Case study: How do you co-create a product mission within your company?
A case study from our experiment in Glovo
For the past year now, I’ve been a UX Researcher at Glovo, working in the Customer Cluster. You must be thinking… but what does that truly mean? Well, let me try and explain During our day-to-day, we uncover insights based on our research with customers, which we inject in multiple company layers, where ‘product’ is the priority. The research we conduct is based on an agile way of working: we deliver great value, quickly. We work hard, with energy and passion to drive results that enable better decision-making in our products. Ultimately, we aim to drive a positive impact for the business while improving Glovo’s user experience for customers.
Together with my colleague Valentina Salvi, we’ve been leveraging our Service Design background to enable a broader spectrum of UX Research initiatives for our team to pursue. We were then asked by our Product Director and Engineering Director to facilitate two workshops with the aim of co-creating our Product Mission and Vision. In case you would like to do the same in your company, with this article we aim to guide you step by step by sharing our main learnings and the tools we used!
If you’d like to check our Product Vision case study experience, take a look this article written by my colleague Valentina Salvi.
What is a Product Mission?
A Product Mission embodies the “what”, “who” and “why” of the product, distilling its main purpose. It’s a concise and clear statement able to define who uses the product and what is the unique value you provide with it. Ultimately, it uncovers the difference it makes in the world.
Having a Mission would help us define a clear strategy for our cluster, setting the tone moving forward. Also, it would enable us to foster a stronger alignment on the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for all Customer teams: Product, Engineering, Data, Design and UXR.
So…why should you have one? Here are the 3 main benefits:
- ⚙️ Leads to streamlined processes within your organization, thanks to a common effort towards one powerful purpose.
- 👥 Clarifies who we design for and why and represents the guiding light we want to achieve.
- 🎯 Promotes strategic decision-making, paving the way for more compelling and memorable products.
Our process
We based our process on this source article, adapting it into a custom approach that fitted us best. Find below the main set-up to prepare a Mission workshop yourself:
Participants: 50. Product Managers/Engineering Managers and domain-specific leaders with representatives from Design, UX Research, Data etc.
Groups: 5. Each group with 10 participants was led by one facilitator on the same Miro board.
Timeline:
- 2 weeks for preparation (gather required materials, prepare assets and book participants’ schedules in advance)
- 1 day for the completion (2h in total)
Tools: Miro & Zoom (or similar tools)
‘Mission’ workshop (~2 hours)
Intro [15 mins]
As a session opener, one facilitator welcomed participants and gave a short explanation of the agenda. The total duration of the session was shared as well as the event sequence to be followed (e.g. 1. Intro + 2. Exercise 1 + 3. Exercise 2…).
Then, our Customer Product Director explained the purpose behind taking on this challenge, including the main benefits and objectives of co-creating a Product Mission. By bringing in the customer lens, based on data, previous insights and further information, the participants were able to empathize with customers, which increased the quality of their contribution overall. Additionally, and with the same objective, we gathered some extracts of previous interviews with customers and channeled them in a video, focussing on the value we provided as a company and how we made their lives better thanks to our product. After that, the participants were split into 5 separate break out rooms.
Mission Brainstorming [1h & 30 mins]
Exercise 1: Crafting the Stories [50 mins]
How it works 📝
1) The facilitator gives an overview of the first exercise to guide the group of participants.
2) Participants get time to add their stories (which summarize the best side of Glovo, as a customer) in case they haven’t done it before the session — and write them onto post-its.
3) Participants identify: ‘Context (specific place or person)’, ‘Actions’ (any mention about the company making a difference and taking action) & ‘Impact’ (any time something in the story changes for better or results from your work) — in their story and distribute these aspects in each of the post-its.
4) Participants pitch their own story and place the elements in the table on the right, according to each of the categories on the grid: ‘Context’, ‘Actions’ & ‘Impact’.
5) The facilitator clusters and groups similar ideas together, for each section of the grid. Patterns and similarities develop naturally.
6) Participants review emerging patterns all together.
Tips 💡
- Ask participants to pre-fill their stories before the session as a way to make the most of the time together and favor a richer discussion later on.
- Have some suggestions prepared to help the group when thinking about the statement. In case participants haven’t thought about their story yet, facilitators can prompt users through a question like: “What does it look like when we’re doing our best work?”
- Ask someone from your group to help you cluster (for example, a designer on your team, who is used to participating in workshops and knows the deal).
- Color-code the post-its to help participants allocate content in different ‘buckets’: ‘Context’, ‘Action’ and ‘Impact’.
Red flag 🚨
- Plan a time margin for each activity in your agenda that accounts for any upcoming participant questions or clarifications.
- Focus on the ‘together alone’ approach to minimize discussions and favor individual work. As a result, participants will work in silence with a balance of interactions between them.
- It is very important that there is no confusion and that participants know exactly what they need to work on to prevent them from creating solutions for the wrong or irrelevant challenges.
Exercise 2: Mission Statement [30 mins]
How it works 📝
1) The facilitator will withdraw the big ideas (cluster names) — in the form of post-its — for each category: ‘Cause’, ‘Actions’ and ‘Impact’.
2) The facilitator will then explain this exercise where participants will craft the mission statements, by giving them guidelines and an example for reference.
3) Participants individually craft a mission statement, taking into account the constraint of fitting it into one single post-it.
3) Participants pitch their own mission statement.
4) Participants get assigned 2 votes each and vote on their preferred mission statement.
5) The facilitator makes an evaluation of the voting outcome and puts the focus on the top-voted statements.
Tips 💡
- Schedule a break between the previous exercise — crafting the stories — and this one. As a side effect, the facilitator will get some time to fill in the information for the second part of the agenda, which will be the starting point of the next exercise. Additionally, participants join the session with renewed energy.
- Remind participants not to worry too much about word choice. Also, point out the fact that the goal is to keep the statement short and simple. Long mission statements prevent having one that sounds memorable, catchy or human.
- Explain the disagreement test to participants to help them in crafting their mission: if no one disagrees with the statement (“make the world better” or “act with integrity”) this might be a symptom of the statement being too generic.
- Add music in the background whenever an activity is longer than 3–4 minutes, the group will feel much more energetic.
Red flag 🚨
- Present an example to participants before having them ideate on their own output: an ingenious and innovative reference point will help them to come up with a more interesting mission statement.
- Reduce the participants’ mental strain. They should be targeting their efforts towards ideating on content. Example: when they add text, having a placeholder of the content that should be entered in the post-its (e.g. write here) will help in making this task more efficient.
Sharing the Mission Statement, Voting and Wrap-up [15 mins]
The five groups returned to the main call and one representative from each of them pitched the statement, formulated on the co-creation undertaken in each break-out room. Each representative explained why that specific mission statement mattered. This way, all participants could notice similarities and differences between statements and have visibility of the key outcomes of the other groups.
Once each group finished pitching, we wrapped up the session by giving participants the chance to vote on their favorite Mission Statement. As a result, the five groups had a clear understanding of the chosen mission and came to an agreement all together, getting a feeling of unity.
Finally, we thanked everyone for participating in the session, and we explained the next steps to give them a sense of continuity and impact based on their contribution.
Channel output into a Product Mission statement
Refinement
During the next weeks after the session, our Product Director took in the outcome of the Mission Workshop and iterated it with the goal of making it clearer and more relatable.
Feedback
The final Product Mission was then shared among the product team and the company to receive feedback. The goal was to question, enhance and add the final touch before releasing a final version.
Broadcast
The final version of the mission was presented to the entire company after getting feedback from multiple stakeholders and including it. Our product team knows now what our product’s main purpose is and what we provide our users with. This way, we now have a crystal clear strategy that unites us towards the same goal.
To conclude…
As UX Researchers, empathetic by nature and creating links through knowledge, we are able to utilize our expertise on multiple levels within our organization. Co-creating a Mission in our company will add great value, especially in one like Glovo that is under constant change and growing very fast. A common Product Mission helps us all row together in the same direction, pushing our products further and delivering the best experience we can for our users.
We encourage you to try co-creating a Product Mission within your organization and enjoy it as much as we did!
If you’d like to deep-dive into our second article on the Product Vision case study, check out this article written by my colleague Valentina Salvi.
Special thanks to our co-facilitators Anna Demina, Julian della Mattia & Meltem Naz Kaso⚡️
