Turbo charged product development - How we introduced a brand new App workflow from idea to launch in one month

Last week Terapeak released a brand new App workflow allowing customers to choose an active listing from their eBay inventory and easily compare it against similar listings that have sold in the marketplace. Our release also included improvements to the active inventory view, inclusion of sales predictions in active inventory and the ability to save a search that is benchmarked to a listing. We achieve a lot in this release! Here's how we did it:

1) By listening to and understanding what customers are trying to achieve. We ran a number of customer interviews and an on-site focus group. During these many interviews, patterns of what our customers wanted to achieve started to emerge. Based on this understanding, we created a solution. Not one customer verbalized the new workflow we created but we got a good sense from our knowledge of our customers that the new workflow would make it much easier for them to achieve their goals.

2) By developing and testings our solution with mocks ups / wireframe. We presented our new solution internally to our Execs, Customer Success, Marketing and Engineering teams. We told a story through the workflow by simulating how customers would use it. The story made sense and was cohesive however, some internal stakeholders had concerns about the design. We made modifications and version 2 passed the internal stakeholders' review. We conducted a round of customer reviews and they were very receptive to our new workflow.

3) We prepared a themed Sprint with all the stories and design mocks required to complete the new workflow. We had a clear timeline that we wanted the work completed by. After grooming and estimating each story we had to make some cuts so that we could achieve our timeline goal. It was not easy. Each story had to be reviewed again with Engineering to understand the estimations, whether the work was really necessary in order to achieve the end user goals, and if anything could be done later. We wanted to make sure we would not compromise the quality of the work or the completion of the workflow. Taking the time to have a detailed-oriented conversation about the development work really paid off as a new level of clarity and focus on addressing the specific user goals emerged. Good partnership and trust between Engineering and Product Management must exist for this step to be successful.

4) We completed the Sprint a few days ahead of time! It was pretty fantastic to see the whole team pulling in and accomplishing the work ahead of time without any undue stress.

Turbo charging product development is possible if you focus the work around a specific theme, are willing to dig into the weeds to understand the technical work and effort required to achieve the user goals, and if you've developed a solid partnership with your technical stakeholders.