Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium C. Kyle Jacobsen

In March of 2017 I joined Teem to build a new product group and introduce and implement product management practices. Teem needed more predictability with their product development efforts and I committed to solving these problems. While interviewing with the executive team I proposed to understand, focus and improve six main areas:

Vision & Strategy
Team & Work Alignment
Communication
Users & Personas
User Centered Design Practices
Professional Development

The following post describes why these topics are important for all product leaders, what we achieved and the problems we faced. I also include a week-by-week account of our first 90 days so you can see how we progressed.

1. Vision & Strategy

This is the first thing every product leader should understand when joining a new company. What is the vision of the company and how does this translate to strategy and the product? Without this, success is impossible because you need to know what direction to take the product (where to invest). Don’t be surprised if you find there isn’t much alignment here so don’t hesitate to jump in and create something.

Here is what I did to learn about vision and strategy at Teem:

I spent a week interviewing the executive team starting with the CEO. I asked each of them the same set of questions regarding vision and strategy and compared results.
I then interviewed the next level of management to compare results. No surprise really, but I found deviations from what I heard from the executive team. Just in case you are asking… yes, I did share this information with the executive team.
Next I analyzed where the development team had been investing resources. Please note that even if a team is aligned to the vision and strategy it doesn’t mean their work is aligned — more about this below.

Before any product leader can make an impact, they must understand if there is a vision / strategy, if people believe in it and if they are staying disciplined to achieve it. The first two are easy, the third is incredibly hard.

In the end, we formalized our product vision (which is really a product centric view of the company vision) in Week 12.

2. Team & Work Alignment

Wow, this is where all the emotions lie so trust me, there is no right way to do this but there are plenty of wrong ways. At this point I understood the vision and strategy but were we disciplined enough to achieving it? And were we aligned to make it happen?

Face it, as product leaders we are ultimately responsible to provide a product vision which aligns with the company vision (sometimes influencing the company vision) but more importantly, staying disciplined to achieve it. And before we can expect to change any aspect of team and work alignment we must realize the importance of building trust (just getting to know people). While building trust I asked a lot of questions like:

Are teams working on the right items?
Are the right people working on these items?
Do they have the right tools?
Do they have enough people?
Are they aligned in a productive manner?
Do they have the right skills?

At Teem we were doing a great job but needed to improve team and work alignment. So we made slight adjustments and here are some of our learnings:

On team alignment: I’m going to guess that most teams are either aligned by Users/Personas or by projects. Whatever the case, you need to make sure you have the right mixture of skills, personalities and people on each team. Consider working with your development lead(s) to pull this off and expect that it’s going to take a significant amount of time.

On work alignment: Consider this, identify the critical work (rely on the work you do for Vision and Strategy exercise) and share why it is critical for the company success. Ask the teams if they agree on this critical work and invite them in to discuss how they would solve these problems. I have found that asking for help and advice builds trust and makes the transition to critical work much easier.

Expect false starts. This part sucks but be ready to experience failure. People will say one thing and do another and this is probably because you haven’t done enough to gain their trust. I made this mistake. Don’t let this deter you. Get to know everyone better (especially their concerns) and work to get them aligned with the critical work items.

3. Communication

This is probably the easiest of the six problems to solve and it’s something you can start solving immediately. I’ve learned that a successful product team is the hub of every business and thus communication from this team is critical. Confidence in a product team is a tricky thing and poor communication will erode any confidence others have in your team.

At Teem there was a lot of talk about “black holes” regarding product development work so this is where we started our efforts. We set out to make communication simple and predictable for all of our audiences.

Tools for communication:

Personal plea: can we please stop trying to retro-fit tools we use to track project progress for communication purposes? Face it, if you are using Jira or Trello it’s not going to succeed.

As product leaders we should be experts at delivering great user experiences so why not apply this skill internally? True, it may be easy for US but what about those who need the information? At Teem we use a method which is simple and accessible at all times which is centrally located in the building and accessible to all.

Version 1 of our product wall (obviously some content is confidential)

Cadence of communication:

This. Is. Simple. Find a cadence for each group and stick to it. Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly — whatever works. Make it predictable for everyone.

4. Users/Personas

The age old debate over personas is something I don’t want to hash out — not here. But let’s just all agree, our teams should have a shared understanding of the buyers and users of our product. At Teem we know who our user is but as we learned more, we realized the need to start focusing on other users.

We began by speaking with every group in our organization: marketing, sales, developers, CSMs. We talked about buyers vs users and how the user role changes based on other variables, including market size.

Once we had a basic understanding, we started talking directly to users and validating our assumptions. When we were done we complied our findings in a simple, publicly displayed document.

This is Chris, one of our users

5. User-Centered Design Practices

Teem needed this desperately.

Simply put, this is a process by which you connect those designing and building the things with those that use the things. If done correctly, your team will be able to create a solution which will solve the major issues of the market while not over-engineering solutions.

There are many different approaches to User-Centered Design practices and they can be summed up into three basic stages:

Discover or learn about the problem directly from the users, design a solution based on what you learn and test the design before you have the development team build something

To help introduce the concept of User-Centered Design practices we put up a poster explaining the process and I worked closely with the product team to implement practices supporting it.

Looking for a solid User-Centered Design practice? I recommend checking out Nate Walkingshaw’s Directed Discovery process.

6. Professional Development

Ok, this is a no brainer. We should be in the business of turning product managers into product leaders. I’m not going to spend time pretending to be the best professional development leader but I’m certainly working towards that goal! Here are two areas I plan to focus on:

Is the product team getting better at practicing product management and UX?
Is the product team able to inspire and motivate others?

I believe if I can get these two basic questions right, I will help this product team grow into leaders and nothing satisfies me more than helping others grow.

So my first 90 days at Teem has passed and we are off to a great start. The next 90 days will bring about a deeper and more intense focus on each of these items and mentorship for the product team.

Check out the weekly breakdown of our first 90 days (below) and a huge shout out to those who made this happen: dal adamson, Harley Jessop, Deanna Walters and Morgan Williams. Also, thanks to those who have given us this opportunity: Shaun Ritchie and zach holmquist.

Product Plan: My First 90 Days at Teem was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Product Plan: My First 90 Days at Teem

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