Supporting Teams Grow and Drive Greater Impact as They Scale

Coffee Circle had historically been a team with few people doing many things, on-site. A few years out of the height of the pandemic, when I joined, it became clear that the transition to remote work had eroded some of the things that had made Coffee Circle such a delight to work at. This, along with massive hiring (roughly 40% headcount growth), created an environment where we needed to come together as a team, take stalk of where we were, and establish what we wanted to achieve.

As Product Design Lead, I spent a large part of my time creating space for conversations to happen, so as a team, we could continue to foster the legacy of a wonderful company culture, while ensuring that we’d work on some long-standing pain points, and newer challenges as well.

Note: I need to clarify one point before we dive in. I don’t believe in process for the sake of process. I do believe there are often systematic issues in companies, where a good process alleviates the challenge, and gives individuals more time to work on the more interesting and meaty topics that motivate them, this was the goal here.

Process

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the triple diamond approach that is often applied to product development, was just as useful as a foundation for our approach to the topic of improving how we worked as a team. Some steps were removed and adapted of course, but the overall concept stayed rather similar.

Results + Learnings

The topic of how a team works, especially one that is growing and shifting can feel like a never-ending hike. By gathering the team’s feedback and structuring it into themes, we could anchor our conversations into actionable steps towards improving. The goal was for leadership to facilitate the needs of the teams, not to impose their specific views - start from the needs of the team and work backwards in solving it.

We deliberately made this a team activity so that it could be owned by all of us, and iterated as the team’s needs evolved. Team dynamics was not solely the responsibility of leadership.

Results

It’s often easy to use an NPS survey or something similar to quantify that everyone at the team is happy. As much as I’d love to use a quantifiable metric like this, I believe people’s experiences at work can’t meaningfully or reliably be boiled down to a number.

But because of our increased teamwork, we were able to re-launch the homepage with significantly faster page load speeds, and top marks for SEO. All this was built as the first milestone in developing the Design System, a project, which the team had wanted to do for 6 years, and ultimately was able to scope and launch in one quarter (Q2, 2022) due to the continued and sustained effort in building strong team dynamics. If you’d like to speak with anyone involved in this work, I’m more than happy to facilitate an intro so you can hear their perspective on it.

A deep Dive into the process

Gathering feedback

[problem discovery]

• One-on-one conversations with the whole team

• Facilitated a group discussion to create a shared group understanding [Workshop template in Figjam]

Meeting on-on-one with individuals in the team allowed me to get a temperature check of the team’s needs in a broader sense, and also start to understand what needs the team had, to better structure the larger group conversation.

From there, it seemed the team really just needed a place to have a conversation “all in one room” to start improving basic communication of expectations. So we scheduled a workshop to have a structured conversation on what we’d all like to improve.

Defining our focus areas + Action Items

[problem definition, solution discovery]

• Shared back the summarized pillars/themes of how we work [Slide deck]

After gathering people’s feedback in the workshop, the leads for Design, Engineering, and Product got together to try and further group the feedback into a few pillars/themes for us to refer back to when evaluating how we were working as a team. We then presented the outcome for feedback and questions to ensure we were properly hearing the team’s needs.

Within each of these pillars, there were a variety of elements that needed to come together for them to be solved.

• Elevate the web experience so it can be brought up to date to communicate the excellence of our product to our customers and prospective customers. (Design System).

• Introduce documentation so we all know what customer need we’re solving, to drive which business metric, and how we’ll evaluate success (Project Briefs).

• More easily access customer needs and research so we can engage with it front of mind as we work through projects (Research Repository).

• More easily get an overview of what each squad and team is working on to better understand and see how all our work ties together. Also be able to keep track of meeting notes for each project. Individuals needed better project management setup to keep the multiple projects properly managed (Larger Notion Documentation Framework).

• Improve how teams work together in the squad format to better define small and large goals and improve the squad’s performance (Sprint Setup).

Test it Out

[concept validation, testing live with teams]

• Present plan for moving forward [Slide deck]

• Project brief [Notion]

In the first iteration, we simply asked PMs to test out using a project brief on one of their team’s projects that quarter. In the second iteration, we had brought on an Engineering Lead to the company and were able to more strongly tie the larger engineering work to the product and design workflows. We had a lot of back and forths around how to best support a growing team while ensuring each discipline would have the right of team support within the discipline, and the right amount of involvement within the squad’s work.

Based on people’ broader feedback, it was also clear we needed to establish a “base” to work from. This is where the larger notion setup with the linked databases came from. It does require a bit of a walk through introduction, but a diagram that illustrates it a bit can be found here.

Iterative feedback + Improvement

[roll out, or roll back]

• Send survey for feedback [Survey]

• Met with discipline leads (Design, Product, Engineering) to review results

  • Depending on the outcome of the feedback, your next steps will vary, for us it was clear we needed to work more closely with Product and Design to increase maturity in the disciplines. (e.g. filling out the project briefs correctly and thoughtfully)

Overall people seemed to be fairly happy with the results we had achieved, but there were a few key areas, particularly in relationship to a strong product development processes that we needed to dig a little deeper into for the comping quarter.

Follow up on improvement topics

[problem discovery, round II]

• Met with Product and Design teams to ask for feedback on what “support” in each of the different areas highlighted from the survey would look like for them [Figjam conversation]

  • Some options of what support could look like:

    • Present: Providing a presentation with more information about the topic and the nuances around it.

    • Create a template: Draft a template slide deck/figma file/notion page to support the documentation/process format.

    • Direct support: Schedule time with each squad’s PM and Designer to support in working through the topic together with the lead.

    • Knowledge share: Schedule a time to share out together with the whole PM and Design team what we each learned through the process - some things that were helpful, others that weren’t, and support each other at improving in the next round.

Regrouping around the customer journey

[problem definition, solution discovery, round II]

• Schedule quarter planing around target customer groups and validation of their first purchase experience journey (currently in the works - July 2022)