Presenter: Jonathan Kim Learn how to align your team around shipping with these simple process changes. These three meetings will give your team meaningful deadlines, collaborative planning and frequent feedback loops. Jonathan Kim is a co-founder of Appcues, a Boston-based company dedicated to helping people create amazing user experiences. Prior to Appcues, Jonathan built product at HubSpot and Performable.

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Three Meetings That Changed
Everything
The long and bumpy road to team alignment

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● The right things got built
● Bug resolution was instant
● High customer growth
● High customer empathy
Summer ‘16
Killing it

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It was miserable

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● “Urgent” beat “important”
● Everything was an epic
● Over-optimized results
● Shipping speed slowed
● Deadlines came and went
Summer ‘16
But...

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What’s the consequence of
shipping this a week late?

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We weren’t learning
quickly enough

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Learning Fast
Traits of my ideal process:
1. Deep, rapid learning
2. Tiny, predictable chunks
3. High alignment, low effortSeeking the ideal process

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Three meetings

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Testing Day
Last Thursday of each month
We gather as many customers
and prospects as we can and do a
full day of user testing.
● Often 2-3 concurrent tests
● Engineers and designers
hunkered together all day
● End of the day recap
● Notes disseminated to the
whole team afterward

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Sprint Planning
We operate on 1-week sprints.
● Plan our path to Testing Day
● Assign problem owners
● Break everything down into
one-week chunks
Monday morning

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Share what you accomplished
that week.
● Everyone (not just eng)
● Chance for internal feedback
● Shared sense of progress
● Results > showmanship
Show & Tell
Friday after lunch

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4,218%
increase in productivity

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(every PM’s dream slide)

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Defining clear, weekly objectives
gives everyone better
predictability and compounds
enthusiasm for shipping.
Tiny tasks
Think in weeks

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Faced with a sense of urgency,
the team organizes around what
needs to get done.
Process
Natural evolutions

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We minimize over-optimization
by agreeing on the outcome and
goal of learning quickly.
More tradeoffs
It has to get done

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Conditions for success

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1. 100% buy-in

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2. Radical autonomy

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3. Lots of patience

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A 4th Meeting
Things you can add:
● Retrospectives
● QA testing
● Customer researchMaking it robust

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copy, paste, iterate
Consider this a scaffold to build upon