each phase in future posts, we’ll explore how this framework can be applied to drive success in your projects and organizations.
Stay tuned as we embark on this journey together, transforming the way we think about and execute digital product creation.