Katie Dill: commitment

Transcript context

…hen has an ability to help narrow and reduce and remove the things that don't fit. At Airbnb, Brian Chesky is the editor of all the things that come together. At the Economist, there's a chief editor. But other organizations, they might decentralize that approach, which is certainly possible, but challenging, because you do need somebody to help see these things come together. That pairs with the next piece, which is about courage, the ability to actually say, "No, this isn't good enough." To have the resolve to just be like, "Almost, but no." Which is one of the hardest decisions I think leaders can make and certainly I've had to ever make in my career, too, is just a team puts all this care and effort into something and then you're going to say, "Actually, unfortunately we're just not there yet. Let's try again." That is, I think, incredibly important part of getting there and building the fitness of what you do. Then, lastly, the thing that I've learned that will lead me to the example that you were asking about is that, in order to build quality, you really do need to understand it also from the user perspective, which gets me into my fixation with journeys, because that is how a user sees it. The user very, very, very rarely just deals with any aspect of what you build in isolation. There has to be a moment where they learn about it. There has to be a moment where they get to know it, and then there's a moment where they actually decide to use it, and then something just changed and now they need to use that product in some other way. You have to understand it from that point of view to really understand whether or not the quality is there. I think that's a critical piece of building teams that have empathy for their users. So, we have been operationalizing that. All the things that I just mentioned, but one of the key pieces is to bring that approach to understanding the quality of the product. So, our goal was to set out to try to solve the fact that products can be shipped and they could be at their highest game when you ship them, they go through all the processes internally to be a high quality thing, and then it gets out into the world and then, over time, the quality regresses. Some of the reasons for that is that other things are being shipped. It's kind of like, again, back to an analogy of a house, imagine you have one room where you redo the molding and you paint the little aspects and you've put new plates on the lights, now all of a sudden that room is great, but it makes everything else look worse and the whole composite is worse. That is something that can happen to products is actually they get worse over time. Then you organize a company oftentimes and parts to be able to focus on their key business areas. That's a very good thing because they get focused and they know what they're building towards and they get expertise and they're laser focused on that. So, ideally, they move faster. But what also happens is that they get so focused on that they forget about that piece of the journey, and how it all fits together, and not recognizing that part of their product experience is intimately tied to another. is that they get so focused on that they forget about that piece of the journey, and how it all fits together, and not recognizing that part of their product experience is intimately tied to another. So, what we did was we set out to, number one, increase the kind of awareness and accountability of leaders to own their journeys. What we have established are we started with 15 of our most important user journeys. 15 is somewhat of an arbitrary number. It's a number that we can kind of keep track of, but also has pretty good breadth, but is certainly not comprehensive of all the most important things. But 15 of our critical user journeys, the things that we know matter so deeply to our users, and we must get right at the highest level of quality possible. Those 15 things then each have engineering, product and design leaders that are responsible for the quality of those products. They review these journeys, what we call walk the store, where they review them as if they're walking the floor of their store on a regular cadence, and they friction log what they experience, which I know David Singleton talked about on your podcast. They will write what they have seen, what's working, what's not working. They're viewing this from, they're trying to put themselves in the shoes of their user. This of course doesn't replace user research, but it substitutes it and it adds to that. So, they go through the experience and noting what's working and what's not working. And very critically, it's a journey, so a lot of times it starts from internet search, it starts on Google trying to understand something, goes to the website, they end up on Docs, they end up in the dashboard, and they're seeing it as a user might. With that, they're able to find the entailments of the experience that may or may not be working. They jot that down, they file bugs, they reach out to the teams that may own the different parts of this experience, and then they score it. Then on, again, a regular cadence, we come together in almost like a calibration, where we meet and we talk about the score of their work. It relates to performance reviews. Performance reviews, managers are assessing an individual's performance, which is hard. There's some subjectivity to it, just like understanding quality can be. But what we do as managers is we calibrate. We come together and we talk about, "Okay, how well is our interpretation of our ladders document? And how well does that performance align? And are we doing it consistently across the rest of the organization?" So, we do something very similar. We calibrate these scores because what we're really trying to do is not just the 15 essential journeys and the owners of those, we want to actually uplevel and bring more shared understanding of our quality bar across the company. These moments of calibration start that. Then having leaders do this creates this, number one, it cascades this idea of the importance of owning your journey and then also has upstream impact. ompany. These moments of calibration start that. Then having leaders do this creates this, number one, it cascades this idea of the importance of owning your journey and then also has upstream impact. Because when people see the state of products in the wild as a user would, they learn a lot about what are some of the bigger opportunities that we can make to make the product better? What are some of the things that maybe we want to change in our process to make sure that we have even better things coming into the wild? One of the best parts of this is, since then we've learned that folks have seen that like, "Oh my goodness, our SEO for this particular product or the way we're articulating it doesn't align to actually how we want people to understand it later on in the journey. So if we improve this over here, we're going to improve outcomes later on." They're seeing that and they're now able to make that happen even faster to make some of the changes there. Then my real favorite part is that we're hearing from folks that maybe at first didn't see this as necessary, that maybe in different functions that are just like, "Oh, I was so very focused on executing the technical ability of what I do on this thing, but I hadn't seen it from this lens before." Now there're actually converts of like, "Yes, this is a really important part of it." That goes back to the point of it's a group effort. You don't want just one function looking out for the quality of the product. So, having engineers and product managers and people of different disciplines walking the store, seeing the experience, feeling it firsthand, I think will lead to better care in all of the details that will aligned to better craft in the end.…

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