My Product Journey of launching Funware

Check out our live product here: https://fun-ware.bubbleapps.io/

A small glimpse of my career journey?

I Vaidehee, have worked in various roles for different business disciplines such as Software, Manufacturing, Operations, Academic, Retail & Technology.?

I initially started as a Computer Science graduate and did a couple of internships as a Software Engineer and quickly discovered 'coding for a living' was something I did not want to pursue. Early years of my career I always knew what I did not want to do but had trouble figuring out what interests me.?

I then moved on to work as a Program Manager and a Technical Analyst. These roles painted an overall understanding of what could potentially interest me. At this point, I knew managing stakeholders and engaging in conversations with people from varied backgrounds on a day-day basis intrigued me.??

I moved to Toronto to pursue a career in Business Analytics and thereafter worked in various analytical roles for over 4 years.?

During this course of time, I was introduced to product management; a space where understanding the problems of a user requires conversing with varied teams but at the same time requires a deeper understanding of business objectives and an ability to visualize complex data into reality through products.?

I was given an opportunity by PMDojo to utilize all my transferrable skills and work as a Product Manager along with a cross-functional team to build a live Product.?

As a team, we were paired with a startup company ‘Funworks’ to launch a product that offers fun, science-backed, team-building activities to improve virtual?collaboration and increase employee engagement.?

We call ourselves ‘A global team’ as we all have worked together for 10 consecutive weeks on a day-to-day basis from 4 different time zones and managed to prioritize and deliver our work on time.

Background of the problem

Work from home has increased by a significant percentage after COVID-19 and the number of remote jobs companies offer today has drastically increased in the past two years and working virtually is the new norm.?

Although working from home has improved productivity it has also led to lack of engagement, virtual burnout, and less meaningful collaboration within teams. We found out that employees are having trouble communicating within their teams, most of them feel disconnected, and all of this is leading to low engagement which in turn leads to lack of ideation.?

Because this is a growing concern within companies, employees are looking to have a sense of belonging.

Problem Statement

Leaders in virtual environments are struggling to foster team engagement and this is leading to ineffective meetings, overwhelm, and burnout, which in turn impacts effective creative thinking and collaboration within teams.

Having the right problem statement was one of the biggest challenges we faced as a team. This involved diagnosing to focus on the real problem and not on assumed problems. Understanding the problem space is crucial. Every week revisiting the problem statement eventually allowed us to develop a user-centric solution.?

Why does this matter?

Endless meaningless meetings, virtual burnout, dull ideas, and disengaged employees cost companies millions of dollars.?

A disengaged employee costs an organization approximately $3400 for every $10,000 in annual salary.?

One employee by themselves cannot solve this problem and which is why we are targeting the decision makers, the people who can implement this change within existing workflows. The ‘Team Leads’ being our target users can bring in Fun and use the concept of different Funware activities to address the problem of disengagement, collaboration, and ideation.??

Journey of understanding our user pain points

We started with making assumptions about what could potentially be some of our user points. This then helped us draft our initial survey questions for the public to collect further data to validate our assumptions.

Conducting varied user interviews outlined a structure for us to start understanding the real problem we were trying to solve, and this led to publishing a secondary survey to further gather data and avoid the mistakes we made during the first iteration.?

During the problem discovery phase, we understood that users had too many virtual meetings that lacked personal connection. Users felt that building a strong personal social tie makes team collaboration better. Individual employees felt their ideas were not being considered and that they could only share their ideas in a psychologically safe environment.?

We also found that lack of communication is the major concern while working virtually and there are no means through which virtual teams can collaborate within their existing workflow. They either must attend additional ‘Happy Hour’ meetings or set aside time in their calendars. These fixed hours have added additional stress and it is not something employees look forward to every week.?

Meet Jake?

Jake is a product Team Lead and has been working from home for over 2 years now. Jake’s goals are to maintain high productivity within his team and build new relationships at work whilst maintaining older ones. He also wants to collaborate creatively with his team members.?

Jake is motivated to have a healthy work and personal life balance. He also wants to create a psychologically safe environment for his team and make them feel included in decision-making.?

He is frustrated as he cannot meet his coworkers in person, and this is limiting him from building better relationships with his colleagues. Attending too many meetings in a day is leading to him feeling burnt out. Some of his colleagues never turn on their videos and all these factors eventually disrupt his ability to collaborate creatively.

Jake's Journey?

At the start of the day Jake feels disengaged and feels like there are too many meetings on his calendar that are boring and redundant. Although he does feel that 1:1 conversations are better as he and the other person feel more connected and share ideas more openly.?

During some of his team meetings to discuss ongoing projects he discovers his team is feeling stuck during these projects and he is unable to make them feel motivated or even think of better ways to ideate such that the team can move forward with the project within the project timelines.?

He wants all of his team members to collaborate but some of them keep their videos switched off and this makes it difficult for him to approach someone or ask the right questions.??

In order to address these pain points for Jake we can bring in some fun at work. The concept of fun releases dopamine within human brains leading to better ideation. Funware activities use the same science within their activities to create engaging and delightful work experiences for work.

Additionally, these activities are built within the workflow. Jake will not have to attend or create additional new meetings to incorporate these activities with his meetings. The user interface uses a no to low sign-up process that eases the user's way directly into the activity without using additional time on tasks that might seem redundant and boring at a later stage.?

Design Process

While in the discovery phase we highlighted more than one pain point of a user; But can the solution address all the pain points of the users or are there any tradeoffs that need to be made were two very important questions we needed to solve before designing concept sketches.?

Is the first iteration of the product release going to really solve the user’s pain points? Always understanding ‘WHY and WHY and WHY are we solving this for’ during the solution phase.

Being cognizant we again diverged to gather some ideas, took inspiration from lighting demo exercises, and built our concept sketches.?

The first concept sketch was then later used to start building wireframes in Balsamiq, which transitioned into a low-fidelity wireframe. During the first iteration of the low-fidelity wireframes, we were provided feedback on our solutions and the feedback from our mentor and senior PMs always helped us think differently and captured a different lens to understand our product.?

We questioned ourselves again “is our MVP really going to solve the problem”. In our early concept, we had introduced a couple of steps before the user can start the Funware activity and this concept did solve our problem but the solution was more complicated than a simple user-friendly humanized version.?

We struggled, we tried, we failed, and we started all over again with new wireframes.?

Some snippets of our final wireframes:

We continued working on our prototype and parallelly started the first sprint with our developer. During the first sprint, we built our Landing page and communicated the vision of our prototype with the developer, and discussed requirements and their feasibility.??

It was important that we did not move too far away from the essence of having fun at work and designing in a way that the users experience fun virtually was tricky; yet after a couple of sprint iterations we delivered the expected user experience design.?

North Star Metric

Value proposition converged the data points from our product discovery phase and summarized details that we required to understand ‘what is the most important to measure?’?

For the purpose of the MVP, we prioritized our metric based on what is relevant in this product iteration phase. Measuring the ‘Funware exercise completion rate’ was a high-priority metric we wanted to measure. This would essentially lead to understanding how engaged the user was while performing the activity.? We incorporated a method to collect data on how many phases of the activity every user has completed by keeping track of their clicks.?

Our founder at Funworks always wanted to ‘measure engagement' when the user is performing these activities. Based on our user research we also believed this was crucial and drafted some indirect questions in the form of a survey that would help measure engagement at an early stage of the MVP.

We initially considered ‘numbers of Funworks exercises completed’ as one of our North Star Metric. This was traded off as we could only test one exercise for our MVP. The goal of the MVP was to test these activities within the existing workflow of the users and create fun collaboration.

For the release, we launched one Funworks exercise where the user can perform these activities outside of the MVP and use the MVP only as an instructional guide. This will help us gauge the engagement of our users and how well this fits into their workflow.?

The Next stage of our product roadmap would be to incorporate the entire activity into the product platform and build our reporting and analytics to measure engagement. This stage would also include additional popular Funware activities.?

User Stories

User Story 1:

As a team lead, I want my team members to participate in the worst idea exercise so that I can Ideate with the team to solve a problem.?

Acceptance Criteria: The prompt to start sharing screen to be displayed in the web browser.?

User Story 2:

As a team lead, I want to start the timer on the worst ideas exercise page so that the team has visibility on how long they have to complete this activity.?

Acceptance Criteria: The start button should display the digital timer on the web browser and this timer cannot be stooped or paused.?

Beta Launch

After completing the user stories and making iterative changes we worked with our developer to build the beta version. Changes were made within the beta version as per user feedback and adhering to the MVP goals.?

The initial beta version was changed as designs and background changes were required. The first iteration was not close to what we visualized within our prototype and we provided design changes to our developer using Figma.?

During this whole journey from designing to beta launch, we learned to communicate the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ when it comes to development.?

What we learned while building this Product?

• Go Broad, go narrow, converge, and diverge: The product development lifecycle as a whole taught us when to diverge our thoughts and when to converge, and what is important at every stage of the cycle. At first, we were overwhelmed and did not understand ‘the why’? and now at the end of 10 weeks we can identify what kind of thinking is required for different phases of the product lifecycle?
• Reduce friction, give the user what they want: Iterative versions of our low fidelity wireframes looked very different from one another and this was not an easy process. We struggled and failed several times to only realize that this is a norm when building products.?
• Never believing our assumptions: It was so easy to have biased assumptions in the problem discovery phase. After making unvalidated assumptions and failing we realized that external inputs are to be considered only as an additional data point and not as validated assumptions.?

Conclusion

When I started my product journey I knew ‘why’ I wanted to pivot into Product. I was unclear on the ‘how’ and ‘what’. PMDojo has given me the direction I needed.?

A special mention to Bosky who decided to give me this opportunity and taught me to have faith in the process when I was unsure of where to begin. This is a perfect example of “you only need that one person to believe in you to succeed”.

Launching a product from 0-1 has helped me learn and unlearn through real-time experiences. Every week throughout the 10-week journey I grasped new learnings through my experiences and now comparing the past to the present I can visualize the switch in my thought process.?

It was very challenging to commit to extra hours every week but I personally enjoyed the whole process of working with a global cross-functional team. Every team member on?this Product team has been a major contributing factor to my journey into Product.?

When you are working in a fast-paced environment it is very easy to get sidetracked and lose focus. Our wonderful mentor Kaustav always helped us stay calm, and celebrate small wins.?

I now finally understand why ‘feeling confused and underestimating is part of the process’ and how this eventually leads to adding value and purpose.?