Going from Good to Great — Talk by Louisa Laughton-Scott, Product Designer at Treatwell, at UX for Change London

“I gave this talk just before COVID-19 resulted in lock-down. I considered waiting to publish this because it didn’t feel like the right time when people are struggling so much. But more than ever, this time has shown me the importance of culture. AirBnB has recently made some extremely tough decisions about their workforce, but their transparency and living out their values has been widely respected. Treatwell truly lived out their culture by focusing all their efforts on being the international advocate for the beauty industry, which has been badly affected at this time. Despite some extremely tough decisions within Treatwell, they’ve received company wide appreciation for their approach.”

Why is culture important?

Product performance and customer experience is driven by product insights, design and delivery. And it’s the culture that unifies all those contributors and is at the heart of all the processes. So if you want an exceptional product? It’s worth focusing effort on creating an exceptional product culture.

A great product design culture combines collaboration, shared goals, creative freedom and an idea meritocracy. This creates the optimal conditions for a team to thrive; workflows become more efficient, decisions are based on correct research and data rather than untested opinions, feedback is free flowing and ultimately this leads to a product performing inline with KPI’s.

There are also indicators when a product design culture is not productive. Feeling like projects are railroaded could be one of them. Maybe expanding the team hasn’t resulted in a significant increase in performance? There can be a number of indicators, and every product team will face their own unique challenges.

Between 2012 and 2016 Treatwell experienced huge growth as a result of organic growth and acquisitions. With this came the scaling challenges of culturally integrating teams, but not in a HQ dominant way. There were many highs and lows of creating the newly united Treatwell culture. While it wasn’t always straightforward, there were some definite steps that any company could take to optimise product design, and move a culture from good to great.

10 Steps to Change Product Design Culture

1. Do your research

Review other product teams and companies to work out what your aspirations are. What you like, and don’t like, about others approaches? This will help your team go about defining culture and be inspired to take steps that are most appropriate to your team / company’s unique situation. We chose to look at other brands we found inspiring such as AirBnB, Google and Spotify.

2. Define the Vision

All the companies we researched had a clear vision and mission statement at the core of their businesses, which drove the culture throughout each team. For Tech at Treatwell, this meant seeing the bigger picture and understanding that spending time now to improve our process and principles will lead ultimately to the goal of value for customers and happiness at work.

3. Inspire others

In order to live out a mission, everyone has to be inspired by it and buy into it. There are a wealth of different ways to do this, but one way that worked well for Treatwell was to build teams around motivated individuals who can inspire the mission and value in others (an effective Agile Principle).

4. Critique Current Practises

Take and apply the same lessons you learn in retros — collaboratively what do you like, dislike and want to improve. Look at the product design process with a 360 review. What are the problems you’re currently experiencing? What are the future challenges? How can you be better than the rest? Everyone should have the opportunity to be involved and feedback.

5. Education

Everyone, throughout the team and organisation, should understand why the culture needs to change and what the benefits of are. It’s not easy to change how teams operate, the mindset of decision making and goals of each person. It takes time to learn how to be better and is different for every organisation.

6. Empowerment

It is the team and the people who will be the driving force behind cultural change, so it’s important to empower everyone to do it. Stakeholders need to rally the team, and give everyone the opportunity to use their initiatives. At Treatwell this meant empowering everyone to continually improve the process and move towards the ultimate goal of customer value, product performance and happiness at work.

7. Get an identity

Make your culture change feel real by giving it an identity. You need to work on creating a concept that is sufficiently inspirational as well as tangible. For Tech at Treatwell, this was the Blue Star Manifesto — Blue Star encompasses both a vision of where we want to be as a team, and the changes we need to make to get there.

8. Align goals

What are you looking to achieve? Where do you want to get too? Treatwell implemented Tech OKR’s that were supportive and not derived from company OKRs. Freedom and lack of organisational impediments meant we could do that, but also because the mission of going from good to great translated throughout the organisation.

9. Define Values

Values inform our thoughts, words and actions and give teams a common understanding of how they want to work together. Values are actionable. Values are a way that team members, new and old, can understand what is important to a team and reduces the need for top down decision making. Well over 50% of tech was involved in creating our values, values that are uniquely us.

10. Live Them Out

Needless to say, this will be different for everyone and is also the hardest part. In our Product Design team at Treatwell we are empowered to make decisions and aligned on our goals in making those decisions, so we have the power and freedom to create change. Every designer owns part of the process, and is responsible for bringing the team along with them. We are all Blue Star.