Part 3 - Growth Burnout Series (Growth Design Monthly)

September 2022

Dear Readers,In part three of this series, we’re going from individuals and teams to companies. Yes, it’s time get to… TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS (sung to the tune of the 80s hit by Bachman Turner Overdrive.)The Growth Burnout Series has three parts delivered daily:Part 1 - Taking Care of OurselvesPart 2 - Taking Care of Teams Part 3 - Taking Care of Business  <<  We’re here!Yours in calm and chaos,Leslie Yang Senior Design Manager at Lyft

In his memoir 11 Rings, Phil Jackson describes how he helped his teams adapt to change season after season in order to win eleven NBA championships. He coached his teams to see that change is ripe for danger and opportunity. When we’re stressed and fearful, then everything seems dangerous. And we fall into rabbit holes worrying about everything. But if we actively take care of ourselves, and help our teams do the same, then we can guide the business through ongoing ambiguity and embrace new opportunities. How do we do that? When the pandemic hit, all our best laid roadmaps, designs, Product Requirement Documents (PRDs) got thrown out the window. The market was and is still upended. User behaviors and business needs shifted dramatically. And we were left thinking, good lord, are we building the right next thing? But for me, this was a familiar feeling. Back when I worked at Pivotal Labs, a software consultancy, I was essentially a product-market fit hunter, meaning I taught teams how to hunt for high value problems and translate them into products the market wanted to use or pay for. I’d start with new client teams every few months in a new vertical with wildly different use cases. Over time, I noticed a pattern. I saw how different functions managed their anxiety and uncertainty of, “Are we building the right thing?” At the start of each project, everyone felt pressure to show they were doing something, anything. Designers started designing in high fidelity, PMs wrote PRDs filled with assumptions and prescribed solutions and implementation details, and engineers started doing tech design. These are great practices, but they’re wasted effort if we don’t first validate that we’ve identified a high value user problem and have a solution that customers are willing to either pay for or use because it is valuable to them. That’s still the case today regardless of where we are in the product life cycle.

Tools for Managing Ambiguity

I have and continue to develop tools and training to support product thinking to the point that I’ve begun to call my collection Leslie’s Library™. Here are my steps to manage ongoing ambiguity plus links to tools you can use. 

1. Define the user problem/pain

When I start a discussion with a partner, I’ll draft a problem statement while we’re talking. It takes a minute and it doesn’t have to be right the first time. For Lyft Business, this could be one of our problem statements: A patient on Medicaid needs a ride so that she gets to her dialysis treatment on-time. There is a specific user, a stated need doesn’t include a product solution, and a measurable product goal: optimize for on-time ride completion. 

• ⚒️ How to write a user problem statement

1. Ruthlessly prioritize based on the biggest, unsolved user pains and where they intersect with business goals. 

You want to stick to low-fi prioritization tools that balance both greatest, unsolved user pains and business goals. To do that you want to use 2x2s or whatever low-fi prioritization tool you use. We want to keep our teams curious and engaged about how they prioritize and validate problems at the intersection of the greatest, unsolved user pains and our business goals. 

• ⚒️ Sample 2x2s matrix ideas for prioritization 

1. Efficiently build shared understanding with cross-functional partners to reaffirm the roadmap and course correct on future milestones. 

One of my favorite tools to build shared understanding is to create a user story map. This isn’t a customer journey map. You want to use user story mapping on projects with a medium to high degree of uncertainty or risk. Do this before you start designing. Story maps are a great way for a big group of cross-functional partners to meet and build shared understanding and work together on a roadmap for a feature with releases and milestones across pods and lines of business. There’s also an O’Reilly book called User Story Mapping that’s a quick read. 

• ⚒️User story mapping workshop

1. Mitigate top project risks and address uncertainty head-on 

I like to run a risks and mitigations exercise early in the project. You want to use the diversity of your cross-functional partners’ perspectives to ask: What are our riskiest assumptions? What could negatively impact our business if we don’t address them now. By asking these questions, we can define possible mitigations and identify point people.

• ⚒️ Risks and mitigation exercises

The earlier and more often our teams do these in the product development process, the more confident they will feel to write PRDs, design at high fidelity, and do technical design. 

Concluding ThoughtsI’ll wrap up by saying we have to accept the ground will continue to shift beneath our feet for the rest of our lives. And I know that can be pretty scary. But, if you take time to take care of yourself and your teams, it’s all reframes when it comes to business. Change IS ripe for danger and opportunity.So the next time you’re nervous, I want you to channel a rapper:

“If it makes you nervous, you’re doing it right.”

–Childish

Gambino

You got this! 

Design Jobs at Lyft

• Senior Product Design Manager, Lyft Pink(US Remote Anywhere) 

• Product Designer, Transit Bikes and Scooters(Montreal, Canada) 

• Product Designer, Fleet(US Remote Anywhere)

• Product Designer (Mexico Remote Anywhere) 

About the Author

Leslie Yang is a senior design manager at Lyft and head of design for Lyft Business. She loves working at the intersection of user value and business impact. Her team focuses on design for riders, drivers and businesses. Prior to Lyft, she led product design for enterprise at OpenTable and taught product discovery and designed products from 0 to 1 with clients at Pivotal Labs. She writes about product design leadership at https://leslieyang.substack.com.

✍🏼 🎨 Edited by Molly Norris Walker. Pitch me: [email protected]

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