In this episode of Product Thinking, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about compliance, dealing with physical and digital goods simultaneously, and what good UX looks like in really complicated processes.
Show Notes
In this episode of Product Thinking, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about compliance, dealing with physical and digital goods simultaneously, and what good UX looks like in really complicated problems.
Q: I started working in product compliance at a company that offers an alternative credit product. It's been challenging for me because product teams do not see the value in my role and do not want to engage in the build-out or with issues that come up as it takes away from them shipping new features. We're a heavily regulated space, but they don't seem to care. And it's making me want to search for a new job. My previous company valued product compliance and saw me as an asset to the team, not a hindrance. How can I help the product managers see the value of my role help?
Q: I worked for a retailer that has offline and online shops, and we're trying to move towards being more product-driven. I've read a lot and listened to your answers about organizing product teams to be focused on specific value, streams and jobs to be done, and to keep them as autonomous as possible. But how should this work for companies that are not entirely digital? Our product team needs to work very closely with teams like retail, marketing, and creative when it comes to new features. So, we struggle with setting up teams that can ideate and execute entirely on their own.
Q: I think it’s the trend that many people equate good UX to simplicity. Cause simple whizzer like workflow might be okay for a phone app or web page in the B to C world, but I work on a product that is helping users to tackle complex 3D engineering tasks, construction of huge infrastructures, simulations of physical phenomenon, building of airplanes etc. These tasks can't be simple by definition and require a lot of flexibility and functionality.
In my experience, blind simplification of the workflow often leads to a UX quality decrease. It's a challenge to get UX designers onboard with this very niche user workflow. What is the best way to approach this challenge, and what UX principles would work best in a complex product environment?
Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com How to Succeed as a Senior Product Leader with Georgie Smallwood
Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome to an episode of Dear Melissa, from the Product Thinking Podcast. The lines are now open, and we're ready to answer your most pressing product questions. Which prioritization framework would you recommend and why? Hi, Melissa. Do you have any suggestions on developing a product strategy?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a lot of questions. All right. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to another episode of Dear Melissa. Today, we've got three really good questions about complex product problems. So stuff about compliance and how do we deal with physical goods and digital goods happening simultaneously?
And what does good UX look like in really complicated or complex problems? So three great questions to dive in. Let's get started. Dear Melissa, I started working in product compliance at a company that offers an alternative credit product.
It's been challenging for me because product teams do not see the value in my role and do not want to engage in the build-out or with issues that come up as it takes away from them shipping new features. We're a heavily regulated space, but they don't seem to care, and it's making me want to search for a new job. My previous company valued product compliance and saw me as an asset to the team, not a hindrance.
How can I help the product manager see the value of my role? Help. Ooh, compliance. Yeah, product people see compliance as their arch nemesis. Compliance sometimes can make you go slower. They tell you what you can and can't do. I hear about this friction all the time, but it really doesn't need to be that way.
Heavily regulated industries will always be different than the ones that aren't. Not everybody can build a dating app, but there's some kind of excitement to that. And actually in our first episode, Georgie Smallwood, or our second episode really, Georgie Smallwood talked about this. She talked about how she loved being in banking and heavily regulated industries because it makes you more creative.
And I think that's how product managers need to look at compliance. Too often, product people see compliance as a stop sign instead of a constraint. And constraints are good. They make us think outside of the box. I once worked with a meal kit delivery company, and we had a certain language that we had to do all over the checkout explaining like, hey, all our packaging has plastic and plastic might cause cancer.
And they put that on all the checkout flows for California residents. And I remember reading this block of text that Legal handed me, and I was like, there's no way we can put this on the checkout flow. Like it doesn't fit, first of all, and second of all, it's going to scare people away. So at first I was pushing back.
I was like, I really, really don't want to do this. And when we realized that we had to do it, we had to figure out how to get creative. So we started working with the Legal team. We ran a bunch of experiments. We made sure it looked good. And we actually got really creative with the way that we did the checkout, which made a huge difference.
It was an interesting design challenge. Like it really forced us to think outside the box and figure out how we were going to make it work because it had to be a requirement.
And sometimes we have to have requirements, right? Over the past few years, I'd say greater than like 50% of my work has been healthcare or banks. And man, do they have compliance in those areas? Super heavily regulated. And when I've gone in to teach product management, a lot of times I get pushback from teams that are like, well, we can't experiment.
We're highly regulated or we can't do this. We have compliance. We have these issues. They're all stopping us. And we need to like embrace compliance the same way that we embrace other cross-functional teams, right? You can experiment when it comes to compliance. You have to get creative about how the solution manifests.
So I always tell people, especially people in banking that I used to work with, a lot of them have been in the industry forever. I know they're new to product management. I'd say instead of looking at this as, I have to do this exactly as compliance prescribes, try to understand it as what is the requirement and what do I need to do, and try to figure out, dig deep with compliance into what that actually is, and then see if you can get creative in a solution of how you actually do that.
So maybe where it shows up on the UX, you know, figure out what your constraints are obviously legally, but really dig and try to figure out, is this a requirement or is this a preference coming from somebody who's actually trying to solve the problem? Like what is the actual problem that we're doing? So you working in compliance, right?
You are the compliance person right now. The way that you can get the product managers on your side though, is to be like the cool compliance person, right? Like Mean Girls where it's, I'm the cool mom, I'm the cool compliance person. We're going to work together. We're going to design some experiments.
I'm going to break down for you exactly what's needed to check a box from a legal perspective and to protect our customers. But we're going to work together because I don't want to be the stop sign, right? I want to just be the person that's part of your cross-functional team. The person who can help you design experiment, present ideas, and make sure it works for the company.
Having a compliance person like that is amazing.
And it's pretty rare that you find people who are willing to do that. So if you can try to present it that way, right? Say let's get on board together, being like, I'm not a hindrance to the company, like that's gold. Every product manager will want to work with you if you can really play up that angle.
And if they don't, maybe it's time to go find a little bit of a smarter product team. But I would try working it in that way. I would try really figuring out how to tell them like, I am part of your cross-functional team and this is my job, but I know that there's different creative ways we can actually do this.
And I'm willing to help. I'm willing to jump in with you and actually design these things and figure out what we can do and how we can get creative. So hopefully that'll help and help you bridge together a little bit more. All right. Next question. Dear Melissa, I work for a retailer that has offline and online shops, and we're trying to move towards being more product driven.
I write a lot and listen to your answers about organizing product teams to be focused on specific value streams and jobs to be done and to keep them as autonomous as possible.
But how should this work for companies that are not entirely digital? Our product team needs to work very closely with teams like retail, marketing, and creative when it comes to new features. So we struggle with setting up teams that can ideate and execute entirely on their own. This is a fantastic question, and we'll get to it right after this message. All right. We are back and we are talking about retail companies and how we can organize teams around value streams and jobs to be done when we have to work with people like retail and marketing and creative.
So when I talk about companies like this, if you're an online retailer, online, offline retailer, you are what we call tech enabled instead of pure tech. So pure tech is you're like Salesforce, like I sell you software and you use it and that's the end of the story. But tech enabled are things like e-commerce companies, banks are tech enabled.
Your actual product is a physical good you sell, but the technology helps you deliver those goods in a way that beats the competition and can really set you apart. So that's something to remember. There's a huge piece of value there. The big thing here is to think in those value streams and enhancing value.
For example, I worked with a bank in Canada that had retail locations and a whole front of the house staff. So you would actually go into the banking centers. Now we had teams that were responsible for enabling that front of house staff to serve their customers better by providing them with software.
So the users were really the front of the house staff when it came to these teams. So maybe for you think about who are you building the product for?
Can you use your technology to help the retail team get better and provide more value, right? Who's the actual user of this? Are you the online part where you're interacting with the customers actually buying something? Or are you enabling the retail stores to actually do their jobs better? Try to get that clear and try to organize around those different personas.
And then two, you need to think about things like marketing, retail, and creative, like cross-functional teams. So if you have to work really closely with retail, the question is, are those your users? So you need to be actually interacting with them to do user research, to learn more about the customers and help incorporate that into technology.
Or are they actually building things with you, right? Like I try to treat them more like a user if you're building software for them. Whereas marketing and creative actually have to deliver things. So when you think about marketing and creative, this is where we get into cross-functional teams again.
So when we structure any kind of cross-functional team in a company, we want to make sure that we don't have too many dependencies.
And that goes for the marketing teams and the creative teams too. So if they are bottlenecks, you need to figure out how to bring them into the fold where they are actually needed. And they should be aligning their functions back to your value streams as well. Because marketing organizes itself very differently, but you need to make sure that you have like a point person or a lead person that goes with your value stream in each one of those things so that there's not that many bottlenecks and everybody can be working towards the same end goal.
So I would really look at that. I'd look at your organization and say, all right, who's my user for these different products? Is it internal user and external user and treated accordingly? And then I would also think about bringing into the fold creative, marketing, all those different people needed to actually execute into those cross-functional teams.
Now that doesn't mean, you know, they have to spend all day on a scrum team. It's just that they're aligned to you. You know who to go to. They have capacity to help you, right? Like it's not a bottleneck.
That's the biggest thing that we actually have to look for when designing these teams. All right. And here's our last question. Dear Melissa, I see the trend that many people equate good UX to simplicity. A simple wizard-like workflow might be okay for a phone app or web page in the B2C world, but I work on a product that is helping users to tackle complex 3D engineering tasks, construction of huge infrastructures, simulations of physical phenomenons, ooh, that's interesting, building of airplanes, et cetera.
These tasks can't be simple by definition and require a lot of flexibility and functionality. In my experience, blind simplification of the workflow often leads to a UX quality decrease. It's a challenge to get UX designers on board with this very niche user workflow. What is the best way to approach this challenge and what UX principles would work best in a complex product environment?
Ooh, I really like this question because I think UX is so much more than just simplicity. And I don't like that word simple. Simple is like dumbed down. It's not complex.
A lot of the problems that we solve in B2B software are actually complex problems. B2C software too could be complex problems. But, you know, it doesn't need to be a simple solution to solve a complex problem. I think that's actually hard. So what I think you need to remember is that UX is more than simplicity.
It's not just simplicity. It's about meeting the user in their workflow and being intuitive. I'd actually say good UX is not simple. It's intuitive. It needs to be intuitive to your users so that they have this seamless experience using your product. And you want that, you want to make them feel powerful.
Like they have more value than what they were doing before. So I would really focus there. You know, it's about intuitiveness. It's not about simplicity. And actually too much simplicity could be bad. I worked with a company once that really tried to like embrace a simple workflow and flat design when that was all the big thing.
And they did a huge redesign of the whole platform. They spent a year doing it. They launched it. Of course, they didn't test it. And it plummeted, like activity plummeted, conversion plummeted, lots of things went wrong because they actually made it too simple. They took away too many things that the users needed, and they put too many clicks between what the user needed to get to and where they currently were.
So users got angry and they took too much time to actually, you know, get things done. And that didn't work out well. It became less powerful by making it more simple. So I really wouldn't think about UX and complex situations as being simple. Make it intuitive. Being easy to use, though, doesn't mean simple, right?
It just means it follows your user's pattern. You understand how they think, you understand how they act, you understand what their workflows are. So you make it so that they want to use your product.
They're more powerful using your product. And it's really easy to use because they get it, right? It provides them with what they need to do to be able to do their jobs. So those, I think, are the UX principles that we all need to follow, whether you're in a complex product or not, but especially in the B2B world, like that's the key to having a beautiful, easy-to-use user experience.
All right, that's it for the Dear Melissa this week. Remember, you can always submit your questions to me. I answer them every other week at dearmelissa.com. I always love hearing your questions and hearing what's on your mind. I think these complex product questions are really interesting because, no, product management isn't the same at every company, and it doesn't need to be.
And I do think we need to talk more about nuances and where we might need to deviate from different paths. So these are really fun to answer. So thank you so much for submitting them. And if you're enjoying this podcast, we'd really appreciate your feedback and reviews. So people find us because they look at the reviews.
Sometimes we actually get people who are like, oh, you don't have that many reviews. I'm like, I swear we have listeners, I promise. So if you can leave a review on Apple or Spotify, I don't even know if you can leave one on Spotify, but anywhere that you can leave a review on this podcast, man, I would appreciate it. I would appreciate it a lot. So thank you so much, and we will see you next time on the Product Thinking Podcast.
