Case Study — Strategic

Cross-team, Multi-product

 
 

Topic.

How might we roll out a company-wide initiative that affects many teams and products?

 

Role.

Product Designer on the IA workstream. I worked with the core team (Product, Design, Content Strategy, Research, Biz Dev, Engineering, Leadership) to evolve a company goal into something we would build. I was ultimately responsible for creating proposals and producing artifacts that represented how it could be achieved.

This study is 80% text 20% visual.

Business Goals

A new company goal for 2020 had a new team defining how our products worked together and the relationships between them. This had to be done while still enabling product teams to work autonomously and with minimal disruption to their individuals roadmaps. 

New framing as an online presence builder
Elements of an ecosystem IA. While product navigation is typically viewed in vertical, this is not ultimately how information is created by us or retrieved by our users.

Process

A team dedicated to IA would need to be spun up to support the needs of all the product teams, and act as the in-between. Ultimately we would make sure that everything was accounted for. This included:

  • Recurring stakeholder interviews and updates.

  • Tracking multiple teams quarterly goals.

  • Company updates, onboarding and presentations to bring people along no matter their involvement.

  • Tracking where/how new features were being built and being aware of implications that we could recommend for or against.

  • Auditing of areas of the product that didn’t have dedicated teams and could easily get lost. And then finding owners for these areas!

  • Workshopping with engineering and product leadership to define a phased approach.

  • Conducting user tests, tree tests & interviews to ensure we could report on our decisions.

  • Pitches for engineering resourcing. 

If anyone wanted to check our latest thinking, I kept a running doc that listed open questions, potentials blocker and links out to all our artifacts. 
All of our starting points follow a similar pattern, but many are built in different apps. User flows like this helped teams to understand how this wasn't a copy/paste job. We needed shared data, shared animations and reusable components.

What would success look like?

An agreed phased approach by all product teams with committed resourcing.

Results

7 Teams
8 Leadership Checkpoints
4 User Tests
19 Prototypes
1 Retrospective

Why is this project important to me?

Cross-team projects are so complex and I was able to use my knowledge of the product and relationships with other teams to successfully bring the pieces together.