What Shipped: Issue 9, 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 the past few weeks:
- Testing, Process
We extended what our team has learnt about testing to the broader business. - Brand, Process
We updated our brand retro process and guidelines to scale alongside the evolution of our team. - Product, Process
We laid the groundwork for ongoing, high-impact, improvements to our website.
Testing, Process
We extended what our team has learnt about testing to the broader business.
We use a test to learn growth strategy. Growing a company by trying many different things on a small scale and investing in what works, rather than picking one idea and going all in without testing assumptions first.
Like any change in how you work, it takes time and constant refining to get better. We’re taking baby steps to eventually nail how we make decisions and operate as a team. This week’s steps are making us better at testing across teams, rather than in organisational silos.
How we got here
A few 1:1 chats made it clear that—while a few teams had started launching tests across our member experience—we had never set out how we’d operate these tests across the board. We were working off assumptions and wires were getting crossed.
Unsurprisingly, we were all still paddling separate boats.
That realisation prompted me to step back and think about how we were working. I put together a quick message to see if we could get on the same page:
This thread prompted two major improvements:
- We’ll set priorities at a business/customer level rather than a team level. Since the experience consumers have with us flows across a few of our teams, we will be more coherent and consistent if tests are planned according to a persons’ experience rather than our internal divisions. We’ll prioritise from consolidated ideas and input, rather than team specific priorities.
- Transparency is key. The benefit of transparency in work communication has been written about All. Over. The. Internet. For us specifically, this principle is about making actual work visible between teams. Sharing works in progress, getting input early and always showing things as close to the real thing as we can. All in service of creating a shared understanding of the actual work rather than adding to the amount of reporting we’re doing. This G Sheet houses all of our tests, results and next steps. I’ve linked it for anyone else on a similar journey.
— Grace
Brand, Process
We updated our brand retro process and guidelines to scale alongside the evolution of our team.
Brand retro gets an update
We rejigged our brand retro to incorporate measures of brand effectiveness. As Grace eloquently said, “It’s hard to see the big picture when you’re only looking back and forward on a single month horizon.” I wrote a little about how we rejigged, it, and why, here.
Brand guidance vs brand guidelines
Brand books. Brand guidelines. Brand bibles. Rules. Principles. Navigating the world of brand guidelines can be a bit daunting. Things look different when you’re on the client side of the fence, versus the brand agency, versus using guidelines as a freelancer.
As we’ve built our brand, we’ve built our guidelines with a bias for ‘just enough, just in time.’ Here’s why:
- Building extensive lists of do’s and don’ts is a lot of work in and of itself
- Rules are meant to be broken
- We’re not done building our system
…but…at some point, you need to document in order to scale design. We’re making a lot more stuff, with a lot more people, than when we started out back in January. So we started cementing a more solid version of our guidelines. You can read more about how we’re doing that, here.
— Amanda
Product, Process
We laid the groundwork for ongoing, high-impact, improvements to our website.
Last issue was when we announced the launch our new-and-improved website. We haven’t stopped working on it since; layout, typography, and content improvements have been published almost every day.
We’re at a point where we could continue with these small tweaks¹ indefinitely. We made a public promise though and, gosh-darn, we plan to keep it.
Here it is as a refresher:
[We will only work on] continual, concentrated, [website] projects that always can be linked back with improving how we represent ourselves, our value, and our resources.
Requests from other folks within Future Super are coming in hot. We’ve already inundated ourselves with ideas on what to work on. So how do we decide what to work on, and when?
Value versus effort
We’re now evaluating all projects and tasks by the value they might bring² and the effort they probably require. We use existing, shared definitions of size and value to ensure parity.
Here’s what an evaluation looked like, fresh from our most recent project prioritisation session:
The sticky notes were populated by an existing list of potential projects and tasks. We didn’t allow notes to overlap which forced healthy debate on why a project should be ranked higher effort or value than another.
This exercise set the foundation for how we triage and rank projects day-to-day. Some examples:
These projects and tasks can only be given an estimated size (analogous to effort) and value after at least two questions have been answered:
- What’s the problem or opportunity?
- Who is affected?
Larger projects go through a proper canvassing session similar to Clearleft’s.
Keep an eye out for some high value, well-scoped, product work being shown off next issue. How’s that for another public promise to keep ourselves accountable?
— Danny
Footnotes
¹ We purposefully launched earlier than we were comfortable with to avoid bogging ourselves down in minutia.
² Value to members, prospective members, or the business.
