The secret to transitioning to a new process? Focus, Focus, and more Focus
For the past two months, I’ve been working with a really cool start-up called GetThru. They are a progressive, political communications platform. They worked with a lot of major political platform and drove mass comms for some of the biggest campaigns in recent political cycles. Their CEO Daniel Souwiene got in touch with me because he was ushering in a new product practice and process and moving two of his employees, Toni Susi and Adam White, into Product Manager roles. GetThru had chosen the BaseCamp process framework Shape-Up as their foundation for product practice and I was hired to help Toni and Adam develop into their roles.
This has been an exciting engagement for me for a lot of reasons. The Shape-Up framework designed by Basecamp provided a really good frame for thinking about process, but also left a ton of space to adapt and fill in the blanks. This means that I was walking into a situation where the company has a shared understand of what they are shooting for, but there was a lot of flexibility and the ability to reflect and change what was needed. I hadn’t worked with the Shape-Up process specifically, but as I took a look at it, it lined up really nicely with the product practice that I have developed and used, just with different vocabulary. Shape-Up is predicated on a few ideas:
A Pitch shaping process that gives teams times to form up pieces of work
A betting process that creates alignment within the team on what appetite exists for pieces of work
A loose delivery process that allowed for evidence driven development and stressed reflection
The Shape-Up process doesn’t prescribe much else besides those three components, this meant that things like customer discovery, user research, lean experiments and tests and OKRs can all be folded into it pretty seamlessly, which gave me a beautiful canvas to work with the GetThru PMs and product teams to construct a practice that worked for them.
Toni and Adam have both worked for GetThru for a few years as customer success managers, so know their customers and their product inside and out. They work on two different product tracks both of which had lots of opportunities and lots of challenges. For me, as their coach, there were a lot of different angles into approaching practice change. In order for me to quickly get a focus on where we should get started, I instituted a weekly retrospective and did a process map overview, where we took time to create a more complete hypothesis on how the shape-up process was going to work at GetThru.
The biggest challenge to the PMs working through this time was not the practice change themselves, but the overwhelm of their context. Not only were they learning the ropes of a new job while doing the job, they were educating the org on their new roles, they were working from home during a global pandemic, while also transitioning away from their previous roles. My work with them was to help them recognize that process takes time, and they can’t and shouldn’t try to boil the ocean. While there was a million things we could have started with, personas, user research, stakeholder updates, it was clear that the most important next step was to focus on delivery team process and creating transparency and alignment between devs and product. In order to get this done in time for the next cycle to start in mid-may we can to accomplish the following:
Extract the overarching business goals for GetThru from Daniel
Line up the potential next pieces of work, or pitches, beneath those goals
Break down product outcomes and loose key results per pitch
Work with the devs on a loose story map to expose complexity and risk inherent in the pitches
A dev once told me “you can’t make a baby with 9 ladies and 1 month.” This sentiment very much applies to process engineering and driving change. As much as you might want to enact change on all fronts, all at the same, that tactic usually sets you up for disaster, burn-out, or both. The best thing you can encourage and drive forward as a product person in change management is focus, focus, focus.