Product Leaders In 2024 Need To Use Scalable Systems To Stay Ahead
I worked with one of Google’s fastest growing product teams managing a global e-commerce business. I was the agency lead building their long-term product design capability and consulting on strategy and operations. We were able to:
- Increase AOV
- Reduce costs / headcount by 15–20%
- Increase design & dev efficiency by 60% without sacrificing quality
Here’s how we focused on scalable systems to “do more with less”:
System 1: Planning
The team’s product planning and roadmapping suffered from silos. PMs generated hundreds of quarterly requests across several teams into a large backlog that was unorganized, un-actionable and needed a more cohesive strategy across all features and categories. In order to create more cohesion, we organized the backlog into themes — not by functional groups but by customer needs (such as “product discovery”, “comparison”, “customization”) — this allowed us to break down hundreds of items into smaller chunks that were easier to digest as an overall strategy and ladder back to our product vision of being radically helpful for customers. We then applied prioritization (using weighted scoring as well as the MoSCoW method) to create clear focus for the organization.
In order to make the roadmap more actionable and create more ownership for individual teams, we overhauled planning from a top-down process to a more W shaped cadence. This approach started with setting the high-level strategy, followed by individual team recommendations and feasibility discussions, integration of ideas into prioritized initiatives, and finally socializing the consolidated roadmap to the entire org. The new process built empathy, helped us de-risk initiatives, and drastically reduced “time-to-start” since broad buy-in happened organically.
System 2: Design Operations
The organization had already built a “1.0” version of the Design System in order to unify brand elements, UI components, and reduce tech debt. The 2.0 version would enable us to achieve more design and dev efficiency and speed-to-market.
We focused on creating a component architecture in Figma that would allow for more transparency between designers and developers in CSS styling and animations. We used tokenization to separate system-wide decision-making from the individual team or feature-level — making design reviews and global changes much faster.
We setup tools for design automation- from auto-layouts to templates to AI-powered creative asset generators. This was all underpinned by the foundational design system and not only helped with productivity, but the system was documented in a way that created a shared language and vocabulary across designers, engineers and product managers.
In fact, the biggest thing team leaders commented on during this change wasn’t the quantifiable improvements in design efficiency, or reduced bugs in code — it was actually the intangible benefit of better collaboration between cross-functional teams, and the more innovative solutions that were created as a result.
System 3: Product Design Strategy
We looked at the individual roadmap items and how they communicated objectives, we realized we needed to take a step back and spend more effort in accurately describing the real problems to solve rather than focusing on incremental and/or vanity metrics.
We facilitated workshops and coached teams on creating space to identify user problems rather than immediately generating solutions. Think of the classic example from Dan Olsen in which Nasa spent $1M of R&D creating a pen that worked in space so astronauts could write. Meanwhile, the Russians just used pencils.
For our work — rather than endlessly testing buy buttons in order to improve ecommerce click-thru rates, we reframed the exercise to examine users’ cognitive load and purchase intent throughout the whole flow in question, then validating with user feedback to ensure we were attacking the right problems. We distilled the research and high level solutions into visiontypes (aka concept prototypes) in order to communicate key ideas and get exec buy-in, without overspending on design too early.
We developed new templates for roadmap items/briefs for product managers and our design leaders to use. We ensured objectives laddered back up to revenue or cost reduction goals. We brought wider awareness to increasing CLV, AOV, reducing churn, or reducing design / dev costs. Other metrics were either in support of, or secondary to, these KPIs. I’ve written about the importance of creating a culture of business ownership across disciplines.
This is where the rubber meets the road in the product management / product design relationship. What Marty Cagan calls transitioning from feature teams to inspired and empowered product teams.
Summary
During this long-term transformation, we focused on using existing resources at the company to improve on 3 main systems:
- How should we organize projects (planning)
- What tools and foundations can improve projects (design ops)
- How should we do the projects (product design strategy)
By overhauling these frameworks at a systems level, we were able to compound the benefits across multiple streams of work at achieve quantifiable business results. In order to gain full adoption of the changes, we piloted with the most experienced and matured teams first, who could then advocate and ambassador new ways of working laterally to other teams.
It’s also important to note that this is a cross-functional endeavor and can’t be done only from within one discipline or department. In order to effect change, you need in-principle alignment from multiple leaders.
The alignment wasn’t that hard, since focusing on scalable systems eventually saved product leaders months of fire-fighting, fixing projects, and trying to get individual teams unstuck on an ad-hoc basis.
I work with product and design leaders to improve outputs, reduce costs, and power strategic growth for their companies. To learn more how scalable systems can drive better outcomes for your business — especially in this economy — shoot me a note at jon@jonsukarangsan.com
