Redefining show & tell for the Product Research and Design team at the FT.

Role

Volunteered to take ownership of show and tell Over 5 weeks I gathered feedback, ran team workshops to shape a meeting that we could exchange ideas and opinions.

Team

Me - Project lead & recurring facilitator

Outcome

Monthly discussions with product mature conversations that the team enjoy, challenging each other on how we think about digital products.

Figjam board

PROBLEM

There’s not been a strong culture of sharing across design and research post covid. We lacked spaces for serendipitous sharing.

So, how might we encourage knowledge exchange in Show & Tell?

PROCESS

  • Spent time with a few team members across design and research to build a picture of how they felt Show & Tell was working noting ideas along the way.

  • Decided to make the discovery ideation a team wide exercise and run a couple of workshops with the team.

  • With an understanding of expectations and alignment on what we wanted, I ran the first Show & Tell.

  • A few tweaks were needed to improve the sessions

UNDERSTAND

What is Show & Tell?

First, I needed to learn first-hand from the former host about their experiences running show & tell, some of the pain points and successes. We discussed things like:

  • The purpose and value of show & tell had been lost amongst the team, contributing to low attendance and participation despite being a mandatory meeting.

  • Sharing work, especially work in progress, isn’t seen as a priority. People in the team only share once a project has matured enough or has been completed.

  • The same few would volunteer to share what they’ve been working on

  • Uncertainty on what leadership want to achieve in these monthly meetings

Naturally we started bouncing ideas off each other on how to address some of the issues we’d discussed, wondering how the monthly meetings could be more engaging and help us to look outside of the FT as a team.

I checked a few external references to see if there were any similar approached taken by teams outside the FT. What did they achieve? What did Show & Tell look like elsewhere?

Brainstorming

I reached out to fellow designers and researchers to share some initial ideas I had for feedback, input and to get sense of levels of interest.

Quickly I realised that a workshop would be the most efficient way of aligning on pain points, getting feedback and buy-in from the wider team, including leadership.

Secondary goal:

After sharing my plans with the Director of Product Design and Head of Research, I agreed it would be valuable to also consider how this meeting could create a new space for us to spend time together in a wider team that felt less formal than away days or crits.

EXPLORE

Discovery & ideation workshops

Planning the workshops:

I carefully considered what the value behind each activity and the order to put them in to help put the team in the right frame of mind. It was also important that the value of each exercise was clear and why it linked back to the wider goal.

Structure:

  1. Understanding “team time”

  2. Finding core themes of “team time”

  3. Understanding Show & Tell

  4. Reflecting on the current Show & Tell format

  5. Show & Tell lighting retro

  6. Getting into groups and ideating

I think the most successful activity was Activities 3 & 4, as I managed to help the team reflect on what Show & Tell meant to them and why it’s important but in way that avoided excessively criticising the previous format.

Alignment workshop

I consolidated the first workshop, revisiting what was discussed and replayed this back to the team. Next it was important to align on expectations, finally sharing an initial format proposal

We were able to successfully agree on smaller details such as frequency, participation and introducing flexibility in the format to relieve pressure off presenters, moving away from decks so presentations could be more interactive. Everyone had felt the impact of having an interactive activity at the start of a session as it encouraged active listening and higher levels of participation.

TEST

Pilot workshop

The first show & tell was introduced as an iterative team meeting with an additional aim of getting us to discuss external digital products, that would be tweaked over the coming months as I wanted to test ideas with the team.

The first one was made up of the following sections:

  1. Warm up

    An Ice breaker exercise to fills that awkward gap while waiting for others to arrive

  2. Intro

    What product will we be talking about, it’s mission statement, a problem, feature updates, key visuals and feedback from users

  3. Discuss

    Polls to get a quick overview on our experiences with the product if any and link back to strategic decisions. Includes time to select stickies with interesting opinions or observations and asking them to expand.

  4. Vote

    Give and ask for options of what we should review next time to help build sense of shared ownership

  5. Show & tell

    Standardised format of linking projects back to related OKR’s, relevant documents and design files and team

    Embed a storytelling tactic, a 3 act structure: context/problem, struggle/transformation and next steps/reflection

Creating a “safe space”:

Show & Tell isn’t a meeting where the host is looking to receive feedback, with lots of team members making exact point during the discovery workshop. Rules were established in the alignment workshop but I wanted to make it more prominent in future Show & Tell sessions as I wondered if this put people off from volunteering to present work.

I added “How to participate” as gentle reminders before relevant sections on the figjam file, which made being an effective facilitator even easier.

The first show & tell went really well! I received lots of positive feedback from my peers and leadership team. It was great to see everyone actively participating being keen on sharing even in a hybrid environment.

As the host however, aspects of discussion activity felt a bit chaotic and the majority of the opinions were quite critical of the product on the board. The lack of structure resulted in sentiment and topics being scrambled across the board, making it more challenging to facilitate an effective discussion.

ITERATE

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Tweaks:

I sought feedback which helped to clarify what it was I wanted to achieve by introducing the interactive activity. I noticed that a lot of stickies added to the board were critical rather than reflective, so I needed to think about how to encourage empathy towards the teams behind the products we were discussing.

To address these points, I decided to add another board that included questions to help everyone to be both more reflective and objective.

  • What do you think is the intent of this product?

  • What constraints do you imagine the team/person had?

  • What is this product for?

  • Who is this product for?

  • Who are their competitors?

  • How do their competitors differ?

A storytelling structure

A month ago, the whole team attended a storytelling workshop that introduced a three act structure, “a story-telling model loosely defined as a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Also thought as the setup, the confrontation, and the resolution.”

Wanting to capitalise on this shared experience, I hoped to incorporate this way of presenting work thinking that it could make presentations resonate with the audience. In an attempt to encourage people to think how they could present this way, I created labeled sections, context/problem, transformation/struggle and next steps/reflection.

However this proved to be too challenging as it disrupted the way people would naturally approach a problem. Instead the three act structure was offered as a way to think about how to talk about work and I would look to reiterate on the structure later. In the meantime, presenters had the freedom to put what ever they liked on the figjam board, as long as they completed the intro and key insights.

Impact

The subsequent sessions were really successful, we had designers, researchers and managers from across teams spending time together in way that added value by developing product maturity in a relaxed environment. I got lots of feedback mentioning how the Show & Tell sessions were something people looked forward to at the beginning of the month and had started thinking about how this could extend to other departments.

I chose to take this on because I wanted to. I could see the potential and value of having structured and meaningful discussions about products across disciplines, seniority and experiences.

Reflections

Important lessons learned:

  • Over an eight month period I was able to really hone my facilitation skills and build upon my other soft and interpersonal skills by being an active listener.

  • I paid a lot of attention to group dynamics and personalities to maximise engagement from people you wouldn’t usually hear from.

How I would approach the same task:

  • As the sole volunteer and person behind the changes, I felt as thought this put people off from offering to take on host for a week and it meant that my workload was sometimes difficult to manage. If I had invited someone else from the very start of the process not only could we have come to a very different outcome but the sense of shared ownership could alleviate the pressure of running this every month and potential ad hoc hosts.