Product and Team Alignment

Magda Griffiths, Mandy Michael, Rory Madden, Maria Edwards at UXDX Community: Australia. Video: https://youtu.be/5gE_nlLukm4

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.

Introductions: what team means to Mandy

[00:00:00] Rory: I'd like to introduce this panel. We're going to be talking about product and team alignment, because one of the biggest challenges that a lot of companies and teams face is how you make sure that all of the team are heading in the same direction and working towards the same goals. To start off, I'd like to get the panel to introduce themselves. We have Mandy Michael, Magda Griffiths and Maria Edwards, as Jovie [?] mentioned. So can we start with you, Mandy? Can you give a quick introduction to yourself? And while you're at it, can you describe, when we say team, what team means to you?

[00:00:38] Mandy: Sure. Hello, I'm Mandy. There's a slight thing with my work at the moment. I used to be the dev manager at Seven West Media in Western Australia up until a couple of weeks ago. Now I'm a software engineer at a company called Hireup. So what team is for me, because I'm in this transition between two different companies: at my previous work, where I was the development manager, the team for me was one big team. We were basically the product team. We had developers and designers and product managers and data and insights and testers, and everyone was in one group, and we all worked together towards a roadmap that we would work out together every quarter.

[00:01:35] And then we would work with other areas of the business, like sales and marketing and editorial. Seven West Media, which I failed to mention, is a news organization, just in case you didn't know. In Western Australia we focused on newspapers, but the digital versions of those, so that was super duper fun. At my current work it's a little bit different, because there are a lot more people. There is still one big product team that consists again of designers and developers and managers, but because there are a lot more people, it's also grouped into smaller teams that you work with day to day, that focus on specific areas or problems for the business.

[00:02:18] So depending on what their requirements are, you'll focus on that and get really deep into it. For me, I'm currently going through this thing of thinking about the pros and cons of both of those setups, because I think there are benefits and there are negatives to both. But I think it's inevitable: the bigger a team gets, the more likely you are to split them up. So I guess that's where I'm at with what a team is and what I do right now.

Maria and Magda introduce themselves

[00:02:48] Rory: Great. We'll probably dive a bit deeper into those differences as we go through today. Same question to Maria.

[00:02:58] Maria: Oh, sorry. Hi everyone. Myself, it's been a wayward journey. I've been an art director in the past, and then dabbled in starting my own business after exploring what UX was back in 2014, and have since, fortunately, been across a couple of great companies, working at CBA and Exetel, and now with Woolworths and their digital arm, WooliesX, as a senior UX manager there. It's been a journey of over three years there now. They started back in 2017, and the team itself has largely grown and ballooned over the last year because of the demand we've obviously seen in retail, and the efforts around the community at the moment to support essential services.

[00:03:56] The team itself has grown, in my direct practice, the UX practice, and also in the other practices, like the product and development teams. So it's really just ballooned over the last couple of years. To us, when we're looking at teams, it's really people who are working towards a shared goal, and bringing along their own capabilities and expertise to work towards that goal. With our teams in Woolworths and WooliesX, the ecosystem itself is so large that we're actually really working towards a culture, and still maturing around that: how do we work better, how do we engage each other, and also, particularly at this time, where it's quite distributed as well.

[00:04:53] Rory: Great. That's interesting; we've got a bit of a difference, so that's going to make for great conversation, hopefully, as we go through. And finally, Magda, can I get you to introduce yourself as well, please?

[00:05:05] Magda: Yeah, hi everyone. I'm a senior product manager at eBay Classifieds Group. I work with Gumtree Australia. eBay Classifieds Group is made up of many brilliant brands internationally. For instance, in Canada there's a site called Kijiji, in the Netherlands there's Marktplaats, Gumtree UK for the UK side, and so forth. Over the years eBay's been acquiring various classified sites, and Gumtree sits under that umbrella. I'm responsible for shaping the experiences that connect buyers and sellers, as well as brands and advertisers, with our customers, using data, messaging and other forms of technology. I work with the leadership team as well as my cross-functional team.

[00:06:00] As we are a global organization, we do work individually as Gumtree Australia, but globally our goals are pretty much defined. That has taken years for the company to do. I've been working at Gumtree for the last five years, and I can't say that there is a stop. That evolution will continue. Transformation and change will always happen, no matter what stage the organization is at, whether it's at a startup stage, or mature, or acquired and part of a merger or acquisition.

[00:06:43] We're also a matrix organization. That means that we do work in cross-functional teams, broadly speaking: product, design, UX, analytics perhaps. But we also have within those teams representatives from the broader organization. So a team will have a sales representative, a couple of people from the sales team, if that team is rallied around goals for sales, for instance. Same with marketing, and so on. The reason we work that way is just to bridge that communication channel. If they come along to the Agile and Scrum ceremonies, those team members hear it directly from a developer. They don't have to go through a filtered process. That process has occurred within the last two years, and I've been part of the change agent group to help bring along that change within the business.

How business goals are set: OKRs

[00:07:57] Rory: Great. That sounds really good. I love going even broader out to the wider business, because a lot of times you have that product owner or product manager who becomes a barrier or a filter.

[00:08:10] Magda: Exactly.

[00:08:12] Rory: You mentioned the business goals. How are the business goals defined for your team? Who sets them, and how much input does the team have?

[00:08:21] Magda: We work with OKRs, which are objectives and key results. The objective is the broad goal. A key result is something specific that we want to achieve within that. For those that may not know, the analogy I use is that the broad goal may be renovating a home, and the key result might be doing up the kitchen; another one is doing the floors, and so forth. Teams are based around those. If we delve deeper into the kitchen analogy, you need the plumbing, you need sinks, the drawers and everything else that comes in. And the teams are responsible for that side.

[00:09:06] So we know that we need to build a kitchen, and that comes from leadership. The leadership team will say, "Yes, look, we're building a kitchen. This is the funding or resources or whatever we have. This is, broadly speaking, what we hope to achieve." And the team sets out, and at that point they have the ownership to make the decisions and make recommendations back up: "Well, you know what? It's actually better for us if we move the plumbing from one wall to the other, because that will enable blah blah blah." So the teams are empowered to work in those ways. So it's both top-down and bottom-up.

[00:09:51] Rory: Great. And Maria or Mandy, are there any differences? Do you use OKRs? When we're talking to people, OKRs just seem to be becoming an industry standard at this stage. Are there any differences in your teams, Maria or Mandy?

[00:10:07] Maria: No, a lot of relatable synergy with what Magda touched on. The difference I think we've seen, because we're maturing, is that we're now setting those goals a lot closer in the year. We constantly assess. We always have an assessment of whether we are tracking to those goals, and whether we need to reassess or change the direction of whatever we've just launched. We constantly look at that analysis and reset what those goals might be, and then, if we need to, cycle that up to our leadership team and talk it through. So we have lots of checks and balances within the team to make sure we're on track.

[00:10:53] Mandy: Yeah, I would say it's very similar in both the teams that I've worked in recently. One thing that might be interesting, though, is that when I first started at Seven West Media in WA, there was no real web or digital product team. When I started, the team was being made. So at that early stage, a lot of the goals and decisions were actually driven by the team itself, because they'd never had a product team focusing on technology in that regard, so they weren't really sure what direction to head in. And all of the people in the business who had that knowledge, experience and background were in that product team. So in the early days it was very much driven by us in the product team.

[00:11:41] Then, as time went on, we were able to meet some initial goals that we had set, and we moved to aligning more with broader business goals. Much like Maria and Magda have said, you have the goal that you want to head to, and then the team would say, "Okay, well, we can accomplish that by doing this, or by doing this, and this is how we will do it." So yeah, I think it's very similar. But I do think it's interesting, when you think about the early days of setting up a product team in a company, how they can start by driving everything, and then assimilate into the business and become a bigger part of a whole.

Marrying user goals with business objectives

[00:12:26] Rory: Right. That was a really interesting, organic way. But when it's coming from the top down, I've seen a lot of teams given very heavily business objectives. What I mean by that is: this quarter we want to get 100,000 sign-ups, or we want to make X million, or whatever the objective would be. And as a team, and I'll give this one to you, Maria: from a user experience point of view, how do you fight for the user's goals and marry them with the business objectives?

[00:13:01] Maria: Yeah, I think in Instacart [?], when we started, it was really about us identifying what those were and measuring them back in wider ceremonies, where we talk about "this is what our users require of our products and services," and identifying them, because we only really started our digital business back around 2015. So we were really trying to understand, firstly, the lay of the land: how our experience and products and services would drive a longer customer life cycle and engagement as they shop.

[00:13:42] Now that we are learning a lot more about our customers, we constantly have an always-on research team, and we are constantly looking at the data we're receiving, whether it be from our customer hub agents through to the research that we conduct week to week, which is really fantastic. I think we've really matured in that area, where we are constantly assessing our customers, and then we have real ceremonies where we support and socialize this information. It might be through a fortnightly showcase, really linking it back to specific experiments that we're testing, back to initiatives or programs that the teams are working on.

[00:14:37] That makes it really clear and transparent whether we are understanding what the customers are experiencing, and reading between the lines of what we don't know about them as yet. Because, coming from COVID, we onboarded a lot of new online customers, and we were seeing trending behaviors that were shifting because of that. So we were able to step change some of that and really introduce it back into our overall strategy. As much as possible we do this in real time, and having an always-on research team really helps drive that transparency, back to the strategy.

[00:15:25] Rory: And when you come up with that... So the team is continuously researching, they discover something that's unexpected and new, and it's going to be big for the plans that you already have. What kind of process do you have for that? You were saying socializing it, but how do you actually turn that into action?

[00:15:48] Maria: Yeah, we have forums across the teams. It really is driven by our research, whether it's the data that I mentioned earlier or the analytics team. We partner constantly with other practices within the business to understand that. One of the key actionable things we do is bring that real-time data back to our end-to-end customer journeys, for example. We have this artifact that we continually communicate back to the teams: are we addressing and investing the right amount of money across areas of the business that we know are changing, or across the projects that we're currently working on? That's one area that we constantly address and bring back to our teams.

[00:16:42] And then there's the strategy. There's tactical and there's long-term strategy. For long-term strategy, we work with our partners in the business to understand a benchmark assessment of customer behavior and really map back to what customers are doing. Is it changing? Can we improve our products and services based on their behaviors? And really model what the next project focus is for our products and services.

Keeping everyone aligned on the OKRs

[00:17:15] Rory: Okay, thanks, that's really insightful on your internal processes. Magda, you mentioned that you have the OKRs coming down from management, and then you also have the bottom-up feedback about what's happening with your users. How do you ensure everybody's aligned? How do you make sure that everybody in the team is very clear on what the OKRs are, and equally on sharing and bubbling those insights up?

[00:17:42] Magda: Yeah, it's very similar to Maria. We have certain rituals where we open up with "the team's purpose is to increase users," or whatever the KR is. We use showcases for that. There are ideation sessions, and online forums, Slack channels and so forth. In terms of how we get that alignment: that alignment is actually global as well. Whilst the KRs may change between teams, fundamentally our goal is to make buyers and sellers successful. So as long as we're doing things that enable users, sellers and buyers to do that, that meets our key objective. And we've really summed it up to five or so KRs that the organization globally is really focusing on.

[00:18:53] That was established by leadership. But to get to that, it wasn't just "Oh, we should be doing this." There was a lot of input from customers, a lot of input from our analytics team, from finance, but also ensuring that it aligns with our long-term strategy. So it was a number of factors, a number of workshops. It was not something that happened in one meeting. And stepping back, those five key OKRs are actually the same year on year. The numbers might change, but overall they've been the same for the five years I've been there. Fundamentally, they've been there.

[00:19:46] We've also done a number of training sessions. One was around the metric that matters, to get that alignment and to bring people along on those journeys. That also helped the team that communicates back up understand how these came about, the why, the story behind it, and also the background thinking on why those metrics are important.

Alignment when working remotely

[00:20:18] Rory: Great. One thing I just want to touch on, because that alignment is really challenging. I'll give this one to Mandy, because you've jumped between teams. I'm not sure, actually, because Australia's doing quite well in terms of coronavirus, but are you remote? Is being remote harder for getting alignment?

[00:20:38] Mandy: I will answer that question, but I just wanted to say one thing about the goals, if that's okay. When people talk about goals, you always think about the big things that you're aiming for. But one of the things I always used to talk to the developers and designers in the team about, and just generally in the communities I'm a part of, is that when you're aiming for those big goals and you want everyone to be aligned, that's great, especially when you want to address the user needs. But any time you do something, whether it's focusing on the user or on your business goal, you can improve something for the user or for the business, even if it's just a small thing.

[00:21:19] Because if you're developing something or building something, there are always little things that you can improve, and sometimes those tiny little things you improve as part of a larger goal can actually have a really, really big impact. So I think you can weave a lot of smaller things, as a contributor in the actual team, into the goals you're trying to accomplish for the business. I think that's a really good way for people to feel like they're contributing and be aligned, and to feel like they can actually improve something that's really bothered them for a really long time, as part of whatever the larger goal is.

[00:21:56] But on the remote thing: yeah, Australia has been okay. Perth in particular, in Western Australia, has not really had a problem until, ironically, just this week, when we went into lockdown. But we've been totally fine since the middle of last year. When we did go into lockdown early last year, I would say as a dev manager it was very, very difficult, because I was so used to working with people face to face. I think all of my experience of trying to get people aligned was face to face. So being suddenly thrown into that environment and trying to work through it was quite difficult and quite challenging.

[00:22:45] It was hard, but you just get used to it and you find ways to work through it. When coronavirus became a thing, there was an influx of resources that you could go and look at to help you if you didn't really know. But yeah, I would say it did impact us. What we actually ended up doing, because it was just a short time for us here in WA, was shift what our goals were. We focused on things that were more task-based, rather than the ideation and things where you might work face to face. So for us it was easier to deal with, because we just shifted what we were aiming for.

[00:23:28] It was very stressful and everyone was having a hard time, so trying to get people to come up with big ideas and solve complicated problems was a bit of a cognitive overload, I think. So our strategy was to focus on tasks and things that we knew how to do, and work through a bunch of that stuff. And that's still valuable, obviously, because the business still needs those things to be done. That was how we managed it. I definitely found it challenging as a manager, and I know the team found it difficult as well.

[00:23:58] If I had to do it long-term, like now, I'm full-time remote. There are a lot more different strategies you can employ. The company I work at now, with me being full-time remote, has regular ceremonies and meetings to share that, and they're very good at documentation, and the communication is a lot more asynchronous. So it's not that difficult to align people remotely if you need to, and there are a lot of resources out there to help you if you're new to it, I guess.

[00:24:38] Rory: Yeah, and I'm currently in Europe, so we've been in lockdown literally for a year now. We're all coming to terms with how to try to get alignment, because we have to. You just figure it out, right?

[00:24:51] Mandy: Yeah.

Alignment at scale across squads

[00:24:52] Rory: One thing I want to touch on is scale. There's one thing about aligning an individual product team, but in large organizations, and Magda touched on this with the matrix structure they have in eBay group... Maria, how does it work for Woolies? If you're working in one product team, how do you ensure alignment across multiple teams, so that you're all heading towards the same business goals?

[00:25:21] Maria: Yeah, I think this is definitely a work in progress. I mentioned earlier we ballooned the team. It grew: we started the team at around 34, and now we're 64 in our practice. That's just speaking of the UX practice, let alone the other practices, like the development team and product team and analytics and finance and so on. So I think we are working on adjusting what we can do. Some of the things, like communication, as Mandy touched on with being remote: when an initiative would kick off, we would naturally do that in person, and that was a lot more collaborative, with a lot more alignment, because we were just able to contact each other one to one.

[00:26:15] As we've distributed and grown, being remote has had its challenges, and one of the things we're countering that with, I think, is creating probably a lot more meetings to sync around whether we are tracking to the project goals, and also, from a UX practice, how we're measuring back to these. Our team itself is spread across... well, I work directly within our e-com business unit, and that alone has around eight squads, and across the business there are around 30-odd squads.

[00:26:57] For alignment, we're working towards first kicking off with that essential kickoff session which we run before a project: go through its business case, understand what the goals are, and then we align through this session and ceremony. That was a lot easier when we were obviously in one room or talking to each other in person. So we've tried to adapt as we scaled, and continue working towards ceremonies that we can break down as we work across the project. That's been one of the areas we're really trying to work on.

[00:27:40] And then secondly, we have showcases to look back on what the experience is and how we work together with our product and development team towards it. That might involve having really clear... we're constantly working with product artifacts like customer journey maps, or project status meetings, where we just try to understand where we are at with the actions and really align across the distributed team. So it's a work in progress, I think, and we're working through these areas and the challenges as best we can.

What excites the panel about the future

[00:28:22] Rory: Great. I could probably keep asking questions forever, but unfortunately we're running out of time. So I'm going to ask everybody to give a very quick answer: what are you excited about for the future? Maria, if you want to go first.

[00:28:38] Maria: Particularly around the industry. I think retail and food itself has been really interesting, with the incumbents and the industries that are coming after us in terms of the customers and the experience itself. It's really interesting how we can fix the customer and products along the experiences that we're creating. Some of the things we've tried to adapt to are more innovative ways, like meal boxes or express delivery services, for example. I think the next breed of what we bring out should be addressing the foundational issues, but also some of these exciting ways customers are demanding in how they shop online, particularly how they've changed their behavior through COVID. So I think that's one area we're definitely keeping an interest in, because it's constantly changing.

[00:29:45] Rory: Great, thank you. And Magda?

[00:29:47] Magda: I'd say I'm most excited about the human-centered design approach and design thinking becoming mainstream. A few years ago organizations were just learning about it, and today it really is a way of working. However, it's not a cookie-cutter approach. What works for one organization doesn't necessarily work for someone else, but the fundamentals do. And I'm excited by that constant change, having that growth mindset, and empowering teams, everyone within the team, to be able to speak up, to share an idea, to test it, to bring about that change, so that it is a collaborative effort. But really, having that human-centered approach, that human-centered hat on, is what excites me, as more and more organizations adapt to these ways of working.

[00:30:53] Rory: Yeah, that's great. It just reminds me of Jeff Bezos standing down, because Amazon is probably one of the most customer-obsessed organizations. When you're at 900 billion a quarter, growing at 44%, I think you can safely step down; you've done enough. And finally, Mandy.

[00:31:14] Mandy: It's a good question. As I mentioned earlier, I just recently moved to a new company called Hireup, and they are a platform which helps people with disabilities to find, hire and manage support workers who are matched to their needs. What I really love about the product, but also products in general and technology, is being able to provide something that can help people in their day to day. What I particularly like about this is that it can really help to drive better user experience and accessibility and things like that for a much broader audience.

[00:32:02] As a developer, I've always been really interested in building products which can reach as many people as possible, and being able to work for a company that aims to do that is something I think is really important. I would love to see a lot of other companies put more effort into making more accessible and generally more user-friendly products for their users. But generally, for the future of products, I really like how over the past decade or so products have focused a lot on iterating and improving parts of their business, parts of their products, to make them as user-friendly and accessible as possible, and allowing users to accomplish their tasks much more efficiently.

[00:32:59] I really like tinkering and poking around on small aspects of things, and the industry has allowed us to do that, rather than always trying to do something really big and flashy: actually getting to work on small parts and delivering that, and demonstrating the change and the impact that a small change can make. I think that's really exciting and really, really fun, and I hope more people learn to enjoy the pleasure of making one small change that has a big impact for a lot of people.

[00:33:32] Rory: Great, thanks. All very inspiring looks at the future. We have gone over time, so apologies for that, but I'd like to thank our panel, Maria, Mandy and Magda. Really insightful, and thank you for your time. I'll hand it back to Jovinia [?].