Goal
UsabilityHub had just established their product team and had done their first ever round of OKR planning, with two specific quarterly objectives identified:
- Increase engagement through customer education
- Build a major feature.
The goal to build a major feature was simply to get the product team forming (then hopefully storming, norming and performing). Prior to this the whole company had been working on a repricing project and there was no product roadmap or strategy yet.
My role
As Director of product my role here was not only to lead the strategy but to act as product manager and lead designer in this small team. I was supported by two engineers, the CEO and CTO, and the Director of CX who assisted primarily with discovery research and acted as a subject matter expert.
Achievements
- In lieu of a roadmap or product strategy, solicited ideas from around the business using a “Product Bet” template that encouraged anyone to contribute ideas framed within the constraints of hypothesised business value, customer value and risk.
- Scored various proposals collectively and then made the final decision from the combination of group feedback, meaningfulness to leadership and product teams and my own call as Director of product.
- Developed a reusable high-level product project template (albeit a little waterfall/linear but helpful to outline the shape of design thinking at a team implementing it for the first time)
- Identify an opportunity (hypothesise a problem/solution match)
- Explore the problem
- Define needs and goals
- Explore ideas
- Define the solution
- Develop the solution
- Ship the solution
- Measure the solution
Identify an opportunity
- Once templates had been establised as the key feature (an idea proposed by the CEO), worked closely with leadership team to understand the hypothesis (Lean canvas, project canvas
- Ranked and categorised hypothesised solutions and outcomes with relevant hypothesised customer needs)
- Eventually narrowed down the goal of the feature - focusing on first-use education rather than power-user reuse/governance
Explore the problem
- Conducted an audit of existing example library (in collaboration with the broader product team) in order to assess whether the content was eligible for use in this feature
- Ranked example tests/content according to traffic obtained from Google Analytics
- Assessed each piece of content for quality of advice, quality of example designs, test construction, freshness of designs and relevance to the current product suite
- Conducted exploratory research to understand the first-use experiences of various customers via remote moderated interviews
- Discovered two distinct usage patterns and archetypes — customers simply exploring the product without having committed to it, and customers who had prepared resources and were ready to run a test
Define needs and goals
- Worked with key stakeholders to choose an archetypes needs to focus on
- Decided the solution should support both archetypes with a lean towards those who were still evaluating the product
- Discovered improvements for the marketing site to add to the backlog based on this research which could be actioned at a later date