Program strategy & definition
I feel very comfortable working to define product and design strategy (due in part to the practice I had in my days as an advertising strategist). As the product team at Signal Sciences grew, we lacked a succinct and consistent way to document the problems and hypotheses at the heart of our new initiatives. I partnered with a senior product manager on the team to create a new internal standard of project/design brief (based on Intercom's Intermissions) that we were able to use to get alignment and summarize project vision to other teams and execs at the company.
Customer research
It's critical to me that I partner with my PM on research for two big reasons: 1) We create a shared understanding of the problem from the outset that helps us move in the same direction faster and 2) We prompt deeper understanding more quickly by putting our findings through both business and design lenses simultaneously. Additionally I've found that PMs tend to be more comfortable with quantitative research methods, which I can amplify by using qualitative methods from my background.
The deck attached to the right is a summary I co-created with a PM to share findings with the broader product and technology team coming out of a round of customer interviews for a new product offering.
Prioritization exercises
Prioritization is one of the key responsibilities of the product owner and often one of the most challenging to wrap your head around. Luckily there are a number of design methods that can help. In the example below, my team was trying to prioritize stories for a v2 of a feature we rolled out in early 2020. The backlog was full of ideas from all over: explicit customer requests, ideas from PM, ideas from Sales, tech cleanup that got left out of the MVP etc... It was a lot to digest, especially in a digital formats so we got the team together to run through two exercises to help inform some decision-making.
First, we placed stories on a value matrix to clarify the areas of most opportunity relative to their risk. And second, we took those stories and pivoted them onto a product story map that visually communicated how each story built out our desired end-to-end experience.
