As December comes to a close, I like to revisit my year. From a fiscal year perspective, I review the goals of my mid-year in-flight programs.

1. Are your programs on track, and can you measure their trajectory?
2. What must occur from January through June to accomplish your goals?
3. Then, what strategic business outcomes can you plan for and fulfill to meet goals between July and December?

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Another way I reflect on my year is to assess if my work compelled me to evolve how I interacted with my customers, partners, peers, stakeholders, and management.

1. Did I target and act on my professional development goals to level up my skills and add one new habit to my professional operating model, making my goals a reality?
2. Did I receive or seek out feedback from others about how I can evolve my techniques for interacting with the teams I work with?
3. Did I cultivate any new customers and partners into advisory roles this year?
4. Looking beyond myself, who did I mentor or support with their role or career?

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BEST MOMENTS

“As a professional, it’s essential to constantly assess what’s working and what’s not working so that you can evolve your next opportunity.”

“Challenge yourself to mature a reputable operating model. Then, work it into your daily practice.”

VALUABLE RESOURCES

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ABOUT THE HOST

Heather has had more than 25 years of experience working with 1000s of customers and securing hundreds of millions of product funding. Early in her career, she was successful at rapidly growing start-up organizations, and over the past 15+ years she has a record of aligning diverse teams to deliver value for customers and strategies for organizations. All through having a focus on solving customer needs to achieve business outcomes.

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Email: info@listen-evolve-inspire.com

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This conversation delves into the methodology of conducting Product Insight Sprints, emphasizing the importance of user feedback in product development. I outline the process from planning and preparing for the sprint, engaging users during the sessions, categorizing and prioritizing feedback, for assessing implementation efforts and creating an executive pitch deck. The focus is on fostering genuine relationships with users and stakeholders to drive informed business decisions and enhance product usability.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The goal of design sprints is to reduce adoption risks and improve a user's experience by:

• Hearing use case-specific feedback directly from users
• Getting answers to critical business questions to make informed decisions
• Coming up with new ideas with users and subject matter experts
• Aligning teams under a shared vision
• Developing scope estimates with all teams
• Prototyping an idea, developing wireframes or workflows
• Validating it rapidly with users
• Finally, having a formulated a data-driven, user-validated pitch for your management and stakeholders

BEST MOMENTS

“I consistently check in with users and stakeholders to stay current with what users need and keep my relationships genuine and accessible should I need to make various business decisions.”

“This product insight sprint is a series of sessions in which users of products and employees from various teams share and discuss usability feedback and run ideation sessions that conclude with a nicely formed pile of stack-ranked decisions for a specific product.”

‘In a nutshell, a product insight sprint is a series of time-bound processes that use design thinking activities to help design or redesign a product, service, or feature.’

VALUABLE RESOURCES

My free guide

Check out my programs and workshops

ABOUT THE HOST

Heather has had more than 25 years of experience working with 1000s of customers and securing hundreds of millions of product funding. Early in her career, she was successful at rapidly growing start-up organizations, and over the past 15+ years she has a record of aligning diverse teams to deliver value for customers and strategies for organizations. All through having a focus on solving customer needs to achieve business outcomes.

CONNECT & CONTACT

Visit my community on Mighty Networks

Find me on LinkedIn

Email: info@listen-evolve-inspire.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Landing programs and messaging are super important, so you want to translate them in a way that will engage folks. Engagement is number one. With it, you will be able to move very quickly. Key to your accomplishments is driving alignment and engagement with your stakeholders, who will be the most important people in implementing those programs.

When crafting executive messaging, assume you only have five minutes with a senior audience. You must land all the important stuff on that first slide. The first slide needs to make the goal clear. Because senior audiences will be able to look at an excellent summary in two seconds, grock, what they want to know to address your ask for support. You could have 1000 appendix slides, but you need to land the important stuff upfront

They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. - Maya Angelou. To be a courageous leader, you must lead with the desire to build trust and accept vulnerability. How you show up constructs a foundation of how you make someone feel and that progress can initiate positive or even motivational actions.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Building next-level partnerships comes from knowing your colleagues; it will add another dimension to your professional relations.
• When you develop long-term relationships, colleagues will not hesitate to call you after a meeting because they want to clarify a topic they weren't aware of during a program update, were caught off guard by a specific detail, or sensed frustration due to noticeable body language. Perhaps they could see that everyone wasn't on the same page and reached out to discuss it.
• If you want to embrace this fail-fast culture, you must be willing to speak up, be vulnerable, and, ideally, have an open culture around you that supports it.

BEST MOMENTS

“You work with two categories of folks. There are the listeners, colleagues who are going to listen and then respond, or there are people who are just waiting to talk and are not actually listening. My challenge to the listeners here today is to think about: Are you a listener? Are you someone who's waiting to talk?”

“Have a solid plan to ground all the stakeholders. If there isn't enough information, they might not be on board. It's important to know early on whether or not everyone involved agrees with how to measure the outcomes and agrees that we've achieved our goal. You need to have people in the room nodding their heads and engaging in the conversation.”

VALUABLE RESOURCES

My free guide

Check out my programs and workshops

ABOUT THE HOST

Heather has had more than 25 years of experience working with 1000s of customers and securing hundreds of millions of product funding. Early in her career, she was successful at rapidly growing start-up organizations, and over the past 15+ years she has a record of aligning diverse teams to deliver value for customers and strategies for organizations. All through having a focus on solving customer needs to achieve business outcomes.

CONNECT & CONTACT

Visit my community on Mighty Networks

Find me on LinkedIn

Email: info@listen-evolve-inspire.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.