What Shipped: Issue 8, 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:
- Launched our new-and-improved website with our eye on more rapid, continuous changes.
- Exploring strategy and creative simultaneously (and continuously) to push ourselves to think big, weird, and wild…but with a purpose.
- Writing up and sending out The Bottom Line for quarter two — our member newsletter where we give updates on the world of superannuation, the campaigns we run, and the fund’s impact.
- Clarifying what we want to get done by September — reviewing how we’ve gone so far, and setting our objectives and key results for the next quarter.
Launched our new-and-improved website
It’s up! See it for yourself at futuresuper.com.au.
Why the drastic change? Because we believed that our prior website suffered mainly from information density and architectural problems. In other words: there was too much content in too many places.
What you’re seeing is one half of a two part approach:
- Simplify and clarify Future Super’s value proposition and resources.
- Create a process for future change and addition requests from colleagues (that they actually use).
The process half is the long-game; we have a ticketing system and form that asks the right questions¹, it just needs to be useful and integrated enough that folks choose to use it over making ad-hoc changes themselves.
The first half is also part of a larger effort; continual, concentrated, projects that always can be linked back with improving how we represent ourselves, our value, and our resources.
This week’s release goes against my perfectionism grain — as it’s not exactly right — but I know any further delay would take us further away from real-world feedback.
If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
— Reid Hoffman
Speaking of real-world feedback, please let us know if there is anything you think is missing or could be improved.
Note: this does not affect the signing up or logging in flow for new and existing members, respectively. Those are still actively being worked on, though!
— Danny
Explored creative and strategy simultaneously (and continuously)
We have been playing with different creative exploration for the last 6 months. Some of these sessions, we love, some of them, we’ve shelved.
One thing we’ve all agreed on: we adore our burn book sessions.
What’s a burn book? Glad you asked. I wrote about it here. TLDR: It’s a tool for exploring strategy and creative simultaneously. It’s about actually making things. Personal favourites of things the team have made: poems from , doodles from , rap remixes from and clever scanning / collage art of analog content by .
It’s good flex for us to move into rogue blue sky thinking without the pressure of necessarily having to ship the work. As a team we decided we’ll continue to have these sessions biweekly and keep pushing our thinking and playing together.
— Amanda
Writing up and sending out The Bottom Line
Following on from the stress of trying to send out a member newsletter in the midst of a pandemic and a global market crash, we decided to work on honing the internal process to get The Bottom Line (TBL) live within a week. Getting crystal clear on the process — particularly the timing of the various tasks and clarifying the key people involved in sign-offs and decision-making — really helped move this project along.
A carry-over idea from the previous TBL was to host an internal newsroom — inviting staff across the business to submit their favourite recent news stories plus why they think it’s relevant for Future Super members. We re-jigged this newsroom to work on a virtual platform, and it still worked a treat.
We ended up with some pretty hard-hitting stories to share — from rad stats about the impact of our members’ super money to side-eying the halfhearted response from big super following Rio Tinto’s destructive action.
What’s next? Seeing how members engage with TBL so we can learn and improve for next time.
— Mariela
What we want to get done by September
At Future Super, we use Google’s model of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to align on where we’re heading as a business and a team. Our objectives help remind us of what’s important and what’s not. And we use key results to indicate whether or not we’ve achieved the goal. Last week we reset our key results for the next three months so I figured I’d share what we’re aiming for. Below is a quick recap of our objectives and the new key results.
OBJ: Safe team, brave work. Although we spend a lot of time thinking that structure, rhythms or tools will build high-performing teams, research by Google has shown that the #1 most important factor in a team’s ability to do great work is psychological safety. ICYMI: Psychological safety is the ability to take risks without feeling embarrassed or insecure. Our logic is that if we can build this within ourselves and the team, everything else will follow.
Key results:
- We’re talking about our work publicly by shipping this blog series every fortnight
- We’re bringing in outside inspiration from others in our industry
- We’re all reporting that we’d recommend this team to a friend or family member
OBJ: Show impact through the brand. As an impact superfund, a core proposition of our brand is showing people the power of their money. This objective guides us to experiment with different ways of bringing that to life in our comms. How might we show people the power of their money once they join us? How might we connect superannuation with climate action and how can we put the power of super in the context of wider culture?
Key results:
- Launching experiments monthly in market
- Revised our initial experiments and incorporated learnings
OBJ: Best-in-class digital experience. Most people find superannuation stressful. It’s constantly talked about as a big responsibility but very difficult to navigate as an individual. We don’t want to add to these stresses in our experience. Not only do we want to help people use their money to create a future worth retiring into, we want people to enjoy interacting with us. That’s why our last team objective is about bringing our digital experience up to scratch.
Key results to indicate success:
- New website launched (see above for update!)
- 50% increase in landing page conversions to signal our join process isn’t difficult
- Lighthouse scores are 90+
We’ve upped the ambition now that we’re more settled into remote working and all like doing these sessions from a digital whiteboard where we can see all of our notes on OKRs in one single spot.
Clear eyes, full hearts, big goals.
— Grace
