Speakap
Introduction
Speakap is a SaaS company that delivers a communications hub for companies that have a large share of non-desk or remote employees. The main market segments are: hospitality, retail and manufacturing
When I joined their big challenga was to create a clear product strategy and roadmap and further mature the design team, in terms of approach and deliverables.
My role
I was the head of Product and Design. I managed a team of designers, being responsible for their career progression and their workload. As Head of Product I managed the roadmap, kept in close touch with our customers by speaking to them regularly and worked on a daily basis with all the key people from all disciplines to ensure we could deliver a great experience.
Product Design Process
Before I joined the company did not really have a design or discovery process. New features were often based on either the ideas of the CEO and or which key customer would be the most demanding. Executing on the CEOs ideas was perhaps a logical thing to do in the startup phase of the company.
But now that the company was growing quickly the CEO realised the product design process needed a professional overhaul. That was one of the main reasons they hired me.
A framework for customer centered Product Design.
Discovery
Apart from listening to customer feedback coming throught the Customer Success and Support channels, the product team had no regular contact with customers.
One of the first things I did was to setp up regular interviews with key customers. Together with the development team we also set up analytics with Mixpanel, so that we also could start analysing usage patterns.
Rather than hapazardly acting on incoming feecback I introduced a simple triage process, so that we could actually start working on ideas that would deliver the most value for our customers.
Having a structured way of handling user insights helped the company transform from a primarily reactive product team to a proactive product team that was in control of the roadmap, rather than the customers who were the loudest.
User feedback session with a key customer.
Product Strategy
Because there was no proper discovery process, a mature product strategy was also lacking. Although there was a lot of market knowledge and a generic idea of what customers would like to see, a clear direction and long term strategy was not present when I joined. Decisions on what to build were taken based on either HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) or WoLF (Working on Latest Fire), Obviously this was done with the best intentions, as everyone wanted to help our customers and improve the product.
Having a proper discovery process in place gave us insights that were backed up by evidence. These insights helped shape the Product Strategy as from it would crystallise a set of user goals, that combined with the main business drivers would give a direction on where to go next.
Creating goals that serve the user and the business: a basis for Product Strategy.
Goals & Themes
Based on the goals we now had defined, we identified four major themes we should be working on, in order to be able to serve our customers well and to conquer the parts of the market we were aiming for.
The themes served as basis for the roadmap. The themes did not prescribe features that needed to be built, but were centered around problems and opportunities.
Deriving Themes from Goals as main input for Product Strategy.
Design principles
Together with the design team and product owners I created a set of Design Principles that would guide us in our decisions on how to design for our users. The principles were based on what we wanted to be as a company (the vision) and the themes we had defined from our user insights.
Roadmap
The roadmap was kept as simple as possible. The focus was on solving customer problems rather than features. It also doesn't mention concrete deadlines or dates, which would only lead to false expectations with our customers.
Now Next Later Roadmap (actual topics removed bc. of confidentiality)
Every other week we would review and adjust the roadmap, based on input from the development teams, new developments and sales opportunities.
Product Development
When a topic from the roadmap would be picked up by one of the team, I would organise a kick-off session with the whole team (UX, Development, QA and also Marketing and Customer Success). We used the UX Canvas as guidance to work through the problem and to get a broad idea what we needed to do.
Frequently, a kickoff would actually be a design sprint of roughly a week. A first concept would be delivered and tested with users at the end of the week.
Lean UX Canvas (Jeff Gothelf - www.jeffgothelf.com)
After that, we would write user stories and start planning the work.
Design Checklist
For the design work, we used a design checklist. The list helped a great deal in not overlooking stuff we needed to do or figure out. It did overlap a bit with the ux canvas but was way more granular.
Examples of items on the checklist were:
Usage: how will this feature / product be used? (frequency, context etc)
Audience: who will be using this?
Context / navigation: how does the feature fit in the Speakap Portal? How do you get there, how is it related to other features?
UI States: what are the loading / empty / partial / error / success states?
Use cases: what are the key usecases we need to design for and why?
Marketing: how would the new feature be promoted?
Post-launch learning and iterating
Once a new feature would go live, usage was tracked through Mixpanel ( a web analytics tool). We would also collect feedback from customers through Customer Support, Customer Success and regular interviews / check ins. In our regular roadmap / strategy discussions we could decide where and when we wanted to improve on a certain feature.
This would often lead to a lot of contentious debate, as there were many interests that needed attention. Are we going to help that key customer who has been complaining about the lack of a certain feature for a while now, focus on that new big lead we're about to sign, or help a bunch of smaller customers with a quick win?
For this there is not one correct answer, and accepting a level of uncertaintly and perhaps failure is very important.