Part 4/7: Meet the Founder - Thriving at a start-up like FreeWill
How do you navigate the challenges of reactive product development? How can user experience research drive better design decisions?
From breaking barriers to building impact, women in tech are shaping the future. Follow Sheba Najmi's journey in this special interview series with Asad Awan (CEO Potrero Labs, ex-Facebook) as they discuss the power of women in civic tech and the change they are creating.
📺 Stay tuned for more!
#WomenInTech#CivicTech#WomenEmpowerment#Leadership#IWD#InternationalWomensDay
You went from very large companies to a startup and you build a design function over there. That's something that, of course, as I'm building my startup is very interesting for me. So I'll start over there. So from LinkedIn, I went from this big company to a small scrappy startup named Freewill. And what Freewill does is it raises non cash donations for nonprofits. So donations of people can in their wills, they can request some amount to a charity or they can leave donations of stocks. Or retirement funds or, you know, cryptocurrency or these sorts of things. Free will had one designer who had been there for three years who did both user experience design and marketing design, basically everything that was needed. So the first thing I did was I talked with a number of people at the organization to understand where we were at, where we wanted to be, and then proposed how to get there. And one of the things that I heard over and over was that product development felt reactive. It didn't feel like we were marching. Words are not star. It felt like we were doing a bunch of experiments to see what sticks. The will product had achieved product market fit, but the other the rest of the offerings were still pre product market fit. So together with the head of product and the head of engineering and the three of us reported to the CEO directly, I proposed and we created a discovery function. From talking with a lot of folks, it became clear that in order to get a Northstar product road map, we really needed to do a lot of discovery research and identify what. The opportunities were what the needs were and so on. And so I hired a couple of user experience researchers that were on the generative side. So not doing evaluative research, but really do sky generative research and going into spaces like what is the future of philanthropy? Like those sorts of big meaty questions and testing any hypothesis that we had. We also did a number of other things like we oriented our pods and our teams around audience experiences and we created a one to one. One Triad pairing of designer, engineering lead and product manager and made them as a unit both owners and accountable for everything. Changed a lot of processes as well, introduced a lot of very, very open and collaborative processes. So that because another thing that I heard was that product development felt like it was happening in silos.
