Giles Colborne - Product Roadmaps: Destination Unknown - #NUX8 - @gilescolborne

[Applause] hi thank you there's an old joke really Giles yes I'm afraid so there's an old joke a man finds himself on a country track in an unfamiliar place and he comes to a crossroads there no road signs no landmarks he can't get a signal on his mobile phone and he's completely lost but he sees a tractor driven by an old man bumping slowly toward so many waves and the tractor gets closer and the old man looks at him and he looks at the old man and pulls up he says hi I'm trying to get to Middleton which is the best way please man looks at him he looks down one path and the other and he gives him a pitying look Sonny he says if you're trying to find the best way to Middleton you shouldn't start here all the road maps start in the wrong place we don't have the right technology we don't have the right skills we don't have the right budget it's what happens next that's interesting and let's take an example and since this is a design conference then we'd better have an example from Apple right so let's think about Apple pay back in 2001 Apple included an application on the Mac called keychain the keychain allowed your Mac to store passwords on a Wi-Fi network or for an email server securely and so long as you're logged in to your Mac all those passwords are automatically entered for you it's still there today if you look in the system utilities folder on your Mac there it is most people never touch it in 2007 when Apple created the iPhone they included keychain so far so dull if you were going to make a big play in financial services you wouldn't want to start here in 2011 Apple launched iCloud which synced various bits of data between your Mac and your iPhone and that included keychain which is nice so now if your Mac knows about a Wi-Fi network then you don't need to retype that password on your little iPhone great Apple starts to add more and more stuff to keychain website passwords you address credit card details all of that can be automatically filled in web forms so you're learning to store payment details on your device and then in 2013 Apple adds touch ID to the iPhone 5s now you can have longer stronger passwords on your iPhone where you keep all of those important details and unlocking your phone securely takes a split second and almost no effort this is good and then the next year Apple included NFC contactless technology and the iPhone 6 and it launches Apple pay and you can add a credit card to your phone tap on it with any contactless payment device and authorize the payment with a fingerprint within two years that service is growing at a million users per week and other companies banks retailers technology firms tried and failed to deliver something similar Apple managed to create the world's most popular digital payment system beginning with a dull system utility now that's a simplification III don't know how things looked at Apple I do know there was more going on than that and Apple said at the time that Apple pay was something they've been working on for years but even when you look at this simplified view you get a sense of what a product roadmap is and how it gets you from where you don't want it to be to where everyone wishes they could be it isn't a big bang release there's a multi-year plan in place the issues are being solved in a sensible sequence start with passwords move on to payments users are getting something of increasing value at each step and the business is getting something valuable to each release has a business benefit to it whether it's product information like with touch ID or a revenue generating service like iCloud there's an evolution of the business model and technical and operational challenges are being solved one by one when I look at that what amazes me is the discipline involved because it takes discipline to keep your focus for years and a lot of people I talk to complain that their organization only lets them do quick wins or low-hanging fruit Big Ideas are just too risky the organization lacks the confidence or the courage or the coordination to embark on something ambitious and demanding and if they finally do get to do those big programs of work then it's just endless grind one of those projects that goes on for years and never actually gets to deliver anything apples roadmap combines that discipline with a regular delivery of something valuable that's what a great road map looks like the other thing you find is that when you're dealing with any kind of plans for the future people get anxious we dislike uncertainty even though the world is full of it and the future is nothing but uncertainty we try to get rid of uncertainty as soon as possible rather than just waiting for things to get a bit more certain and that causes people to behave in all sorts of weird ways and those ways tend to undermine product and UX teams so if we're going to get from here to there I think we need three things some things that give us direction a way to maintain focus while we deliver and a technique for dealing with all that weirdness so if you're going to lead people into that uncertain and difficult future they need to believe in your vision you're sending them to a destination that doesn't exist yet and if they don't believe in your vision then they're just going to creep forward with those quick wins getting people to buy into that vision is hard work and most people places I visit there's only surface agreement ask around and you find that everyone's got their own pet project and they're just waiting for this one to fail so they can push their own idea and there are so many opportunities well how do you even know which is the right one well a while back a team came to me with that problem and they've been working for a financial services firm looking at how they could help people whose investments were coming to maturity but they had stakeholders and at least one of whom was pushing his pet project before they'd even finished their discovery phase and that a presentation looming and they were feeling that stakeholder anxiety in a number of ways and they needed to get buy-in but in truth they didn't even have a vision they'd set themselves this question which I think is a pretty good question for discovery phase what's the best opportunity it allowed them to kind of go broadly and deeply across the whole thing and to explore widely and they've done the user research and competitive analysis and stakeholder interviews and they'd assembled what they'd found and they've mapped it all out from the start to the finish of the user journey and they create an experience map like this one a map like this is a huge database of findings arranged to let you analyze things in a structured methodical way and the best person in the world to talk to about this would be in DeYoung who happens to be here today if you can't talk to her read her book I'll give you the details later by being gentle with you here because experience maps are big databases and they tend to end up looking something like this and I know what you're thinking this is this is really a tool for researchers who are deep in the detail this isn't an output that you want to share with the rest of the organization but with a map like this you can identify all kinds of opportunities so you can look for gaps where no one's supporting users and shortfalls where competitors are doing a better job and pain points where everyone is getting it wrong and also for places where regulation or technology is about to change and the service needs to change with it each of those things is an opportunity and behind each of those things as a user story and anytime you like you can go back to the map and you can look at that users story and get all of this rich data around it that's amazing if you're doing design discovery so you get a number of user stories like this and that's what this team had and whenever somebody suggested a feature they like we should alert people via our app they'd say maybe and they'd write down the user story but it's user stories like this that they captured and they had 36 of these things and none of these things are really a product did not even features yeah there are opportunities quick wins mostly so there's no vision here there's nothing that will inspire and there's no strategy there's no way of telling what to do and what to ignore and if you're not careful this is the point where that senior stakeholder comes in and says because the world needs another one of those and another scene it's they call I was saying well we've got a list of stuff here what I want is business cases for each one of these so we can choose what to do and love roadmaps look like that a prioritized list of problems to solve or worse a prioritized list of features to deliver no vision we just pick the low-hanging fruit and right at the end is the complicated stuff we never really get to the interesting bits and some of these things obviously small fixes and some of them are slightly bigger ideas nothing really big there really is so the team and I were discussing this problem and we talked about the opportunities and we did a clustering exercise to see what was really there and when you come to do that there's a number of lenses that you can apply which lenses you apply depends on the situation so some organizations have a clear mission or a rock-solid brand definition and others have nothing written down some have obvious structural changes that are shaping the landscape it might be open banking or new ways of working or our customers are shifting to mobile other times those things seem to be marginal discovery should be about finding out about those lenses and if you look at only one then you're in trouble but often you'll lead with the customer lens you're a UX person that's probably where you have the best data and since organizations exist to serve their customers or users that can be over a powerful lens to use in this particular case we knew the organization was focused on certain types of customer and we had good data on what those customers wanted so we began to cluster and sort the cards and we got four clusters three big things and one collection of other stuff small fixes improvements that weren't part of a larger theme business as usual stuff we handed that off to the business-as-usual team for maintenance work but those themes were exciting and there was real value for customers and there were real opportunities for the business to differentiate itself from competitors and there were also technical and organizational challenges some of which we understood from our discovery phase so we came up with descriptions for those themes and one of those things was a dashboard thank you you're very clever but it wasn't the only thing we had three different themes three paths and not yet an answer to this question well being the best means different things for different people it could mean being the one that minimizes effort and risk or it could mean the one that's most valuable to customers or it could mean the one that's most valuable to the business if you're gonna deliver a great product you need a vision and story that covers all three a good business model is one where the customer and the business both get value and the business is playing to its strengths or learning something learner ball so your way to the themes on all three factors and we used a very simple scoring exercise based on the evidence we just read it uncovered in Discovery those are the three questions you'd ask in a business case would people want this how would we recoup our investment can we fix it but we only had a little launch we had a shallow broad knowledge from the discovery phase so instead of calculating return on investment we just gave things of rating red amber green and there you go theme three was a wonderful idea but there was this massive legal and technical barrier it just wasn't going to be overcome in any realistic period of time theme to was the dashboard which was kind of okay for customers kind of okay to do kind of okay business valley not dead but not winning and theme one was great for the customer great for the business and there was a moderate degree of complexity the winner sort of all those opportunities we'd distilled down the ones that could really take us somewhere not just the low-hanging fruit but something with a story behind it and we were ready to present but we thought well before we present this we'll run our stakeholders to our thinking so we just walked them through the wall that we'd put together and they said I love this we agree do that you don't need to do the presentation just tidy this up a bit because they didn't need rankings or business cases even though they thought they did even though that's what they had asked for what they needed was that vision and then he did a story and that's what we gave them it's funny but the things often visiting missing from roadmaps is that vision statement you can use an elevator pitch or a story board like this one or a prototype or all three of those but since half of what you're trying to do is get people pointing in the same direction I think half of your roadmap should be about the big the statement it seems really obvious I can't we don't include that there's more detail here that we need to get into but this frames what you're trying to do it keeps conversation at the right level the other half the roadmap is the plan right and there's another trap here the problem with cunning plans is they're just too many things that can go wrong your roadmap isn't really a place for planning it's a place for focus it's a place for engaging with the entire organization so that each department can understand what role they have to play in this bigger goal and it's a place for making sure that first things are dealt with first that much of planning does need to be done this is where we're going and this is what we've got to deal with right now so it shouldn't look like a normal plan no matter what anyone else tells you when a work of team's their instinct is often to create a Gantt chart showing when features will be released and even when I warn people against doing this they sometimes come back and say well I thought about it I decided what I needed was a Gantt chart and then they get into problems arguments over release dates botched implementations sliding back into delivering prioritized lists of features and soon the vision is gone and you're just doing quick wins and grabbing the low-hanging fruit that's not what a robe app is it's a place for focus it's a place for saying here's where we're going and this is the thing we're doing next so I think it should look something like this each phases is find in less and less detail the future the further out you look is Mystere and grayer so we're not going to make promises that we can't fulfill we're not going to say things that we don't understand yet each phase has got a theme so that people understand what that phase is for what they're trying to do it gives meaning to what you're looking at in this case the themes are set Direction build capability deliver at scale but your themes could be something different and as you move along scope is a bit looser because you're less certain about what you need to do goals are more loosely defined timelines Alissa the only timeline I think that should be tightly defined is the core Faye's this release I learned a few years ago that three months is the maximum length of project for the kind of of the kind of I work on longer than that and people just start to lose focus it just seems to be something that will happen in the future and they can get around to it when they can so I tend to I tend to set three months limits on a phase and less than six weeks and it's hard to do something of value so I make the current phase no more than three lengths three months in length now your mileage may vary and you will need to find that number but the only phase with a deadline on it is the current one none of this is a project plan project planning needs to happen elsewhere in your sprint planning with your project planning document the purpose of this the reason you gather teams around this is to focus on the long term goal and remind ourselves what's important right now and when you're drawing up this document you're constantly bringing in stakeholders and asking them this question you're trying to figure out what problems need to be solved in each phase it's a tool for discussion and coordination of buying my advice is get lots of input more than you'd like input equals understanding a buying input reinforces the goal in people's minds and because it's a plan you'll constantly discover new things and you'll need to return to it and ask those questions again and again but as you do that you get to something like this a phased approach with a vision that each phase a sense of customer value the business value and the challenges that each team will face along the way let the project planning happen in the sprint planning meetings on a different document so we have a vision and we have a phase delivery that helps us maintain our discipline focus I think though you know that we're in danger of getting obsessed with with deliverables because really what matters is that discipline really what matters it has nothing to do with with documents or laying post-its on a wall it's the problem of maintaining alignment because from day one team members will start to wobble and they need to be brought back into alignment and it's brilliant but the advantage Patrick Lencioni says the one thing that sets great organizations apart is that ability to remain a your roadmap is a visual reminder to help with that but Lencioni says alignment really begins with trust and honesty and unfortunately that means that having the confidence to step into uncomfortable situations situations of conflict which is something we all hate doing your marketing director is demanding the feature list for the next two releases the CEO has come up with a new direction for the product and he's worked in this industry for 30 years so he just knows it will work you don't need to research this your IT director tells you a vital piece of infrastructure is not a priority for her you need to be able to call out broken promises unreasonable requests without fear or blame so this amazing but crucial confrontations shows you how to walk into situations that would normally be an argument or a put-down or a conflict weekly avoided and turn them into positive discussion and at points are the first person we have to deal with in that situation is actually ourselves we have to master our own stories you're probably telling yourself a story about the other person they're an idiot they're disruptive they're interfering and if you walk in with that attitude that there wasn't really room for discussion there's no room for cooperation one of you is right one of you is wrong you're both going to end up trying to prove that you're the best or you avoid it and things break down in other ways mastering your stories means starting by finding the reasonable explanation for the other person's behavior I'm gonna start figuring it out what you want from the situation so you're walking in there with a kind of an open mind did I think this is what's going on how can we figure this out has issued if you think back to most of the problems that we've seen technology the stakeholder anxiety asking for too much certainty too early throwing out ideas to fill the uncertainty gap chances are the person who's being difficult when it comes to your roadmap is feeling anxious and the story want to go in with is here's a person who feels anxious about the future you need to help them find a way to manage that anxiety and you need to make it safe for them to tell you their problem their side of the story show you share the same Gong's the ones in your roadmap we're both trying to get this product delivered and do an amazing job and you need to show them you've given thought about their position and I know you've got to deliver a marketing launch plan and we both need that to go well and then you can describe the problem I'm trying to manager an uncertain delivery process and there are some promises I just can't make like when that feature will be delivered so how can we support you without making promises that could blow up in our faces focusing on goals shared goals makes it easier and safer for you to recognize disagreement and work together on the way forward I think the real skill is in how you have those conversations without blame and avoidance so I came to talk about roadmaps but I think what we're really talking about here is leadership not the my way or the highway kind but the kind of engages and aligns and includes now you might say well I'm not senior enough to be that leader but leadership isn't about seniority I see lots of senior people in organizations who don't lead I'm sure you do too and I see lots of junior people who propel teams forwards it's not about seniority and you might say well in my organization it's really marketing you lead but they don't see the whole picture you act sits at an intersection you see more which means you can influence more and you might say well I'm afraid I don't know anything and you know what yes that's right but here's the secret no one knows anything William Goldman wrote The Princess Bride and he won Oscars for Butch Cassidy in the Sundance Kid and he said this terrific thing his point being there are plenty of people in Hollywood who thought they knew exactly what would make a hit movie or they pretended that they knew and there are plenty of people who will ask for things that they don't really need and if you listen to them you're giving up on your own ideas you're giving up on your chance to lead people to a better destination I think people here have the skills to lead people into the uncertain future and I hope you do thank you thank you thank you very much right bear with us that's a right question don't I think anybody that most people in this room would probably kind of dealt with those situations and stuff they've talked about and I think going forwards it's probably gonna be a constant I think that we've got to work towards in the future as well it's only a zone that's never gonna go away so if you were to do a call to arms for people working in our around user centered design today what would it be call to arms people working you know I think what matters in any organization organizations exist to to serve their customers to serve their users and organizations tend to lose their way when the organization's goals become somehow decoupled from the goals of the user I think we're absolutely crucial fixing what's broken in a lot of organizations fixing business models that you know don't support user goals business models that's you know the support revenue generation over customer satisfaction well there's a problem there and that organization is going to break it's going to hit a regulatory barrier or it's going to hit a financial barrier and it's just gonna fall apart somebody's going to come along and take it apart we can fix that and we can make organizations you know that aren't businesses work better for their customers you know whether that's third sector or public sector I think we have an amazing skill set I think we're absolutely at the heart of solving problems and how's that feedback loop between customer and organization gets faster and faster thanks to the technology we work in that challenge becomes more more important so yeah there's a call to arms there what we do is absolutely about making the world a better place is there any spaces that you haven't worked in that you would like to in the future personally I have a kid of industry verticals or kind of public or private sector so anything specifically we would like to work in Wow all the difference um I'm so I'm really lucky to have you know been working this industry for a long time and I've worked in most sectors I think the frontier and I think the thing that's really interesting that is happening is that with each generation or our work we get involved in a bigger and bigger stage so you know where it was you know usability work it's become product design it's become service design and I think we're on the on the verge of you know ecosystem design where you're you're not working for one organization you're trying to coordinate organizations around really complicated human problems problems like so it's not just about working for a train company it's actually about solving more complex problems like mobility or well-being or or pollution and you can see those dots starting to be joined an organization's starting to come together around that so I think that's where the interesting boundary of practice is and I think rather than it being a particular sector or vertical its those sorts of challenges how do you align value across something that's bigger than complicated as that that's really interested in so pause on this and the question that I did to VIN say ex-partners is wildly successful and well-known and the work that you've done is being really important what would you want your legacy than me people I think you know what's what's always exciting is and when I look at if you think about the organizations I admire their organizations where you can see not only do they continue to do great work but also the people that move on from them go places and carry their elsewhere and you know that's one of the reasons I love coming to events like this incredible event is because it's it's really about spreading the word about what we do and and showing our knowledge thank you very much chance to give Jones one of the pause thank you [Applause] you

Channel: northernux

Views: 158

Rating: 4 out of 5

Keywords: usability, user experience, ux, nux, conference, design, nux8

Id: CXqfaNQyRMA

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020