natalie hollier

PRODUCT DISCOVERY

When I first joined Validately we were refining our customer Personas. We realized we need to focus on a narrower solution to achieve more product-market fit, but weren’t sure of the right approach. 

One of our advisors, Marty Cagan, helped us in a workshop to explore our potential customer markets and select one to target first. We then began a Customer Development Program to accelerate our product-market fit. I have lead the program, which began with on-site field research and synthesizing insights to discover shared and unmet user needs for our target market. This helped us to clearly identify the product opportunities we should pursue next. We are now working with our CDP customers to co-develop the solution.

PRODUCT DESIGN

I do sketching, wireframes and interactive prototypes for our team’s product design. My process is to research the problem, explore similar interfaces, and sketch out at least 3-4 UI design alternatives. I then wireframe or prototype out the complete flow and do user testing as often as possible.

I have also produced visual style guides to ensure a consistent design across our website and product. When we updated our website design based on market feedback I took the visual designs from our freelance designer for 3 pages and applied it to the rest of the site. 

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT 

I captured our current product opportunities in a backlog and add to this as we identify more. The priority of these opportunities inform our near-term, mid term and long-term product roadmap. When we prioritize opportunities they move into a Product Discovery phase where we often do MVP experiments such as marketing landing pages or concierge solutions. 

After opportunities have been validated they are moved into the development backlog and broken down into smaller stories. I have introduced the team to more formal agile cadence with sprint planning, showcases and retrospectives.

If you work in digital products you've probably noticed the rapid rate of innovation that is needed to keep up with new technology and fast moving competitors. Product development teams can no longer plan for and manage to a 2 year roadmap; a new paradigm to deliver digital products faster is needed. 

Using a lean & agile approach ensures teams are building products that are valuable to customers and are quickly released in the market. This way of working includes:

* Discovering customer needs and problems through user research

* Defining the outcomes we want to achieve and clear measurable criteria for success

* Testing small MVP solutions not just through development but also through user research and prototyping

* Iterating on feedback to continuously evolve the product opportunity backlog in response to what you learned 

  VIEW THE SLIDES HERE:  http://bit.ly/lean-roadmaps

PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

During my time at ThoughtWorks, I led engagements to help multiple companies, including Fortune 500′s, adopt Lean portfolio management techniques. 

Whether it be a portfolio of strategic initiatives or a portfolio of technology products, the goal was to reduce the time from concept to cash, to enable them to innovate and deliver value to market faster.

BUSINESS STRATEGY

I led workshops and off-sites with executives to explore their business goals and strategy. Often we start with the big picture context, looking at their competitors, industry landscape and market trends. Then map to their short term, mid term and long term opportunities using the McKinsey Three Horizons of Growth model. 

This big picture thinking not only helps to identify potential gaps, but is also valuable context to share in internal communications within the company. 

INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO

I gave presentations, workshops, or worked hands-on with leadership and PMO to look at how the current investment in products or projects relates to the overall business strategy.

Over time we helped leadership adopt more of a venture capital model approach to invest incrementally in small bets and hold teams accountable to delivering outcomes. (Rather than the more traditional approach of choosing a single product or program solution and implementing a long, rigid, and potentially flawed 1-2 year project).  

For example, if a company has the goal of expanding to reach a new customer base and decides they want to allocate 15% of overall spend towards it (see Goal 4 below). They can then experiment with different opportunities and check in regularly to see if they are on track to meet their goals. 

If the first approach fails, they don’t have to throw the baby out with the bath water: they can try another approach instead of abandoning their goal. 

VALUE BASED PRIORITIZATION

In order to prioritize investment in this way, we instill a Lean MVP mindset. I introduced light-weight 1-2 page briefs to assess business and product opportunities, which framed the problem and set clear and measurable success metrics. I led exercises to estimate and prioritize opportunities based on value and their size or cost. This encourages large programs to be broken down into smaller chunks and allows risky assumptions to be validated as early as possible. 

Prioritizing opportunities based on value also has a key downstream effect: It empowers the team to discover and decide on the best approach to deliver it successfully. 

LEAN DELIVERY TEAMS

Once opportunities with clear goals and success criteria had been selected, my team would help to setup and support dedicated, cross-functional delivery teams within the organization to deliver them. 

I usually worked partly embedded with teams to help familiarize them with lean product development techniques. I ran exercises with teams to generate problem and solution hypotheses, and explore design concepts. We supported teams with user research, design or technology prototyping, and software delivery. We ensured teams were monitoring success metrics and continuously learning and iterating towards the best solution.

LEAN ENTERPRISE

Working with these companies my goal was to move Design Thinking and Lean Startup techniques earlier up in the idea and strategy phase of their business, to help the entire organization become more lean and innovative. 

I worked directly on teams for 2 products: the classroom tablet and the admin device management portal. 

PRODUCT DISCOVERY

My UX team and I conducted user research with teachers and students to gain insight into education today and explore technology use in classrooms. We synthesized our findings into “How Might We ...?” Opportunity statements, then ran sessions with the broader product development team to present our findings and generate ideas from them. 

Before our first (alpha) launch we had also started to conduct on-site field research in schools and once it launched we continued to observe our early product being used in classrooms. 

As the company grew we established weekly research sessions where we brought teachers into our office for interviews and paper prototype testing.  

Every few months I also helped to facilitate MVP Product Discovery Workshops with various product teams. This involved bringing together a subset of our cross-functional teams for a day and presenting a product opportunity to tackle. We used a Design Thinking approach, starting from user research context and User Journey Map exercises, then working in small groups to ideate and iterate on sketched designs. By the end of the workshop we arrived at a shared vision of the MVP for an initial product or major feature launch.

PRODUCT DESIGN

I was a user interface designer for two products. I primarily did sketching and wireframes, and also usability testing of prototypes. I worked with visual designers to create Style Tile templates and developers to create a live style guide of existing html/css components. This meant our UI components and visual style was consistent and re-usable across the ecosystem and reduced the need for creating visual comps for every single wireframe.

Our tablet product won a User Experience Award for classroom education.

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

I worked with the product management team to adopt Lean Startup methods as the company continued to scale. We started to use one-page Product Opportunity design briefs to state products/features in terms of the user needs or problem they address. We could then define success criteria and metrics. This also opened the doors to begin testing hypothesis earlier, with our prototypes and field research sprints, rather than waiting until they were coded.  

We moved towards a product Opportunity Backlog mindset, where major chunks of work could be addressed as and when the teams had capacity - rather than getting bogged down in rigid long term release plans and detailed project management.

Once we had grown to 5+ teams we restructured into Goal oriented teams, where each team owned an area of customer focus rather than a software app or platform. 

UX 1.0 was defined by the era personal computing, and user experience was constrained by having to interact with computers using specialized devices; keyboard and mouse.

UX 2.0 is our current era of cloud and multi-screen (laptop, phone, tablet, TV). User experience is improving due to advancements in technology that allow us to interact by using touch, gesture and voice commands. UX 3.0 is the future we are moving towards, driven by connected devices (watches, glasses, cars, appliances, etc) and the Internet of Things (IoT). User experience with software is becoming more and more like our natural and immersive interactions with physical objects in the everyday world. 

The future of UX 3.0 will enable us to design software products that people can interact with in very natural, meaningful and human ways. However the challenge for software designers and developers to overcome will be to escape the ingrained norms and standards of traditional software UX which may reinforce interactions being unnatural and constrained to a screen.