Shipping a product is not the final destination
Based on the true story of a team that got an app into the wild.
At the time of writing this article, I was leading design on the wealth and investment team at a large financial services organisation in Johannesburg. I’ll start by providing a little bit of background on the events to follow.
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The product is a customer facing app and a web based tool for financial advisors. At any one time we had two design leads and five product designers that contributed to the project. Two of the team members made babies, had babies and came back after maternity leave, and another moved to Dubai— this gives you an idea of the time it took us to get to market in our environment. We launched to the public in 2018. Let’s go back to where it all started…
In the beginning…The team started off like this…
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Excited, inspired and energetic. We had been given the opportunity to work on a new and interesting piece of work. Energy levels were high. We needed a plan, and a process to execute the plan. It looked something like this…
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And off we went…
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Remember the plan?
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Well, we were soon to find out the reality looked more like this:
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First up was the winter wasteland of requirements and customer access. It was a cold and baron place. We scrounged around, picking up anything we could find in our path to formulate our requirements and create our ad-hoc personas. There wasn’t a customer in sight, for miles around — we looked to see how others had gone before us. We emerged from the wasteland with story maps and user journeys in our back packs. Ready to face the next challenge.
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Next was the shark-infested depths of defective services. These constraints impacted the user experience, badly. Frustration levels were high and many debates occurred amongst the ranks. We finally navigated our way through the treacherous waters and emerged on the other side with an intuitive experience for our customers, by keeping our unique problem solving wits about us and understanding that each discipline — be it design or development, all face their own challenges.
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Just as we caught our breath, we headed straight into an inferno. A new style guide had materialised, one that we would need to reference. We felt despondent and overwhelmed by the flames. Would this be the final straw? Fortunately not, we pushed forward in the understanding that consistency is important , to us and our users — we left the ashes behind and continued our journey.
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The vortex of validation was next in line. It’s incredibly frustrating to create a product for a user you’ve never met. We hoped that we would learn more from analytics. In our quest we were sucked down into a vortex, spinning around and around– other items were prioritised over ours and just as we began to lose hope, we clawed our way to the top of the backlog and emerged from the vortex successful. Analytics were implemented in the app.
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Finally we launched…
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We stood back to admire the work that we’d done. This product was 3 years in the making.
Just when we thought we were home free…
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The garbage data grizzly bear appeared. This wasn’t our first rodeo, we knew what to do…We would ride that bear if it was the last thing we would do. We were tossed around from left to right, finding incorrect account balances here and missing customer data there. Many fixes were made and deployed, and much testing was done — riding the bear became easier over time.
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So what have I learned?
I’ve learned that this journey is ongoing. I can assure you that these challenges don’t disappear once the product has been shipped.
- The nature of the landscape we work in is challenging, there is legacy and there are constraints. It’s our job to navigate our way through.
- Hindsight is some of the best insight. What can we understand from the outset that will help us further down the line?
- One of the most beautiful parts of what we do is the ability to continuously improve on our work and the experience for the user. We should never launch a product and leave it.
I view product design as I view life - a work in progress, and an opportunity for growth in every challenge.
As the Haitian proverb puts it:
“Behind mountains are more mountains. Elysium is a myth. One does not overcome one obstacle only to enter the land of no obstacles.”
“The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”
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