How we involve our whole team in product development
I joined HostnFly as their first product leader when they raised 2,5M€, after two years of existence. HostnFly allows its customers to rent out their flats on online platforms, without any hassle. We manage: listing ads, guest communication, keys, cleaning, linen…
My biggest challenge at the beginning was understanding how I should work with the operations team. Indeed, they keep adapting their workflow so we can manage more flats and guests, always reliably. Since I had a lot of product knowledge to catch up on, I thought the best way would be to turn their team lead into a product leader herself. Thus I decided to observe and analyse first.
Here’s our journey involving the whole team in the product development process.
I/ Letting teammates express themselves
1. Make them feel welcome to give their feedback
Do your teammates feel that they can give feedback on your products? In one of my past experiences, Sales and Customer Success teams didn’t feel like they could talk to developers or product managers anymore because they felt like their opinion wasn’t taken into account: “no time” or “not the priority” were common excuses to prevent discussion. Remember Sales and Customer Success are the people who talk to your users everyday, all day.
Instead, make them feel welcome to share feedback, preferably in a structured way!
2. Our approach
At HostnFly, we collect our teammates requests on a Slack channel. They can post them following this template:
Context
Problem
Why should we solve this problem?
Users affected
Solution proposal
Priority
It’s common for people to give you the solution they want. But having this kind of template makes them think about the problem first. It also allows anybody to challenge the request and the solution proposal with another point of view. We chose Slack because it’s the communication tool we use the most. Finally, posting on an open channel also shows the team that they can ask for what they need.
3. Push your team to share requests
At first, it may feel intimidating for somebody not involved in the product process to send a request. To solve that, we relied on team leads to push the whole team to do it. We ended up with a large pile of requests, much more than we could absorb. Most of them are still waiting to be prioritised, analysed and shipped.
We add requests on Trello and try to be as transparent as possible about our prioritisation. To achieve this, we assign the requester on her card so that she receives a notification and knows that we’re working on it. We also announce when the feature is shipped and tag her. Showing that a request may turn into a feature encourages everybody to be less timid when it comes to giving their feedbacks.
II/ Shipping fast
1. Learn faster
Understanding problems is great but if you don’t ship, you don’t learn. Shipping fast allows you to learn faster. Besides, putting a new feature into the hands of users is the best way for them to realise what’s good and what’s missing. In the Tech / Product team, we enjoy seeing our teammates be more productive by quickly shipping a feature.
When we work on a product request, we always keep in mind the Pareto Principle (or 80/20 rule): we design and implement our features to cover the most important cases. We ship even if the whole feature is not perfect because we know that it will also give us time to learn from it and iterate. To cover the remaining 20% reliably for our internal features, we generally put an alert (on Slack, again) indicating what needs to be done manually.
2. Get rid of the unnecessary
It may be hard to convince your teammates that their feature request could be reduced to a simpler first version. Ask: “What if we removed that?”. It will help you remove unnecessary complication and rare use cases.
Think about the problem you want to solve and the many solutions you have. Writing them will allow you to scan, review and iterate on your possibilities. For complex features, I ask the requester to write her thoughts on a Google Doc instead of Slack. This allows us to keep an history of our questioning and iterations. Google Doc is great because everybody knows how to use its basic functions: write, draw, share and comment.
3. What happens when you ship fast
Moreover, the byproduct of shipping fast is that it will make your teammates feel that they’re listened to and that the company keeps moving. This will not only improve their morale but it will also keep the feedback coming. This is a great feedback loop.
III/ Handling volume
1. Bottleneck of requests
What happens when your team sends many more requests than can be processed by your Tech / Product team? You accumulate requests that will probably die in a backlog. And your teammates get frustrated. We currently have around 150 cards on Trello (not bad for a team of 27!) waiting to be prioritised.
2. How we address it
It took us some time to figure out how to address that. Step by step, we found ways to decrease this frustration:
- By leaving room for small tasks in every cycle, which will be rewarding for both requesters and developers.
- By trying and gathering requests to fit them in a bundle or to add them to the next iteration on the feature.
- By sharing priorities to indicate when requests are relevant. We used to present a roadmap to achieve this and we are currently giving OKRs a try.
Final words
This is how we involve our whole team in Product Thinking: giving room for expression, shipping fast and iterating to improve efficiency. Many iterations brought us to our current processes and it’s just the beginning.
Product leaders and developers don’t build a great product sitting in an ivory tower. Getting the points of view of your teammates especially those who are the closest to your users and sometimes your actual users is extremely precious. Ask for feedback, share your thoughts, and keep going! And most of all, keep challenging and improving your workflow, with the help of your teammates.
Have you also led your team to participate in Product Thinking? What’s your take on it? I’d love to hear your experience!
