Scaling success, research from Monzo and collaborating with colleagues.
Product Re:Wired. A weekly newsletter, helping tech leaders and product teams reimagine the way they build products and high-performance cultures.
Here are the 3 ideas for you and your teams to consider this week.
I. Empower
Ideas for unlocking your teams' potential
"Give a product team a solution, and the best they can do is build it. Empower a product team to learn from customers and devise their own solutions, and they'll build not only something more likely to work, but an understanding of what it takes for your business to succeed."
With my first thought of this inaugural Product Re:wired edition, I thought I'd jump straight in with both feet. This is the idea I'll be banging on about, in many editions to come, from numerous perspectives.
If your product org is able to successfully decentralise decision making, by enabling your teams to learn from customers, and make their own decisions about what to build, you'll scale your ability to continuously discover new opportunities and quickly capitalise on them.
In short, scale your ability to succeed. Sounds like something worth exploring right?
Here’s a couple ideas for you to start thinking about.
1. Stop referring to features or projects and start referring to your users’ tasks in their language.
Completing tasks and projects isn’t a predictor of success. Helping users complete tasks they care about more easily is.
The simple act of identifying the tasks your product supports and using these as the reference point for your work keeps people focussed on what matters, in language everyone across the business can understand. The nice thing about tasks is that they come in different sizes too, to handle different levels of granularity. So there’s always a task formulation for high level strategic views or in-the-weeds details.
For bonus points, start matching these up to business goals. “Increase customer acquisition” at a bank might be linked with making tasks like “Open a new bank account” or “Find a relevant mortgage package” easier.
Further reading: The new user story map is a backlog (Jeff Patton)
2. Start watching and recording users use something you’ve built, to complete one of more of those tasks.
There’s nothing like watching people struggle to use a thing you built to kick-start effective learning practices. It begins building humility within the organisation and ensures more decisions about what, how and when to build stuff is grounded in facts rather than bias and assumptions based fiction.
Further reading: Fast path to great UX (J. Spool) and Chapter 9 of Don’t make me think (S. Krug)
That’s it. There's lots, lots more stuff, but the ripple effect of these two simple steps (that you’ll spend a lifetime improving) will begin laying the foundations for successfully empowering teams and scaling your organisation’s ability to succeed.
I’ll leave it there, but rest assured we’ll be digging into this stuff lots more. From my own experience and those at the worlds most successful product organisations.
II. Discover
Tips on how to uncover new opportunities, unmet user needs and solutions customers love.
"A reproducible testing process is more valuable than any one idea. Innovate here first. All things equal, a team with more shots at bat will win against a team with an audacious vision."
Building the capabilities to test ideas frequently is a huge competitive advantage and a cornerstone of success.
A few weeks back, Monzo bank in the UK showed one way of how they do this themselves. They shipped a small feature to gather some customer feedback on "paying someone" (notice they don’t say “payment feature” or some other business-perspective rubbish) and asked for permission to contact me in the future.
A few things I really liked:
Reasonably unobtrusive. It didn't rudely block me from getting on with my business. The Call to Action (CTA) just sat patiently but noticeably at the top of my transactions list. And I could easily dismiss it if I wanted.
They were super focused. One question, plus a free-text-field follow-up. Not a million questions. This shows respect for customers’ time and their ability to prioritise. That’s of course not to say all users were asked the same question with the same focus of course.
Their 3rd question was a request to contact me for follow-up research. They can follow up on comments and they’re building a database of customers for future research.
If finding users to ask questions about existing habits or future solutions is easy, you'll do it more often.
If I were you, I’d look at ways to get focussed feedback and build a database of willing customers like Monzo does here too.
III. Excel
Thoughts on how to help teams fuel innovation and push each others’ ideas further.
"High-performance doesn't exist without empathy and conflict between colleagues."
Last week I experienced my first ante-natal class. Hanging out with other soon-to-be parents, learning all about the final weeks of pregnancy and labour etc.
During this, the Mums and Dads-to-be were split into two groups and given a question. For the boys, we had “How can I best support my partner while they’re in labour”. The girls got “How can my partner best support me while I’m in labour”
It was a great exercise. It built empathy, trust and we learnt a lot. Not to mention team Dads nailed it, to the huge relief of our partners. Things like "pack snacks" and "play bouncer to family" got as much appreciation as "advocate for their wishes with medical staff" and "chant supportive messages (unless you're told to shut up)"
Why am I bringing this up?
Because it's a great exercise for you to do with your colleagues for exactly the same reasons. To empathise with each others' role and reveal ways to support each other better too. This explicit act of considering each others’ perspectives does wonders for conflict management. And you want constructive conflict. Not lots of polite people walking on egg shells.
Here's some classic pairings that should do this exercise:
Designers and devs.
Marketing and Sales.
Chief Technology Officer and Head of Design
Legal and Product
Finance and Product
Basically, whoever you work closely with and often bump heads with. Or whoever you should be working closely with and bumping heads with.
Just split into two groups eg. design on one side and devs on another (try to keep equal numbers) and give this question to both:
“How can I better support my (insert role) colleagues? How could they better support me?"
Then start filling it with ideas. Give it a good 20 minutes. Long enough to get past the obvious stuff and 5-10 minutes into twiddling thumbs and clutching at straws territory.
Then come together to compare and contrast. Simple.
Try it and let me know how you get on.
Thanks for reading and hopefully see you next week for 3 more ideas!