Changing product’s mindset from “Stakeholders” to Ambassadors

Summary

For over two quarters, Attest have fully immersed members of the business teams (we call them ambassadors) into each product squad. They are there to rep their customers and teams to the squad and importantly the squad back to those teams and customers.

It keeps the squad close to customer problems and creates valuable partners for rolling out experiments. It’s also all round great for culture, development opportunities and diversity, especially given our remote working reality. It doesn’t really matter what you call them — ambassador might not even by the right nomenclature for every business.

The key change here for both the “ambassador” and the squad is a mindset shift from the external (demands, objections, requirements) to the internal (accountability, buy-in, insight, commitment).

Why we introduced Ambassadors

• Customer-focused OKRs

At the beginning of this year Attest’s tech team decided to commit to doing OKRs properly, increasing our focus and accountability on what we spend our time on and how that helps the company-wide strategy. We truly wanted the work we were doing in tech to become more relevant. We thought that an ambassador model would make our customer-related OKR focus more successful as there would be more understanding and buy-in of the strategy. People in sales, customer experience and account management are the closest people to our users and so it was important they had a seat directly at the table when we were working out how to fix customer problems.

• Us and Them feeling

Very unintentionally there had built up a sense of “Us and Them” between the tech and commercial sides of the business, which can unfortunately creep up on product companies. This was worsened by the physical set up of our office - we were on one wework floor which was lovely but had an inexplicably large glass column right in the middle of the office essentially splitting one massive room into two. So the term “The other side of the room” was getting bandied about a lot and we in Product as well as the founders were keen to remedy that. For the product team, it had also contributed to a challenge getting input and buy-in for the product vision. We needed to improve our relationships in order to improve our ideas and impact.

Want to read this story later? Save it in Journal.

• Diversity

Attest truly lives diversity. Emily Lincoln-Gordon our VP Ops has written about it here and here. We fundamentally think diversity in background and experience will help us build better products for our customers. But technical teams generally don’t happen to be too diverse. Even if you set aside for a second the obvious demographic diversity problems in tech, you tend to have people who have similar-ish career backgrounds. By bringing in people from customer experience, marketing, sales and account management you are immediately forced to diversify your thinking. There are more ideas and they are better. Then when you implement them you have really bought in people who can help you make them a success.

How it works

• Each squad asks relevant non-tech teams to nominate an ambassador who will be part of the squad. Depending on the squad’s remit, this is a combo of marketing, sales, account managers, and our customer experience reps. They do not have to be the most senior people in those teams, in fact it helps if they are not. You then avoid any HIPPO problems.
• Those ambassadors are “onboarded” to the squads by the PM. They’ll run through the OKR, existing experiments, ideas for next ones and squad rituals. They’re asked to actively participate in ideation workshops.
• Roles and responsibilities of ambassadors: We have this captured in a lot more detail in Notion but in a nutshell we are clear that this is a role that will take a few hours out of their week and we expect them to be actively participating in conversations about squad projects/experiments throughout their lifecycle, from ideation to post-launch analysis. They are part of the squad solving these problems, they are not there to just bring more problems. This has changed the relationship from “can you fix this thing” to “how do we fix this thing and also I know that that means we can’t do this other thing”. This is the key difference between a stakeholder and an ambassador.

• Communication: We have slack user groups for Squad-all and Squad-tech and Squad-ambassadors and then @mention the relevant one in our slack channels so Ambassadors don’t feel like they have to check everything. We’re also disciplined with capturing decisions, wireframes and scope in Notion documents so everyone can catch up a-sync. Miro boards have been a brilliant way to engage people in interaction workshops but also provide a nice async dumping ground ahead of them. Communication and facilitation are definitely muscles that get a work out when you are suddenly trying to merge squad ways of agile working with multiple people from the business on a day to day basis.
• Participation: it differs from squad to squad and at the point of the quarter we’re in. Ambassadors are always involved very heavily in ideation for each quarter. Some squads have opted for a weekly ambassador catchup to run through everything and then specific chats around experiments to gather feedback. Other ambassadors also opt to come to every standup, retro and planning.
• Feedback: The ambassadors are personally responsible for “dogfooding” features (trying them out before customers see them) and gathering feedback from customers once they’re live.

Benefits

I asked others at Attest what they felt the benefits were of the ambassador model (including ambassadors and tech members, thanks everyone!) and here were the conclusions:

• Better alignment — more communication and shared accountability on decisions that are made in the squad to the rest of the business. PMs don’t have to always worry that the whole company doesn’t understand or buy-in to their strategy; the ambassadors help to facilitate communication and kick the tyres of the things you’re working on together.
• Good for culture — Having ambassadors formally means we participate in squad processes and rituals, which means by default we spend more time together. More time together = we actually build relationships. This is particularly important now that we’re working remotely so you can’t have that organic, casual chat in the office kitchen. It means we’re not only cross-functional on the work, but as a company, we genuinely have cross-functional relationships. The structure makes it harder for silos to be formed or reinforced.
• Personal growth — As a product manager I’ve had to really build up better communication and facilitation muscles, especially remote. Engineers and design also have to learn to work with a more varied group of people on a more direct basis. Ambassadors are suddenly thrown into agile squads and have to navigate ways of working, and put a strategic hat on to think about the broader experience not just their own remit. We’ve already had one ambassador transition at least partially into a PM in a new squad, and it’s a really great way to expose more people to product thinking.
• Fewer blockers — Ambassadors are asked to be the voice of their function; if there’s a decision the squad want to make, ambassadors help us get there quicker by being able to rally the right people in their function together, fast. Sometimes it takes a little longer to rally people around something but you’re going to overcome objections earlier and better with the help of ambassadors rather than throwing something over the fence once it’s made.

• More and better ideas. We’ve had some really great ideas and feedback come from our ambassadors. They are very close to our users and bring a diversity of experience and thinking. It’s much easier to get access to customers with them introducing us. They also remind us to think about user edge cases.

Challenges

This is a visual representation of an ICE scoring session we ran with the whole squad including ambassadors. Talk about noise 😂

• More noise, sometimes leads to a less clear signal. There’s suddenly a lot more people than a typical squad. You’ve got to coach people to give feedback in the right way and right point in the product lifecycle. But if you remember that ambassadors are just another part of your squad and you can utilise tools to help you understand the signal appropriately then it’s valuable.
• Learning to disagree and commit — Input does not equal decision power, and that is something that ambassadors have to be coached through. Ultimately the product manager has autonomy over the strategy and priority. It has been tough for some ambassadors to give wonderful input on one thing but for one reason or another it still isn’t the direction the squad prioritises. This gets easier with time, and product have to be patient with understanding that that ambassador is likely still an individual contributor with targets and their own customer agendas they need to protect. Take the time to walk them through the reasoning behind priorities changing and how that helps the shared goals. Being able to keep them onside and engaging even if they’re personally frustrated is a careful balance.
• Hosepipe of comms — Feedback has been that the volume and variety of communication channels can be overwhelming to a new ambassador. Giving clear frameworks and forums for contributing ideas and feedback is important from the beginning. Don’t expect them to read everything or come to every meeting, as they have their own day jobs too. Help them out by prioritising what they need to know and engage with. Async and capturing decisions is important. We lean on Notion documentation and Loom video explanations a lot for this.

Hopefully this has been useful! Keen to hear how other businesses apply this kind of model or anything better. Attest is hiring in lots of teams so if you’re interested in joining a tech team that believes in true cross functional ways of working, or a commercial team that also has direct skin in the game on product strategy check out our open roles here.

📝 Save this story in Journal.

👩‍💻 Wake up every Sunday morning to the week’s most noteworthy stories in Tech waiting in your inbox. Read the Noteworthy in Tech newsletter.