How to set a long-term goal and stay focused on what’s important to level up the team

Danwei Tran Luciani at UXDX Community: Using Comedy and AI Insights for Team Success. Video: https://youtu.be/PCqZLRBoues

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.

Introduction and my path from design to product

[00:00:00] Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, depending on where in the world you're tuning in from. I'm based in Stockholm, Sweden, so for me it is evening. It's very dark outside, but at least I'm happy to be here with you for a couple of minutes, or almost an hour and a half. Today I would like to share an approach that I used in a product design team to set up a long-term goal and stay focused on what's important to level up the team.

[00:00:28] My name is Danwei and I work in a cyber security company called Detectify. It was founded by Swedish people that are ethical hackers, and together with our users we're on a mission to make the internet more secure.

[00:00:45] I have worked with design for the past 15 years, wearing slightly different hats, but I took a pause with design around 2021 to try out the role as a product manager. That was before I went into a formal manager role as head of product design in March 2022. What I want to share with you today is something that I learned from these three different roles.

[00:01:18] The biggest change that I faced during these three changes in my timeline was not when I went from an individual contributor to a manager role. It was actually between going from design to product. If anyone thinks design is abstract and fluffy, let me tell you, it's nothing compared to product. When I first started as a product manager I was a bit shocked at how my days got filled with meetings, meetings and meetings, and I was sitting there wondering, when am I going to have that heads-down focus time and do my actual work?

[00:02:05] And then it hit me. Being in meetings was my work. It was in meetings when I was doing what I was supposed to do as a product manager. The meetings were when I got the time to communicate and create alignment between different people, and that was a big part of my role as a product manager: to make sure we were aligned, we stayed focused on what was most important, and made sure that we provided value to our users and customers. I needed to make sure that we knew what we were doing, that everybody was focused, and communicate that also broadly, and make sure that we were continuously moving toward the same goal.

The opportunity solution tree

[00:02:55] One tool that I learned to use as a product manager was something called an opportunity solution tree. An opportunity solution tree is something that is supposed to help map out product discovery, an attempt at approaching that in a structured and systematic way. I like it because it starts with why.

[00:03:20] At the top of your opportunity solution tree you're supposed to define your desired outcome. So what's the purpose of you being there together as a team? Below it you start defining all the different opportunities that you could pursue in order to try to reach that desired outcome.

[00:03:40] If we were to take an example, if a desired outcome is to, let's say, increase revenue — as a product manager we take the business side of things — one way to increase revenue, one opportunity, could be to raise prices. Another opportunity could be to increase customers. Another opportunity could be to make sure customers stay longer. So there are different kinds of opportunity in order to be able to reach a desired outcome. You map out your tree starting from the top going downwards.

[00:04:15] The idea with an opportunity solution tree is to do continuous discovery. By understanding more about your intended users you will start being able to populate this opportunity solution tree with more things and start coming up with potential solutions, turning user pain points into "how might we". If you hear a pain point you turn it into how might we solve it, and define it as a possible solution or as an opportunity.

[00:04:47] For each opportunity you break that down even further and start listing potential experiments, something that you can try out quickly together with the team and measure the impact, to understand if this is a promising experiment or solution that you should iterate further, or if it's time to leave that on the side and move on to another solution or potentially another opportunity branch.

[00:05:13] So this is the basics of an opportunity solution tree, and if you're interested in learning more, I know that Teresa Torres has written a book called Continuous Discovery that goes through this a little bit more in detail. She also has a website that I can share a link to, where she writes articles and blog posts about this approach.

[00:05:36] I like this tree because, like I mentioned, it starts with why, and then you can go downwards in the tree to get into something specific. It's also a nice way to use as a communication tool with stakeholders and also within the team, to explain why you're focusing on a specific experiment, on a specific part that you're working on at the moment, because you can always traverse upwards to explain why. If you're at a higher level you can traverse downwards to explain and give examples of how and what you're doing in order to try to reach that desired outcome.

[00:06:19] The strongest use case that I see with an opportunity solution tree is when you're using it collaboratively in the team, when you explore the different kinds of opportunity, when you try to link the solutions and experiments to really map out your opportunity tree, where you should spend your time and focus. I'll get back to this in a moment.

Designing the experience of being a designer at Detectify

[00:06:45] Back to this personal timeline of mine. An opportunity solution tree was what I learned during my time as a product manager, that I used together with a team. Looking again at this timeline, I also wanted to exemplify that I worked as a designer a lot longer before I started as head of product design. I've only been in a manager type of role for the past two years, so I still have a lot to learn.

[00:07:20] When I started in a manager role people started asking me, oh, don't you miss doing design? The answer I gave them was that I still see myself as a designer. Sure, I'm no longer designing our intended users' experiences of using our product or our services, but I'm still designing experiences. Right now I'm trying to design the best experience for our product designers working at Detectify.

[00:07:52] So I approached it the same way that I would with any design, by trying to understand their pain points, their needs, their wishes, trying to understand where we should focus our time to improve it, to make it nicer to be a product designer at Detectify. As designers we're trained to spot these areas of improvement, and we all have our toolkit of methods that we prefer to use. Personally I really like interviews, and I used to see our one-on-ones as a form of interviews where I could dig deeper and try to unpack long-term goals and dreams, and things that are even beyond their time here at Detectify.

The sailboat exercise

[00:08:40] Another tool that I learned to use as a designer was something called a sailboat exercise. The sailboat exercise is supposed to be done in collaboration in a team, so we did this as a kickoff in the product design team back when I started. We had these three areas for our sailboat exercise.

[00:09:05] The boat that you see represents the team, and the island to the right represents the goal, where we want to reach, where we want to sail towards. The first thing we did when we did a sailboat exercise was to think, what are our team's goals?

[00:09:25] The approach we took was to start off by having some individual thinking time, which is the way I like to start things even though it's in a collaborative setting. We each had a stack of Post-its and pens and time-boxed it for each and everyone to write down, what are our team's goals? When the time was up we shared it and put the Post-its up in this area.

[00:09:49] The second step in the exercise is to think about, what is the wind driving us closer to the goal? What are the things that are already in place that are already helping us move closer to our team's goals? Again, same approach: individual thinking time, write down on Post-its, and then when the time's up we share it and put it up in that area.

[00:10:14] The third step in this exercise is to think about, what are the anchors that are weighing us down? What are the things that we're missing, or what are the things that are making it more difficult for us to reach our team's goals? Why aren't we there yet? So again, time-box it, individual thinking time, and writing down on Post-its. When the time was up we shared what we'd written on the Post-its and then posted it up in the third area.

[00:10:46] And now we had these three groups of different types of Post-its focusing on answering these three questions.

[00:10:56] So what we did then was we started off looking at the posters in area one. We agreed on, okay, what are our team's goals, what is it that we all see is the most important desired outcome that we wanted to have? We created alignment on that. Then we moved on to the second area: what are the winds that are driving us closer to goals? Now this is mainly like a pat on the back, giving us a little bit of yay and cheer of the things that we already have in our disposal, and things that we're already great at and doing well.

[00:11:36] I think it's important to have these moments of celebration so we don't just stare blindly at the long, distant, faraway goal and only focus on trying to reach that, because reaching a goal is an extremely fleeting moment. We've got to make sure that the journey towards the goal is also enjoyable and something that we should appreciate. It's moments of learning and moments of improvement that are the things that we should be happy about, not just reaching a faraway goal. So I appreciate that we take time to give ourselves and each other a pat on the back. But there's no action point more than that for the posters in the second area.

[00:12:22] Now the Post-its in the third area are the pain points. That's where we should focus and take action on. And I love this. I love hearing about everything that is not working, about problems and issues. It gives me a little kick about trying to figure things out. I think it comes from when I used to do UX research and gather customer data and get it ready to create some sort of insights. It's like having puzzle pieces and being faced with a puzzle that's ready to be solved. It's super exciting.

Where our first attempt got stuck

[00:13:04] So this sailboat exercise was something that I used in my role as head of product design, but it was something that I already learned in my role as a designer. We thought we could bring all those pain points, map them out in an opportunity solution tree, and then figure out, okay, where should we focus our attention and try to make it better?

[00:13:30] But here's when we struggled. Here's where we hit a blocker in our approach. It was really hard for us to create a structure of all our pain points in a way that made sense, and this is the tricky part about opportunity solution trees. Depending on how you formulate the desired outcome, of course it will define how you structure the rest, and how you slice the different opportunities again affects what kind of experiments you will come up with.

[00:14:05] We didn't manage to come up with a structure where one Post-it didn't feel like it fit in in all places, or none at all. So we didn't manage to put these two together at this moment in time. But we had lots of pain points on Post-its, so at least we had that part. We didn't know how to proceed at that moment, so we paused for a bit.

The UX maturity assessment

[00:14:32] On a parallel track, because I had just entered the head of product design role, I also wanted to get a better sense of the UX maturity in the team. During one of our team times I asked everyone to take a UX maturity self-assessment test, and we took the one that's available on the NN Group website. The purpose of this was not just to get the result but also to use it as a discussion point, and to get everybody to talk about what they experience and see, okay, from this point of view, are there more things that we could identify as areas of improvement?

[00:15:18] This is the different levels, or different stages, of UX maturity according to NN Group. You can see the link there at the bottom that will take you to that UX maturity self-assessment. After you've answered that quiz you'll get the result, and that says that you're either in stage one, two, three, four, five or six.

[00:15:43] But it's also important to know that, okay, don't just stare and get fixated at stage number six. There are really great things happening in all of these stages, and when there's an organization change you might change stage as well. So again, not just focusing on the end goal, but appreciate and focus on the incremental improvements as well.

[00:16:09] So we took this assessment just to understand where we were, and try to figure out, okay, what are the things that we could try to make better depending on where we were at that moment? Our results came back and we all agreed that we were in stage three at that time.

[00:16:29] That meant that we were in an emerging state. We had some functional and promising things in place when it comes to design, but design work was done inconsistently and a bit inefficiently because we didn't have some of the basic processes and basic things in place yet.

[00:16:48] With that you also get some more details on things to consider, depending on which stage you end up in. For us, because we were in stage three, we were reading more about how to level up to stage four, and included in that description there were seven bullet points describing efforts to consider. For us it suggested: provide professional development for UX staff; create UX training for cross-functional roles; establish centralized UX resources; create a unified design principles document; share standardized processes; enhance collaboration; and have standardized design metrics to track and communicate improvements.

Putting the two tools together

[00:17:43] I decided I was going to take this and look into these seven areas further. But then when I started reading this, something hit me again. Just looking at the top part, how to level up to stage four — that sounded to me very much like a potential desired outcome. Reaching UX maturity level four could be a potential desired outcome.

[00:18:12] And then those seven bullet points sounded to me like they could be potential opportunities. So it could be formulated like: how might we upskill UX staff, how might we educate other roles, how might we centralize UX resources, how might we unify design principles, how might we standardize design processes, how might we enhance collaboration, how might we set quality metrics?

[00:18:37] So I decided to try this out. How about we take all the pain points coming from the sailboat exercise, try to again map out an opportunity solution tree to help us focus on what's important, but use the UX maturity assessment as the structure of the tree? And then maybe we could put it all together to level up the team.

[00:19:05] So we did it together as a product design team. We put UX maturity at the top of the tree, the seven bullet points as opportunities, and then we dumped all our pain points in there. But to be honest it was more like this amount of pain points, and it was quite a lot.

[00:19:27] This is a tip when you're doing an opportunity solution tree: don't do it on your own, because a tree that you create by yourself is usually only usable by yourself. Approaching this collaboratively is also the purpose of creating an opportunity solution tree. That's why we also gathered together as a team, started sorting it into the columns they belong to, grouped them, and then created labels as possible solutions, turning the pain points into "how might we" kind of phrasing.

[00:20:02] This is where we hit another celebratory moment, because we'd struggled for so long to find a structure of this opportunity solution tree that would make sense with our pain points, and this actually did. We were able to fit all the pain points into one of those categories and make sure that everything made sense for us.

How we worked with the tree week to week

[00:20:27] If I were to go through how we continuously worked with this it'll probably take another session, but I still want to describe in broad strokes how we moved forward after this. We gathered on a weekly basis to look at our opportunity solution tree together. We looked at any new pain points that we might have stumbled across and then turned them into ideas or experiments where they belong, in this solution and opportunity and the desired outcome.

[00:20:55] Then we would together as a team decide, okay, what are the most important things that we want to focus on now? And then we would mark them, create Jira tickets, so whenever a product designer had some extra time to pick up something from this kind of work they could go ahead, because we had already agreed that this was something we wanted to focus on as a team. As time went on we could check them off as done, and we decided to keep them in the tree also as a visual representation, as a pat on the back, to see that hey, we're actually making progress. So we don't only have an opportunity solution tree that is a forever-growing to-do list.

[00:21:42] This is where we got at one point in time, and I would love to say that we reached maturity level four, but we didn't when we stopped, because it takes time. Also, to be honest, since July last year I've been working as VP of Product, so this hasn't been my main focus in a while. But this is actually the snapshot of where we got to after a year of working with this opportunity solution tree, so this represents our actual progress in the product design team up to July last year.

[00:22:19] So this is what I wanted to share with you: how we used a UX maturity assessment result as a base for an opportunity solution tree in order to map out all the pain points that we got from our sailboat exercise, in order to approach something that was important for us all, but focus on what was important for us collectively and make progress towards a desired outcome, which for us was to level up to stage four. That is still something out there in the horizon, but we're happy that we made progress up until July last year at least.

[00:22:59] If this is something you think is interesting, I'll be happy to bounce ideas, or I'll be happy to hear if you've done something similar or something completely different, just to hear how you make sure that your team stays focused and continuously makes improvements towards a shared long-term goal. And with that I will say thank you for listening and for your time, and I will hand it back to you.

Q&A

[00:23:26] Host: Amazing, thank you so much. There are a few questions, so I want to try and get through them quickly because I really like all of them. Nice intro for someone looking to move into a product management role. What advice would you give me, where to start?

[00:23:44] Danwei: Oh wow, that's difficult without knowing more about your personal journey.

[00:23:50] Host: Maybe reflect on your personal journey of how you did it.

[00:23:55] Danwei: Yeah, I guess I slipped on a banana peel more than anything. I worked as a product designer at Detectify to start off with, and then I wanted to try something new, and there was a product manager role available within the company, so I moved within the company to try the product manager role. But I think it goes without saying that I was showing things that were desired in the product manager role. So I would say informal leadership is something that you could try to exemplify in your current role, even without formal leadership training. It's not needed. It's to be able to show how you influence other people in different ways, and you just have to find your personal way of exemplifying that, because that's something that's very desirable in the product manager, at least that was here at Detectify.

[00:24:48] Host: Yeah, love it. Teresa Torres is a central part and you've mentioned her. From my perspective, people think of Teresa Torres, they think of product, whereas in fact it's all about UX and research and design, so it's kind of similar to your angle, and people kind of forget that there are so many synergies. Another question that's really great: can you use opportunity solution trees at all levels, C-suite to junior?

[00:25:22] Danwei: Yeah, I guess you could use it on a personal level as well. I think Teresa Torres has an example either on her blog or in the book where she takes a personal example, like if you want to have fun. If the desired outcome is to have fun, what could you possibly do? Or if you want to experience something new during your vacation — I'm making that up — that could also be something that you can hash out either by yourself, if it's only something that affects you, or even with your partner or family. It could be a fun exercise.

[00:25:58] Host: Definitely. And how do you define the anchors, how should you define the anchors?

[00:26:06] Danwei: So you had a think — no, no, the anchors in terms of...

[00:26:10] Host: Yeah, sorry, continue.

[00:26:13] Danwei: No, no, thanks for clarifying. I don't do those things extremely structured, as in you have to write it in this way or that way. I rather keep it very open, because that opens up new ways and opens up discussion, because the point is for everyone to share. If you give too structured instructions you might miss out on all those other pain points that somebody might be experiencing but that don't fit into that way of formulating it. So I'm just keeping it very open, those questions. That's pretty much the only instruction I share when I do the sailboat exercise.

[00:26:56] Host: Yeah, fantastic. And what blogs or resources do you use to keep connected with everything? What do you like?

[00:27:05] Danwei: Oh, what do I like? I read a lot of books, but books take time before they get written and published. So I haven't found my venue where I really get heads down. Also, for the past year I've been working with product, so I try to listen to podcasts, I try to read Medium, and I also subscribe to different kinds of newsletters. Now I'm really bad at remembering any of those names, but there's one, TLDR kind of newsletters, like "too long, didn't read", and it has different kinds of topics that you can subscribe to, like product, design, AI. That's one of my go-tos.

[00:27:56] Host: Really great, oh fantastic, thank you for that. We're out of time. That was really amazing, Danwei, really valuable and logical in terms of the flow for how people can execute, so thank you so much for that.

[00:28:07] Danwei: Thank you, we'll talk to you soon.