#ProductDiaries 3/3/23: project before and after deck to the whole engineering team

#ProductDiaries is a documented series of my experience as a product manager — what I’m doing, what I’m learning, and what I’m changing.

What I did:

I presented a project before and after deck slide deck to my engineering team help clarify where the need from the project stemmed from, how we prioritized which problems to tackle, why we chose to tackle them in the way that we are, and what it could look like when the entire project comes together.

Format:

• Title, names, date of presentation
• Problem: what major insight led to us knowing we needed to invest in this
• Top problems via user research:
• Top problems via quantitative analysis:
• Solution theme, product requirements doc link, data point(s) that make us believe this solution is the proper way to tackle the theme
• Review of top problems but now with a summary of how we’d have solved them by the end of the project
• Link to prototype of end vision product
• Contact info slide for questions/feedback

Why I did it:

If you’re communicating what, why, and how it’s going on a regular basis with everyone who relies on you, you’re a 1 in 100 PM.

We’re undertaking a redesign of a major flow but we’ve broken it out into a roadmap of individual projects. An engineer on my team had asked to understand how her project fits into the timeline for the greater redesign She knew what she was doing but not the greater context of why and how it’s going relative to the other dependent parts. This forced me to realize that I was failing to socialize the image of the forest from the trees.

Once I started sharing the deck that highlights the parts of the projects AND their why’s, I received unanimously positive feedback that this context was both useful and necessary. Not only did it benefit the engineering team but my manager and her manager and her manager all were thankful to have a breakdown of the meaning of the work they were investing in. Yes, they were already bought in on the benefits but seeing the totality of the whats and whys together unlocked greater alignment and investment in making the total redesign come together.

What I could do better:

Do it sooner!