We're trying something new with Dear Coach this month. You can listen to the full audio of our coaches unpacking the challenge below or read the summary if you prefer.

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Summary

In this series, our expert coaches answer your burning product-related questions. This month we cover creating a process to facilitate collaboration between Product Managers, UI, UX and engineering. TPR CEO Robin Zaragoza discusses the possible solutions with fellow coaches Laura Morgan and Neha Datt.

Q. As a product manager, I have all sorts of requests from the business and from users to improve our user experience or user interface. And currently, there's no formal process to kick off design meetings, or workflow to hand over from product manager to UI to UX to engineering. Engineering and product managers want wireframes to develop, but chasing the UI and UX teams only means they push back and say they're still in discovery mode. I've read a lot of articles, but I'm still lost! — Product manager at a large bank

A. Thank you for your question, product manager!

Our first thought is that you don’t have to go this alone! Try to find an ally within each department who is bought into the way you would like to work. Have an open conversation to flag the challenges as you see them, understand how they like to work, and then use that as a starting point for potential change.

Our second thought is that everyone may not be on the same page about what discovery means. It’s probably worth asking questions to better align on the purpose of discovery. When do we do it versus when do we skip it? What are the different stages and output of those stages? What types of discovery are we doing? How long does it take / should they take? We suspect that the lack of understanding and alignment is at the core of friction between teams.

More specifically, if engineering is looking for wireframes, this is no longer a moment of “discovery” (or it shouldn’t be anyway).  Discovery is about what problems are we solving for the customer, and what’s the best solution for that problem? Detailed wireframes that engineering can build from almost always come much later in the process when the solution is already validated.

While we understand that working in a product trio is not the way your organization is currently set up, and you may not have the seniority to change that en masse, we would challenge that it’s not possible to move in the right direction. Our strong view is that engineers (and product managers) should be involved in discovery in some way….not waiting for the solution to be handed to them. Engineers are your greatest source for innovation. If they are relegated to building what is handed to them in a wireframe that a designer has created in isolation, you’re missing a major opportunity to create even greater value for your customer.

Can you find a single opportunity to all be involved in some piece of discovery work to see what happens when you take a different approach? You could try bringing together representatives from engineering, product, and UX/UI to form a ‘virtual team’ for one small piece of work. In addition to only doing this for an individual idea or feature, putting a timebox around this can also help the whole thing feel less daunting. In this way you're not embarking on an organisational restructure or changing reporting lines. You’re doing something that is low risk, low investment, but with big potential returns.

In terms of creating the new process itself, we suggest one of two approaches. You can do a quick service design map of the current process, identify friction points, and then redefine the process to fix those problems. Alternatively, you can look at a recent feature that got delivered with the current process and do a bit of a retrospective on it to identify where you need to make changes. Again, we have to stress that you do not have to do this alone, and in fact, we encourage this as a collaborative approach.

Finally, we suggest viewing your process in the same the way we view product – as something iterative that will change over time. Setting that expectation with everyone introduces the mindset of continuous improvement and hopefully encourages everyone to take part in identifying and changing what’s not working, instead of relying on what has always been.

Hopefully this gives you some good food for thought!

Have your own product challenge you'd like some advice on? Submit your Dear Coach question to us at hello@theproductrefinery.com.