Principles of Product Design

When faced with interesting and complex challenges, it pays to have strong principles to fall back on.

My examples are focused around the attendees virtual experience.

Go and see

We took this principle from Toyota.

The best and most efficient way to gain empathy for customer problems

Set aside time to experience what the customer feels first hand.

Outcomes over outputs

Outcomes are the goals and metrics you want to achieve.

Outputs are the work being down my individuals and teams.

Efforts made by your team should have a motivating purpose.

Measure first and last

Take time to know where we are and where we're going

By the end of the quarter, you'll know whether you've made progress in the right direction.

Think big, start small

This is the one I think we’ve improved the most on over the last year.

How we’re thinking about the problems and solutions at various levels

From the long term 50,000 foot view down to where the rubber meets the road right now.

Intentional and flexible

We stole this one from Intercom. As we scale our business, this one becomes more and more critical.

I understand we’ll be getting into some lego building exercises this week.

All in an effort to help us be more opinionated by default and flexible under the hood.

We care about people

At the end of the day we’re building product to make someone's life and work a little easier.

Not only do we want to make an impact for the business but always think about the impact on the individual

The perfect opportunity to Go and See was INSIGHT 2021.

After experiencing that event first hand, we got as many of us as we could into one Lucidspark doc

and noted problems we’d like to address to make the event better next year.

With the affinity map exercise and follow-up surveys, we were able to identify focus areas (that we’d later refer to as Objectives)

For Content Discovery, a leading indicator of success was having the attendee consume more event content.

How can measure the outcome? We worked with Rob Clark, Data Scientist, and tracked the % of registered attendees who viewed at least 1 session.

I’m still not exactly sure how we did this, but from 2020 to 2021 we increased this metric 32%.

As the AVX team started iterating on solutions for the attendee portal, catalog, and session detail pages, we stayed in a low fidelity as we dreamed big about what the future experience could become.

We tested designs with clients and internal stakeholders and learned along the way.

We learned what themes or solutions would need to be prioritized and how that work could be distributed across AVX teams.

This took the course of a few months, but it helped us establish this product process and how we’re thinking about problems and solutions at various levels of the business.