Vision and strategy: Conversations

The Conversations product has had over 1 million people create over 6.3 million pieces of content in 4 short years, with a client list that includes global technology firms using the product as their main performance development tool. Despite the success of Conversations, market research as well as business imperatives and a competitive landscape meant that we had to shift into a new mode in order to continue the growth of the product. Therefore, with my leadership and facilitation skills, I took the lead on helping the team to define 3 main areas: Product vision & strategy, a product development structure that we called Sprint Blocks, and an outcome based roadmap.

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My role

• As a senior member of the Conversations team, I took the lead on establishing the need to define our vision and strategy, and therefore became a single point of focus for the process.

• Extensive market, landscape and trends research to help inform executive stakeholders about our current position and future growth areas.

• Designed and facilitated multiple complex workshops to give voice to all interested parties on Conversations in relation to our vision and strategy.

• Exhaustive data analysis, affinity mapping and blending of multiple sources of data to ensure those on the team were educated as much as possible before making informed decisions.

• Collaborated with all interested stakeholders, removed blockers and critically found creative space in which a design thinking, outcome based approach was facilitated by the business.

• Worked with other areas of the business such as engineering, product management and executives to get buy-in for the outcomes of this work.

• Worked with marketing, branding among others to socialise the outcomes and outputs of these workshops to drive greater business alignment.

• When outputs where defined, I went on a listening tour to share the vision for the product, and educate others on this new way of working.

Key activities I led

1. Design thinking: I was able to leverage design thinking methodolgies to help get a better understand the problem we faced on the team, as well as propose a process for solving it.

2. Leadership: I was able to lead the design team through a trying time and support the development team in re-establishing a sense of worth and identity.

3. Empathy: I was able to build and maintain relationships with executives, product managers, and developers, emphasising the importance of achieving a more human and empathetic approach to product design.

4. Adaptability: I was able to adapt to changes in the development lifecycle, from the traditional development cycle to a more executive and stakeholder-driven process.

5. Persuasion: Using my skills and leadership, I was successfully able to carve out time in our busy calendars to go through this important process.

6. Macro-awareness: I was able to leverage my experience and skills to understand the context in which we were operating as a team, a company and an industry to begin a process of business change.

7. Growth: By providing a framework for how and why we worked on the Conversations team, I was able to give clarity for career direction to juniors on my team.

Design Process

In leading the transformation of the Conversations product, I followed a rather traditional product design process of discover, define, develop and deliver. Starting with extensive market research and collaborative workshops, I facilitated a design-thinking approach to define the product vision, strategy, and a unique Sprint Blocks development structure. Leveraging empathy, collaboration, and adaptability, I engaged stakeholders across the company, addressing challenges and ensuring alignment. The outcome was a clear, crowdsourced roadmap reflecting user-centric outcomes. The process fostered team unity, re-establishing identity and purpose, exemplifying a successful application of design leadership in a complex organisational context.

Skills utilised

• Empathy

• Collaboration

• Facilitation

• Leadership

• Growth mindset

• Product management

• Design thinking

• Agile methodology

• Communication

Key outputs and outcomes:

• Product vision, strategy and team structure that is reflective of company goals and objectives

• Sprint blocks product development process.

• An outcome drive product roadmap

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In depth details

Introduction

After an unexpectedly extended period of doing spec work for a large client, the Conversations team members began to feel a loss of identity and lack of clarity on the future of the product. Couple this with a shifting macro environment as well as shifting business objectives, there existed an opportunity to rethink the future of the Conversations product, why we existed as a team, as well as how we worked.

Objective

Given this opportunity, we soon understood that as a team we had a new goal. Define the vision and strategy for the Conversations product that would help unlock growth, generate revenue and increase team happiness.

Challenges

But rather than simply achieve these objectives though direct talks with our executive team, I saw an opportunity to take a design led approach. The biggst challenge with taking this approach was building trust, getting enough time in our busy schedules to hold the workshops and convincing others that this was the best way forward. I had to use my experience and collaboration skills to help our leaders see that first, there existed a problem and second that we should follow the approach I was advocating. Thankfully, after a long listening tour and taking as much feedback onboard as possible, we were able to overcome this first hurdle and got leadership buy-in.

Approach

With our executive team bought-in to a design-led approach, I began to craft the series of workshops that would help us to achieve 3 key outcomes.

1. Product vision and strategy

2. Product development structure

3. Outcome defined roadmap

I used various sources of inspiration and collaboration, including the help of other designers on the team to create a multi-day workshop that included exercises such as the poster exercise, problem statement generation, crazy-eights, etc to document the things that we needed.

This was very much a team collaboration where I facilitated and done the data analysis / affinity mapping in preparation for the next workshop. Executives we included in many of the workshops to ensure their voice was part of the process and that this design-led approach didn't feel alien to them

Results

After this series of workshops had been complete, I began to analyse all of the data that I had. I created a series of outputs that could be shared with everyone on the team which would become living documents. Below are the outputs themselves

1 - Product vision and strategy:
This document outlined why the team existed, how the mission of the team fit into that of the company, how we would achieve company goals as well as a rational as to the internal team structure. This got immediate buy-in from the team as they had much more clarity on their work, the future and why they work.

2 - Product development structure:
As the team had been working on spec for in the previous months, they felt that it was extremely important that we created a new product development structure that worked for us and that was outcome based. Furthermore, senior leadership needed clarity on how these outcomes would be achieved and that chasing an outcome wouldn't become a time-sink. Therefore, Sprint Blocks as we called it combined the speed and iterative nature of Agile, the outcome led approach of designing as well as time box to give our leaders certainty. Coupled with this process, we created a set of education materials that we would share with other that helps explain how we work, and how it would operate.

3 - Outcome defined roadmap:
If creating a vision and strategy was important, as well as creating a process of how we would work, then so to were the things that the team would be working on. Previously, the team would be given a problem with a partially defined solution to explore and implement from senior management, but that as changed thanks to my ability to shift us away from outputs and focus on outcomes. I facilitated separate sessions with executives to document the outcomes they would like to achieve in the coming year, and documented those into tangible outcomes that would then be parsed to a business model canvas the team could iterative up.

Learnings

When this process was complete, there were a lot of things that I knew I could have done differently but in general the process was successful. The team regained their identity and reason for existing. Executive leaders were happy as their voices were heard in the process. I used every piece of my experience to first get space for the team to do this, but also to bring people along on the journey with us. As this was much more focused on product management, I had to be careful not to be seen as infringing on the work of others. In retrospect, I would have included product management more in the process at the beginning.

Conclusion

This was a massive undertaking, but one that I'm grateful to have done. The goal was to define a vision and strategy, but in reality the goal was to create team unity. We definitely achieved this as the rollout process for these outcomes has been smooth and without issue. Of course there is always room for improvement but feedback is being sought at every stage. A real indicator of the success of this process is if other teams would do the same? Thankfully, I have been working with 2 other teams in Workhuman to run the same thing with them which is a real mark of success.