What Shipped: Issue 12, 2020

Future Super is a superannuation fund that helps people use the power of their money to build a future worth retiring into. We’re building our product and brand in-house and documenting what we learn in the process.

Here’s what we’ve been up to in the past few weeks:

1. Converging on collective power: How we’re refining our ‘power’ messaging
2. Design: Playing around, finished or otherwise
3. Setting a North Star: Laddering up to something bigger by getting explicit about the change we want to make in our member’s lives
4. Socials: Lessons & reflections on working with an external consultant

Converging on collective power

How we’re refining our ‘power’ messaging

This week feels like we’ve unlocked a new level of team mind-melding. “It feels like we’re all talking about the same idea across ads, website, and member experience,” someone said in a recent working session. As a brand strategist that makes me want to do a happy dance. Why: it means we are consistent (but not uniform) in what we say — this is the holy grail.

The power of my money or the power of our money?

For a while now, we’ve been talking about the power of money. One thing that came out really clearly in user interviews recently was that people struggle to get excited about their individual power and impact, especially when we put it in terms of tonnes of carbon. That makes sense to me: One, I’m not sure what a tonne of carbon means in terms of impact, so it’s a hard concept to start with; two, the size of the problem we’re tackling is so big that it feels silly to think that one person can make a change. So what should we be talking about?

The answer came directly out of user interviews: people were amped that they were part of a massive groundswell of people coming in off the back of a recent FriendlyJordies video. Jordan’s message was heavily focused on the impact of a group of people, versus placing the onus on the individual alone to make a change. (Related: I learned this week that BP was one of the biggest proponents of introducing a carbon footprint — placing guilt on individuals and diverting attention from massive companies).

Where we’re “sensing” this information from

• Interviews with people who received a personalised member page about the impact of their super
• Sharing learnings from weekly ad testing with the team, then incorporating them into tests on things like our homepage header
• Conducting website user interviews and sharing debriefs with the wider team
• Doing a sweep of news about money, climate change and culture, and a session to build on what messages we think should fit into those
• Feeding questions and comments from members and potential members on social media and emails into our channel

The cool thing was that once we started talking about the concept of collective impact, everyone had different (but related) ideas about how to play with it. This is hands down my favourite part of the creative process, when an idea starts to take shape and give off heat — it’s generative. That started to look like:

My reflections:

Having regular rhythms of testing helps us gather information about what’s working and what’s not, and connect disparate dots from a place of shared ownership. Whole team sessions help us bring these learnings together, build and refine ideas and agree on themes to take forward. Safety, and fun at work plus the expectation and freedom to play around with the idea on a common theme = our superpower. We’ve got several irons in the fire right now about how we speak about collective power, so stay tuned for that!

—Amanda

Design

Playing around, finished or otherwise

I’ve not had time to write pithy one liners about super company logos this week. So in the spirit of sharing, finished or otherwise, here’s a board of some exploration I’ve done over the last little while. Some finished, some ready for the trash can, but all in the spirit of safe team brave work.

—Nick

Setting a North Star

The game plan for getting to a shared understanding of the benefit Future Super wants to have on people’s lives

I’ve been off for nearly three weeks recovering from a nasty wisdom tooth extraction. The #1 thing I have accomplished since we last published What Shipped is impeccable dental hygienics and learning what purulent means.

Where this came from

Before my life turned into soft foods and pain meds I set a rough plan for how we’ll define the benefit we want to bring to our end users as a team.This is a project came about from our desire as a team to define the bigger vision of our work, giving us the chance to plan better and have a shared view on where we’re going. It will be a tool we use to prioritise and align our various projects. Everything will move toward creating the change we want to see in people’s lives.

We’re calling this nugget of gold a North Star.

Why we want to do it

As a team that covers product design, advertising, brand and communications we all have ideas of what we want to create within our craft. Without clear convergence on the user benefit we’re trying to create with all those crafts, it can feel a bit like we’re all going for a run with slightly different views of the destination.

And in a practical sense, the clearer we are on the benefit, the easier it is for everyone to reduce stuff that’s adding noise and focus better on delivering real value to our audience.

Game plan

Here’s what’s in our calendar invite that explains the process:

Big picture

A few weeks ago in how we work retro we realised that we’ve never been explicit about what we want to create in the world as a team. Now that we’re a strong multi-disciplinary team well into the rebrand and product redesign it feels like the perfect time to zoom far out as a group and ask ourselves to get explicit about the benefit we want to provide end users going forward.

Why it matters

By clarifying the end user need we’re filling we can start to see where we’re falling short today and then prioritise our medium term focus to step change these areas.

What I propose we do

Break this chat into 3 parts:
Part 1: Diverge / Part 2: Converge on a vision / Part 3: Use North Star to build prioritisation list

Part 1: Diverge on what the benefit might be. Bring in references from our specific craft but focus on the end user benefit (rather than the work we want to create) so there’s good fodder for us to start from. Outcome of the session is to build a hive mind to solve from and identify benefits that are resonating with all of us.

Part 2: Use a participatory decision making framework to converge on a definition of the end user benefit we’re trying to create. Outcome of the session is to have a shared understanding or at least moving towards convergence on the benefit we’re providing to people.

Part 3: Once we’ve set the North Star let’s use it to prioritise our work for the next 3–6 months. We’ll use the North Star to define the biggest pain points and projects we might do to step change our ability to deliver the benefit. The outcome of the session will be a revised and jointly owned priority list.

Homework for Part 1

Bring your thoughts on the below (I’d say take about 1hr to reflect) so we can dive into discussion. Visuals, videos, notebook scratchings all welcome.

Why does Future Super improve people’s lives?

What is the benefit we deliver to the end user? How will we deliver on that benefit in 6 months time? 12 months time?

How might people incorporate us into their lives? When do we want people to use us? How do we want them to use us?

What is the fundamental change we’re making for them?

Here’s a North Star statement structure (to give a picture of what this might look like after our sessions)

Today, when [identified group] want to [desirable activity/ outcome], they have to [current solution] . This is unacceptable, because [shortcomings of current solutions]. We envision a world where [shortcomings resolved]. We are bringing this world about through [basic technology/ approach].

Next steps

In our next issue I’ll share how Part 1 goes along with things we learn along the way. Hopefully by the time you are reading this we’ll have already road-tested this game plan + shared improvements for future teams!

—Grace

Socials

Lessons & reflections on working with an external consultant

—Mariela

That’s all for now, folks! Hope you enjoyed this (slightly delayed because I had a hard stop @ 5pm Friday to make it to a Drag King comedy night) issue of What Shipped. Seeya on the flipside!

—Mariela