Okay, let's begin this week's Designing in the Open with a question:
When was the last time you consumed a video or audio insight straight from your user or customer? Verbatim, unadulterated truth? If your role is miles away from the action, chances are you're missing out.
Enabling a Culture of Knowledge Sharing at Glowstick
So, here's the deal: At Glowstick, only a select few of us had been in meetings with customers and users, leaving the rest of us feeling a bit out of the loop. The goal was clear, how could we enable a knowledge-sharing culture that empowered our colleagues to be user and customer-informed?
What we did:
Co-opting the popular Instagram Stories, we jazzed up our internal comms with Grain an AI-powered meeting recording and insight-capturing tool. We cut snippets of pertinent information from recorded conversations and stitched them up like short bite-sized stories.
Why It Matters and What We've Learned:
- With our tight-knit crew, our momentum was directly proportional to the new knowledge we were unlocking. The faster we all got up to speed, the more angles we could tackle, leading to informed decision-making.
- While quantitative, hard data was great, it was the qualitative user and customer nuggets that brought nuance to the stories we were telling ourselves. The why’s and how’s added necessary detail.
- By slicing each story down to under 4 minutes, we lowered the barrier to engaging with customer context and our team was able to consume almost all conversations being had in time for our weekly Exploration and Planning meetings.
- This repository of stories and recorded conversations also became our in-house research hub. Grains’ search capabilities helped look up keywords or hashtags; like #UXR #Wisdom #Painpoints This helped us in 2 ways: • to validate if there was a positive or negative learning for a specific concept, feature, or idea. • to help us decide if doing fresh new research was necessary because oftentimes the answer was almost always in this gold mine.
At our size, this helped everyone in the org be very clear about who our buyers, decision-makers and users are. This gave us the confidence we needed to be industry experts and know fully well who we were building for and messaging to. The insight nuggets helped us frame stories and paint archetypes in colour.
At Glowstick, our mindset has always been to do and learn more using the path of least resistance; but if you've got some cool tricks or processes up your sleeve for something similar, we'd love to hear about it. If you’d like to do this at your company, deets below!
6 steps to being Customer Informed
- ☎️ Depending on the size of your company, identify the main sources of recorded conversations.
- 📝 Handpick eagle-eyed folks within each department (Sales, Design, Customer Success) to identify the juiciest bits of a call. Prompt: Why would the entire org find it interesting? Establish criteria.
- 🤓 Keep it casual – let everyone pitch in to label, preferably those who weren’t on the call.
- 🛠️ Go for tools that play nice and keep it simple, there’s Grain, Blossom
- 🔖 Keep it short, sweet, and to the point - use the inbuilt chapters feature so folks can jump to sections that are most useful to them.
- 🍕Share the nuggets in a spot where everyone hangs out, so nobody's left out of the loop.
It's all about keeping things inclusive, making sure everyone's got a piece of the user and customer pie. Good luck! 🙌🏽
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