Accelerate achieving business outcomes
By Aishwarya Sivaramakrishna, Agile Team Lead at CBC Digital Products
Would you agree that the processes and conditions in which your bread is made (of course the dough!) determines its texture, taste and quality? Yes, the processes that we follow to make our digital products makes a difference in the final product outcome. What best practices could accelerate making great digital products that delight the audience and achieve our business goals? Let’s explore some ways we do that at CBC Digital Strategy and Products.
Engage users, early and often
Questions to ponder — Who are your users? Why and how often do you talk to them? What do you do with the insights obtained from meeting them? How do you funnel it into product development?
For us to deliver the right product features, we must figure out the right opportunity space. To do that, we should continuously engage with our users as early as possible and work with them to identify what they need.The Agile Manifesto states “The highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software” as its number one principle. Involving the stakeholders (and if possible direct consumers) early and often into product discovery and delivery is recommended by industry experts.
At CBC Digital Strategy and Products, we work closely with our internal users and audience through various avenues such as UX research, User interviews, Intercept surveys, Chatbots, A/B testing, Customer experience management, etc. The product teams work to discover the right problem space that would not only identify and satisfy potential audience requirements but also provide business value to the organization. Through qualitative and quantitative feedback loops, we gain valuable user behaviour insights, where the former informs us on why the users do what they do and the latter tells us about what they are actually doing with our products. Qualitative feedback is a valuable and necessary input for defining product strategy, key metrics and future product developments.
Plan work, coordinate and deliver
Questions to ponder — How could we plan work that aligns with desired business outcomes? What could help to develop a cohesive solution? How could we deliver solutions quicker, more frequently with quality and efficiency?
Ultimately, the processes and practices that we follow to deliver on product requirements determines the efficiency and effectiveness of the business outcomes. The digital product teams need to be cohesive and work together to solve their business problems.
At CBC Digital Strategy and Products, we do “Planning sprints”. Every quarter, cross-functional groups of people come together for a one week sprint to jointly plan and organize work for the next quarter. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are then worked on by the product teams. Objectives are areas of focus defined by management for the fiscal year that are aligned across the organization to have clear focus and prioritization. The product teams create key results (KRs) that are measurable, not a defined solution and are ambitious (aka Moonshot OKRs). The planning sprints brings alignment, creates focus and limits the amount of work in progress.
Next, we track the work dependencies among the product teams through Flight levels. Flight levels help us to tie the strategy, coordination and operational objectives across product teams, visualize the flow of work at each stage of discovery and delivery and track dependencies.
We then strive to deliver with quality and efficiency. Our product teams follow agile ways of working for discovery and delivery of solutions. They are autonomous teams missioned with a specific product vision and mandate that delivers product outcomes to achieve the overall business goals.
Create inclusive products, cater to everyone’s needs
Questions to ponder — Why do you need to make inclusive products? What do you do to make your products more inclusive? How do you design products that can be used by all people including people with disabilities?
Inclusivity is essential for the success of a business. All types of audiences, including those with disabilities should share a sense of belonging, representation and have their needs met from our service offerings.
At CBC Digital Strategy and Products, we remember that our audience includes people that have a variety of different needs. We include accessibility as part of everything that we do. We put ourselves in the shoes of people with disabilities to attempt to understand what their world looks like.
A few things that we do to develop inclusive products are recruit a diverse set of staff who understand the product requirements, partner with organizations such as D(if) Labs that researches with people with disabilities and have a pool of users to test our products. We strive to delight our audiences through equitable and enjoyable product experiences.
Measure, make progress
Questions to ponder — ‘We cannot improve something that we cannot measure.’ Do you know how you are performing to reach your goals? What metrics could you use, what do you measure? What do you interpret from those metrics and how do you use them?
“We can’t improve something that can’t be measured”. Defining meaningful metrics and a process to derive meaningful insights aids to determine how we are performing. At CBC Digital Strategy and Products, ‘return frequency’ is an important metric that helps us understand if our product is valuable and how often users engage with it.
One approach is to define lagging, leading and transactional indicators.
- Lagging indicators — To measure if a product team is making meaningful progress on its product outcomes
- Leading indicators — To prototype, experiment with the users to inform on product decisions.
- Transactional metrics — Are relevant to product outcomes, which we could experiment with to observe user behavior. They are leading indicators by nature.
This table shows a sample to gauge audience engagement -
It would be a worthwhile effort for the product teams to analyze and decipher what the metrics tell us and how we could funnel the findings into future product development. A next step could be to automate the capturing of metrics based on certain triggers and getting a continuous stream of metrics data to analyze user behaviour patterns.
Conclusion
Having the aforesaid best practices along with the people who are intrinsically motivated, with an agile mindset to continuously experiment, have a customer centric mindset for solutioning and live the values of Collaboration, Learning, Continuous improvement and Inclusivity could accelerate making great digital products that delight the audience and achieve our business goals.
To join our teams at CBC, check out our current openings here.
