Organisational impact

Makers Day was a quarterly fun team activity me and the group product manager organised for the teams. They get to spent 1 day together on a topic of their choice as long as they can scope it down to 1 day of work. The purpose was partially to improve the collaboration in the team as well as exercise their rapid prototyping muscle.

A very simple example of one of these is the swatch colour selector you see above. It’s a nice improvement that was done in a Makers Day and visually makes the PDP nicer to look at.

At first the teams found it difficult to scope a topic down to 1 day and sometimes needed more time to implement it in production. But after a few Makers Days they got better and liked it a lot. It became a thing they looked forward to each quarter.

For the product and users it was amazing as they implemented many small UX improvements that otherwise would be very difficult to push through in the teams. Often these improvements were unsubstantiated and so it’s hard to make time for it.

I identified a process problem that happened to several people in the product department and felt it was a very interesting problem to solve.

I will explain each of the problems I encountered while running retrospectives or talking to people. One is that the product designers wanted to work on different topics than only conversion related ones. They would also like to focus on things that aren’t easy to measure like: long-term retention through consistent design. Delightfulness. Or specific engagement features that improve retention but only over a long period of time

Product management wanted a bigger backlog of ideas they really wanted to implement and wanted new ideas that we usually don’t focus on. They also wanted to move a bit more away from very often quantitative proving ideas are worthwhile.

Product managers often are constricted by OKRs and so they can’t always work on ideas they believe in. So getting freedom to work on different ideas that are intrinsically motivated is very appreciated by them.

After noticing the problems I facilitated a session with PMs to learn from them in more detail what it is that was preventing them from working implementation without proving upfront or after that it’s driving a business metric. After learning about their challenges with it I talked with product management and presented the issues.

Afterwards I created a proposal to solve each of those problems and give the teams space to work on bets that are not aligned with OKRs or need quantitative evidence. It’s inspired on Basecamp’s Shape Up and with it I created a lightweight proposal and governance process for it and presented this to product management and they approved. In Q1 2027 this will be trialed out for the first time.