Collaborate on Proforma Format for Product Quality with Ease Using airSlate SignNow

Proforma format for Product quality

hi everyone my name is thomas and in this presentation i will talk about the life cycle of a feature and what are the challenges pms are facing in a remote setting towards the end of the presentation i will give a quick overview of the tools that help me a lot while i fully embraced working remotely i'm based in budapest hungary i've been building products in the last seven years and have been working remotely for more than two years now i started out in e-commerce then i moved over to mobile apps i've worked at skyscanner for three years on their mobile app experience i joined a remote first sas startup called hopkin five months ago open is an online events platform where you can create engaging virtual events the company has seen an unprecedented growth since it launched last year it's valued at more than 5 billion dollars now i was used to working with remote teams at skyscanner due to their global footprint but hoping to cremate to the next level it's a high growth environment and going back to the office is not even an option for us now let me show you the different stages a feature goes through before it hits the sunlight we have the following starting point based on some insights or push from leadership you are exploring a certain problem space this is what we usually call a business case or prt stage prd stands for product requirements document you need to prove that the problem is worth solving and you want to provide clarity to the team once you have the buy-in from stakeholders you are moving into the discovery stage your goal is to come up with multiple ways of solving the problem then you narrow it down to the one that you think solves the core user problem since you have a good understanding of what you want to build it's time to ship it welcome to the delivery stage congrats you shipped the feature don't sit back just yet you need to show that the feature you shipped adds value to the user and to the company this is what i call the outcome stage now that you have a high level overview of the different stages it's time to unpack them one by one as i said we need to prove that the problem is worth solving and it fits into the company objectives you need to back up your assumptions with evidence this could be quantitative as a result of a user behavior analysis in amplitude in a bi tool or coming from a product analyst that you are working with or another option is to gather qualitative evidence based on discussions with customer success or sales teams even better if you directly talk to the customer the goal isn't to write a detailed product documentation at this stage but to paint a vision this way you can show to the executive team what you are going after address risks early on and identify what is out of scope from the first version this will come handy in the discovery phase the earlier you understand how you will measure impact the better set up your hypothesis and plug in the metric that you want to move i will show you the framework we used as skyscanner for that there are three essential elements to a solid hypothesis it must be falsifiable testable and based on objective data and insights the most important of these is being falsifiable this means it is possible for the hypothesis to be proven false take the following statement introducing social logins will make it easier to sign up this is not falsifiable but if we make it more specific it becomes a better hypothesis like this introducing social logins will improve the sign up rate by 20 a b testing and hypothesis testing would require a separate session but i added the framework we used and the link to the backup slides where you can read a lot more about it in the remote setting it's much harder to build meaningful relationships you have to make a deliberate effort to get to know your colleagues and build trust with them take the time to get to know one or two of your colleagues from each department you will certainly need their help while building great things since every meeting happens over video conference presentation and persuasion skills are crucial you better start working on them this is definitely something i need to improve on what helped me so far was writing a script before big presentations and recording my voice don't sit on a problem for too long once you have a fairly good understanding of the problem space then start sharing your business case early on don't be afraid to ask for feedback this will help you reach alignment faster i'm certain that you will be able to overcome these challenges and all your plans will align so you finally got the green light and now you have got to work out the details with your team start validating your ideas early on with real customers and create quick feedback loops with your engineering team the key is that the team explores multiple ways of solving the same problem and then narrows it down to a single one which solved the original user problem outlined in the business case one problem that i faced recently was not having good enough overview of the discovery process blackboard is helping us with that we start out with a design brief which evolves into a full-blown feature documentation that can be pushed over to jira for implementation we involve engineers early on in the process and quickly iterate on it the feature corresponds to an epic in jira and the sub features beneath it are the user stories associated with it so what are the remote challenges at this stage i still feel like nothing beats the good old white boarding experience even though there are good tools such as miro i'm yet to find anything that is as efficient as writing on a board designing good experiences requires a lot of care and attention it's easy to miss out on comments or forgetting to answer slack messages jump in a quick call or record a loom video to bring across your ideas you need to make a conscious effort to remove silos between disciplines involve engineers early on in the process they have great ideas and can guide the design process with valuable insights on the feasibility of the solution now let's move on to the next step good documentation is key to ensuring smooth delivery we're closely together with your engineer manager and engineering team on prioritizing the different functionalities while approaching the release pms need to make sure that the whole company understands what's going on you can achieve this by organizing enablement sessions for support and sales in a b2b setting or by writing comprehensive faqs or by presenting during company all hands and other internal platforms i'm a big fan of the moscow framework for privatizing features it forces course functional parties to prioritize each component of a feature and helps us reaching alignment on what the core functionalities are the idea is that you go through the whole user flow that you design and put each step into one of these buckets must-have functionalities are non-negotiable needs should haves are not vital but add significant value over long term they will become must-haves functionalities that end up in the could have column usually don't make the first cut but it doesn't mean that they cannot be added to the next release will not haves are out of scope feel empowered to push back on launch dates there's a really good twitter thread from julie zoo on this topic it explains a similar approach to what i followed in the past we started to show the product to real customers very early on we announced the closed beta program which will then turn into public beta public release may happen once you have a solid product at hand this approach keeps the team focused and helps you manage expectations early on it cannot be stressed enough how important documentation is in a remote setting it starts with the acceptance criteria and then continues with documenting the trade-offs and decisions that were made throughout the development process i really like to engage in conversations about edge cases you didn't think of try to resolve these as fast as possible planning meetings are the highlights of the week make sure you arrive prepared and be open for feedback from the team log the changes that you discussed and follow up on the open questions don't let things fall on the ground end-to-end testing with the team creates stronger relationships we used to sit together in the same room when we were collocated put some music on and tested out the features on various devices find the time to create this experience with your remote team it's great fun it's easy to move on to the next thing without fully understanding your real impact the last piece of the puzzle is making sure that your original metrics and kpis are measurable and the data that you collect is transparency build dashboards or just pull together a google sheet that will help you monitor your metrics prepare a report with key takeaways and next steps these can be shared across the board to communicate the impact you made marty kagan is the best at capturing the essence of this step measure success by business results outcomes not features shift output these challenges are not really specific to remote but they are worth calling out don't jump immediately onto the next thing you might want to consider adding some of the should have or nice to have elements after your release now let's move on to the remote toolkit i put slack into the middle because it's not specific to any of the steps i won't go too much into details in terms of what each tool does just going to mention a few of them we do most of our documentation either in notion or in google docs i love notion due to its flexibility we recently started to gather qualitative insights via product board it helps us in privatization and having a strong foundation for upcoming features we use amplitude and our own database for gathering product insights we collaborate a lot in figma and miro during discovery we map out user files and finalize the ui in these tools i strongly recommend doing a beginner course on how to use figma as i mentioned earlier i love recording short video snippets with loom it's much more personal and easier to bring ideas across that way we use usertesting.com for testing the usability of our designs in the delivery phase jira is our main tool i think everyone has a love and hate relationship with it app appqueues is a pretty cool tool for creating guided onboarding experiences in the outcome stage you can rely on amplitude or your bi tool for measuring kpis monitor your support channels and collect user feedback in one place congratulations you made it until the end i hope there were some great insights that i could share with you and if there are any questions just feel free to ask in the chat or hit me up on social media i want to mention that we are hiring at open so check out our queries page and if you're interested in hypothesis testing check out the backup slides because there are some good frameworks that you can use there goodbye [Music] you