Coronavirus Adds New Opportunity For Distributed Design Teams To Go Virtual
Even before coronavirus isolated us from our software product team members, UX designers at ITX Corp. created a guide for translating the design sprint process to a virtual environment. Our already-distributed workforce has enjoyed using the virtual design sprint for months. And they’re confident its value will outlive the pandemic that inspired its expanded use.
Let’s talk about two very important artifacts that play a pivotal role within our product development teams: roadmaps and release plans.
Experience is what creates sustainable competitive advantage. This is the nature of competition.
The Experience Puzzle
Economists have argued for centuries about the nature of competition.
According to Adam Smith in the 18th century, every individual “intends only his own gain.” Therefore, he exchanges what he produces with others who sufficiently value what he has to offer. One thing many economists agree on is the elusive nature of individual utility. What one man values, others often ignore. This simple fact is what drives human innovation and ingenuity.
I was taught many things about competition and positioning in the course of earning my MBA, We read about Michael Porter’s five-forces model, Jerome McCarthy’s 4 P’s of Marketing, and a few other generic frameworks, which invariably describe the relationship between cost and target positioning. One model that stuck with me, as I have seen it used countless times in business, is a more traditional contextual model for determining the positioning of your product, your services and ultimately for your firm called “The Tradeoff Triangle.”
Authentic, self-determined loyalty only occurs after hard-earned, authentic trust is well established. This is true for interpersonal relationships just as it is for the relationships between customers and firms or between employees and firms. Trust is always a fundamental prerequisite to loyalty. If you are serious about earning sustainable and authentic loyalty, you must have established an authentic and thorough foundation of trust.
Once you have gained trust, the next natural step in your customer relationships is loyalty. The “buy 12 cups of coffee and get the 13th cup free” type of loyalty behaviors some companies use to bribe through discounts or freebies are not sustainable. You have to keep giving the discounts to continue to get the behaviors. The type of blind loyalty demanded by drug warlords or mafia boss “leaders” who use fear, manipulation or outright bribery is generally feigned as well. When a more powerful, more frightening or higher paying leader comes along, loyalty is quickly questioned.
Coronavirus Signals Need for Rapid, Lasting Societal Change
As I write this, I am closing out week three of the coronavirus lockdown across New York State. We’re all focused on the immediate impacts, and rightly so. But business leaders can ill afford to overlook the more profound, longer-lasting systemic changes.
Among them is our society’s readiness to accept, let alone embrace, the speed of technological evolution. Throughout human history, our resistance to change has delayed technological expansion and adoption.
ITX Corp.’s Remote-First Culture Eases Transition To A New Normal
“ITX is a remote-first workplace,” marked the first words uttered by my HR contact during our initial screening interview. If they’re going to start the conversation with that, I thought, it must be pretty important.
Over that past couple years – but especially the past couple weeks – I’ve learned exactly how important these words truly are.
Frameworks, however flawed, are critical tools for leaders. Having a system to help you think clearly, segment activities, and create priorities, will help you create momentum and scale thinking through those you lead. It will help you achieve better strategic and tactical outcomes. The higher up you go in an organization, the more important it is to be able to share ideas and structure thinking in a memorable way.
Useful Frameworks
A useful framework will serve to order the thinking of your teams in ways that will align them, promote project confidence, and elicit intrinsically motivated, authentic commitment. It will reduce the collective cognitive load associated with strategy and prioritization and allow your teams and the people on them to spend more time creating and working toward your shared strategic goals. Analogies, metaphors, and contextual models, in the form of a framework, help us scale our leadership through others. When teams are using the same language and shared context, through metaphors, outcomes will improve.
Social distancing is forcing Agile product teams to become truly (small ‘a’) agile. At ITX, adapting and collaborating virtually are part of our culture. With our long-standing remote first philosophy, we’re prepared to seamlessly transition from co-location to remote work. Let our architects, designers, and developers help ease the transition to your new normal.
Review our remote work checklist for everyday best practices. You can also catch some of their personal anecdotes and insights to help you and your product development teams become truly agile. We hope these tips enhance your productivity, effectiveness, and morale.
Imagine a colleague asks you to describe the software product manager role. Where would you begin? So few of us actually studied this stuff in college. How can we hope to explain it when we’re not even sure we’re doing it right? We deliver MVPs for MVAs. We set goals using OKRs and KPIs. And we apply a host of methodologies to build all this incredible software. But in the midst of all the jargon, it’s easy to lose sight of our greater purpose.
In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Sean and Paul chat with Johanna Rothman. Also known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” Johanna helps product leaders identify problems, recognize opportunities, and remove obstacles in their development process. Though she has authored more than a dozen books on digital product management, Johanna sees software not as the end goal – but as the means by which we achieve that greater purpose – inspiring our teams to improve the world around us.
As organizations move inexorably to a team-based, agile methodology, how do individual contributors effectively demonstrate what they’re working on or what they’ve accomplished? If performance is measured based solely on the team’s deliverables, how do team leaders appropriately acknowledge each member’s contribution or target their professional development? Enter the concept of contributive design, in which involvement of the individual is made clear. Contributive design fosters an environment in which team members collaborate as one, but also where they’re not necessarily dependent on others for their own outcomes.
In this episode of ITX’s Product Momentum Podcast, hosts Sean and Paul welcome Miguel Cardona, professor of design, artist, and keynote speaker at ITX’s 2nd annual ITX UX 2019: Beyond the Pixels design conference. Miguel introduces us to contributive design and its far-reaching impact – not only in the classroom, where contributive tools help him evaluate the performance of project teams and isolate the contributions of each student. Contributive design applies with equal significance in the workplace as we consider the modular nature of teams, design systems, and the user experience.
