Tent Talks Featuring Christine Perfetti: Redefining Collaboration: How Strategic Rallying Shapes a Research-Driven Product Vision

[00:00:31] Chicago Camps: You’ve introduced us to the concept of “Strategic Rallying” as a pivotal method for connecting research insights to action within organizations. Can you give us an in depth look at what Strategic Rallying involves?

[00:00:44] Christine Perfetti: In terms of thinking about Strategic Rallying, the way I describe it at a high level is it’s a team based collaborative approach for setting a strategy and product vision, and then also successfully executing on it.

So what does that really mean? We’ll delve in a little bit in terms of the process and approach. There’s another important aspect to Strategic Rallying aside from just the collaborative approach to the work. It’s also a perspective and mindset where the focus is on understanding people. So what do I mean by that?

With a research background and looking at organizations, many organizations already do a great job of understanding their people, who are their prospects, users, and customers. The idea behind Strategic Rallying is we understand those people. But we also spend a bunch of our time understanding and involving the internal people in the company.

So working with the teams in house to collect their insights and involving them in setting the direction and vision. So that’s a big component of Strategic Rallying. Yeah. So at a high level, it’s really about involving your teams in terms of setting the vision and strategy for your company and product.

The first time I ran one of these Strategic Rallying workshops, in essence, in a product organization, what a strategic rally is, it’s a one day workshop where you’re bringing together your cross functional team and you’re working with them, first setting context for the day, but then you’re working with them to collect their brilliant ideas in terms of what the long term direction should be for the product.

The story I wanted to share was that 10 years ago, the head of product at Aquia, where I was working at the time, came to me and said, you know what, Christine, I’m not really confident in the direction we have right now for the product. I would like to bring in the most brilliant minds in our organization to first share with them what my goals are for the business and the product direction and also share with them the insights we have about our users and customers.

But here’s what I’d like you to do, Christine. Can you bring in these 40 people into the room? And by the end of the day, can we set a direction and set a product vision?

And my reaction, frankly, Russ, you were asking about brainstorming sessions. My reaction 10 years ago initially was thinking, could we really accomplish that end goal in just one day with these stakeholders and bring them in and get to our final destination, which was a product vision. And our plan was a decade ago to try it out and bring people in, taking my background and expertise in research, but also facilitating teams.

We structured a one day workshop to really get to the point where we’re channeling people’s brilliance, giving them an opportunity to share their individual ideas and insights, but then also having them collaborate with each other so we could get all of the insights out there, allow people to hear from everyone else, and then by the end of the day converge.

I bring up this story because throughout this session, by the end of the day, It was a real success story in that we achieved our initial end goal, which was to get the group of people in the room, the cross-functional group, to be converging on a long-term vision. We hit that goal, but what really surprised me out of the day is that we did so much more than what I expected from a visioning session or Strategic Rallying session.

So by the end of the eight hours. We had seen that this cross functional team that was a very opinionated team who had very different viewpoints had come together, had shared their individual ideas, but by the end of the day, this team had converged by close to 80 percent on a vision for where we wanted to get to.

What was also really surprising was how well the team was getting along as we were going through this process and sharing feedback with each other. The executives in the room were saying what was so fabulous about the session for them was that they were hearing input from team members that they had never heard before.

And then finally, we got to the point where at the end of the day, we felt like everyone had been heard, everyone had contributed, but we were aligned as a team. That didn’t answer your question yet, Russ, but in terms of how this, from my perspective, how this process was different than traditional brainstorming.

When you hear people talk about brainstorming sessions, it’s typically the approach of any idea is an okay idea. It’s the idea of let’s get out as many ideas as we possibly can. It’s about quantity over quality. There’s also this notion with traditional brainstorming that there aren’t any wrong answers when you’re brainstorming.

And I’m sure, like me, Russ, and I’m sure the audience also has had the perspective. I’ve sat in on brainstorming sessions where it’s been a mess. A bunch of people are throwing their ideas out there. There’s no systematic way of vetting the ideas or bringing the best ideas to the top. And people at the end of the day in these traditional brainstorming sessions will wonder, Why were we here?

Did we actually achieve anything from this session and how do we move forward? The difference with the Strategic Rallying session is that it’s not focused on saying any idea is the idea we want to focus on. Instead, when people come into the workshop, we don’t just bring them in and say, hey, okay, let’s set a vision.

Instead, we spend, at the beginning of the workshop, a good two hours setting context and providing these team members in the room with insights. And these insights are related to, we talk about what the business goals are for the upcoming year or two. Typically that’s a C level executive who’s presenting to the group to share, here’s where we’re trying to get to from a business perspective, and here’s our goals.

But then the second huge component is during this session at the beginning, right after the C level executive has shared the business goals, we also go into an in depth review of the user research and the customer insight. So even before anyone’s asked to ideate, they have specific context that helps inform their ideas.

So those are some ways that this is different, this all this notion as well with traditional brainstorming that any idea we want to throw out any idea, that’s not how we set up Strategic Rallying. Instead, we tell these knowledgeable team members from the cross functional group that the ideas they have when we’re thinking about setting up the product vision should be tied to the business goals.

And the problems we’ve identified that our users and customers are having. So by giving them that context and then giving them structure through the rallying approach, a systematic structure for ideating and converging, we land in a very different place at the end of the day than a traditional brainstorming session that says, Oh, this was a waste.

I’ll hear so many product leaders be talking about establishing a product vision, and the idea is for a product vision to be successful, the key priority typically is to get the rest of the team to understand that vision. So there’s so much time spent on communicating the vision out to the teams. The difference with this approach by involving the teams is that they not only understand the strategy and vision, they contributed to it and have a sense of ownership in it because they got to contribute their ideas.

So what happens then? They’re much more likely to rally behind it and execute on it. So it’s this component of it’s not enough to have your team understanding the vision. It’s so much more powerful to have your team contribute to it and then evangelize around it. It’s a huge component. I’ve also noticed when I talk to product leaders and design leaders that we all have somewhat different definitions of what it means to establish a product vision.

And for a Strategic Rallying workshop, the goal for a product vision is to establish a two to three year vision of the experience your users and customers will have with the product. It’s not about talking about features of the product, it’s talking about when we’re thinking through where the experience will be.

In two to three years, what will that end to end experience look like and what will the user’s experience be? So that’s what we try to achieve. You also touched on, I have so much to say on this topic, but you were touching, Russ, on the fact that we get to this 80 percent convergence when we get to the end of the workshop.

When I first start talking to product managers and product leaders about this approach, there’s sometimes some pushback and anxiety about doing this approach where there’s the thought, and rightfully the product managers and product leaders will say, it’s our responsibility to map out what the vision is, so should we be involving all of these other people, and what I respond back to them is, At the end of the day, they still own what the long term vision will be.

They’ll also be prioritizing the roadmap. In the case I shared, the story at Acquia, the head of product, when we got to the 80 percent of convergence with the workshop, he didn’t say, oh, our job is done. Instead, at that point, he and the product managers took these insights And they refined on it and they iterated on it and they were still driving the final destination, but they got so much input and brilliant ideas from the rest of the organization.

And that was key.

[00:11:16] Chicago Camps: For organizations interested in adopting the Strategic Rallying approach. What initial steps would you recommend they take to shift from a solution focused mindset to a problem space ideation culture?

[00:11:28] Christine Perfetti: One thing that I wanted to highlight about this entire approach is that a Strategic Rallying session, a one day product visioning workshop.

We don’t just come into an organization and just say, okay, we’re ready to have a visioning workshop. There’s steps in the process that have to happen before we run that workshop for the Strategic Rallying to play, in essence. And the steps are the way I like to describe it. And I’ll preface this. The reason the framework for Strategic Rallying is set up this way is that I have been watching a lot of basketball.

With my eight year old son, every other day, approximately, we’re watching the Celtics, we’re huge Celtics fans, and through this process of watching how teams work, and what leads to success, and having watched with my son for two years, I’m now using a lot of sports metaphors and sports analogies in my work, so I preface everything that I share here, it does have a bit of the sports analogies, because it works, and it plays, and When I think about Strategic Rallying now, there’s really three main steps to prepare for the strategic rally.

The first step is what I call the scouting stage, which is similar to scouts who go out and scout out potential players and team members. During the scouting stage, the goal is to talk to your stakeholders even before we’re running a research. So that’s step one, and I’ll go into what that step entails.

Step two, before running the workshop, and I touched upon this earlier, is that before you plan out a vision, you need to know the problem space and you really need to know your users, your prospects, and your customers. So step two of the process. is what I refer to as pre season discovery. So this is before we’ve mapped out our strategy, we need to collect the insights.

And these are the insights from users and customers. I have a background. I’ve spent most of my career in research. You won’t be surprised that the Strategic Rallying framework, the underlying pillar is this pre season discovery, collecting the insights. So that’s the user research stage, and then finally, we’re at a point, the third stage is establishing the game plan and vision, and that’s where the workshop comes into play.

I touched upon earlier, the workshop’s eight hours, the first two hours is the context setting. And what happens there, we prepare that context set, set, excuse me, we prepare that context setting part of the agenda based on what we learned from the scouting and the preseason discovery. So what happens in the scouting?

We go out and we talk to the stakeholders. Who are the stakeholders? It’s your cross functional team. And we run one on one interviews with a mix of people across the organization to really. Understand what’s happening organizationally, but also start collecting insights from the internal team, insights related to what they think the big problems are for users and customers, but also insights related to where they think the business should be going, what they think the big business priorities are, and we start there to already have a lens on what is the situation today.

Then we run the research and I’m not talking in length about that, but this is Putting together a strategic research plan to really understand your audience and their needs. And then once we have that information, then we’re ready for the one day workshop. So the visioning workshop and the Strategic Rallying workshop, we talked about the context setting for the first couple of hours of the workshop.

Then we start getting into the individual and time team. Then we start getting into the individual and team ideation on a product vision. People ask me how long that takes. That’s typically the meat and the in depth portion. All of the workshop is important, but that’s where a lot of the magic happens.

An approach I highly recommend, which I took advantage of for this four hours. What happens during this individual and team ideation work, I took from the work of the design studio method. So there’s excellent resources out there from the design world in terms of how to ideate first individually, but then as a team to converge on design solutions over time.

Todd Zaki Warfel has done excellent work in this area. 10 years ago when I was asked to create this workshop, that’s the resource I went to. Todd has some excellent information on how to set up a design studio. The approach I use in that four hours is it’s using that approach but modifying it for my work.

But that four hours we do individual and team ideation. The final step is, once we were coming to that converged version, 80 percent conversion with the teams, We run what’s known for the last hour or two of the session we’ve run a KJ exercise, which is an excellent approach for prioritizing opportunities.

So after we shared the vision with each other as we were working on it, we ran a one hour KJ exercise to prioritize the opportunities. I didn’t go in depth into what the KJ exercise entails. An excellent resource is Jared Spool’s article on the technique, but it’s a wonderful way to bubble up to the top the best ideas that you may want to act on.

It’s actually very similar to a traditional product development and design process. It’s the same sort of steps. But what I’ve been sharing with my clients and the groups I’ve been working on, it’s taking a different lens and perspective to the work. So you’re still having conversations with your stakeholders, you’re running the research, and then you’re coming together and getting ready for establishing a vision.

But what’s turning this on its head a little bit is that at every step of the process, we’re focusing on How do we bring the team along for the ride, gathering their insights, involving them in the research we run. So when we get to the Strategic Rallying workshop, it’s a team based collaborative effort.

So the activities are the same, but what I’ve found is super, super valuable is if at every step we’re thinking about how do we best involve the right people and collect their knowledge, it only leads to good results down the line.

[00:18:17] Chicago Camps: You’ve advocated for connecting research insights to actionable outcomes in organizations.

What are some of the common gaps you’ve observed between research findings and their application and decision making processes? And how does Strategic Rallying help bridge these gaps?

[00:18:34] Christine Perfetti: In terms of gaps I’m seeing within organizations, in terms of teams who are running research and the gaps between that research leading to action and outcomes.

There’s a couple of stories that come to mind. The first is about, now this is aging me a bit, but about a decade and a half ago, I was leading up the user experience team at a company. I was leading up a team of designers and researchers. And when I arrived at the organization, the team had already established a research practice They were, when I talked with the head of research, they mentioned to me that they had talked to and interviewed a hundred users over the last year, which you think is fabulous.

I thought it was fabulous. I thought that rate of velocity of research was excellent. Talking about going out and talking with your stakeholders, I was also early in my tenure under assessing the landscape and understanding the landscape. So I was going out talking to the head of marketing, the head of product, all of the cross functional teams.

And what happened here is when I talked with the head of product about what they were using in terms of the insights and how they were using it, the head of product said, what insights? And it was mind blowing. This is, there were all of these research studies being done and the head of product wasn’t really aware of it.

That’s an extreme, when there’s all of these research activities happening and the decision makers aren’t aware. The most common scenario I’m seeing where there’s a gap is that there’s so much excellent research being done by the research teams. They put together decks, they’ve put a lot of effort into communicating the insights out to their stakeholders.

They put effort into telling stories and narratives around what they’ve learned about the major user problems and customer problems. The gap I’ve been seeing and the pain I’m hearing from research leaders is that there’s a wealth of insights in their research work that the decision makers in the company aren’t acting on to the degree that they’d like.

So the major problems they’re identifying aren’t being addressed necessarily in the product roadmaps. The key stakeholders are prioritizing some of these problems. And what the reason I am so excited about sharing more about Strategic Rallying, it’s by no means the only way to start connecting your great, amazing insights in house to action and execution and strategy.

But why Strategic Rallying can work most very effectively is that, and we’ve talked about this by first involving your stakeholders, getting their insights, but then sharing with them what you’ve learned from the research in the context of, okay, now we’re going to plan out our strategy and vision. What ends up happening because we’re using that one day of visioning and we’ve shared all of the insights.

The stakeholders in the room have just heard those research insights and they’re ideating and converging on a vision based on what they just heard. So it’s by no means the only way to connect research to strategy and vision, but it’s a wonderful way for a couple of reasons. First, the stakeholders are hearing the research at the moment where they’re preparing what the strategy and vision would be.

And second, you’ve involved them in the entire process. They’re much more invested in moving forward with the insights when they’ve been involved throughout the process. They have a degree of ownership they wouldn’t otherwise.

[00:22:16] Chicago Camps: Given your emphasis on the importance of moving beyond this us versus them mindset to foster collaboration and mutual respect, how do you propose organizations recalibrate their culture to not only recognize but also celebrate the unique contributions of design, research, and product teams in a way that transcends traditional metrics and fosters a genuine sense of team success and collective achievement?

[00:22:42] Christine Perfetti: This came up as a topic of conversation and I’ve been writing about it a little bit where one of the things that I’ve been highlighting for researchers and designers who I coach is that Their success is not all about connecting work to measurable outcomes. By no means am I saying that it’s not important to be really taking your work and trying to drive outcomes.

By no means am I saying that. I did observe, and I’m seeing this quite a bit, especially in this current climate and the tech world and the research and design world. What’s really struck me is that all of the research and design and product leaders I talk to start with the exact same line that my superpower is the ability to connect my work to measurable outcomes.

And the reason I’m saying is there needs to be more to the discourse is that. That’s what everyone’s saying, and we need to find other differentiators there. Having said that, there’s a couple of components in terms of thinking about being a designer and researcher, and how do we show our contribution and show our value?

And also, how do we strategically partner with the rest of the organization? And there’s really three components that I focus on when I’m coaching product and research and design leaders. It’s The first component is prioritizing your relationships in house, and we’ll talk about that. The second is focusing on not just business outcomes, but on user experience outcomes.

And the third area is when you’ve conducted your research and you’ve done the design work, and you’ve focused on relationships and UX outcomes, the third component is celebrate the wins, not just celebrating the research wins or the design wins, celebrating the team’s wins. I’m sure you can tell as I’m highlighting these three areas that it’s really all about the people and the relationships.

And what I’ve seen for researchers and designers, the best way to have influence Is really to focus on those relationships and figuring out from your stakeholders what they need to be successful in terms of those three priorities, prioritizing relationships. This notion of I’ve talked with so many researchers and design leaders who are grappling with how do I find the numbers that show my team’s level of contribution.

And it turns out when I work with organizations, of course, we want to find the numbers to quantify our value. But I oftentimes find that when your highest level stakeholders are really just focusing on just bring me the number, bring me the number, what numbers can you show me? When I actually talk with those stakeholders and do my understanding, the landscape assessment, what I find is when your stakeholders are only focusing on the numbers.

It’s typically an indicator that your stakeholders may not have trust in your team or you to be a strategic partner in the work. So it’s less about having the number. It’s more about establishing trust. A story I like to tell going into an organization was prioritizing relationships. Why is that important?

When I come to an, into an organization to establish a research program. The first two people I talked to are not probably who you’d expect. The first is the chief financial officer in the company. The second is the head of data analytics. And the reason I have those discussions first is to establish partnerships and relationships with them.

Because I know as we try to figure out how to show the value of research or design, These are going to be the biggest partners to help us do that. So research leaders, what I recommend, if you haven’t done it yet, go talk to your CFO or if the CFO is unavailable to talk to you, talk to one of the CFO’s analysts and start talking with them about the Biggest business metrics and levers driving the business.

Understanding those insights with the head of product analytics, data analytics, you want to start talking with them about what can we measure in the product and design. So when we make design improvements, can we actually show differences? The reason I mentioned establishing these relationships, there’s a lot of discussion in the design community that many organizations are not yet equipped.

With a product analytics platform or even having their business metrics in such a clean way that it makes it very frustrating for design leaders to show their value. If you can’t measure user behavior on your platform, how do you know whether a design change improves things or not? And what I’ve found working with organizations is, yeah, that’s sometimes the case that the analytics aren’t where you want it to be.

But if that design leader has already partnered with the CFO and the head of analytics and started talking about what they’re trying to accomplish, It really ends up being those two partners really start trusting that the design leader is coming from the right place and doing the work in the right way.

So it’s that element of trust and that turns out to be key, prioritizing those relationships. I won’t go too much into depth with the focusing on user experience outcomes. Jared Spool at Center Centre can clearly articulate and does an excellent job of talking about for design and research leaders. How to effectively perform your work and show the success of your work.

It’s very hard to tie all of the design and research work to business outcomes all the time. And I’m a huge proponent and highly support Jared Spool’s approach and recommendations that design teams and research teams would be best suited to focus much more on user experience outcomes to show their value.

The example. I like to bring up is working with a client of mine from the audio streaming world. Initially, when I first started working with them, I sat down with the C level execs and talked with them about what business outcomes they wanted to achieve. And when I was working with this client, they wanted to, you won’t be surprised, they wanted to increase retention from their customers. When I first was undertaking a strategic research project for them, it would be really challenging to say, okay, this one research project translated to this percentage of customer retention. So instead, we focused more on user outcomes.

And we asked them questions more focused on the user experience with the lens of what do we want to achieve for the business. So the question we asked is if we’re able to increase customer retention, in what ways would that have happened by improving the user’s experience with the product? And working with the teams, we started realizing through our research findings that there were problems we could solve for customers that would increase listening hours and increase engagement.

And we weren’t really focused on can we increase customer retention, but we focused on these behavioral analytics. Could we, through the work we do with the design, increase listening hours? We did increase listening hours and guess what, after we did that through our partnership with the CFO and the head of product analytics, we could tie listening hours to customer retention metrics.

So it all ended up being a partnership between the head of analytics, the head of the financial metrics, and the design and product team to start showing our success. This partnership, it wasn’t just showing the success of design and research, it was showing the success of how the team had worked together to increase listening hours, but also increase customer retention.

So it was a huge win, which leads into the final point. When sharing these results, it was never a discussion about the design. And the research led to all of these business outcomes. It was a discussion and celebration of the way the team worked together to solve these problems and outline what business outcomes we wanted to achieve and then translate it into what would have to happen for the users led to this amazing result.

So it was a team celebration at the end of the day. And it was teamwork throughout. When a design leader comes into the organization and says to their manager, I’d like to talk to the head of legal. I’d like to talk to the CFO. I’d like you, it’s a different discourse, not to say that leaders aren’t doing this, but some leaders are not, and it changes the discourse immediately.

You may not have the numbers yet, but you’re starting to gain the credibility and trust and respect. A lot of people, and I know this, think of researchers and designers as less involved in the day to day business. That isn’t the case for the strategic researchers and designers I know. They’re thinking about the business as well, and they’re strategic partners with legal, finance, marketing, all of those groups.

[00:32:24] Chicago Camps: You’ve observed in your research that there are several factors that contribute to product organizations struggling to successfully achieve their goals, including a lack of team chemistry. How does your approach to product development tackle the chemistry part of the equation?

[00:32:38] Christine Perfetti: From the lens of research, I just realized looking back, I’m now going on 25 years now of being in the product and user experience space.

And we talk about in my research, what have I learned? In addition to working with teams to establish customer research programs, I also during those two decades have gone internally to research teams and product teams. And it’s been fascinating through those 20 years what I’ve seen. And what I’m looking at is when you go into an organization and you’re looking at how the product teams operate and the organizations operate.

It turns out, as I’ve observed those organizations and conducted research, it turns out that there are four primary internal pillars that drive whether an organization successfully launches their products or into the market or fails. There’s really four internal pillars. Teams don’t have success over all things product.

There’s external factors, but the four internal pillars. And going back to the sports analogies, the way I think about it is the first pillar is the front office and the coaches. So that’s the investors and the senior management possessing the appropriate talent, knowledge, expertise, and priorities to grow the business.

The second pillar is the players. So your internal team and the employees who are responsible for executing. Those people have the abilities, knowledge, and information to establish a vision and execute on that strategy and vision. The third pillar is the game plan. That the organization’s strategy and vision is on target.

It’s based on data and insights and the team’s brilliance. The fourth pillar, and you were asking about this Russ, was team chemistry that the organization’s culture promotes a successful partnership and collaboration among the team members, the leadership, and employees. That’s what I’ve seen over the decades.

Those are the four pillars. Why I’m so passionate about talking more and having more discussions about Strategic Rallying is one link that can really bring those pillars together and help with that team chemistry. We talked about how Strategic Rallying brings the team together to set the game plan and helps the team collaborate and work well together, helps the team contribute and have ownership.

That ties into the chemistry, but there’s also another important component here when we talk about that front office and the coaches and the players. A big philosophical part of Strategic Rallying is that you have brilliance in house with your team, and that by using this approach of cultivating that team brilliance to establish the game plan, guess what?

Team chemistry can come from that. There’s a lot of discussions about what makes team chemistry, and there’s not one size fits all approach. But I’ve got to tell you, by involving team members, having them collaborate with you, having them feel heard and be part of a partnership, all of those components, whether it’s Strategic Rallying or other methods, leads to an increase in chemistry.