about me!
DocuSign
Creating a service design map to streamline the internal collaborative processes across all Product Experience teams.
Year
Summer 2022
Team
Mentors: Mariné Palamutyan, Sarah Campbell, Sai Srinivasan
Skills
Miro, Figma, service design, user interviews, affinity diagrams
Role
As the first-ever service design intern at DocuSign, I took ownership of an original project that focused on visualizing the current state of team collaboration and creating recommendations to improve product development strategies.
👁 Overview
Background
To deliver cohesive and delightful product experiences to our customers, there must be scalable processes in place that empower people to do their best work.
This project is driven by the Product Experience Leadership Team's (PXLT) curiosity of discovering how our people work together.
The Goal
Gain a better understanding of what works well and what can be improved between Product Management (PM), Product Experience (PX), and Engineering sectors and how they each define individual success at work.
The Deliverables
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Design a visual map of current internal collaboration model and its pain points
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Propose recommendations that equip DocuSigners to be and feel successful at their job.
Read my presentation here for a more thorough analysis of my insights!
🔎 Research
Methodology
8 in-depth Userzoom interviews from 2 teams: Contract Lifecycle Management Essentials and E-Sign.
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2 Product Managers
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2 Designers
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2 Researchers
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2 Engineers
I transcribed each recording and created affinity diagrams in Miro based on their responses to my question guide. This let me visually connect the most common responses and to identify similar motivations and frustrations across job positions.
🧠 Analyze
What we're doing well now
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Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers work in a well-established framework known as 3 in a Box
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Flexibility
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Team members are individually supported by peers and managers of their own craft.
Map of the Current Collaboration Model
This map reads left to right and demonstrates the actions and pain points of Product Mangers, Designers, Researchers, and Engineers over the time span of a 2-week sprint in the Agile Scrum framework.
How to read this map
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Top half = Product & Engineering perspectives (🔵)
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Bottom half = Research & Design perspectives (🟤)
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Solid black arrows = chronological events
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Dotted black arrows = continuous actions
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Dotted green line & boxes = current strengths in the existing model
💡 Key Learnings
Summary
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Research needs to support building the Product Requirements Document (PRD)
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Design needs a better process to ensure their work will get implemented
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Product Managers and Engineers need clear acceptance criteria across their team
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Understanding how well features perform will inspire product improvement
🤝🏼 Recommendations
What can we do now?
When our teams agree on what to build, we unlock the ability to work cohesively and without doubt.
Our internal processes should enable us to build products that our users need.
Strike a Balance in Innovation & User Centricity
Research must be help guide the way we develop and improve our features - it's how we understand our users' behaviors, motivations, and what makes their experiences enjoyable.
By using Research-led processes, we ensure that DocuSign will be able to uphold its values of being trusted, valuable, and responsible.
My Top 3 Proposed Solutions
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Rolling Research methods regularly support the PRD (not after the fact)
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Build a relationship with Data Science to establish telemetry that measure performance of currently-launched products
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Utilize the "Paired PM" system to raise visibility on Research
1. Establishing Rolling Research
Purpose: Conduct lightweight research to provide generative feedback to Product and Designers
Benefits:
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Gets Research involved earlier to help build the PRD for presentation at the Kick-Off phase of each sprint
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Ensures a close relationship between Research and Design
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Both want to create impactful experiences for customers
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Design gets more opportunities to explore different solutions that are not solely demanded by Product
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User Quotes:
"The work is better, the collaboration is stronger, the life of my insights last longer if I am engaged as an active member of the team [and present for the whole experience.]" -Researcher
"So is [Product] just telling me to mockup whatever [they] give me as the solution, or do I still have space to explore and discover other solutions?" -Designer
"...You're brought in when a problem arises...and they want to pull you in to answer questions rather than being a staple component of the team." -Researcher
"Some PRD's, you don't need to have research if it's a well-defined product or decently small...researchers whould be able to read my PRD and understand what I'm trying to get at...if we need to have IX or Research brought in, we tie them into our processes." -PM
"It was like pulling teeth to get included in on meetings, it was weird." -Researcher
2. Relationship with Data Science
Purpose: To inform PX on what they want to understand about a user's behavior
Benefits:
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Research schedules bi-weekly 1:! with 1 - 2 Data Scientists to provide telemetry through...
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Deciphered data
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Raw data
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Can lead the team in the right direction to continue improving a feature
User Quotes:
"There's a hunger for that information from both PX and Product, but we rarely have the opportunity to make that happen...we don't have good telemetry to be able to answer the kinds of things we want to answer - it's almost like meaningless data." -Researcher
"It would help my confidence if [our team] checked into [our] past or recently released features; if it's bad feedback, we would be able to take it constructively and continue to push [our team] in the right direction of fulfilling a customer's need." -Designer
3. Paired PM Methodology
Purpose: A user-centric Product Manager collaborates with a technical Product Manager as a "pair" to determine what is the most efficient and impactful way to manage the product at hand
Benefits:
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Brings equal visibility to both PX and Development concerns
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Clearly solidifies the acceptance criteria and goals across the team
User Quotes:
"We are all coming from different places...there needs to be a translation that has to happen for us to genuinely understand each other." -Engineer
"The state of our [team's] releases is always changing...the commitment and goals as a product development team are constantly in flux - I honestly could not tell you right now what will actually be released which is terrifying." -Designer
"Everything was so busy...that it was even hard to just get on the same page to let people know that a design that was in progress was probably not going to get done for another year or two." -Researcher
"UX debt has been really hard to prioritize, and sometimes when we finally get into a sprint...and then it gets secretly moved out, which is really sad." -Designer
Map of the Future State of Collaboration Model
This map reads similarly as the Current Collaboration map above, except this integrates my three solutions across different phases of a 2-week Scrum sprint. Below is an updated key.
How to read this map
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Top half = Product & Engineering perspectives (🔵)
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Bottom half = Research & Design perspectives (🟤)
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Solid black arrows = chronological events
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Dotted black arrows = continuous actions
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Dotted green line & boxes = current strengths in the existing model
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Yellow boxes = my implemented solutions
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Yellow solid lines = relationships between two perspectives
To visualize the level of attainability for my 3 solutions, I used this graph to indicate what would be more costly for implementation versus something that can be done with little effort, but still quite impactful.
I rationalized that the Paired PM framework and standardizing the use of Rolling Research across all DocuSign teams would take a lot of time and resources to fully and properly establish. On the other hand, opening a line of communication between Researchers and Data Scientists would be easier to achieve.
Impact-Effort Matrix
External Research - Case Study on Shopify UX
Additionally, I gathered information on how Shopify's experience with having their Product Managers work closely with UX Researchers. I used this information to advocate for the "Paired PM" methodology, which was created by VMware's Tanzu Labs.
Check out my slide deck here on the case study I made!