Product owners: don’t let your conversations fade into the background
As product owners you want to deliver a quality product promptly while managing inputs from every facet of the organization. From financial restrictions to business requirements and technical limitations, all requests need to be taken into consideration. There is a lack of tools that exist to support Project Owners in their main activity, having conversations. Luffa is the tool to fill that gap.
1. Luffa helps you create a shared understanding of your product
As a product owner, you are constantly engaged in conversations, spending most of your time gathering crucial product information. These conversations are one of the central responsibilities of a product owner and yet there are still very few tools to help people manage their conversations.
“Product Ownership is about proactively taking the understanding to the team, so that they don’t have to come to you.” — Chris Guest
As a product owner it’s your responsibility to understand the information you receive from every department and transform it into knowledge to guide product decisions.
By using Luffa to capture all of your important conversations you can review them when you need to reference them. By capturing meetings with stakeholders you will be able to track all of their requests and be sure to not miss any important parts of the conversation. By having these conversation available in a shared location everyone in the organization can listen and learn the language spoken by other teams, helping to foster a shared sense of understanding and focus for a product.
2. Luffa helps you speed up your workflow
From Scrum meetings to planning sessions to backlog reviews, product owners spend a lot of time in meetings. During these meetings, there’s a lot of talk before decisions are made concrete or actionable. Once you are ready to begin entering user stories, there are a plethora of project management tools to choose from to manage your tasks. But before you get to that point, when you’re still in discussion, the tools to help you are very limited.
“Conversation about their stories should be the beginning of a journey to building this shared understanding with our teams.” — Sherif Mansour
These conversations are critical in the development of the user experience and overall goal of the product. Being able to capture them efficiently is a rare skill that’s very time-consuming. Many product owners will work hard to write excessive notes or spend hours after meetings entering new user stories into JIRA to make sure that everything is clear and properly prioritized.
By using Luffa during these meetings, a Product Owner can enter tickets into their project management tool of choice with just a few clicks and their voice instead of after everything has been said and often forgotten. Luffa integrates with popular task management tools so that users can flag the moment a user story is explained in a meeting to instantly create a ticket in their system that links directly to the moment in the conversation. Using the voice of the original creator to support the decision and reasoning.
3. Luffa lets you keep an eye on the past and your sights on the future
When looking 3 to 6 months into the future of new features it’s easy to lose sight of what’s already been accomplished. Remembering the history of a project becomes exponentially more difficult on older projects that have gone through multiple iterations or significant changes in management or technology.
By capturing iteration demos in Luffa, you can build a timeline of product evolution. With captured sprint planning, sprint reviews, or retrospectives it’s easy to go back and see how you got to where you are. By keeping an eye on your product history, you can avoid making past mistakes and take inspiration from previously well-executed ideas.
“The number one contributor to poor design is an inconsistent understanding of why the project exists. Smart leaders focus their efforts on reinforcing everyone’s understanding on the reasons the work is needed.” — Jared M. Spool
With Luffa it’s easy to keep tabs on your project history. Jump back in time to important conversations that greatly influenced product design or re-listen to meetings that initially inspired your project. Make recorded meetings accessible to people in your organization so they don’t need to attend each and every meeting, listening only to the key moments. Luffa helps keep past conversations and decisions relevant as you continue to move forward.
Conclusion
With a shared language comes faster communication, innovation, and understanding. Keeping user stories linked to their original conversations leads to the ability to stay focused on your mission and the problem you are trying to solve. Luffa helps you capture knowledge from your most important conversations, making them quickly accessible, searchable, and shareable. Your conversations are important, don’t let them fade into the background.
Luffa is currently in private beta and looking for curious and eager users to have conversations with. Request access at https://okluffa.com/access/
