How I Led My Team to Achieve the Desired Outcome in Just 3 Months After 3 Years

Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

In a CEO/founder-led startup, I was responsible for providing value to Merchants.

I embarked on a journey to focus onand solve critical business and customer problems.

But the journey was not easy …

When I kicked off my research to understand the most painful user problems, a common theme emerged from this extensive research.

Surprisingly, the solution for addressing this specific problem had been in development for three years. Yet it had not progressed to the point of being deployable to production.

The team and upper management recognized its importance. However, delivering it remained a challenge.

Upon closer examination, the root cause of the issue became evident. We deprioritized this project. It meant the team never had the opportunity to dedicate their time to it.

ACTION ITEM FOR ME:
Prioritization

But….

In a company structure where high-level management influences resource allocation and project prioritization. I knew it was necessary to connect user problem prioritization with the company’s larger business goals.

This is approach was also essential to validate my assumption. I wanted to make sure that the identified problem was indeed the most critical customer issue. It will also provide a high impact on business as well.

This linkage laid the foundation for my approach. The steps to lay the foundation involved 2 main phases

1. Phase 1: Setting the foundation for business and user goals prioritization
2. Phase 2: Setting the foundation for user goal delivery

Let us have a look at them in detail.

PHASE 1: SETTING THE FOUNDATION FOR BUSINESS AND USER GOALS PRIORITIZATION

This phase was crucial to align the stakeholders in prioritizing the company's goals

1. Setting a Clear Vision:
   Aligning the team’s vision with the company’s broader goals.
   Action: Defined the user goals and business goals.
2. Gaining Data-Driven Insights:
   Analyzing data, and identifying crucial business objectives and customer problems.
   Action: Defined the business metrics linked with user journey metrics.
   e.g
   Business metrics: Merchant retention metrics in x%.
   User metrics: Merchants with a one-year tenure experienced a y% increase in their retention rates.
3. Conducting User Interviews:
   Gaining insights from merchants, operations, marketing, sales, and other teams, as well as exploring customer reviews and Zendesk complaints.
   Action:
   a) Organised the findings into different themes
   b) Sent NPS surveys to gauge how merchants felt about the product.
4. Strategy Alignment:
   Product strategy is aligned with user problems and business objectives.
   Action:
   Prioritised end-to-end journey.
   e.g. Based on data analysis, our merchant retention rate was spiky as compared to merchant growth. Hence I prioritised the merchant retention.
5. Defining team KPIs and prioritising the user group:
   Defining key performance indicators (KPIs) to provide maximum value and impact on both users and the business.
   Action:
   a) Defined the KPIs to align with the strategy defined above.
   b) Prioritised the user group (All user groups: small, medium, and large merchants)

Once I laid the foundation and agreed with stakeholders, that retention needs to be prioritised over growth. I knew the project would pick up at a good pace.

PHASE 2: SETTING THE FOUNDATION FOR USER GOAL DELIVERY

In this phase, I aligned the team on executing the product strategy foundation.

1. Problem Discovery:
   To uncover a recurring theme where customers expressed frustration.
   Action:
   Took the inputs from steps 3 and 5 of phase 1. I did more in-depth customer interviews and data analysis.
2. Project Scoping (MVP):
   Scoped the project with a minimum viable product (MVP) approach.
   Action:
   Performed JTBD exercise with merchants
3. Team retrospective:
   Regularly conducting regular team retrospectives to identify the bottlenecks in processes or tools.
   Action:
   Conducted retrospectives with teams every 2 weeks.
4. Metrics measurement:
   To ensure the team is moving in the right direction, I kept a close track of product metrics and impact on users and business.
   Action:
   a) Before and after progress on business metrics, user journey metrics and project success metrics
   b) Compared before and after NPS survey scores
5. Stakeholder management:
   Overcommunicated the project's health and impact on the metrics .
   Action:
   a) Biweekly Slack updates
   b) Monthly meetings

This journey shows how a data-driven, user-centric, and collaborative approach can unlock the solution to a long-standing problem. It also achieves significant improvements in user and business outcomes.

For suggestions and feedback, please feel free to comment or contact me at my email nidasaleem333@gmail.com.