Open Questions

At Parabol we built tools that we wanted to use for ourselves. However, we needed to gain conviction among adjacent product areas where we wanted to find product-market fit: culture, team building, surveys, professional development (hiring, leveling, performance), post-mortems & incident response, and prioritization activities (RICE, MoSCoW, Kano, etc.).

• Where might there be open space in the market? What problems are being underserved?
• What do competitors look like?
• How might we test which problems teams are most eager 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 a good razor for us. Is there whitespace? Can we be competitive? Would we build it for ourselves?

Building a fully featured Activity Library

We built an Activity Library solving for two problems. First, folks weren’t naturally discovering the templates that were available. More importantly, we wanted to use templating to present new meeting types using existing workflows. We wanted to see what folks would reach for. Then we would improve those experiences with more specific workflows.

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. 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.”