︎

Creating a product brief to improve workflow


The current iteration of the product brief

Background

Beyond my responsibilities as a product designer at SmartAsset, I’m always looking for ways to improve our various processes. I often collaborate with coworkers to identify problems and subsequently test out different solutions. By treating our workflow as an ever-evolving product, we are able to iterate and see what helps the team operate at the highest level possible.

One solution I proposed and successfully integrated into our process was the product brief. It started as a means to address the following recurring problems that I would run into frequently when working with product managers.

  1. No background context as to why we’re working on a given project / feature set, who we’re building it for, etc.
  2. Stakeholders with different goals
  3. No clearly defined metric of success
  4. Related documentation that is not shared or hard to find

The first iteration of the brief was a simple one-pager with a list of questions for the product manager to answer before I would start any design work on a project or feature. It was helpful in getting alignment across relevant stakeholders. However, upon using it more frequently, Kyrsten (UX Researcher) found more ways to improve it and made those revisions.

Eventually we landed on its current iteration, where, in addition to answering key questions, the brief serves as a tracking document that contains links to all other relevant files, as well as findings from each round of testing that Kyrsten conducts.


The product brief for the Handoff Screen Redesign.


I like taking pictures on Instagram.