A coworker from the Research department reached out to me for support with their roadmap. Their team, focused on building tools to scale and manage language data collection, consisted of software engineers but had no dedicated Product Manager or Designer. As a result, they had reached a dead end. There were many issues in their backlog and often several contradicting solutions for each of those issues. They didn’t know where to start or what to make of it.
Create a prioritized list of opportunities for the team and provide them with knowledge to repeat the process on their own.
After the initial chat with the colleague who reached out to me, we met up with the rest of the team to get to know each other and so I can get a feeling of the level of design, research and product management maturity in the team.
Some of the people on the team have been there for several years already. They had a lot of knowledge about the workflow, the platform as well as the dependencies on other teams or external contractors. Others were newer and had a fresh, curious and different approach to solving the issues they were facing.
We then met for two one-hour sessions where I talked a bit about an optimal product development process, one that invests more in the early stages — discovery and prototyping — and pushes writing “proper” code as far in the process as possible. Covered some UX research methods, as well as prototyping and testing, as essential exercises in getting to the root of the problem and choosing the best solution for it.
Then, to help the team remember what we talked about and move forward, I helped them identify and use an appropriate tool to map their current situation. Because of the complex workflow that involves multiple actors and touchpoints, I selected the Service blueprint, as it allows us to see the entire workflow.
The struggles of this understaffed team highlighted the need for skills typically provided by a Product Manager and a Product Designer—such as discovery and UX research, sense-making, synthesis, prototyping, and prioritization.
These skills are highly transferable and deliver value quickly, especially by improving alignment, deepening the understanding of users and their problems, and strengthening strategy.