What are Hills in IBM Design Thinking?

An elegant way to come up with a vision for your next project

Scenario 1: If I put you in a room and tell you to walk in a straight line to any corner of the room, then as you walk towards one, I put an obstacle in front of you. At this point you would be stuck with nowhere to move, since my instruction was for you to move in a straight line.

Scenario 2: I put you in that same room, and tell you to walk to the same corner, but I do not tell you how to get there, then I put an obstacle in front of you. This time you would get around the obstacle and continue your movement towards the corner of the room.

Scenario 2 is what a good Hill Statement is all about. It tells you where to go, what goal needs to be achieved, but not how to get there. It is used to keeps teams focused while exploring breakthrough ideas without losing sight of the goal. When you define the method or solution the team should use to achieve a goal, it hinders the team from exploring ideas from different directions and creates a bias towards the suggested approach.

To define, a Hill is a clear statement that is drafted to position a team towards a common understanding of the goal needed to meet user needs. Hills are like mission statements that define the direction for a project and its team. Hills are solutions-agnostic; they are not lists of requirements and do not contain the solution.

In Japan, there are these rock gardens, sometimes called zen gardens located in Buddhist temples. These gardens are mostly small and consist of small, finely washed rocks and unevenly spread apart large boulders. The design of the garden is quite interesting and have some design principles behind their layout.

The smaller rocks are perfectly raked into neat lines and curves around larger boulders. The raked stones create remarkable designs around larger boulders that serve as the rock garden’s anchors.

One principle lies in the process of raking lines in the rock garden. If you rake with your heads down focused on each line as you make it, you will end up with lines that are not straight. Instead, you must focus ahead on the boulder to keep the line straight as you rake. You need the vision, the larger boulders to guide you, and keep you grounded while performing the task.

SYNTAX OF A HILL

A Hill focuses on three key elements: WHO, WHAT, and WOW.

When you are writing a hill, focus these three aspects. The Hill must address who the outcome will serve, what they will be able to do, and why they will care.

WHO
Who are the users? (Specific user or class of users)

WHAT
What’s the need they’re trying to meet? (Specific user enablement)

WOW
How will you measure your success? (Specific or differentiating value to the user, i.e., what is the wow factor?)

An Example of a Hill:

• Josh the chef, can order different recipe ingredients from multiple merchants in less than 3 clicks on the same interface

WHO

• Josh the chef

WHAT

• Can order different recipe ingredients from multiple merchants

WOW

• In less than 3 clicks on the same interface

Other Example of Hills:

• A biomedical scientist can view multiple variations of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine on the human body, without having to use humans for trials.
• Amy, the bus passenger, can view all nearby bus stops at a single glance.
• Michael, the Hiring Manager, can interview the best talent without having to scan through a pile of resumes.
• A development manager can set up an environment for a production-level application so that she and her team can onboard and be productive in 15 minutes.
• Sarah, the cyclist, can get GPS navigation without looking at a screen for directions.
• A software engineer should be able to deploy multiple docker containers to different hosts all from one interface.
• “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to the earth” — John F. Kennedy.

A project can have more than one Hill, and Hills can change as you move along, solving and gaining a better understanding of the problem.

Hills are a part of IBM Design Thinking Process, and Design Thinking is a collaborative endeavor, hence, drafting Hills is best done with a team. Writing Hills should be done while defining the problem, and before ideating or exploring any big ideas to keep your team’s innovation grounded in feasibility.