PAUL BERG
Paul Berg
◇
Product Designer
Postlight was growing fast and getting a lot of interest from potential clients. This was great for the business but put pressure on the sales team to quickly qualify leads and close more deals. This proved challenging because our sales process was very collaborative and involved a lot of tools.
Aboard was started as an internal project at Postlight to make it easier for a small teams to manage workflows, such as a sales pipeline, in a collaborative and efficient manner. Basically, it’s a platform that brings together workflows, relevant information, and chat so teams can work together without hopping from tool to tool to get the full picture and make progress.
Our approach was to create an MVP of the software and run a beta test to validate the product vision and focus the product strategy on clearly defined use cases.
To kick things off I signed up for various workflow management, task management, and collaboration products including Monday.com, SmartSheet, Asana, Pipefy, and Pipedrive.
We then had bi-weekly retros to discuss the products and reflect on what worked, what didn't, and how we wanted to differentiate Aboard.
We interviewed employees across Postlight to learn about their needs and map out real-world workflows to test the product against. We knew it was important for a product like this to prioritize specific use cases so we could focus our design and development efforts as well as find ways to compete with existing solutions that had already been in market for years.
Wireframes were created to visualize different design approaches and quickly iterate based on feedback. We wanted our approach to solve the problem in a novel way so it was important to validate our ideas before deciding on a direction.
Next we created high-fidelity mockups of the core features including creating boards, managing cards, messaging, tasks, and activity tracking. These were then shared with engineers to reference for development.
As we designed and developed the core experience we also created a basic design system to align the interface with the newly created Aboard brand. Early on, our goal was to get something in front of users as quickly as possible but we still felt it was important to have a consistent, professional, and accessible foundation established for the product.
We identified users within Postlight to use Aboard for their everyday work and provide feedback. This feedback was given in real-time via Slack and in bi-weekly feedback sessions ran by the design team. This test allowed us to refine our understanding of their workflows as well as continue iterating on the designs and overall product strategy.
Based on positive feedback from the beta test our leadership decided to invest more resources in Aboard and hire a dedicated team to work on the project. To help with the transition we documented our research findings and design thinking for the new team to pick up where we left off.
