Aligning Change with the Product and the Team

Magda Griffiths at UXDX Community: Australia. Video: https://youtu.be/mNA3LOa_k6s

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Product management and UX

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, thanks for joining. My name is Magda Griffiths and I'm a senior product manager. I've been working in product management for the last 15 years, crafting cross-platform digital experiences. I've worked for the likes of ninemsn, News Corp and Federal Publishing, I've run a number of product management courses through General Assembly, and for the last five years I've been working at eBay Classifieds Group within Gumtree Australia. I started in design, then marketing. Early in my career I started out as a graphic designer. I created websites in the early 2000s, before UX was really a thing, and I moved into various marketing roles before finding my feet in product.

[00:00:48] What I love most about product management is that it's a diverse role which solves problems. For those that may not know what product management is, it's the intersection of customer experience, business functions and technology. In my role I'm responsible for balancing the business's long-term strategy with short-term wins, and ensuring the products and features we deliver are usable and desirable to the customer, feasible to build by the technology team, and viable for the business.

[00:01:30] I'm often asked how user experience professionals and product managers fit and what role they have in business. Both are closely connected to the product and to parts of the product development process. They do indeed overlap, but here are the differences. Broadly speaking, product managers and user experience professionals both use the human-centered design approach to problem solving, which is a process that starts with people and ends with solutions. In a nutshell, user experience professionals focus on designing the end-to-end, while product managers are responsible for setting the vision and strategy and managing the communications between the various stakeholders, and we also own the roadmap.

[00:02:24] In this presentation I'll share how you can foster change within a business and balance customer needs to deliver results for your business. At its core, I'll provide some frameworks for how you can influence people and processes to deliver value.

Human-centered design and change agents

[00:02:41] To inspire change within an organization and within various teams, the human-centered and design thinking approach can be used. This shouldn't be too unfamiliar to you, and it may not be the solution, but it is a good starting point, because it allows you to empathize and view the world through a person's or a team's eyes. It can uncover pain points, perceptions and feelings, and help us understand why certain things are carried out a certain way. It also helps build rapport within the team. If you're a UX professional, you're already doing this. However, instead of seeking customer feedback, when applying the human-centered approach here you're getting team feedback or an individual employee's feedback to validate various assumptions or problems you may have observed.

[00:03:43] In my experience, a number of change agents generally come together. It's not just one person working as a lone soldier. Generally, if you're trying to instill change quite broadly within an organization, these change agents come together and they're identified by a leadership team. They have the ability to mobilize people around them, to rally around the company values and purpose, and they create momentum through action and help scale and sustain change. They can come from the inside or outside of an organization to transform how it operates.

[00:04:26] If a number of change agents have been identified, you should be working together as a group to align on the assumptions and questions you want to ask your teams and colleagues. You want to begin by building empathy, and keep in mind that bringing about change is a group effort, and it also has to have support from the leadership team.

The double diamond applied to ways of working

[00:04:51] You may be familiar with the double diamond. For those who may not know it, the double diamond model is a design process consisting of two overarching stages. The first diamond focuses on the problem and understanding the why, while the second diamond looks for a solution. Each half of a diamond covers a step, so there are four steps: discovery, definition, development and delivery. Both diamonds have divergent and convergent thinking.

[00:05:32] Divergent thinking is to go wild, and go wide as well, with your ideas and challenge assumptions. This should be done with a group or with teams, and there should be no constraints: an open discussion about what the key problems are. A good way to kick-start the lateral thinking is to ask "what" questions. An example of a what question could be: what action needs to change to make you feel XYZ? Or what would great look like? And so on. Convergent thinking represents the opposite. It's about choosing the best ideas and focusing on the most promising solutions.

[00:06:18] Remember that there are four quadrants in the double diamond. In the first step, discovery, we carry out qualitative research by speaking to people. The second is to narrow and synthesize the discoveries of the problem to draw insight. This is the define step. We'd define the problem as a problem statement from a product perspective, but here you do it as a problem statement from a team's perspective.

[00:06:50] The second diamond puts a spotlight on the solution. In the UX world this is a sketch or a prototype, but here, rather than a sketch or a prototype, it might be a way of working or a change in a process. Again, you can go wide and explore potential solutions, and use the hypotheses to guide the ideation process. To synthesize problems and ideas, the framework I like to use is the affinity diagram. This tool helps organize data and ideas into groups and themes of similar items, and again this should be a group effort. It really emphasizes that it's not one person trying to bring this change; by bringing people along on that journey, you also get their buy-in.

[00:07:43] We can take these ideas or themes, learn, iterate and repeat until we get to the last quadrant. That's when we hope we get it right, and that's the delivery side, bringing it into your team. By this point you should have found the right solution to the problem you're trying to solve, and the deliver step of the double diamond is where the final idea is taken to the team's rituals, or to a particular expectation of how the team should work.

[00:08:14] Something to note is that your first solution likely won't be your final one. This is a continuous and iterative process. A solution may create problems, and problems will change as the team changes and evolves. A new person starts, and that changes the dynamics of the team; it can bring a new set of challenges. So the idea is to have a foundation but continuously add and finesse, just like you do in your workplace with any feature that you're working on.

Lean: build, measure, learn

[00:08:52] This is the lean process of product development. Lean is essentially the premise that you can put ideas forward to a team. Generally this could be an MVP of some sort, but it could be an idea or a way of working that you want to try. It's always try before you buy. You agree with the team how long you want to give something a try, and then assess it. You can assess it through a team retrospective, if you're working in an agile environment that uses Scrum, or you can set up a separate meeting to see: did this work or didn't it? Do we continue? If we do, how can we improve it?

[00:09:41] You're unlikely to nail it the first time around, but that can actually work in your favor, because again it brings people on that journey. It brings in member input and allows for variations in the idea, which is likely to get some steam, and then it becomes a problem for the team to solve, so you're not on your own. Continuous improvement seeks incremental improvement over time.

[00:10:10] When we talk about lean, we ultimately mean three key steps: build, measure and learn. To bring about better ways of working with product and development teams, you can also apply these steps. Here's how. Rather than building a product or an MVP, you implement a way of working. It might be an idea from the change agents that is agreed upon for a particular trial, say for four weeks. Then you measure the team's reactions, get that feedback, observe the behaviors, learn from this, and use what you've learned to build something better, or, as part of that change process, make it better.

[00:10:57] Seek feedback to understand how you can further optimize. Keep in mind, though, that while positive feedback is great, it's the negative feedback that has the potential to provide valuable insights for change. Learning comes from getting the data and feedback from your teammates and from the broader group. Iterate and repeat this process until you get it right. You will find a sweet spot for ways of working within teams. If not, it's back to the drawing board, and this is going to be a long process.

Change takes time and understanding

[00:11:37] I've been with various organizations for many years, and it takes time for individuals and groups of people to adapt to change. Right now, with COVID and working from home, that has been one of the biggest changes we have seen, particularly for new starters. They don't have the same relationships, maybe the same backbone to go in and do things. So how do we empower them to feel like they can make a change or make certain improvements? Each team will have a preference on how they work, especially if you're working with tribes or pods or whatever your organization calls it, and the dynamics and backgrounds of different people will also vary.

[00:12:44] The frameworks I'm showing you will not necessarily work for every team, but it's about taking the best learnings and sharing those across the organization to see how you can bring about change. When we bring about change, it doesn't happen overnight. You won't break down walls and barriers, but it's about sprinkling influence and, as I mentioned, bringing people on that journey, and ultimately connecting it back to the business's vision and objectives.

[00:13:22] The other thing that's really important is to understand what each team member does, what role they play within that team or pod or tribe, and what they're responsible for. Having a team effort also brings about ownership, by saying, I'm responsible for X, Y and Z, and everyone is aware of that. The other thing is understanding each department's remit. In cross-functional teams we're likely working with analysts, developers, product and so forth, but understand what each of those silos has as its core objective, maybe for the year or for the quarter too. Sometimes they're not necessarily aligned within the organization, or they're specific to that particular department.

[00:14:15] For instance, the development team may have a goal of reducing the time it takes for a page or an app to load. But someone in marketing or advertising may have a partner in mind, and they want us to include that partner's code on the site for spend optimization or to help the ad network. Well, that can actually add to page speed; it increases load time. Recognizing the disconnect between these will help everyone in the team understand each other's motivation or hesitation towards a particular idea or initiative that has been brought forward to the team.

Share and visualize the work

[00:15:07] As a product manager, I'm responsible for keeping cross-functional teams together, and I use various tools to communicate initiatives and priorities. We use project management tools to communicate with our team and stakeholders. These shouldn't be foreign: they include spreadsheets, project management software and roadmap tools. Some are free, such as Trello, and they're great for ideating, prioritizing, communicating and sharing. So share these with your team and with the broader group; don't keep them to yourself. Again, that helps bring about change: that transparency, that vulnerability, that it's a work in progress.

[00:15:57] Share it and visualize it. It helps communicate what you're doing and what the team is doing, it helps with collaboration, and it really brings people on that journey. I can't emphasize that enough. Communicate it, share it electronically, talk about it at any opportunity that you have. Make it heard.

Recommended books

[00:16:26] To wrap up, there are some books that I recommend. Scaling Lean by Ash Maurya: this book is targeted at building successful products, but the case studies and systems thinking can be applied to many parts of the business. It emphasizes the importance of being customer-centric and carrying out rigorous testing methods, and it ensures that you're focusing on the right thing. The one in the middle is Walking the Talk by Carolyn Taylor. This book covers culture and how you measure culture to change people's behavior. It emphasizes inclusion and collaboration to achieve the desired work.

[00:17:20] The last one is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, who are ex-Navy SEALs and are now leadership consultants. This book may not appeal to everyone, but there are interesting leadership principles which can be applied to a business setting. For example, taking responsibility for yourself, which might be taking responsibility for explaining a mission and developing certain tactics to achieve goals. It also instills how teams can feel empowered to walk the talk, own things and see things through. So those are three books I recommend reading, or listening to.

[00:18:07] My time is up. Thank you for having me, and thanks to UXDX for hosting. My name is Magda Griffiths. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you thought via LinkedIn or Twitter. My handles are in the slide deck below. Thank you.