Sprint 64 :: Feature Discovery and Delivery for Internal Products
With special guest Mike Watson
Supporting internal applications as a product person can be an amazing experience.
You can connect with team members to empathize and understand how helping their day-to-day can affect your company's bottom line and, in many cases, directly help improve the customer experience your company provides.
Being able to determine what to build for internal products isn’t drastically different than customer-facing.
Still, there are some benefits, such as ease of access to your user group, that, if harnessed correctly, can instantly improve your product.
Here’s how the process can be broken down into the stages:
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1. Discover and Document Issues
Begin by immersing yourself in the team’s experience with the product.
Engage in discussions, observe usage, and identify all potential areas for improvement, with a particular focus on major issues.
Document these findings clearly, emphasizing the problems that need addressing.
This stage combines understanding user experience and evaluating app functionality to pinpoint exactly where enhancements are needed.
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2. Develop and Refine Solutions
With a clear understanding of the issues, brainstorm various solutions, ranging from quick fixes to more substantial, long-term changes.
Collaborate with your team to assess the feasibility and impact of each proposed solution.
Then, refine these ideas by consulting with key stakeholders and incorporating their feedback to ensure practical and effective solutions.
This stage merges the ideation of diverse solutions with the validation process, streamlining the development of actionable plans.
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3. Plan and Prepare for Go Live
After finalizing the solutions, prepare a detailed plan for their implementation.
Discuss this plan with senior leaders for approval (if your situation calls for it), ensuring it aligns with broader organizational goals and resources.
Then, coordinate with the development team to outline the execution strategy.
This final stage is about refining your approach based on feedback and setting the stage for the development team to bring the updates to life.
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Final Thoughts
By focusing on the process following these steps, you can efficiently gather input from internal team members, develop impactful solutions, and implement updates that enhance the usability and effectiveness of your internal applications.
Aside from these steps, I encourage creating a spin-off from this process where you establish an open line of feedback for the team members you are supporting.
Not only will you be able to understand how impactful your new feature is, but you’ll also establish a relationship that can be bi-directional moving forward.
You get all the feedback and feature ideas, and they get all the benefits that come from your team’s efforts. A win-win situation for you all.
Mike Watson & The Product Land ⛰️
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