The hardest part is getting started
A friend who is now a PM at Meta told me a story from their previous employer, that the company struggled to know what to do with the designers they hired. The company makes software, is a proper SaaS company, and at the same time, couldn’t get past “designer means graphic designer.”
This isn’t a shame game. It’s a reality check that even today, 15 years after we got into tech and took up the mantle of design and product’s worth, business leaders still struggle to understand how design adds value.
But they do understand capturing lost value from existing expenses. And you and your team can take initiative to give that to them.
The smallest first step you can take is to answer two questions:
- What is it like for the team to answer a question?
- How do we currently leverage existing data?
What is it like for the team to answer a question?
Make a diagram while you think or discuss. The first part is what kind of question: within the team, or stakeholder questions from other domains.
From there, trace the procedure for when someone has a question in the team, or how you handle requests from outside the team.
The goal is to get a sense of how you and your actually team work, irrespective of official documentation and standard operating procedures. Then evaluate. For instance:
- Do you notice a lot of “Ask {specific teammember}” steps?
- How quickly does “set up a new research study” appear?
- If you have a team archive or repository, how many steps are there to look for something?
- How many touchpoints do you have with other parts of the company in your diagram?
You might even want to draw again (however you see fit to portray it): how isolated versus integrated is your team? How many of your responses to questions involve making new data versus searching through existing data, whether your own or other parts of the company?
How do we currently leverage existing data?
After you’ve created your diagram of your team’s reality and can see in front of you how often you rely on your own team, other teams, or new data your team generates, you are ready to answer the question, “How do we currently leverage existing data?”
If the answer is, “we don’t,” you don’t get to mark “not applicable” and move on. Dig into why not.
For example, you might find that your team is worried about losing tools (or budget for tools) if you aren’t seen to be using them consistently and frequently. Maybe you have a lot of new hires who are not as familiar with the company and team’s history of work so are more likely to try to get new information to answer a question to be seen as productively contributing their mark.
For those times you noticed your team does leverage existing data, start with highlighting where and when (yes, get out the Post-its and Sharpies, if you must). And then analyze it.
What patterns can you spot in those times? How about trends? And more importantly, how can you expand and strengthen this practice?
How does this relate to capturing lost value from existing expenses?
As in the physical world so in the digital: you cannot know where to go until you determine where you are.
Answering two questions is the smallest first step to determining where you are.
From there, you could make a list of tools and decide if you really need all of them — maybe you can cut one or more, or go down a subscription tier.
Or perhaps you notice that you involved Data Science once on a project and it went well — can you do it again? Do you see any change to delivery timelines?
Or maybe you want to increase your team’s efficiency and responsiveness by cleaning up your own repositories and archives. Methodically reviewing and deleting what you do not need may directly save the business money in reduced storage costs.
(You may also be able to demonstrate a cost savings by improving your time-to-effectiveness in new hires, who can more easily navigate the team’s history and contextual materials while onboarding.)
These are just our ideas in general — you will no doubt think of more that are specific to you and your team!
