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THINGS WE LEARNED Product Management It takes a strong personablity to organise a company-wide project like our packaging redesign. Our Product Manager Becky did a great job getting keeping everyone on track, while maintaining internal deadlines, external suppliers and unexpected disasters. She’s got some useful tips about teamwork and discpline below. Have a read and let us know what you think. We’re talking about packaging on @bareconductive with the hastag #barebranding.
1 BRING THE TEAM IN NOW With multiple stakeholders, interdependant deadlines and lots of pressure, a company-wide project is a challenge. Sticking your head in the sand doesn’t solve it. Bring your team in as early as possible and keep them up to date. Give people a chance to tell you that their expertise isn’t needed at this stage, not the other way around. At a minimum, bring in team members at least one step before the project gets handed over to them. They know what they need so give them a chance to explain that to their colleagues before its crunch time.
2 DISCUSS, DON’T DISPUTE Conflict is inevitable. That doesn’t mean its bad. But without communication, conflict within an office is destructive. Communication is important, especially when it relates to the timelines imposed by external partners. You’re not in control of when something arrives from a supplier and it can have a big impact on your internal workload. With open, consistent communication across the team, you’ll be able to weather unexpected disruptions and keep everyone excited about reaching the goal. Vision:
3 DON’T BREAK DEADLINES
Product idea Set goals to measure product performance Market research Customer research Define price point & project budget Create timeline tasks Problem Opportunity research Evangelise team Brief
Think that relaxing deadlines will make your team’s life easier? Nope! Moving deadlines back creates more stress. Meeting deadlines can be hard, but they are always accompanied by the satisfaction of having something behind you. Don’t deny everyone the pleasure of wrapping up a stage of the project by relaxing it a few days. Work hard to set reasonable time scales and discuss timings across the team. Good discpline in deadline setting will lead to better outcomes and happier people.
Product Discovery: Personas & User stories Identify key users Idea generation Concept development & prototyping User testing (value) Define and present use-case & product specification Detailed Design & Pre-Production: (Design FMEA) Prototyping (concepts) Technical design Becky February holiday 15 Feb - 1 Mar User experience & industrial design Source new suppliers manufacturers Communication & packaging design Component sourcing & BOM Usability testing Artworking Present & sign-off design Production: Becky April holiday 9-17 April Easter bank holiday 14-17 April Onboard suppliers & manufacturers Production prototypes Packaging proofs Tooling First production runs Becky maternity leave Assembly Distribution-ready Send key users EPSK Kits to thank Deployment: Sales requirements Original launch date Operations requirements Marketing requirements Pitch to target retailers Go to market plan Product photography, video assets Asset roll-out Physical product launch Evaluation: Analyse performance data & user feedback Measure product performance and propose ongoing actions.
4 MAKE SUBJECTIVE OBJECTIVE Finding consensus is difficult when you’re creating something new. With little to refer to, discussions can become very subjective, making them emotional and tiresome. Try to make the subjective objective by agreeing on some basic waypoints to navigate around. We had a hard time beginning the communciation design aspect of our packaging until we developed a system that graded and sorted existing product communication into five different types. We applied the system to our own products and made something everyone loves.
5 INTUIT THEN TEST The intutive answer is often the right one, but not always. We wanted to control costs on our packaging and thought that using a single colour print (black on white), would be the best way to do that. When we talked to our printer we found out that single colour printing can be more expensive at our production volumes. Not using the other three colours would mean cleaning down the whole machine just for our production run, increasing the cost dramatically. This extra information from our supplier will increase our speedand reduce our workload next time.
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Get in touch! We want to hear what you think We’re on @bareconductive talking about our new packaging with the hashtag #barebranding.
We’re keen to share what we’ve learned in the last year. Check out our NEWS page for more tips and in depth articles about the strategy, design process and details of our new packaging.
