The Why and How of Creating a Product Wall
“Kyle, product development is a black hole. I don’t know what is being researched, built or released.”
As a product manager, this is a something I’ve heard many times throughout my career. So when I arrived at Teem in March 2017, I wasn’t surprised to hear it again. Sales, Support, CSMs, and Marketing didn’t know what was being developed and it was making it hard for them to predict and prepare. And the by-product was that others were losing confidence in product development.
Now to be fair, the product development team had previously tried using tools, like Jira, to share project status information but it wasn’t working. And let’s be honest, there just isn’t a software solution for this problem.
So, we went analog.
I ran to the office supply store, bought supplies and we got to work providing clarity to the entire organization. Before we get to the “how” of building a wall, let’s talk about why I recommend doing this:
- Transparency: Sometimes it was uncomfortable but exposing information helped us gain the trust of those who depend on your success (most notably, sales). If you are open to sharing information, you create an opportunity to have a candid dialogue with others.
- Discipline: The Product Wall will keep you focused. As new ideas come up (and they do everyday) we can point to the Wall and ask, “what should we take down?” As a product leader, I love this!
- Resources: If we, the product team, feel like we need to go faster we can point at the Wall and explain to the exec team that we need more resources. There really isn’t a better resource to start such a conversation.
- Communication: We needed to host conversations about product development progress and the Wall is a perfect backdrop to do just this. Plus, it is interactive (anyone can look at designs) at anytime.
- Readiness: This is the best part about it. As projects progress through product development, everyone else can anticipate what is coming. Development can anticipate work coming from the Product team. Support can expect changes as Development gets closer to Beta. Marketing and Sales can get ready as items near production.
How we built our Product Wall at Teem
The purpose of the Product Wall at Teem is to tell a story. That story is: 1) the company vision and strategy 2) product strategy 3) who we are building for (personas) 4) what we are building (roadmap) 5) what is in research (discovery, design, test) 6) what is being built 7) what is in beta 8) what has been released. Anyone should be able to read this story from left to right / top to bottom.
We began by commandeering an area of the building which everyone had access too. We didn’t build this in an area near product development but rather, close to sales. We also selected an area which could serve as gathering place — which it ultimately did.
In fact, just weeks after putting up our first version of content Teem started to host town hall styles meetings with the Product Wall as a backdrop.
Our first version was really basic. We had some early stage personas (we’ve since iterated and expanded) and using a very basic board we began to describe:
- Build: anything the development team is actively working on (WIP). Eventually we began to post designs to accompany each sticky.
- Beta: anything we are internally testing (alpha) or externally validating (beta).
- Release: anything we recently released to production.
This was our MVP. Later we added more detail to our Research section but this was enough to start using this new tool.
Sidebar:
The black horizontal line across the “Build” section (which, if you are curious, is actually electrical tape) was a critical piece early on in our Product Wall. If you look at an even earlier version of the wall (below) you will see that “Build” was loaded with a lot of stickies — 23 to be exact.
Each of these large stickies represented a project and for our size of company, 23 items in WIP was insane. So, in an effort to normalize we limited the space (which explains the horizontal line) to just 7 large stickies (or 7 items in WIP). Why 7? Because it was better than 23 — there was nothing scientific about this. The result on making this decision was impactful and I’ll share that story for another day. So, by using our Product Wall we were able to visualize all the WIP and reduce the chaos everyone was struggling with. Once we got everyone comfortable with doing less that horizontal line came down.
While we were starting this project, I was meeting with the executive team to understand our company vision and strategy. I did this because we needed to find alignment between vision, strategy and work. For more on how I accomplished that check out this article.
Eventually, we added our company vision and strategy along with our product strategy, roadmap and details about items in research which you can see below.
Sidebar:
Adding a sticky to the Product Wall, particularly the Research section, only means that we are making a commitment to research this and nothing more. The likelihood that this project makes it to the Build phase is high but there’s always a chance that our research reveals a problem and we need to either delay or kill any intention to build.
Along the way, we began to include others!
If you create a Product Wall, you should expect people will ask how they can influence it and here’s my suggestion on how to do this.
Create another space nearby where anyone can add ideas, but not just any ideas. The ideas need to aligned to your company vision, strategy and product strategy. This is a great way to keep everyone focused on the vision and strategy of the company.
Getting started with this is simple but time consuming. Your product team should have some record of ideas not yet built. Expect that those ideas are spread out and in many different tools — at Teem they were in emails, Slack messages, Jira, old excel docs and verbal conversations. We (the product team) got together and transcribed everything and added them to our Idea Wall and then we asked the rest of Teem to add to it.
Then we provided instructions to everyone and asked that they share. Note that we do a bit of education on basic software development too.
The goal is to review the ideas with those who submit them and then agree on the relative priority together — this way we set a clear expectation of when we may do something.
Making small stickies into big stickies
The first question I always get when giving tours at Teem is how do we transition the small stickies (ideas) into big stickies (product wall). This, of course, is the prioritization process that each of us go through and to be honest — nobody has mastered this. But, it is important that you make sure everyone knows when their ideas get transferred to the Product Wall. Here’s an example of how I recently used Slack to communicate progress:
Quick summary and acknowledgements
I like to argue there is no better steward of the company’s vision and strategy than your product team. And I’ve learned that if you create a Product Wall you will find it easier to keep your company focused on the big picture and avoid distractions.
If your team is in SLC and wants a tour of Teem hit me up at kyle.jacobsen@teem.com
Also, post your “stickies” in the form of comments below and share how you keep everyone up to date on your product development progress.
Finally, I didn’t do this alone. We have an amazing product team and they each have contributed to the making this an amazing place to work.
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