How to have fun building your product and deliver great results
Reflections from a successful project
Recently, my team and I completed an improvement project. We took a slightly different approach and the journey was really fun. More importantly, we delivered on our key success metrics. I reflected on what made this journey different.
A quick little background for some context. I’m a Product Analyst at Vend, a cloud based retail platform. A few months ago, Jordan Lewis (Product Manager) and I formed Vend’s Inventory team. After thorough evaluation of our product’s health, customer satisfaction and future roadmap, we decided to completely re-design the Inventory Count feature.
So back to our project, here’s three things we did to make the journey a fun and rewarding one:
1. Eat your own dog food
Being a data driven company, we analysed quantitative and qualitative data ranging from product usage, support volumes, NPS (Net Promoter Score) feedback and retailer interviews. However, to really develop empathy for our retailer’s pain points, we had to experience it for ourselves.
Jordan and I went out to one of our retailers’s store to perform a physical inventory count using our own product. Spending half a day counting, we were incredibly frustrated. We constantly lost track of where we were up to as we needed to focus both on the physical counting and the app. Also, spending hours counting all of the store’s inventory felt like a huge effort.
We felt the pain and needed to fix it for our retailer’s sanity. If we hadn’t gone out, we wouldn’t have introduced ‘Partial counts’ to enable our retailers to choose a small portions of their inventory to count or a ‘Count history’ to keep track of their counts.
2. Design is a team sport
They say two heads are better than one. So why not put all of the team’s heads together? Our design team are made up of engineers, product designers, quality analyst, and support analyst. We got together for a co-design session where we came up with many concepts to re-design what an amazing experience would feel like for our customers. The co-design session was a very efficient way to draw out different ideas and we were also able to choose and combine the best elements from each concepts.
Furthermore, I believe it contributed to the team’s ownership of the solution and made self-organising possible. Each member of the team understood the reasons behind why each element of the designs were made. It led to a shared understanding of the end product, and everyone knew what needed to be done.
3. Get feedback early and often
Development did not start immediately. We took our lo-fi designs out to our retailers for their feedback. Then re-iterated a few more times to refine the designs before we started the engineering. This would’ve saved us reasonable amounts of re-work later on during beta.
Once the feature was beta-ready, we continued to get feedback and iterate. Getting beta users to test work in progress meant that we could get their constructive feedback on how they expected things to work, and it helped with prioritising work until the launch for general availability.
So to summarise, to have fun and deliver great results on your product improvement journey:
- Eat your own dog food
- Design is a team sport
- Get feedback early and often
