Enrique
Sánchez

Enrique
Sánchez

Enrique
Sánchez

Testing new markets with an Activity Library

2023

Parabol

Parabol started as an agile meeting platform and quickly became a top choice for teams who needed to run Retrospectives, Standups, or Sprint Poker meetings. On 2023 we set out to explore new markets by expanding the type of activities our customers could run in our platform.

As a Product Design Lead, I worked closely with our Product Managers, Developers, Growth Experts and our Founders, to explore, test and validate our assumptions.

Validating assumptions

Based on our own research and customer feedback we already had a pretty good idea of the type of activities and jobs to be done that our customers were missing from both ours and our competitor's platforms. We narrowed it down to the following types:

  • Retrospective

  • Estimation

  • Standups / Check-in

  • Feedback

  • Strategy

Our goal then was to create a familiar and easy-to-use interface that enabled our users to both continue to run the meetings they already ran with Parabol, and introduce a new catalog of activity types and pre-made templates that expanded the kind of meetings they could run on Parabol, and value they were getting from us.


Note: activity illustrations by Frederique Matti

Based on our own research and customer feedback we already had a pretty good idea of the type of activities and jobs to be done that our customers were missing from both ours and our competitor's platforms. We narrowed it down to the following types:

  • Retrospective

  • Estimation

  • Standups / Check-in

  • Feedback

  • Strategy

Our goal then was to create a familiar and easy-to-use interface that enabled our users to both continue to run the meetings they already ran with Parabol, and introduce a new catalog of activity types and pre-made templates that expanded the kind of meetings they could run on Parabol, and value they were getting from us.


Note: activity illustrations by Frederique Matti

Based on our own research and customer feedback we already had a pretty good idea of the type of activities and jobs to be done that our customers were missing from both ours and our competitor's platforms. We narrowed it down to the following types:

  • Retrospective

  • Estimation

  • Standups / Check-in

  • Feedback

  • Strategy

Our goal then was to create a familiar and easy-to-use interface that enabled our users to both continue to run the meetings they already ran with Parabol, and introduce a new catalog of activity types and pre-made templates that expanded the kind of meetings they could run on Parabol, and value they were getting from us.


Note: activity illustrations by Frederique Matti

The Activity Library

In order to test our experiment, we designed a library of activities where users could browse our catalog of activity types, as well as get recommendations of activities based on various criteria.

A mockup of Parabol's new Activity Library, showing tabs for all the offered categories, and activity templates under each section.
A mockup of Parabol's new Activity Library, showing tabs for all the offered categories, and activity templates under each section.
A mockup of Parabol's new Activity Library, showing tabs for all the offered categories, and activity templates under each section.

Creating a flexible system

I designed a new architecture and component system that gave us the flexibility that we needed in order to test different activity types and presentation formats. This included alternative versions for displaying and highlighting activities, as well as an end-to-end flow for searching and bookmarking activities.

This new flexibility also allowed us to explore ways in which we could improve the overall experience, particularly when it came to onboarding new users. From nudging them to try some of our most popular activities, to surfacing tutorials on how best to facilitate activities and coordinate their teams.

Validating our experiment

In order to validate our experiment, we tracked several metrics that would show us how it was performing. Our data not only showed us that users were running more types of activities as well as trying more templates beyond the regular agile meetings, but we also learned about what kind of activities where being run more often.

With these fresh insights we where now in a confident position to plan next steps and double down on our assumptions.

✌️

Enrique
Sánchez

Enrique
Sánchez

Enrique
Sánchez