Stephanie Weeks

maintaining team focus on customers

While vision and long-term strategy are critical to any organization and employees at all levels, delivery teams must also have the tools they need to stay grounded and focused on their current work. Adopting mechanisms that make this organically a part of the team’s work is effective. For example, at Blackboard, my team led a program that brought real-time customer engagement on the work being actively built; at Amazon Business we host an annual event to help teams see how all of the work currently being built will come together for that planning cycle, allowing them to remain focused on those deliverables. In both cases employees reported that the programs made it easier to do their job.

REMOTE IS NOT JUST LOCATION; IT’S A METHOD

I’ve run teams in multiple states, teams in multiple countries, and teams in fully remote environments. Just shifting from a room to a screen will not succeed in terms of employee engagement or ultimately business growth. I found success relying on 3 critical mechanisms:

1. Continuous education: share customer learnings with all employees. The good and the bad.

2. Frequent connection in large and small groups: using something as simple as a weekly 15 minute connection to share things of interest, like the latest technical design or a recent customer finding, creates interest and commonality without formality.

3. Real 1-1s: leaders don’t know who they are supporting unless you spend real, quality, non-output focused time with employees. It’s amazing the impact it makes just to ask someone how they are doing and how you can support them. Don’t fear the scale or time commitment—just do it.

HOLISTIC VIEW FOR EVERY EMPLOYEE

An organization has the potential to succeed to the degree that employees understand what success looks like. Functional teams have their own focus to contribute to success, but if employees do not understand how it all fits together, the vision will be blurred, and this becomes even more critical as a company grows. At Amazon Business:

• All 40 designers working across 15 development teams came together for design review weekly to help one another and to maintain a holistic view of their product goals for end users.

• I produced a quarterly report of the user behavior and programs being run across all development divisions, to review with the organization leaders—it was their own view into the entire customer experience and led to priority changes as they began to understand more insights.

• My team hosted and presented an annual showcase of concepts that provided context for what customers would experience by the end of the year.

These led to both more productive employees as well as increased employee satisfaction.

SCALING KNOWLEDGE: ADJUSTING TO A NEW type of CUSTOMER

Amazon was always built for consumers. Amazon Business required a whole new way of thinking about who was going to use Amazon’s marketplace: business suppliers and business buyers. In additional to building a world-class design team, to be successful we need everyone in Amazon Business as well as every Amazon.com division to understand this new type of customer: same humans, but with entirely different motivations and behaviors.

My team researched, synthesized and built out a living framework for employees to learn about our targeted users in the context of business procurement. The framework was used first for education, and then scaled to be leveraged for all product initiatives driving funding, priorities, and dependencies on other amazon divisions.

accessibility as a win, not just a passion

A prestigious Blackboard customer spoke with me about her view on what we should do regarding accessibility in education technology. As I built trust with her and dove in deeper she asked a question that hit me hard: “Why did it take me 11 people at your company to find someone who understood?” While I turned the software around with the fastest plan execution plan possible, I also built a plan for continuous education into all divisions of the company. One year of driving change systematically, resulted in Blackboard receiving an award for “ground-breaking advancements in accessibility” alongside Kursweil and Apple. It took more than product requirements— it took broad scope organizational change:

• Guests with disabilities came to show employees what it was like to use the software with assistive devices.

• I built corporate level partnerships with groups like the National Federation of the Blind.

• I built a program internally for how to drive accessibility as foundational in design, development and testing.

• I taught our sales and marketing teams how to communicate about these activities to decision makers.

• I worked with third parties to invent a report card for all ed-tech companies that allowed them to rate their software as they made progress in accessibility.

• I spoke to external industry groups about what we were doing and how they could do it too.

• I enabled specific employees with drive to become not just champions, but experts.

SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE OF K-12

Blackboard was built as a solution for Higher Education, and for years it failed to make significant penetration in the K-12 market. My mission was to create an execute a winning go-to-market product strategy in partnership with the sales and marketing teams. A primary focus I instituted was to re-position our product offerings in terms of values that resonated to that market. Learning to “speak K-12” required knowing and understanding those customers intimately, and infusing enthusiasm about the vision and action the organization can take.

In just 11 months our division recorded the first successful quarter ever for the K-12 sales team. The President of the division said I was the “poster child for change” because of how I delivered results including the mindset change in the organization. 

DELIGHTING CUSTOMERS DURING A MIGRATION

Blackboard merged with a competitive company, resulting in the need to “bring the products together” for the combined customer base. The company had no design team at that point. I was asked to drive the product and design strategy (and create a team that could execute it) that would deliver a product experience that customers from both companies would love. Testing with users proved the results worked.

Years later I continued to drive change throughout the product portfolio, establishing a design system to scale across newly acquired products.

from US-centric to international mindset

As a U.S-based company, Blackboard’s deepest customer and user insights were based on U.S. education environments. To expand internationally, I guided the customer engagement and product roadmap based on understanding regional nuances in teaching and learning, starting with Australia. By engaging locally with customers, I built trust with them that allowed me to drive the right priorities that made a product work extremely well for them. I also built in mechanisms that allowed U.S.-based development and marketing teams to better understand those customers, so that we could drive further innovations on their behalf. Every new customer type deserves a focus on shifting the mindset of those who build for them.