Two Days of Strategy
One of my most memorable experiences as a Product Design Intern at Parabol was the company’s quarterly strategy retreat called S.P.A. During S.P.A., Parabol’s distributed team gets together in one geographic location and spends two intensive days together doing strategy workshopping. During this retreat, I got the opportunity to see how product strategy is conducted, and was also able to directly contribute to it.
S.P.A. VI was held in Brooklyn, NY. On the top floor of Whole Foods, Co-founder Jordan Husney began the retreat with the “State of Parabol”. He gave a quick retrospective on the last three months and a preview of where the next three months is headed. He explained that our core strategy for the next months will be on the beginning of the conversion funnel. This meant our priority had to shift from feature development to marketing, in order to increase signups. We then went through a brief round of reactions where everyone got a chance to speak their thoughts. I mentioned the importance of finding out why so many users were churning in an effort to better understand what would make users stick with our product and build our marketing message. We then headed to our co-working space for a detailed retrospective round. Full-stack Architect Terry Acker led this session with three columns and lots of sticky notes.
Our next session was on proposing strategy even/over statements. Everyone had an opportunity to state proposals and we went through a holacratic exercise of questions, reactions, amendments, and clarifications. The proposals were voted on by team members and narrowed down to three to five proposals. This list would then be used to determine what features to focus on next in our product. I was quite surprised to see that one of my proposals made it to the final list and began to realize my ability to shape the future of Parabol even as an intern.
Day one concluded with a live user research session conducted via Zoom and led by Co-founder Taya Mueller. During this session we asked our users questions based on our observations of their use of Parabol in their weekly meetings. This involved a lot of silent observations and rapid note-taking on my part. This session resulted in a lot of ideas for enhancements and new features.
We began Day Two with strategy refinement. Everyone wrote out their high level ideas from the previous day into specific Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) format. I later came to realize the trick on how to write these effectively: the more focused and specific they are, the easier it is for them to get prioritized to the top if they are in line with the strategy even/over statements. After sharing our ideas we grouped similar items together and gave a name for that epic/milestone.
The next activity, led by Full-stack Developer Matt Krick, was one of the most enjoyable sessions. We prioritized each of the epics/milestones utilizing a modified version of the Scaled Agile Framework’s Weighted Shortest Job First prioritization model.
(Strategic Alignment + Time Criticality) ÷ Job Size = Priority Score
After determining our prioritized features, we broke into groups for some quick design sprints. My group worked on the design of “in-meeting search items”, and I had the honor of presenting our design to the whole team. Both groups asked questions, gave each other feedback, and iterated further on their designs.
We wrapped up the retreat with objective planning on what needed to be done in the next three months, three weeks, and three days. This process informed the next few things I would be working on during the rest of my internship: third-party software integration experiment design, and churn analysis. Our last session was a governance session for members to suggest proposals to address any tensions they may have about internal operations. Of course, we still made time to have fun and relax before heading back to our home offices.
This retreat was a great learning experience for me as a newcomer in the world of digital product design. One of the amazing aspects of working at Parabol was that it welcomes even the most junior teammates to share their ideas and transform the company. I had the unique opportunity to shape the future trajectory of the company’s next three months. Click here to read more about my experience at Parabol.
