Open Questions

At Parabol it was always important that we built something that we would use ourselves. However, we needed to gain conviction among a few adjacent product areas, namely, culture and team building, surveys, professional development (hiring, leveling, performance), post-mortems and incident response, and prioritization activities (RICE, MoSCoW, Kano, ranking, voting, etc.).

• Where might there be open space in the market that is being underserved?
• What do the competitors look like?
• How might we test what problems teams are looking to solve?

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Mapping adjacent market opportunities

As a squad we explored adjacent markets and identified competitors. We were keen to look for whitespace in the market and see what aligned with products we were most excited about and would use internally. This is always a good razor for us. Is there whitespace? Can we be competitive? Would we build it for ourselves?

Building a fully featured Activity Library

When we set out to build the Activity Library, we were solving for two problems. First, folks weren’t naturally exploring the templates that were available. And more importantly, we wanted to fake it until we made it with templates that repurposed our meeting types to look like other meetings. We wanted to be able to see what folks would reach for. Then we would improve those experiences.

Creating landing pages for market entry points

We created a dozen landing pages to test which market entry points would drive the most traffic. We created blog posts, resources, and landing pages for specific meeting templates.

Prioritization wins the day

We had a suspicion that we would see the most interest in prioritization, and we tried to avoid our bias there. We have since prototyped several activities to validate our assumptions around the UX without investing full development cycles on the Product team. Read more about how we prototyped stand-alone activities on our quest to build a fully modular workflow system or “Bring Your Own Workflow.”