Visioning and assessing product-market fit
Overview
Role: Lead designer and interim product manager
When: Q3 2019
Overview: I worked on a cross-functional team of data scientists and engineers at a mid-sized, growth-stage startup. We were in the process of hiring a product manager for our team but leadership wanted to move quickly on the discovery, so I stepped in to support PM duties in the interim and worked most closely with our engineering lead along the way. The business goal was to create a new data product to expand offerings and drive growth. This was about a 2-month long discovery effort that kicked off with a design sprint, included a round of qualitative user interviews, and concluded with strategic recommendations that were presented to our leadership team. In summer 2021 the company received Series B funding to fill product roles and fuel innovation in this area.
Key takeaways:
When communicating findings, it’s important to convey them in ways that will best resonate with the target audience. This may require tailoring messaging and creating specific materials for different audiences. What was the most important for the engineering team was communicating top insights and next steps in terms of a product roadmap. The marketing team needed findings to be conveyed in a way that helped them know how to tweak their outreach messaging moving forward. The leadership team needed findings to be conveyed in terms of actionable next steps with supporting data and the impact to the business clearly stated. While my interim product manager hat had me communicating our findings across the business, I learned that designers can make an impact here by creating compelling visuals to communicate opportunities e.g., user personas, data visualizations, etc.
Another key takeaway for me was having a strong partnership with an engineering lead. I learned that while designers and engineers may not always speak the same “language”, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to work collaboratively and effectively together. What made this strong collaboration possible were frequent check-ins to ensure alignment, creating a safe space to ask each other clarifying questions, and general optimism that by leveraging human-centered design practices we’d be able to persist through a very ambiguous problem space together.
Design sprint
To kick-off the project, we did a week-long design sprint. I created a sprint plan, including an outline of activities for each day and split up the preparation tasks with my engineering lead. We had a wonderful cross-functional group of data scientists, marketing/business development friends, and engineers present throughout the sprint. Throughout the week we fleshed out user personas and a complex user journey map, and identified key business problems to solve. We ended feeling energized and eager to test a concept in user research. While these are great sprint outcomes, the best outcome from my perspective was the expressed appreciation from our team in the process of design sprints. Most of our team had never done a design sprint before and they seemed to really appreciate being introduced to a new way of approaching complex problems.
User research
We did a quick round of user research on our design sprint prototype (I designed the prototype and worked with my engineering lead to coordinate user interviews on an external user research platform). The primary takeaway from this round of research was that our concept “failed” - users did not need our concept because it didn’t solve their pain point in the right way. While it was disappointing to some of the design sprint team to learn that our idea failed, I reassured them that it was ultimately a good thing to know early on in the project that this wasn’t a path worth going down. This, I explained, is the purpose of testing our ideas early! I took the lead on thinking through and documenting the product risks involved with developing this concept further.
We concluded that we still needed to understand some of the broader product opportunities in this space. In order to do so, we needed to conduct a more extensive round of qualitative user interviews combined with competitive analysis. I led the planning for this round of user interviews while the engineering lead sorted out the logistics, and I conducted a competitive analysis as well.
We recruited and talked to about 10 people who worked in the data space (director and VP-level executives). While I created the interview guide and led the interviews, my data science and engineer teammates helped take notes and synthesize each interview. My engineering lead and I then synthesized all interviews into actionable insights.
Findings & outcomes
From this round of research, we were able to flesh out a complex user journey, highlighting various actors and their interactions with each other, major phases of the user experience and user’s existing pain points. We also realized there were two primary user personas in this problem space, each with a different set of needs and thus two different major product opportunities for the business. I took the lead on creating the user journey map and documenting the user personas. After this was complete, I then conducted a competitive analysis to understand products that are already solving problems in each of these product opportunity areas. The engineering lead helped fill in some of the details for this competitive analysis.
We wanted to champion the following across the business:
The two primary user personas we learned about and their needs
The product opportunities aligning to these user needs
Our strategic product recommendation & vision (which was to pursue one user persona and product opportunity)
We told our story by creating different presentations for different audiences, the most important of which was the one for our leadership team (in attendance were the CEO, VP of Finance, and Director of Data Science) where we told a data-driven narrative. Overall the leadership team was receptive to our recommendations. While I was mostly a fly on the wall during this presentation, I saw firsthand how insights from research can positively impact business decisions when communicated effectively.
Following the leadership presentation, I initiated the creation of visionary product designs which aided in further conversations about our product opportunity, both internally and externally. We found that this helped everyone better understand our vision and built collective excitement about the new product opportunity.
Impact
In summer 2021 (I was no longer at the company), the company received Series B funding to fill product roles and further fuel product innovation in this area.
