Product Discovery using MURAL

I recently presented a LAST Anywhere workshop for participants to experience a fully remote inception where I tried to show the power of a remote-first digital collaboration approach to product and improvement discovery. The workshop was a success and thanks to the participants for a good first run!

The move to #RemoteFirst for most organisations requires a redesign of inceptions and kick-offs. Recently I helped a major Australian brand stand-up a high performing product discovery team using digital collaboration techniques in the middle of a pandemic, where many team members had never met in person!

I used a visual collaboration tool mural.co to successfully kick-off this product discovery initiative. Key agenda items included:

• Teaching participants how to use the digital collaboration tools

• Building early trust between people who have never met in person

• Defining success criteria for the initiative

• Establishing ways of working for the team

• Creating a “mission control” for visual management of the initiative

• Setting up the daily meeting online

• Running a retrospective online

I’ve made a set of three MURAL templates that allow me to instantly setup for these workshops:

• Introductions Template

• Product Discovery Template

• Team Visual Management and Retrospective Template

If you’d like to use these templates yourself, you can request access here!

Rethinking digital collaboration for a #RemoteFirst world

Hi,

My last blog post talked about the physical vs digital trade-offs for using kanban walls. Reading it again today I felt it needed a refresh for today’s world.

I’ve for a long time been a proponent of the physical wall, however in a #RemoteFirst world it has surprised me how effective a fully digital collaboration approach has been working. This won’t be news to the few teams that have been 100% remote for years.

Over the last few months I helped a major Australian brand stand up a new product discovery team, including people who had never met face to face. We used a fully remote inception, a set of team kick-off workshops, online daily meetings, online stakeholder showcases and online retrospectives to great effect, and I want to share what worked:

• Using a powerful digital whiteboard canvas for collaboration. We used Mural.co

• Building early trust between people who have never met in person

• Defining success criteria for the initiative using exercises and OKRs

• Establishing ways of working for the team that match the new working environment

• Creating a “mission control” for visual management of the initiative

• Using mural to run the daily meeting and retrospectives online

I’ll be talking about these tools and techniques in a couple of weeks at LAST Conference Anywhere. I’ll be running a 90-minute workshop on digital collaboration (co-facilitated by Christine) that lets you experience a simulation of a product discovery inception. Note: there is a 20-person limit per workshop, so get in quickly if you are interested!

If you’d be interested in running this 90-min experience for your team or the full set of team inception workshops please get in touch! Schedule a free consultation in my online calendar.