The 3-Step Secret Sauce for Successful Product Launches

If you’ve been following Crafted for a while, you’ve probably heard us talk about the importance of Balanced Teams. We believe that the best way to deliver high-value, quality software fast is by leveraging these highly collaborative units made up of product management, product design, and software engineering. If your product team is having trouble iterating and shipping value, it’s time to take a closer look at your team culture and agile processes.

In this blog post, we’ll walk through ways product teams can craft their “secret sauce” by fostering better relationships, and get software that drives key business outcomes into the hands of users faster.

You’ll learn…

• How to establish a collaborative culture

• How to find cross-departmental synergies between product management, product design, and software engineering

• How to implement these collaborative best practices with the Three-Week Product Sprint

Step 1: Establish a collaborative culture

There’s a good chance you’ve found yourself in the following scenario in your current role or at a previous company…

You’re either a PM, designer, or engineer working on a product. Whether you’re writing requirements, designing wireframes, or coding, you’re focused on your piece of the puzzle and when each piece is done, work gets thrown over the wall to/from your counterparts. Once you receive other pieces of the puzzle, you realize that they don’t quite fit together. Decisions were made without considering your (or your teammate’s) perspective, and now you need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to get all the pieces to connect.

This lack of communication and collaboration is why so many projects end up over budget, under scope, and slow to market. When decisions are made in a vacuum and other perspectives aren’t considered, it forces teams to scrap or redo work. Needless to say, this is expensive and inefficient. That’s why it’s critical to shift your product team’s mindset away from linear decision-making and instead establish a collaborative culture built on trust, transparency, and flexibility.

• Trust: Have shared ownership over the project outcomes (both business and customer), not the deliverables. Share successes (and failures!) across teams in “blameless” retros.

• Transparency: Engage in regular, open communication and knowledge sharing. This extends beyond the Balanced Team to stakeholders and other supporting teams (like marketing and sales.

• Flexibility: We at Crafted like to practice “strong opinions, loosely held.” Seek diverse opinions, consider multiple perspectives, and exercise understanding over persuasion.

Step 2: Find cross-departmental synergies

Establishing a strong, collaborative culture built on trust, transparency, and flexibility isn’t a one-and-done thing; it takes attention and repetition. As you continue to practice your foundational values, identify ways product management, product design, and engineering can work with each other to overcome bottlenecks, mitigate project risks, and bring quality products to market fast.

Product Management and Product Design

These disciplines collaborate best when product managers…

• Use research and other user-centered design best practices to decide on product and design direction

• Give attention to near-term delivery of features while finding ways to manage scope by iterating towards future designs

• Call out assumptions and surface ways to validate them to move forward

• Clearly convey design and user needs through user stories and frequent communication

And when product designers…

• Are willing to show designs and concepts early, ugly, and often, and are open to feedback/making quick iterations before design solutions are “too baked”

• Consider multiple perspectives (user and business needs) when solutioning

• Leverage design libraries and best practices so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel

• Have the flexibility to not be pixel-perfect

Product Management and Software Engineering

These disciplines collaborate best when product managers…

• Communicate technical constraints to stakeholders and articulate business needs to engineers

• Serve as a buffer to minimize distractions so engineers can work efficiently

• Suggest common solutions to problems that engineering may not have considered

• Understand the software development process enough to organize workstreams, prioritize stories, etc.

• Work to evolve the product beyond deadlines

And when engineers…

• Break down and explain complicated technical concepts

• Help assess technical feasibility to balance product and design decisions

• Surface risks and offer solutions to help mitigate them

• Communicate problems and blockers; people can’t help fix what they don’t know!

• Empathize with the user and business for a well-rounded understanding of the problem space

Product Design and Software Engineering

These disciplines collaborate best when product designers…

• Strive for great rather than perfect and understand you can make style tweaks as you go

• Have frequent design reviews to identify potentially difficult implementations early

• Help engineering understand the ways users will engage with the product

• Move fast and have visions of where the product should go

• Keep engineering in the loop on users’ friction points and parts of the product they enjoy

And when engineers…

• Vocalize technical options for achieving an ideal state or give alternatives

• Call out possible edge cases to consider during the design process

• Pay attention to alignment, font styles, and other design details during development to avoid having to go back and fix things later

• Have empathy for users and develop with them in mind

Step 3: Implement collaborative best practices with the Three-Week Product Sprint

Now that your Balanced Team has identified opportunities for collaboration, test them out! First, pick the right-sized problem to solve. Think like Goldilocks and hone in on something that isn’t too big or too small but will deliver the most value to users and the business. You can use a 2x2 prioritization matrix to help identify what’s high value and low risk/effort. 

Then, execute a successful three-week product sprint. It’s more spread out than a week-long sprint to allow time for more learning, iteration cycles on designs, and an understanding of technical feasibility. This will ensure you begin implementation with confidence and alignment. The Three-Week Product Sprint can be broken down into, you guessed it, three phases.

• Phase 1 | Align & Strategize: Align the Balanced Team and stakeholders on goals and the process. This is when you’ll lay the foundation for success via stakeholder interviews, persona generation workshops, and more.

• Phase 2 | Discover & Empathize: Understand the problem space and determine a problem to solve that will drive the most user and business value via generative research, assumptions & risks workshops, and more.

• Phase 3 | Ideate & Validate: Determine a viable solution as a starting point and continue to improve and evolve it based on validation from users. Brainstorm, build low/medium fidelity wireframes, do usability testing, and more.

For more detail on the Three-Week Product Sprint, check out our Denver Startup Week talk.

Measure Your Success

How do you know if implementing a collaborative culture and finding cross-department synergies is driving more successful product launches? While you should be having retros on a weekly basis or at the end of each sprint, recognize cultural improvements over time and be on the lookout for these key outcomes:

• Informed Stakeholders: You share incremental progress week over week and everyone is aligned on product direction and vision.

• Engaged Users: Users are willing to speak to you early and often, and you incorporate that user feedback into your decision-making.

• Shipped Value: You continue to reduce the number of times you trash solutions and start from scratch and product launches become quicker and more efficient.

• Healthy Team Dynamic: Your company has a blameless, egoless culture, and team members feel heard, valued, and bought into product direction and strategy. 

Conclusion

Product teams that are having trouble iterating and shipping value don’t need to throw everything out the window and start from scratch. We hope that in sharing some of these tactics and best practices you can incrementally improve your collaboration and thus impact the success of your product launches. 

And if you need help implementing any of this and maturing your agile processes, the Crafted team is here to help! Reach out to us and we’ll partner on the best solution for your team.