hipages product vision 2019

Background

Hipages is a two-sided marketplace that allows homeowners to connect with tradies when they need some work doing around the home.
hipages has never had a vision for its product
Without a clear vision, we tended to work on disconnected projects meaning we never really made any observable progress in any given direction
This strategy (or lack of) created a product that from the customers’ perspective hasn’t really evolved in six years
When a new Chief Product Officer joined hipages in 2018 he set the goal of establishing a product vision to help give direction to the ongoing development of the project

Problem(s)

How do you build a product vision (this was my first)
How do you lead a group of people who have no experience in building a product vision to build a vision that they all agree to commit to?
How do you then sell the vision to the whole company and get them to buy into the chosen direction?
How do you use a product vision on a day to day basis to guide the direction of several cross-functional teams?

Objectives

Deliverable

Build an engaging story for the vision set at the boundaries of technical reality
Build a vehicle for the vision that makes it consumable and memorable

Organisational

Get alignment amongst the senior leaders from the organisation so they agree on the vision for the product
Make everyone feel like they’re included and part of the team
Design an engaging and fun way of pulling people together to flesh out the vision

Constraints

No one in the product team had ever built a product vision before
Tiny budget
Three month time frame

Approach

We knew from the get go that things would need to move pretty fast if we were to meet the three month deadline so we made the decision to re-use the user research we already had rather than conducting research specifically for the vision project.

We wanted to ensure our founders and senior leaders felt listened to and validated so we started by working with them on the foundations. We then brought more stakeholders into the project, got our story nailed and then decided what the best medium to share our story was. This gave us a simple, fairly linear process:

Throughout the whole process I was constantly researching, whether it was workshop techniques, story design techniques, competitor analysis, screenwriting or videography, everything was new to me so I felt like I needed to learn as much as possible and lead as I learnt.

Getting Started

Luckily, when we were asked to devise the product vision we were already in the habit of conducting regular user research and testing, this gave us a fair amount of pre-captured user insights to work with. But… we didn’t just want to build a story based solely on the problems of today’s customers, there had to be a strong visionary element to our story. We first engaged with our most senior leaders in the company to understand their vision and whether it had changed over the years. Our plan was to mix the visionary elements shared by our stakeholders with the user problems to create an interesting cocktail of fact and vision.

Research

I first revisited our old customer roadmaps where we used to catalogue and rank the user problems we are aware of. I did this to get an historical view of our customer problems, I was really interested in the issues that had stubbornly persisted for multiple years. I then worked with the cross-functional teams to understand the customer problems in their backlog. I then revisited several old user tests, surveys and pieces of customer feedback to refresh my empathy for our customers and remind myself of their goals, anxieties and moments of delight. This was a really important foundational exercise that armed me with the knowledge I would use to guide the vision process and the conversations I would have with my collaborators.

Working with our leaders and founders

First Workshop

It was essential that the business leaders felt some form of ownership over the vision as they would need to be some of its strongest advocates for it with their respective teams.

In our very first workshop with the senior product leaders of the company we explored our existing brand definition. We looked at other product vision statements for various well known products and companies for inspiration and reflected on our company’s vision statement, mission and brand values which had been produced recently in conjunction with the brand management team. It was felt that as we were a product-centric company we could leverage and re-frame the company’s vision statement as a product vision statement so our product vision statement became, “The place to go for home improvement”. Even though I wasn’t 100% convinced, this was entirely fitting. I chose to not push it and go with our leaders, after all the major aim here is to build alignment.

We then reviewed the current top-rated pain points from our users and using challenge mapping landed on the problem of “How might we make our tradies’ lives easier?” We then brainstormed some ideas and tried to think how we could use emergent technology to solve the problem (Don’t forget our vision is supposed to be set 3 - 5 years in the future).

We also wanted to create some guiding principles for the product that was to be portrayed in the vision. These would help with direction and give the product an overall flavour, they would also be interwoven into the narrative of the vision. We explored what feelings we wanted the product to elicit in its users and how the product should feel to use. We were able to craft a large set of proto-values which could later be refined into more polished guiding principles.

Second Workshop

In the second senior stakeholder workshop we revisited the proto-values we had made in the first workshop. We practised some convergent thinking and tried to reduce our big vague list of principles down to a more refined and elegant set. We de-duped, combined, grouped and voted to get a set of 20+ ideas down to 4:

These guiding principles not only guided our work on the vision project but also became our design principles for all of our work.

Collaborative storytelling

Now that we had some high-level direction we needed to layer in the detail and we also wanted to pull more people into the project to give lots of people that sense of ownership and build some excitement about the vision. To do this we decided to run a cross-department workshop to get perspectives from around the business and build advocacy for the vision. We put out the call to all departments and on the day more than 40 people volunteered to help us build and evolve our vision.

The goal of the workshop was to produce a story that would become the spine of the vision, something which gave it form, makes it relatable and brings some human interest into what would otherwise be a list of features. But, hipages is a tech company, not a creative agency, we’re not creative writers. How do you get 40+ developers, product managers, designers, sales people, service agents, finance experts and senior managers to come together and write a great story?

We first grounded ourselves in the world of our users. We examined our customer value proposition for customers on both sides of the market. We then looked at the tasks both customers were trying to achieve, the pain points they endure (or try to avoid) and those magic moments that get them excited. Then, using the Customer Value Proposition Canvas we began to brainstorm the features that would mitigate the pain points, generate the moments of delight and allow them to complete their tasks. In essence it was if we were designing the hipages marketplace from scratch.

Through a series of collaborative exploration activities we built out lists of features for each stage in a job for both types of customer. Again, participants were encouraged to think about how the problems could be solved with technology that was either just emerging on the market or technology they thought would exist in a few years time. We now had some props for our story but it still didn’t feel like a vision, more like a shopping list of projects.

For the story writing part I crafted a competitive story writing exercise for teams using the Pixar story formula:

Once upon a time there was _______

Everyday ______

Until one day ______

Because of that ______

Until finally ______

The teams were encouraged to think about the main moments in their stories, what parts of the customer experience they referred to, the features that would be demonstrated and the emotions generated in the customers. From here they added detail and refined their flow until they had a story. Each team was then asked to act out or narrate their story with the group voting for their favourite. The senior stakeholders in the room were also asked to pick their favourites but they had the superpower of being able to steal scenes from the other stories to make their favourite better.

The outcome of the workshop was a collection of stories with one being chosen as the favourite and alignment amongst the participants on the features that should be present in our vision and how the story should be told.

Designing the vision

With the ingredients to the story coming together I began to hone and refine the story whilst being respectful to the outcome of the workshop. I captured all the story beats and added some depth to the characters. I did several cuts of the story that each emphasised a slightly different perspective until I found one that resonated with my colleagues and stakeholders. I also had to reduce the story’s length as we’d created quite a winding narrative. Reducing the length but keeping the moments of delight and vision was hard and again I made several versions of the story and tested them with my colleagues. After about a week I had a story that flowed, was about the right length and had as many moments of delight as I could fit in.

Whilst I was writing the story we also started engaging a senior UI designer to help us create the visual language in which we would build the future version of our product in. Due to us setting the vision a few years down the track we were keen for the vision product to not resemble our current product.

Together we reviewed current design trends and explored mobile apps and products that we felt really stood out from the crowd. We looked at products from the usual tech juggernauts but also some from some promising up and coming startups and some industry leading products too.

We took inspiration not just in terms of visual user interface design but also how intelligent agents could be used, how machine learning could be used and how we could promote easy seamless communication.

Working iteratively with the designer we walked through the story and selected scenes where we thought we wanted to show the vision product in action to support the story. We sketched ideas, found examples of technology that could be used and played with the character of the product to come up with concept moments. We then brought these into the story like a supporting actor is help the narrative and bring a bit of texture to our storytelling.

We shared our concepts with our project stakeholders to get their feedback and used their feedback to iterate and refine. Over the course of a few meetings we had a working model for how and when we would use the product in the story of our vision.

Essentially at this point we now had a product vision, we had a story that spoke of collaborative success through the use of technology that helped our protagonists achieve their goals. We just needed to give it a physical, shareable, memorable form.

Giving the vision form

The primary goal of the vision project was to help facilitate internal alignment amongst the product department and the rest of the company. To do this the vision needed to be consumable, understandable and relatable so now we began to think about how we would share the vision. There were two competing ideas for this, these were a storyboard showing the journey from each side of the marketplace in a style very similar to how AirBnB produced their their Snow White project and then a more conventional product vision video. Both formats had their positives and negatives and lent themselves to different forms of interaction but it was felt that a video would be more flexible as it could be viewed anywhere and would not need an introduction, it could simply be played and consumed. With the vision’s form being chosen as a video we hired a videographer to come in and help us turn our story into an entertaining and informative video.

We had what we thought would be a great character-based story underpinned with clever use of some future-focused technology but it needed to be reshaped, reduced and refined to be a great video. Again, whilst working with the videographer I was conducting lots of research to help me understand how to turn a story into a script. Plus I watched every product demonstration or product vision video I could find to help me find a style of video that would work for our story and budget.

After iterating a few times on the script and acting it out a few times we came to a workable script we were happy with. We recruited some actors from our own team members to keep budgets down and began rehearsing the script. Originally we planned for our actors to be mainly offscreen and narrating a story told mainly by the product being onscreen. After recording a test scene and adding some placeholder visuals we reflected and felt that our approach made it harder to relate to the protagonists and hindered the story telling. Luckily we had amazing actors so we were able to re-record the scenes with them on camera and positioned them so that the product could be shown at the same time.

The video was shot in our office, again to keep budgets low and after half a day’s shooting we had the ingredients for a pretty cool video. We added the vision product UI with some animations and some background music and our vision video was complete.

(Apologies, only limited stills from the video can be shared her due to most of the features contained in the video not yet being released)

Using the video to drive alignment within the company

Throughout the journey we maintained quite a tight feedback loop with the product team but had only given high-level feedback to the senior leadership team. When the vision and vision video were complete we were asked to present to the senior leadership team. We walked them through the journey we had been on and then showed the video. For the main part they were really receptive and complementary. A few minor changes were suggested but nothing structural.

Once an updated version was completed it was shown at a town hall for the whole company followed by a Q&A session. Again the reception was great, people seemed excited by the video which was exciting and asked great questions around why we had included certain features. We produced an explanatory slide deck and shared the vision with the company so leaders could show it to their teams and get direct feedback.

We then dissected the video with the product team, going through the story in detail and examining the problems that were solved in the video. We used this list of problems as a lens on the cross-functional teams’ current backlog to identify which squad was looking after each problem. The vision video wasn’t a list of features to be built, it was never meant to be prescriptive instead act as inspiration and fodder for discussion when looking into how to solve these problems in the real product. This analysis identified gaps where no squads were looking at these problems so they were added to the relevant squad’s discovery backlog.

We check in quarterly on vision progress to understand things like:

What progress is being made towards the vision?
Have we invalidated any of the problems or solutions shown in the video?
Is there anything new that should be added to the vision?
Are we roughly still heading towards the vision or are we going in a new direction?

Recently a new squad has been created and charged with trying to build the key moments of delight from the vision. This squad has now begun testing various parts of the vision with homeowners and tradies to identify which parts of the vision would bring the most value to our customers and business. This squad has now identified a part of the job process to focus on and is tackling the problems found in this part.

Reflection

We achieved our primary goal of bringing closer inter-department alignment around product direction which was really rewarding to see. We produced something tangible that can be shared which talks to where we the company wants to go and our values. But if we were to make product vision v2 what would I do differently?

Product marketing

The product vision was a product of the product department. I think we missed an opportunity to really collaborate closely with our product marketers and empower them to help set the product’s direction. Marketing team members came to our workshop and helped construct the story but they didn’t feel a sense of ownership. For v2 I’ll be sure to make sure that both consumer and tradie marketing are co-owners of the vision, after all more ownership will help with alignment and adoption.

Research

We didn’t conduct primary research for the vision, instead using our existing research. For the next version of our vision I think it would be beneficial to incorporate some user research to validate the highlighted problems and solutions. This was done for the current vision but a few months after the vision was shared with the organisation. I think it would be better to do this as part of the vision project.

Work more closely with senior leadership on how to use a vision

The vision was really well received but our leadership team used it in a very prescriptive manner, they distilled the features from the vision and then asked the product leadership team to deliver them. I don’t think this is how vision videos should be used, instead we should look for the values, themes and messaging in the vision and use these as guiding pillars rather than the actual features. The technology world changes quickly so locking in a catalogue of features months or even years before they’re delivered is not the correct way to build compelling products. The cross-functional teams should be challenged with achieving the goal of the vision rather than the vision itself. They should then be empowered to deliver the features, be they ones in vision or different ones.

Final thoughts

I’m really happy with what was produced for our product vision and look forward to updating it in the near future in order to keep it relevant. Sure, there were lessons learnt and I would change how we produce the next vision to take account of these but on the whole I feel the 2019 hipages product vision project was both fun and successful.

Work Samples In Design Interviews

Bunnings Partnership

Contact

Jules Munford
Phone: 0431 414322
Email: julian.munford@googlemail.com
Twitter: @julesmunford