Product maturity, the unexpected joy of status reports and designing for world leaders

[00:00:00] Tom: Hey, welcome to the Lighthouse Podcast where we dive into UX design, all things digital products, and the ins and outs of running a modern creative agency. Lighthouse is a UX and UI design specialist based in London, working in digital since 2008. We partner with ambitious businesses from all over the globe to help solve their toughest problems, grow their product teams, and strengthen the future of their digital products.

I’m Tom, one of the co-founders here at Lighthouse, and I’ll be your host today. Coming up in our spotlight section, we talk to Shelly, our head of client services, about the importance of product maturity in tech focused organizations and what teams can do to improve this across their business. In housework.

We’ll, we discuss the inner workings of the creative agency. hear from Jolene, also from our client services department about how small changes to state reports. I know boring had big impacts on client happiness and even created a potential new revenue stream. We round up with a recap of our last Many Hands event, where we brought together a bunch of talented product pros to work for a fun, creative challenge.

Some of the ideas I came up with were equal parts, amazing and sinister. You all love it home with the show.

In the spotlight section of the show, we take a deeper dive into a topic we know will give a ton of value to product people. I’m joined by our head of client services, Shelly, who’s gonna be chatting about the work she’s headed up recently around product maturity. Hey Shelly. Hi. Welcome to the podcast.

Hello. Hey. Good to have you here. I guess let’s start off with a bit of background about you and the work you

[00:01:35] Shelley: do at Lighthouse. Yeah, so I’m Shelly. I head up our client services team here at Lighthouse. So what that means is that we look after our clients, understand what our client organizations are looking to achieve strategically.

And I help create a UCD approach to deliver against whatever our client’s objectives are. Me and my team, we’re here to ensure that we know what success looks like for our clients and help support the team to ensure that project success. I personally have worked in user experience for a good few years now.

I came into it from a background in psychology. And I just really love advocating for starting with the user, doing research with them and creating products that that uses actually need.

[00:02:15] Tom: So we’re gonna talk about product maturity today. How about a bit of an intro into that. And what we mean when we talk about an organization having high or low maturity.

[00:02:23] Shelley: So yeah, there’s, there’s three parts really to being a mature product organization is what we’ve found. So firstly, it’s a purpose basically how well the work is connected to the broader organizational purpose and that there is a clear vision and strategy of what we are working towards. So that’s the first part.

And the other part is people, so people in the product team, how connected. People feel to each other and the work that they’re doing through collaboration, through feedback for each other, clear responsibilities and structure within the team. And lastly, process. So this is about how teams actually tackle the work, the process they go through, having the right tools and the product development techniques and practices to, to actually do the work.

So yeah, so we’ve defined it as those three parts, purpose, people and process. And this forms part of our bespoke product maturity framework, which we’ve called Beacon. And there’s others out there which has inspired us. For example, Nielsen Norman has their own one for UX maturity, which is really interesting.

And what we’ve done is created our own, which we’ve found is really helpful with helping clients see their blind spots and improve their maturity.

[00:03:32] Tom: That sounds really cool. Can you run through those three pillars in more detail to kind of show the difference between mature and immature organizations in each category?

[00:03:40] Shelley: Yeah, absolutely. So firstly, purpose. So the immature side of things are where organizations are making decisions based on speed, where they need to get something out quickly, which might trump then doing what’s in line with the strategy or what’s best for the user. So that’s more short term thinking.

May be making decisions based on what you know, that senior stakeholders want and perhaps opaque decisions that the team aren’t brought in on. And the mature side of things for purpose is that the roadmap is more outcome focused. The team is empowered to prioritize the roadmap themselves in line with the vision and decisions that are being made are informed by a strong understanding of user needs data and leveraging the team’s expertise.

The underlying principle here is autonomy. It’s something that. Martin Erickson emphasized in his book Product Leadership really interesting book, and it talks about the fact that the best product teams are autonomous and co-located. And in the book he talks about extremes of this. So, for example, Holocracy where there isn’t a traditional hierarchy of command, and instead it’s self-management and people have authority to make decisions within their role.

And he lists some companies that are doing it. For example, Spotify. Who adopt this successful model of self-managing teams. And you were seeing this more and more where companies are working more so in tribes, but then to avoid havoc of everybody kind of making their own decisions. What’s really important is having an aligned vision and a unified strategy from leadership to then bring everyone together, pulling in the right direction.

So for purpose, then we have some questions that people can then ask themselves to figure out how mature they may be in terms of their purpose. So for example, a question you can ask yourself is, does your organization have a clear vision and goal for the product and how it fits into the wider organization strategy?

And then is that. Accessible by the team, and can it be articulated by everybody in the

team?

[00:05:42] Tom: You mentioned people as well. Is

[00:05:44] Shelley: that the next one? Yeah, that’s right. So people’s next. And so yeah, this is about how connected people feel to each other and the work they’re doing, how much they’re collaborating, how open the feedback culture is, and how clear everybody’s responsibilities are.

So the mature side of people. Is that there is cohesion across the product team and there’s natural collaboration. So that’s not just forced by the usual rituals that you have but genuinely going out of your way to collaborate. So you know, not waiting for those standups and the retrospectives to, to have that collaboration, but perhaps when you’re in the office and walking over to someone’s desk and asking them to have a look at what you are doing or having an ad hoc huddle to collaborate on something that you’re working on.

But that natural collaboration is across a company too. So working with different departments across the organization, for example, working with the customer service department, the commercial team, sales, and hearing other perspectives across the organization who have contact with users and listening with an open mind and welcoming each other’s input.

So that’s the mature side of of people. And on the immature side of things, this is where teams are working in silos. And so what that might mean is perhaps people are avoiding conflict altogether by not sharing what they think or not taking the time to understand how each other work best. And so conflict is kind of seen as a negative rather than constructive.

And so people might avoid it all together and have inner frustrations. Or on the extreme, maybe people are having open conflict with each other, but it’s not being handled in a very constructive way. And I really think that conflict is great. It’s, it’s all about being able to have different perspectives and have a disagreement, and it’s really about creating an environment and creating a, a healthy, positive working practice where you can share different perspectives and then ultimately you’ll get an even better outcome from that.

So for people, a couple of questions that you can ask yourself is, for example, do you naturally collaborate outside of existing meetings and are you working with other teams across the organization? And if the answers are no, then you can take these to your teams and ask, well, how can we change this?

So we’ve had purpose and people. And then lastly the third one is process. And so this is all about how teams tackle the work through having the right tools and product development techniques and practices. So the immature side of things here is that you’ve got perhaps untrained people conducting research where bias could be introduced.

So for example, falling into the confirmation bias trap or actually maybe not doing any research at all. Or if you are doing research, you are limiting yourself by not using a range of different techniques. Cuz using different research techniques can help you find different angles and perspectives.

And it’s such a great thing being able to, to go outside of the, the norm. The best research that I’ve been a part of is when we’ve actually got outside the usual lab based research where when I was working with a a supermarket, we shadowed people doing the weekly shop and with a train company speaking to people on a train platform, also waiting for their platform number to show up.

And so you get some really rich and. Insightful findings from doing a real range of research techniques. And it’s also fun. It’s fun for the product team taking a day out to do something a bit different. But then also the, the immature side of this is that maybe you then get those insights, but.

They’re kept within the product team and not shared with the rest of the product team, or not even shared with the developers, for example who might be working on requirements and not really understanding the, or knowing the context behind it and not sharing those insights with the wider business as well, to understand the context and the reason why the, the company’s product is going in a certain direction.

So yeah, so that’s the immature side of things. In terms of mature process, this is where people in the product team are encouraged to experiment, try new things before progressing with what they think is the best way forward. And having a design process in place that allows designers to sketch, map outflows, and iterate collaboratively with the product team on features before even opening up a Figma file.

So some questions again that, that you can ask yourself to figure out how mature you think you are in terms of processes. Do you consider and facilitate different types of research? And are you sharing your insights widely across the product team and across the organization? And are you experimenting?

Are you sketching and collaborating before opening up Figma? So yeah, so that’s the three areas. I hope that all

[00:10:33] Tom: made sense. Yeah, it does. I mean, there’s a lot to take in there and I mean much of that really resonates with what we try to do at Lighthouse, but clearly loads of our clients over the years sit at different levels in that in that framework.

And it’s not easy to get right. But I suppose a, a good question to ask would be, why would you bother, why would you want to increase your maturity as a business?

[00:10:51] Shelley: Yeah, it’s a good question. And put simply it’s financial return. So it’s really hard sometimes to prove the value of UX and following a UCD practice.

And what we really need is to show stakeholders the return that they’re getting from investing in user research, user experience, and following this, this good practice. And there are stats now that show the financial return that it’s having on businesses, which is fantastic. And user-centric organizations are more profitable and 60% more profitable.

In fact. So this is taken from a report that Forbes did few years ago in 2020. Another thing that they said in it was that 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience. Report an increase in their revenue. And another one that they said is that brands with superior customer experience bring in almost six times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience.

So those are amazing stats to really show the impact of being a mature product organization. I’m sold.

[00:11:56] Tom: Brilliant. Sign me up. No, it’s great. And, and obviously as a, as a UX agency, we, we know the value that this can bring to an organization and great to have those stats to, to call up on at the right times.

That’s all great. You know, the, the theory, but can you tell us about a, an example when you’ve run through this beacon process with a, with a real life business or client? Yeah,

[00:12:14] Shelley: absolutely. So we are rolling this out for our clients at the moment and it’s going really well and, and clients are responding to it brilliantly.

So what we’ve found is the first step from any organization of, of wanting to embark in understanding their maturity is wanting to hear it in the first place. So if someone, if an organization says, thanks, but no thanks, it does make me wonder why they don’t want to find out how mature they are. And perhaps it’s distracting from their delivery.

They might have some pressing deadlines coming up and they, they don’t want to be distracted by it, or maybe they’re worried that it’ll make them look bad, and I get that completely. It might be quite daunting getting a report saying how mature you are as an organization, especially when. It’s your responsibility to own product in, in UX in an organization.

So, completely empathize that it’s perhaps an an overwhelming finding to, to have, but that’s why one of our clients who’s reacted well is that they genuinely have come with a learning mindset and an open mind. And they might, you know, one might think that you get a long list of issues that you’re gonna need to fix and you’ve already got a few things that you need to, to be dealing with.

But what our client has found is that we’ve broken it down into tangible steps and made sure that there’s a great balance of also giving credit where it’s due. Telling the organization exactly what they’re doing well and then simply pointing out the blind spots or issues that they may or may not already know about.

But it’s helpful having it written down in, in a report. So one thing that’s come out of, of that particular client report. Was actually showing how leadership and product felt, for example, that the vision and mission is, is super clear and that the team have autonomy to prioritize their work based on that vision.

But then what the results found was that the designers and developers in that team felt that they didn’t actually know what the vision was, let alone feel empowered to make decisions based on that. So what it really showed all of us was that. Fundamentally things are in place. There is the vision and the mission there, which is brilliant cuz that’s the, the important thing that there is one defined.

But there’s a discrepancy there and, and something to flesh out that there was a difference between what leadership and product believed to be the case and the reality that the design and development teams were, were feeling. And so actually working with the CEO of that, Organization in particular that I’m talking about.

They were really open to hearing that feedback and now we’ve already put some changes in place to, to tackle that with the team.

[00:14:46] Tom: Yeah, really cool. I mean, I, I’ve witnessed some of that happening over the past couple of years with, with that particular client and it’s amazing to see Where they started and where they’ve managed to get to in that time.

This is a process to run through. It’s not something you can change overnight, certainly with a larger organization like these guys. But but yeah, it’s always awesome to see progress as we, as we work through this stuff. I mean, speaking of clients, we’ve worked with ones on various levels of, of maturity.

What would you say is a, a kind of telltale sign that the company isn’t mature in how it thinks?

[00:15:13] Shelley: Ah definitely hearing clients say that they don’t need to do user research, hearing them say that they already know what they need to build, and they’ve already got that clear in their mind and, and we don’t need to speak to users.

I think that that for us is always an alarm bell and, and a bit of a red flag. Yeah, I’ve heard that many, many times and from clients, from huge organizations as well where you kind of expect them to, to know better. And of course, you know, there, there’s loads of research that’s done in the past, which we are building on, which is absolutely valid, but there is a context for that research to be taken place within.

And although of course, research done in the past is valuable things change so quickly and so it’s really important that we’re, we’re constantly doing and learning. From users that we are creating these products for. Also, it just might be seen as too expensive or time consuming or a barrier to hitting deadlines.

And sometimes I’ve even found that I’m a bit of a nuisance by asking to do research. So yeah, I think when it seemed as a nuisance, then that’s definitely when we feel like the, the client is more immature in that side of things. I

[00:16:20] Tom: think it’s unfair to call yourself a nuisance. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, we, we hear that all the time.

It, it’s surprising how common it is to hear people say that they don’t want to do research or kind of cut down research phases. We totally get that people wanna move quickly and do, do things and, and re research can be seen as a barrier. But but yeah, we are, we are firm believers in the the power of research and, and what it can do to shape the future of your product in a positive way.

Mm-hmm. You’ve mentioned Beacon already. But do you wanna chat about the actual process and how people can take advantage

[00:16:47] Shelley: of it? Yeah. So it is based on a questionnaire. So it’s about 21 questions. It’s really quick and easy to answer. It’s about 10 minutes tops, and it’s anonymous as well. So all we ask is what role you have, so whether it’s leadership, product design, or development, so that we can then slice the analysis and, and find some interesting insights from it.

So yeah, so a questionnaire that we then analyze and then create a report for your organization to then show you how mature you are as an organization across the, the spectrum. So yeah, so it’s easy to do. It’s, it works better for as many people in the product team as possible to fill it out so that we can draw some comparisons between different roles.

But yeah, it’s just 10 minutes tops, and then we do all the hard work to to give you some recommendations and, and to, to show you where you are on the maturity scale.

[00:17:39] Tom: Cool. Sounds nice and easy. If people wanna find out more about this, where can they head?

[00:17:43] Shelley: Yeah, so you could just go onto our website, we@lighthouse.com, slash beacon and, and you can find it from

[00:17:49] Tom: there.

Thanks chatting to about today. That was cool. I’ve actually learned more about what we’ve been doing than I knew previously. Hopefully you’ve all enjoyed it too. Hope to chat to you again soon. Awesome. Thanks for

[00:17:58] Shelley: having me. Cheers.

[00:18:06] Tom: So now for the housework section. Each episode we like to dig into the detail of behind the scenes stories that come from building an efficient and high functioning digital design agency. We spend a lot of time focusing on refining processes and making the experience of working of us as seamless as possible for our clients.

This episode we wanted to touch on project status reports. Not the most glamorous of topics potentially, but it’s amazing how small changes can create big reactions to stuff like this. Joining me is Jolene from our client services team. To give a little insight, let’s start off with a bit of background about you for our listeners.

[00:18:37] Jolien: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Tom. So I am Jolene. I am a senior client service manager here at Lighthouse. I partner up with clients to ensure that we’re hitting their objectives throughout our engagements, and I’m also making sure that they’re having a great experience getting there.

[00:18:50] Tom: So, it might seem a bit obvious, but can you start off by talking about why we do status supports for our clients?

[00:18:57] Jolien: Absolutely. Yes. So we’d like to consider ourselves an efficient team who are looking after our clients every step when working with us. So we deliver great design of course, but that is only a part of the overall experience of working with an agency. Making sure that our clients know what’s going on and when they can expect things to happen is really important.

So communication, or actually a lack of communication is one of the biggest issues that we’ve seen turn projects bad. So we at Lighthouse pride ourselves on having great relationships with clients and we’re communicating constantly and status reports are a big part of this, and something that we are always referring to in our regular meetings and catch ups.

And on top of that, it is also great for us internally and it means that we can work efficiently together, especially on projects where our team is larger and spread across different disciplines. So reports might seem like a slightly boring thing but as you’ll see, we spend a lot of time getting them right and making them a little bit more fun.

[00:19:52] Tom: That sounds really cool. Very intrigued to, to hear how status reports can be fun. Let’s talk a little bit more about how we used to do status reports before our, our current incarnation.

[00:20:01] Jolien: Definitely. Yeah, so our status reports were weekly word like documents that would detail the time that we had spent in the last week on the project, and then we would divide it by the task.

So it’s a very limited update that require different status updates in other formats and platforms. And it was just not the most efficient.

[00:20:20] Tom: So why do we see a need for change there?

[00:20:23] Jolien: Yeah, so the document didn’t really feel as if it was really updating either the clients or the team on what.

Had actually happened in the last week. So what we did is we started using Miro for our weekly catch ups, where we’d walk through the last week and also make plans for the next week instead where we would use a project timeline, et cetera. But then when the weeks continued, we started adding more and more sections to the Miro board.

Like, oh, the key decisions that we took last week and risks that we want to keep an eye on and mitigate accordingly. So instead of creating these boards on a case by case basis, our delivery team so that is project management and client services and also operations, got together a workshop, probably 74 different options.

Then we tested a few iterated and launched our new status update board to all of our

[00:21:08] Tom: projects. What changes did you make?

[00:21:10] Jolien: So there’s a couple of things that made a difference. Firstly, we brought information from different places to one area the whole project team would look at on a weekly basis which make the information more accessible and transparent.

And secondly, the updates turned from an arbitrary budget report to a tool that we used to discuss our progress, align on our goals, and manage the whole project. So the project status board is now like our Bible that we keep turning back to. Because all the information that we need is there. But there’s also just a really nice way to start the week.

We get together with a project team on a Monday morning. We turn on some tunes, we update the board together, and then we walk through knowing exactly what will be happening this week and what we need to pay extra

[00:21:49] Tom: attention to. I hope there was some unexpected feedback from clients after this event live as well.

Yes, that

[00:21:54] Jolien: is so true, and it really made all of the 74 different versions worth it. But yeah, our clients absolutely loved it. We hope the response would be positive, of course. But the response that we actually got was so much more which is great to hear when you put a lot of effort into creating these.

One client actually said last week after seeing the board on a new project that we started with them and she said, oh, can I just reiterate how much I love this board? I have really missed it. So that was lovely. Yeah. And another client actually told us last week that they have started using it themselves to report internally on progress in different projects that they are having.

And what is it that they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Well, we were flattered.

[00:22:39] Tom: Over here at Lighthouse, we run a creative collaborative event aimed at product pros. We’ve called many hands. We invite experts from within the industry to get together and work on a fun, creative challenge, as well as here’s some talks on a variety of topics. After running these online for the past year or so, the last session saw us get together in London for our first in-person event.

It was awesome. We had our own Shelly, who you had at the top of the show talk about product maturity and our good friend Daria Lance from PlayStation popped down to talk about how play is an important part of the creative process for anyone who’s been to a many hands. You’ll know that we create our challenge live on the night by spinning our randomizer.

This selects a persona and an application type from a list. This time around, we ended up with a social network for world leaders. So with that in place, everyone got into groups and started coming up with ideas. We had people doing crazy eights, whiteboards full of ideas, and above all, lots and lots of laughter.

The event finishes up with presentations back from each team. This time around we had an AI chat bot for troubled leaders to offload their worries and confidence. I guess we had to have AI in there somewhere, a network for top tier rulers to get on better. There was something in there about bears.

But I forget exactly how it fits in. I don’t think I can repeat the language here though. This is a family show. One team had war as a service on the list of features, but I guess luckily this was crossed out by the time we got to presentations. Another team decided to onboard people via a QR code in Boston into Gold Bullion.

Now that’s the v i p treatment. As we publish this, the next event is on the 7th of June. So come on down. If you wanna join the fun, you can find all the info you need over at we are mini hands.com. We really hope to see you there.

That about wrap it up for today. Thanks very much for listening. Check in next time for more in-depth products and New York discussions explorations around how we run an efficient, collaborative digital agency and stories from the frontline of digital design. Subscribe. Give us a like, or drop us a review wherever you get your podcasts.

Find more about us@wearelighthouse.com. At We Are Lighthouse on the socials. Until next time, that’s it from me and the team over at Lighthouse. See ya.

Hey, welcome to the Lighthouse Podcast where we dive into UX design, all things digital products, and the ins and outs of running a modern creative agency. Lighthouse is a UX and UI design specialist based in London, working in digital since 2008. We partner with ambitious businesses from all over the globe to help solve their toughest problems, grow their product teams, and strengthen the future of their digital products.

I’m Tom, one of the co-founders here at Lighthouse, and I’ll be your host today. Coming up in our spotlight section, we talk to Shelly, our head of client services, about the importance of product maturity in tech focused organizations and what teams can do to improve this across their business. In housework.

We’ll, we discuss the inner workings of the creative agency. We’re here from Jolene, also from our client services department about how small changes to state reports. I know boring had big impacts on client happiness and even created a potential new revenue stream. We round up with a recap of our last Many Hands event, where we brought together a bunch of talented product pros to work for a fun, creative challenge.

Some of the ideas I came up with were equal parts, amazing and sinister. You all love it home with the show.

In the spotlight section of the show, we take a deeper dive into a topic we know will give a ton of value to product people. I’m joined by our head of client services, Shelly, who’s gonna be chatting about the work she’s headed up recently around product maturity. Hey Shelly. Hi. Welcome to the podcast.

Hello. Hey. Good to have you here. I guess let’s start off with a bit of background about you and the work you do at Lighthouse. Yeah, so I’m Shelly. I head up our client services team here at Lighthouse. So what that means is that we look after our clients, understand what our client organizations are looking to achieve strategically.

And I help create a UCD approach to deliver against whatever our client’s objectives are. Me and my team, we’re here to ensure that we know what success looks like for our clients and help support the team to ensure that project success. I personally have worked in user experience for a good few years now.

I came into it from a background in psychology. And I just really love advocating for starting with the user, doing research with them and creating products that that uses actually need. So we’re gonna talk about product maturity today. How about a bit of an intro into that. And what we mean when we talk about an organization having high or low maturity.

So yeah, there’s, there’s three parts really to being a mature product organization is what we’ve found. So firstly, it’s a purpose basically how well the work is connected to the broader organizational purpose and that there is a clear vision and strategy of what we are working towards. So that’s the first part.

And the other part is people, so people in the product team, how connected. People feel to each other and the work that they’re doing through collaboration, through feedback for each other, clear responsibilities and structure within the team. And lastly, process. So this is about how teams actually tackle the work, the process they go through, having the right tools and the product development techniques and practices to, to actually do the work.

So yeah, so we’ve defined it as those three parts, purpose, people and process. And this forms part of our bespoke product maturity framework, which we’ve called Beacon. And there’s others out there which has inspired us. For example, Nielsen Norman has their own one for UX maturity, which is really interesting.

And what we’ve done is created our own, which we’ve found is really helpful with helping clients see their blind spots and improve their maturity. That sounds really cool. Can you run through those three pillars in more detail to kind of show the difference between mature and immature organizations in each category?

Yeah, absolutely. So firstly, purpose. So the immature side of things are where organizations are making decisions based on speed, where they need to get something out quickly, which might trump then doing what’s in line with the strategy or what’s best for the user. So that’s more short term thinking.

May be making decisions based on what you know, that senior stakeholders want and perhaps opaque decisions that the team aren’t brought in on. And the mature side of things for purpose is that the roadmap is more outcome focused. The team is empowered to prioritize the roadmap themselves in line with the vision and decisions that are being made are informed by a strong understanding of user needs data and leveraging the team’s expertise.

The underlying principle here is autonomy. It’s something that. Martin Erickson emphasized in his book Product Leadership really interesting book, and it talks about the fact that the best product teams are autonomous and co-located. And in the book he talks about extremes of this. So, for example, Holocracy where there isn’t a traditional hierarchy of command, and instead it’s self-management and people have authority to make decisions within their role.

And he lists some companies that are doing it. For example, Spotify. Who adopt this successful model of self-managing teams. And you were seeing this more and more where companies are working more so in tribes, but then to avoid havoc of everybody kind of making their own decisions. What’s really important is having an aligned vision and a unified strategy from leadership to then bring everyone together, pulling in the right direction.

So for purpose, then we have some questions that people can then ask themselves to figure out how mature they may be in terms of their purpose. So for example, a question you can ask yourself is, does your organization have a clear vision and goal for the product and how it fits into the wider organization strategy?

And then is that. Accessible by the team, and can it be articulated by everybody in the team? You mentioned people as well. Is that the next one? Yeah, that’s right. So people’s next. And so yeah, this is about how connected people feel to each other and the work they’re doing, how much they’re collaborating, how open the feedback culture is, and how clear everybody’s responsibilities are.

So the mature side of people. Is that there is cohesion across the product team and there’s natural collaboration. So that’s not just forced by the usual rituals that you have but genuinely going out of your way to collaborate. So you know, not waiting for those standups and the retrospectives to, to have that collaboration, but perhaps when you’re in the office and walking over to someone’s desk and asking them to have a look at what you are doing or having an ad hoc huddle to collaborate on something that you’re working on.

But that natural collaboration is across a company too. So working with different departments across the organization, for example, working with the customer service department, the commercial team, sales, and hearing other perspectives across the organization who have contact with users and listening with an open mind and welcoming each other’s input.

So that’s the mature side of of people. And on the immature side of things, this is where teams are working in silos. And so what that might mean is perhaps people are avoiding conflict altogether by not sharing what they think or not taking the time to understand how each other work best. And so conflict is kind of seen as a negative rather than constructive.

And so people might avoid it all together and have inner frustrations. Or on the extreme, maybe people are having open conflict with each other, but it’s not being handled in a very constructive way. And I really think that conflict is great. It’s, it’s all about being able to have different perspectives and have a disagreement, and it’s really about creating an environment and creating a, a healthy, positive working practice where you can share different perspectives and then ultimately you’ll get an even better outcome from that.

So for people, a couple of questions that you can ask yourself is, for example, do you naturally collaborate outside of existing meetings and are you working with other teams across the organization? And if the answers are no, then you can take these to your teams and ask, well, how can we change this?

So we’ve had purpose and people. And then lastly the third one is process. And so this is all about how teams tackle the work through having the right tools and product development techniques and practices. So the immature side of things here is that you’ve got perhaps untrained people conducting research where bias could be introduced.

So for example, falling into the confirmation bias trap or actually maybe not doing any research at all. Or if you are doing research, you are limiting yourself by not using a range of different techniques. Cuz using different research techniques can help you find different angles and perspectives.

And it’s such a great thing being able to, to go outside of the, the norm. The best research that I’ve been a part of is when we’ve actually got outside the usual lab based research where when I was working with a a supermarket, we shadowed people doing the weekly shop and with a train company speaking to people on a train platform, also waiting for their platform number to show up.

And so you get some really rich and. Insightful findings from doing a real range of research techniques. And it’s also fun. It’s fun for the product team taking a day out to do something a bit different. But then also the, the immature side of this is that maybe you then get those insights, but.

They’re kept within the product team and not shared with the rest of the product team, or not even shared with the developers, for example who might be working on requirements and not really understanding the, or knowing the context behind it and not sharing those insights with the wider business as well, to understand the context and the reason why the, the company’s product is going in a certain direction.

So yeah, so that’s the immature side of things. In terms of mature process, this is where people in the product team are encouraged to experiment, try new things before progressing with what they think is the best way forward. And having a design process in place that allows designers to sketch, map outflows, and iterate collaboratively with the product team on features before even opening up a Figma file.

So some questions again that, that you can ask yourself to figure out how mature you think you are in terms of processes. Do you consider and facilitate different types of research? And are you sharing your insights widely across the product team and across the organization? And are you experimenting?

Are you sketching and collaborating before opening up Figma? So yeah, so that’s the three areas. I hope that all made sense. Yeah, it does. I mean, there’s a lot to take in there and I mean much of that really resonates with what we try to do at Lighthouse, but clearly loads of our clients over the years sit at different levels in that in that framework.

And it’s not easy to get right. But I suppose a, a good question to ask would be, why would you bother, why would you want to increase your maturity as a business? Yeah, it’s a good question. And put simply it’s financial return. So it’s really hard sometimes to prove the value of UX and following a UCD practice.

And what we really need is to show stakeholders the return that they’re getting from investing in user research, user experience, and following this, this good practice. And there are stats now that show the financial return that it’s having on businesses, which is fantastic. And user-centric organizations are more profitable and 60% more profitable.

In fact. So this is taken from a report that Forbes did few years ago in 2020. Another thing that they said in it was that 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience. Report an increase in their revenue. And another one that they said is that brands with superior customer experience bring in almost six times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience.

So those are amazing stats to really show the impact of being a mature product organization. I’m sold. Brilliant. Sign me up. No, it’s great. And, and obviously as a, as a UX agency, we, we know the value that this can bring to an organization and great to have those stats to, to call up on at the right times.

That’s all great. You know, the, the theory, but can you tell us about a, an example when you’ve run through this beacon process with a, with a real life business or client? Yeah, absolutely. So we are rolling this out for our clients at the moment and it’s going really well and, and clients are responding to it brilliantly.

So what we’ve found is the first step from any organization of, of wanting to embark in understanding their maturity is wanting to hear it in the first place. So if someone, if an organization says, thanks, but no thanks, it does make me wonder why they don’t want to find out how mature they are. And perhaps it’s distracting from their delivery.

They might have some pressing deadlines coming up and they, they don’t want to be distracted by it, or maybe they’re worried that it’ll make them look bad, and I get that completely. It might be quite daunting getting a report saying how mature you are as an organization, especially when. It’s your responsibility to own product in, in UX in an organization.

So, completely empathize that it’s perhaps an an overwhelming finding to, to have, but that’s why one of our clients who’s reacted well is that they genuinely have come with a learning mindset and an open mind. And they might, you know, one might think that you get a long list of issues that you’re gonna need to fix and you’ve already got a few things that you need to, to be dealing with.

But what our client has found is that we’ve broken it down into tangible steps and made sure that there’s a great balance of also giving credit where it’s due. Telling the organization exactly what they’re doing well and then simply pointing out the blind spots or issues that they may or may not already know about.

But it’s helpful having it written down in, in a report. So one thing that’s come out of, of that particular client report. Was actually showing how leadership and product felt, for example, that the vision and mission is, is super clear and that the team have autonomy to prioritize their work based on that vision.

But then what the results found was that the designers and developers in that team felt that they didn’t actually know what the vision was, let alone feel empowered to make decisions based on that. So what it really showed all of us was that. Fundamentally things are in place. There is the vision and the mission there, which is brilliant cuz that’s the, the important thing that there is one defined.

But there’s a discrepancy there and, and something to flesh out that there was a difference between what leadership and product believed to be the case and the reality that the design and development teams were, were feeling. And so actually working with the CEO of that, Organization in particular that I’m talking about.

They were really open to hearing that feedback and now we’ve already put some changes in place to, to tackle that with the team. Yeah, really cool. I mean, I, I’ve witnessed some of that happening over the past couple of years with, with that particular client and it’s amazing to see Where they started and where they’ve managed to get to in that time.

This is a process to run through. It’s not something you can change overnight, certainly with a larger organization like these guys. But but yeah, it’s always awesome to see progress as we, as we work through this stuff. I mean, speaking of clients, we’ve worked with ones on various levels of, of maturity.

What would you say is a, a kind of telltale sign that the company isn’t mature in how it thinks? Ah definitely hearing clients say that they don’t need to do user research, hearing them say that they already know what they need to build, and they’ve already got that clear in their mind and, and we don’t need to speak to users.

I think that that for us is always an alarm bell and, and a bit of a red flag. Yeah, I’ve heard that many, many times and from clients, from huge organizations as well where you kind of expect them to, to know better. And of course, you know, there, there’s loads of research that’s done in the past, which we are building on, which is absolutely valid, but there is a context for that research to be taken place within.

And although of course, research done in the past is valuable things change so quickly and so it’s really important that we’re, we’re constantly doing and learning. From users that we are creating these products for. Also, it just might be seen as too expensive or time consuming or a barrier to hitting deadlines.

And sometimes I’ve even found that I’m a bit of a nuisance by asking to do research. So yeah, I think when it seemed as a nuisance, then that’s definitely when we feel like the, the client is more immature in that side of things. I think it’s unfair to call yourself a nuisance. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, we, we hear that all the time.

It, it’s surprising how common it is to hear people say that they don’t want to do research or kind of cut down research phases. We totally get that people wanna move quickly and do, do things and, and re research can be seen as a barrier. But but yeah, we are, we are firm believers in the the power of research and, and what it can do to shape the future of your product in a positive way.

Mm-hmm. You’ve mentioned Beacon already. But do you wanna chat about the actual process and how people can take advantage of it? Yeah. So it is based on a questionnaire. So it’s about 21 questions. It’s really quick and easy to answer. It’s about 10 minutes tops, and it’s anonymous as well. So all we ask is what role you have, so whether it’s leadership, product design, or development, so that we can then slice the analysis and, and find some interesting insights from it.

So yeah, so a questionnaire that we then analyze and then create a report for your organization to then show you how mature you are as an organization across the, the spectrum. So yeah, so it’s easy to do. It’s, it works better for as many people in the product team as possible to fill it out so that we can draw some comparisons between different roles.

But yeah, it’s just 10 minutes tops, and then we do all the hard work to to give you some recommendations and, and to, to show you where you are on the maturity scale. Cool. Sounds nice and easy. If people wanna find out more about this, where can they head? Yeah, so you could just go onto our website, we@lighthouse.com, slash beacon and, and you can find it from there.

Thanks chatting to about today. That was cool. I’ve actually learned more about what we’ve been doing than I knew previously. Hopefully you’ve all enjoyed it too. Hope to chat to you again soon. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Cheers.

So now for the housework section. Each episode we like to dig into the detail of behind the scenes stories that come from building an efficient and high functioning digital design agency. We spend a lot of time focusing on refining processes and making the experience of working of us as seamless as possible for our clients.

This episode we wanted to touch on project status reports. Not the most glamorous of topics potentially, but it’s amazing how small changes can create big reactions to stuff like this. Joining me is Jolene from our client services team. To give a little insight, let’s start off with a bit of background about you for our listeners.

Yeah. Thanks for having me, Tom. So I am Jolene. I am a senior client service manager here at Lighthouse. I partner up with clients to ensure that we’re hitting their objectives throughout our engagements, and I’m also making sure that they’re having a great experience getting there. So, it might seem a bit obvious, but can you start off by talking about why we do status supports for our clients?

Absolutely. Yes. So we’d like to consider ourselves an efficient team who are looking after our clients every step when working with us. So we deliver great design of course, but that is only a part of the overall experience of working with an agency. Making sure that our clients know what’s going on and when they can expect things to happen is really important.

So communication, or actually a lack of communication is one of the biggest issues that we’ve seen turn projects bad. So we at Lighthouse pride ourselves on having great relationships with clients and we’re communicating constantly and status reports are a big part of this, and something that we are always referring to in our regular meetings and catch ups.

And on top of that, it is also great for us internally and it means that we can work efficiently together, especially on projects where our team is larger and spread across different disciplines. So reports might seem like a slightly boring thing but as you’ll see, we spend a lot of time getting them right and making them a little bit more fun.

That sounds really cool. Very intrigued to, to hear how status reports can be fun. Let’s talk a little bit more about how we used to do status reports before our, our current incarnation. Definitely. Yeah, so our status reports were weekly word like documents that would detail the time that we had spent in the last week on the project, and then we would divide it by the task.

So it’s a very limited update that require different status updates in other formats and platforms. And it was just not the most efficient. So why do we see a need for change there? Yeah, so the document didn’t really feel as if it was really updating either the clients or the team on what.

Had actually happened in the last week. So what we did is we started using Miro for our weekly catch ups, where we’d walk through the last week and also make plans for the next week instead where we would use a project timeline, et cetera. But then when the weeks continued, we started adding more and more sections to the Miro board.

Like, oh, the key decisions that we took last week and risks that we want to keep an eye on and mitigate accordingly. So instead of creating these boards on a case by case basis, our delivery team so that is project management and client services and also operations, got together a workshop, probably 74 different options.

Then we tested a few iterated and launched our new status update board to all of our projects. What changes did you make? So there’s a couple of things that made a difference. Firstly, we brought information from different places to one area the whole project team would look at on a weekly basis which make the information more accessible and transparent.

And secondly, the updates turned from an arbitrary budget report to a tool that we used to discuss our progress, align on our goals, and manage the whole project. So the project status board is now like our Bible that we keep turning back to. Because all the information that we need is there. But there’s also just a really nice way to start the week.

We get together with a project team on a Monday morning. We turn on some tunes, we update the board together, and then we walk through knowing exactly what will be happening this week and what we need to pay extra attention to. I hope there was some unexpected feedback from clients after this event live as well.

Yes, that is so true, and it really made all of the 74 different versions worth it. But yeah, our clients absolutely loved it. We hope the response would be positive, of course. But the response that we actually got was so much more which is great to hear when you put a lot of effort into creating these.

One client actually said last week after seeing the board on a new project that we started with them and she said, oh, can I just reiterate how much I love this board? I have really missed it. So that was lovely. Yeah. And another client actually told us last week that they have started using it themselves to report internally on progress in different projects that they are having.

And what is it that they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Well, we were flattered.

Over here at Lighthouse, we run a creative collaborative event aimed at product pros. We’ve called many hands. We invite experts from within the industry to get together and work on a fun, creative challenge, as well as here’s some talks on a variety of topics. After running these online for the past year or so, the last session saw us get together in London for our first in-person event.

It was awesome. We had our own Shelly, who you had at the top of the show talk about product maturity and our good friend Daria Lance from PlayStation popped down to talk about how play is an important part of the creative process for anyone who’s been to a many hands. You’ll know that we create our challenge live on the night by spinning our randomizer.

This selects a persona and an application type from a list. This time around, we ended up with a social network for world leaders. So with that in place, everyone got into groups and started coming up with ideas. We had people doing crazy eights, whiteboards full of ideas, and above all, lots and lots of laughter.

The event finishes up with presentations back from each team. This time around we had an AI chat bot for troubled leaders to offload their worries and confidence. I guess we had to have AI in there somewhere, a network for top tier rulers to get on better. There was something in there about bears.

But I forget exactly how it fits in. I don’t think I can repeat the language here though. This is a family show. One team had war as a service on the list of features, but I guess luckily this was crossed out by the time we got to presentations. Another team decided to onboard people via a QR code in Boston into Gold Bullion.

Now that’s the v i p treatment. As we publish this, the next event is on the 7th of June. So come on down. If you wanna join the fun, you can find all the info you need over at we are mini hands.com. We really hope to see you there.

That about wrap it up for today. Thanks very much for listening. Check in next time for more in-depth products and New York discussions explorations around how we run an efficient, collaborative digital agency and stories from the frontline of digital design. Subscribe. Give us a like, or drop us a review wherever you get your podcasts.

Find more about us@wearelighthouse.com. At We Are Lighthouse on the socials. Until next time, that’s it from me and the team over at Lighthouse. See ya.