Let your clients make informed decisions with you
It was a big week at Elevator Up last week. We launched two major projects.
Both projects are e-commerce stores and they took a good team effort to get them out the door. Let’s talk about the client & team dynamics.
First of all, our launches last week were non-events for our clients. Although it was a big relief (for everyone) to get them live, our clients had been so ingrained in the process from the start that the only difference was a URL change.
We’ve talked plenty before on our blog about how EU treats clients like part of our team. We don’t let our clients outsource understanding -- and by that we mean, any information we learn, most decisions we make, or insights discovered along the project -- are clearly communicated between us and the client, as if they were team members. By keeping our clients as informed as we are, everyone is able to make better decisions. Or at least, we have intelligent debates about those decisions.
Together with our clients, we made millions of decisions during the project. Information architecture, data mapping, design, feature sets, project management techniques, infrastructure, meeting requests (internal joke) and so many other aspects when building digital products. If it weren’t for the combined knowledge between EU and our clients, these decisions could have been fraught in debates. And that leads to two possible outcomes:
watered down decisions, or
discourse between the teams
Neither are great for the project or the people on the team. Especially (and I may be totally biased here) for the PMs.
It’s the PMs job to keep the project and team members (and the client) on track, happy and excited about the work we’re doing together. So I’ve found that by simply keeping everyone in the loop with discoveries and understanding, discussions are much easier to facilitate.
Want an example? Sure you do.
My client, kind of knew what their customers wanted in an e-commerce system. They’ve had years of experience helping and servicing their customers, so who would know them better!? Well, it wasn’t until Emily and I jumped on a few phone calls with their customers that we unearthed a massive amount of insight that directly influenced the end product. The discoveries made by just a few short phone calls allowed us to share that information with the client and together we were able to make a simple decision like “should we show tiered pricing on the product page?”. Absolutely yes!
Again, this happened with a LOT of the decisions that were made. But they were made by the entire team (EU + Client) as we were all informed about why and the positive outcome it would have.
Of course, now that our projects are live, we get to test our ideas with a larger number of people. We did test a couple iterations of designs early and have a reasonable amount of confidence of the version deployed today.
Now we’re planning the next (smaller) increment releases to our projects. A lot of features hit the cutting floor during the months of product development (like all projects) - so now it’s time to reflect on those features and cherry-pick the ones with the biggest impact.
Look forward to more updates on how we work together with our clients.
Till next time,
Joel Taylor, Product Manager
