theConsultancy

Is product design complete without interaction and motion design? 💡 In the early days of product design, simply providing a flow document with screens and arrows ➡️📄➡️ was often enough to consider a design ready for development. But as technology has evolved, so too has our approach to user experience. Today, companies aim to make interactions as seamless and natural as possible, leveraging innovations in both software and hardware to create immersive experiences.✨ For instance, haptic engines now add a new dimension to feedback, while tools like Lottie by Airbnb simplify the integration of motion animations 🎞️. In 2024, product design involves more than just static flows; it requires a comprehensive prototype that incorporates interactions, transitions, animations, and detailed descriptions of haptic feedback 🔄📲. Clear protocols should define specific animation logic to ensure consistent, meaningful interactions. Take Apple, for example—they use a concept called "element weight" in their designs. Swiping through photos is smooth and easy because photos feel lightweight 🖼️. In contrast, switching between background apps requires more effort, as if you’re interacting with something more substantial, like real-world objects. Try these interactions on your iPhone, and you’ll “feel” the difference. In digital product design, elements like touch, weight, and ergonomics should matter just as much as they do in physical product design. Consider these details carefully if your goal is to create exceptional user experiences. 🎯

🌍 Is your business harnessing the full potential of Generative AI? 🚀 Most discussions focus on automating tasks or copywriting with tools like ChatGPT. But what if I told you there are far more creative ways to use AI that can transform your operations and impact? Here are 3 exciting examples of how Generative AI can take your business to the next level: 🎙️ Voiceover generation: Create voiceovers for your product videos in any language, catering to global audiences. Whether you want to use your own voice or choose from a range of accents, tools like WellSaid, ElevenLabs, or Synthesia make this possible. - 🎥 Video generation: Need engaging videos, but short on time and resources? Generative AI tools like Runway, Pika, Luma AI help you produce high-quality content efficiently. - 🖼️ Image generation: Producing consistent visuals can be costly. Luckily, AI models are now so advanced that they rival stock photography. With tools like Picsart and Midjourney, you can create personalized visuals affordably. - 🌟 How are you using Generative AI to level up your business? #generativeai #voicegeneration #videocreation #midjourney #AIproductivity #automation #AItools #visualcontent #digitaltransformation #theconsultancypartners

♻ Companies with high employee turnover cannot afford fast and simplified processes. From the beginning, the key criteria for startups have been rapid growth ↗ and swift execution. This is achievable when teams are small. As a company scales, more processes are introduced to ensure alignment across teams and with broader goals. Despite this, startups still strive to remain nimble and fast-moving 👟. Why do some startups succeed at staying agile while others struggle? One major reason, in our experience, is that companies lower their hiring standards and bring in "mercenaries"—people with a high turnover rate who are likely to leave soon. Every time turnover occurs, an information vacuum is created, causing ongoing projects to slow down or suffer in quality. To address this, companies start introducing stricter processes, especially around documentation and knowledge management, to combat the loss of information. In contrast, companies with lower turnover rates can afford to assign experienced individuals to key projects, ensuring continuity even if team members change. These low-turnover employees are typically "missionaries" who are committed to the company’s long-term success. So, the next time you’re looking to simplify processes and move fast, ask yourself: Do you have a high turnover rate? #agile #leadership #management #processes #productteam #company

⏰ How many times did you speak to customers during the last 30 days? If you're a B2B company with a limited number of customers, chances are you have dedicated customer agents who maintain constant communication with them. This makes sense, as each customer contributes significant revenue and requires special attention. But what if you're building for the masses 🤔 ? In this case, the responsibility of staying in touch with customers often falls on Product Managers. While every product management book highlights customer interviews as one of the highest-value activities for PMs, in reality, day-to-day execution and communication often overwhelm them, leading to very few (if any) user interviews. Want to test this at your company? Simply ask every PM how many interviews they’ve conducted in the past 30 days. - 🏁 Here are 3 ways to address the lack of user interviews: 🔍 Hire a User Research team: Ensure the ratio of user researchers to PMs isn't too wide, or they won’t be able to handle the workload. Their main goal is customer discovery—bringing valuable insights to PMs for prioritization, solution building, delivery, and growth. ⚙ Hire a Product Operations team: This frees up PMs from routine execution tasks that consume a lot of time but aren’t directly tied to customer discovery. With this support, PMs can dedicate more time to conducting user interviews. 🎙 Simplify the customer recruitment process for PMs: Build a closed Stack Exchange or Reddit community with your superusers and engage with them regularly. Hire PMs in key customer regions. Make legal processes easy so that PMs can easily reach out to potential customers. Use tools like UserInterviews.com. There are plenty of ways to reduce friction, and when you remove friction, the frequency of interviews will increase. How does your company keep user interviews alive? #discoverysprint #productmanagement #userresearch #userinterviews #customerdiscovery

Which is more efficient: policy 📃 or culture 🖖 ? This question highlights the difference between managing and leading. Policy is a management tool 🗓 , while culture is a leadership 👣 tool. Let’s take the back-to-office movement as an example to explore how these tools function. Studies show that transitioning from onsite to remote work can lead to a significant decline in team productivity over time. If we implement a full onsite policy, it immediately addresses the issue but may limit our ability to hire exceptional talent from abroad or provide flexibility to top performers, potentially driving them to seek opportunities elsewhere. Alternatively, using culture to encourage onsite work puts the responsibility on managers to communicate the productivity benefits of working together in the same space. Of course, some may resist this shift, which is why, in a culture-driven organization, it's crucial that every team member embraces the company’s values. If they don’t, it may be better for them to move on. Ultimately, company leadership must decide whether to take the policy-driven or culture-driven path, understanding that these two approaches will lead to building fundamentally different types of organizations. #leadership #policy #culture #compnayculture #productteams

🚫 It is not the Product Designer’s job to draw UI 👩🎨 with the instructions of the Product Manager. Product Managers tend to misunderstand the role and responsibilities of a Product Designer in a team. This can usually happen due to the PM taking a commando role and trying to manage people in the team to do what they think is right. This naturally is a terrible positioning and will both lead to the PM pushing many wrong ideas forward as well as blocking the Product Designer from having knowledge growth. Eventually this type of PMs will end up with agreeable Designers who tend to not take ownership higher than doing what PM says. In a true product team the PM and PD are partners 🤝. While the PM spends most of their time focusing on user problems, the designer spends the time to find the most useful, natural to use, scalable and sustainable solution to the problem. Product Designer crafts the product experience that the end user will have when interacting with the product. Therefore it is critical for Product Designer to both deeply understand the use case and problem they are solving by tightly collaborating with the PM throughout the Product Discovery process. It is a Product Designers job to initiate researches that would give deeper insights on the problem. The solution shouldn’t be considered complete if there has been no research data to validate its completeness. A healthy PM and PD collaboration puts an equally complex problem for both of them to solve and by dividing this equality both Product Manager and Product Designer can dedicate quality time to do their job well.

🎯 Quality Engineering: Stop ‘Assuring’ and Start Engineering Excellence. Setting up lower expectations for quality control will result in lower quality. Many companies unfortunately think about Quality Engineers as people with the job to monkey test the user interface of the program 1000 times a week in the hope that it will result in a higher quality product. And whenever this doesn’t happen the reason is usually attributed to shortage of Quality Engineers.  In reality there are number of things that should be done differently to ensure high quality standard A Quality Engineer's job starts from deeply understanding the primary use cases for the product and digesting the new Product Specs in order to understand the product as a whole and what key changes will happen to it. In fact Quality Engineers are the people who know the product on the level if not deeper than the Product Manager. As the Product Manager writes the Product Spec the Quality Engineer writes the Test Cases. Quality starts before the branch is handed from your Front and Backend Engineers to Quality Engineers. It is crucial for the prior to have strict code quality control rules including Unit Test coverage, cross-code reviews, developer testing to ensure that both Quality Engineers time is not wasted as well as to create a discipline of quality throughout the engineering org. Quality Engineering usually starts with manual testing of the Test cases, but eventually as product grows the goal shouldn’t be to intensively grow the headcount instead Automation of the Test Cases must be done in parallel to product development. Ideally 80% of your test cases must be automated to leave manual testing the time to do meaningful use case testing of the product. 🔦 How many percent of test cases at your company are automated? Why?

You need a Product Operations department 😎. Product operations roles started in 2011, yet seem to be overshadowed by Product Management roles. There are key distinctions between these roles and clear need to have them both if your company has more than 10 product teams. Product Manager role is to be 100% focused on discovering and solving customer problems related to the area of ownership. This is not an easy job. To discover customer problems they need to to users, analyze data, research markets and competitors, work with designers to create solutions, write product specs, work with engineering to ship, work with marketing to sell. Can you see the pattern? This is a huge responsibility scope. Product Operations is there to remove roadblocks and create organized product development lifecycles. Product Operations teams main goal is to setup the product development process in a way to keep PMs from different teams aligned together, working towards the company goals, keeping track of execution and helping with resourcing or any cross team roadblock surfacing and solution, keeping transparency between departments especially on matters such as product roadmapping, product DEMOs. These are silent evangelists of helping PMs and product teams to work together as a true single company to ensure whatever reaches to end customers feels like one cohesive product and serves to business growth. If you struggle with the product alignment and PMs being too operational, think about creating a Product Operations team. #productoperations #productteam #product #operations

Every new major product needs a pitch 📣 . Just like startups pitch their ideas to investors for funding, new products within your company represent a significant investment from the finance team and leadership. With more ideas than resources, companies—like investors—must decide which products and major bets to back. This is why it’s crucial to start the discovery process for any new product with a well-crafted Concept document. A Concept document is essentially a short pitch designed to highlight the key aspects of a new product and secure buy-in from leadership and finance teams. Let's dive into the Concept template offered by theConsultancy. The template consists of the following eight sections: ✨ Objective: Explain which company objective this initiative supports. If your company uses OKRs, identify the specific OKR this product aims to contribute to. 📜 Press Release: Craft a half-page press release aimed at your potential customers, but intended for review by the concept committee. This approach, highlighted in “Working Backwards” by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, is used by Amazon to start product development from the end goal—a compelling press release. If you can’t sell your concept in a press release today, it’s unlikely it will become more persuasive after launch. 👨🚀 Customer Persona: Provide real-life examples of the customers your product is designed for. Describe them in as much detail as possible. If your product targets multiple distinct personas, don’t hesitate to describe each one separately. 🤸♂️ Use Cases: Identify the use cases these personas have. Are these use cases frequent enough to ensure repeat usage of your product, or are they premium enough to generate a high LTV from a single purchase? 🐲 Problem Statement: Outline the challenges your personas face when addressing these use cases with existing solutions. How significant is the pain point? 🏋♂️ Validation: This is the most critical section of the concept document. Provide extensive evidence regarding the size and severity of the problem. Include all relevant quantitative and qualitative research. 🎯 Solution: Describe your envisioned solution at a high level. This could include bullet points, Mockup, Flow, Logic (as discussed in previous posts), or examples of similar competitor behavior. Also, introduce a cost assessment, covering both people and financial resources required for the initiative. 👨👩👧👦 Stakeholders: List all stakeholders necessary for the initiative. Involving them early on will ensure a higher level of collaboration throughout the product development lifecycle. How do you pitch major concepts? What best practices have we missed? Share your insights in the comments! #productmanagement #discovery #concept #pitch #theconsultancy

🔍 Ever found yourself in a situation where the deadline is too tight for a full Discovery and Development lifecycle? We’ve all been there. Whether it’s an unexpected deal with a B2B client or a major IT event with rigid timelines, sometimes you just don’t have the luxury of time. If this happens frequently, it might indicate poor planning, but in rare cases, it’s simply business as usual. At theConsultancy, we’ve developed a framework to navigate these extreme deadline scenarios: Extreme Discovery 🏇. The concept is straightforward—you gather requirements incrementally and implement them simultaneously. Imagine a one-day sprint with only one ceremony: the standup. Here’s how it works: Every morning, during the standup, you communicate the latest requirements to the engineers. They start implementing immediately while you continue to discover more details for the next iterations. For example, you might begin with the high-level structure and functionality of a page, adding UI details or analytics requirements in later stages. For Extreme Discovery 🏇 to succeed, you need a highly aligned team with a strong sense of ownership. Everyone must understand and embrace the deviation from the standard process, being flexible and adaptable. This approach demands deep product understanding from your engineers and engineering manager. Remember, Extreme Discovery 🏇 is a tool for exceptional circumstances—it should be used sparingly and not become your go-to product development lifecycle. #productmanagement #discovery #extremediscovery #productdevelopmentlifecycle #process #lean