Enhancing the Product Function: Insights from Hum Capital
I joined Hum Capital as an early stage startup. As the company grew from it's scrappy startup days, to a team of 100 employees, they started experiencing growing pains from not adapting to their processes to fit the new team size.
Overview of Product Process (before)
The key problem that Hum Capital faced was that the founder continued to be a bottle neck for driving product innovation even after hiring a number of experienced product and design leaders. I set out to help drive a new organizational design and product process in order to improve job satisfaction and better product outcomes. User research and validation was also completely missing from the process and led to a "feature factory" product strategy.
Why was this important to change?
I needed to communicate to the executive team why this was a problem. The founder was very familiar with both user groups (investors and founders) as a former investor and now a founder of a startup who was looking for funding. But there is a point when a founder stops looking for problems to solve in conversations with users and starts selling the solution. This of course is an important and necessary transition, but masks itself as user validation. For example the founder would ask a company, "let me show you our product, do you see how this gets your company funded faster?". The company eager to be introduced to funding opportunities, enthusiastically says, "yes that's great. I would love to reach your promise of getting funding faster!"
Introducing Krista's Design-centered Product Process
I developed this method of unifying organizations by centralizing the product vision around a "North Star". The north star is not a static deliverable, but rather it evolves based on all inputs which include business analysis, ideas from the founder, and user research. The role of the Product Managers also evolve. They become more strategic by getting closer to user-driven insights. Most importantly, the design org owns the evolution of the "North Star" which elevates them within the business and allows them time to test and validate well before it needs to get into a sprint for development.
Key Components
The North Star
Hum's North Star started out as a prototype which was leveraged by the founder to successfully pitch the product vision to investors. But in order to be more nimble and not add unnecessary overhead, it became important to reduce fidelity. The deliverable morphed into a "service blueprint" which showcased the end-to-end user journey across teams and highlighted key areas of the customer experience that needed improvement.
User Research
By creating a low-lift 'Voice of the Customer' program, this enabled us to continually drive qualitative customer insights into the team through ongoing user interviews which we distilled into bite sized user insights.
Brainstorming Sessions
Brainstorming sessions with the founder and other cross-functional, especially customer-facing teams, fed the innovation engine and allowed voices across the organization to be heard. I led a number of workshops focusing on hypothesizing solutions for key problem areas that were derived from user research and other user data.
OKRs
OKRs that drive forward increasing user satisfaction and product value were the final keys to the product + design team's success.
Lessons Learned
Process and organizational design have to go hand in hand. Many times leaders and ICs have a reduction in job satisfaction due to bad processes. My team gave me a lot of feedback during the change from top-down management styles to a more centralized and user-centered philosophy.
Strategies need to be plug and play
When it comes to the inputs into this process including user research, maintaining the north star, and managing OKRs the operational aspect needs to be low lift.
Recruiting users for interviews
I set up an ongoing automated scoring mechanism to target users for interviews. We triggered a templated email with a calendly link once every couple weeks to the list of recruits. Additionally, I created an ongoing database of user questions to pick from each tagged with user qualities so we could easily cobble together interview scripts on the fly.
Use team meetings effectively
By utilizing team meetings to review OKRs, update our north star document, and share new insights we were able to keep the systems going without adding additional overhead to the team's day-to-day work.
Create a committee
After each user interview we asked if they were interested in joining our 'insider committee' to get previews of new features and in turn give feedback. We didn't have to put any effort into hoping users will answer user testing emails, we already had a list of people to go to.
Communicate effectively
The north star needed to be accessible to the entire organization and everyone needed to feel like they had input and ownership of it, not just the product and design orgs. I hosted quarterly workshops with customer-facing teams and ensured we had a team voice from each group. We also used company all-hands meetings to share user feedback and update the org on product vision
