I’ve always felt that one of the hardest things about working at an agency is when projects come to an end. 

After months of working with our clients, learning, empathizing, designing, building, and iterating, we’ve come to care deeply about the team and the product we’re building. 

Then suddenly it’s over. Time to say goodbye.

Like all good caretakers we wonder how this thing we’ve nurtured to life will fare once it’s out in the world. Will it be everything we believe it can be? Will it do everything we built it to do?

And maybe more importantly, can it grow and thrive without us? Have we given our client’s team everything they need to take what we delivered to them, and build on it long after we’re gone?

The fourth objective

Amidst a global pandemic, MetaLab began an ambitious year-long engagement with Upwork, the “world’s work marketplace.” 

Upwork wanted to harness the sudden influx of skilled remote workers that had taken to the internet in the wake of the pandemic, and to navigate a strategic shift towards more skilled talent and longer-term engagements.

Initially, our partnership had three objectives. We’d start by articulating an achievable mid-term vision for Upwork. Then we’d give their design system a major overhaul. And finally, we’d begin implementing the vision and the design in their product.

We knew from the start that this would be a substantial undertaking involving multiple verticals and teams within Upwork. We also recognized that our job wasn’t to see the whole thing through to the end, but to lay the groundwork to enable Upwork’s own teams to take ownership and run with it.

To make sure that our impact would reach beyond the work we created, we needed to give Upwork’s teams the tools they’d need to get the job done after we’d left. In short, our fourth objective became to find ways to “arm the rebels.”

Which leads us to brand guidelines.

The problem with brand guidelines

Brand guidelines need to be actionable. Unless some designer in the future can use them to create something that captures the underlying spirit of the design, they’re just nice mirages. 

If they just pitch a set of ideals that don’t match the work, the result will be forgettable, inconsistent and, most importantly, not all that useful. 

To make something that can endure, your guidelines need to document more than the what and the how. They need to capture the spirit of the design — the why.

How to arm the rebels

When MetaLab delivers a product, we don’t just deliver the product. 

We leave our clients with a comprehensive design system and brand guidelines that are clear enough for everyone who’ll work on the product to understand, and flexible enough to grow with the product. 

All this comes with everything you’d expect, like an exhaustive set of feature flows, UI kits, motion examples, journey maps and other behaviour documentation. That’s how we document the what and how.

But how do we document the most important aspect of the design: The why? 

Let’s use Upwork’s brand guidelines as an example. To help their designers run with the ball and create consistent and high quality designs, the guidelines connect the fancy and abstract big picture concepts to concrete, tangible examples. 

‍
So we built the guidelines in three tiers: 1) principles to focus the design solutions around user needs, 2) applications to maintain consistency across all areas of the product, and 3) examples to use as inspiration and clarity.

→ Principles

A complex document that nobody can remember won’t gain traction, so we created some rules: Be simple. Be memorable. Show them how. If we couldn’t remember the principles in a pop quiz, we went back to the drawing board. Over time, we refined down from five complex sentences down to three imperative statements. These were our top level principles, all centered around supporting the ideal user experience.

→ Applications

Each principle is broken down into five unique applications that support that principle. In addition to zooming in a level, we created these to be used as a checklist of potential approaches that help to achieve a principle. While designers were not required to use all of these applications, they were intended as a toolkit to help create and evaluate new design work.

→ Examples

Finally, each application was illustrated with a variety of real examples that we compiled as we worked with each feature team. What started as a purely text based document soon grew into a gallery of screens and flows that illustrated each of our principles extensively.

How I learned to let go and trust the system

Over the year we spent with Upwork, we built and refined our design principles. As we completed our work with each of the verticals (virtual talent, client onboarding and talent acquisition) we would return to our system, cut things that were no longer true, add things that we learned, and document real product work as examples that would make those principles concrete.

Arming the rebels wasn’t the main focus of our time with Upwork, but the design principles we left them with have played a big part in the company-wide adoption of our work.

Letting go can be hard. You can never know what the future brings, and what exactly will happen to the product after you’re gone. But building real, usable systems that we know our partners can use to go forward certainly helps.

Now that you have a strategy and your differentiators in place, it’s time to draft the entire product experience into a single document. This is a key step in the product lifecycle called product definition. 

One of the key deliverables that comes out of the product definition is the product blueprint. Your product blueprint allows you to visualize the entire product service on one page. This helps manage its complexity, including the actions and touchpoints of all the actors, key features, technical dependencies, and operational requirements.

Behind the scenes, there are several key assets that power this product blueprint: 

This view helps to ensure your team is aligned on the critical pieces of success.

That being said, it’s easy to go overboard with product blueprints, so don’t boil the ocean! Focus on the few critical features and components that will make a big impact for your customers.

Remember to trust in yourself and the research that has been done. Your customers don't always know what the right solution is for their wants and needs. That's why it's your job to consider their needs in the context of your product's potential and develop an appropriate blueprint that can scale in the future.

We saw earlier that you’re going to be spending the majority of your time in the product definition/design, testing, and build phases, which means you need a talented team of skilled makers. 

This may seem obvious, but when building the right team with the right chemistry within your budget, there are a lot of factors to consider. How long will it take for the team to gel? Do you stick with who you have? When should you contract vs. hire?

Too often, we see companies spend big budgets hiring a ton of great developers and designers. They throw them onto a project expecting the product will be delivered fast only to find the team isn’t hitting their milestones. Why? 

Teams typically struggle to get going immediately because of differing working styles, personalities, mindsets, and honestly… sometimes ego. That’s why you shouldn’t focus on individual hires but on the team as a whole.

If you have time, budget, and desire to invest in the future culture of your company, you have to invest time to build the team dynamics. We find that it typically takes 4-5 sprints for a team to find its groove — approximately four months, or more.

If you are an early stage startup, and don’t have a lot of time (six months or less), but still want to get a product out there quickly, we recommend hiring a pre-built team of skilled makers who have launched several products together. 

The key takeaway is to not waste all of your time and money hiring. Building a successful team takes time and cycles of members working together to hit their stride. When necessary, augment with experts to help your team grow, add a skill, or just simply to outsource a function. It ultimately comes down to how you want to allocate your resources.

Don’t reinvent the wheel… and don’t build everything from scratch! Accelerators are existing tools and technologies you can leverage or integrate into your product.

Some of the tools that we use to help accelerate the design process to create and test out designs, concepts, and prototypes with users include Figma, Framer.io, and even Typeform.

For development, we use many different tools and platforms on our projects to help accelerate the product development lifecycle and build products that can scale to meet customer demand.  Several of the most popular and impactful integrations and platforms used by our teams include:

AI is everywhere these days for a reason. It’s powering brand new ways to get work done and being incorporated into almost every tool we already use to make workflows easier. From content creation to scheduling, we are seeing tools popping up for everything. Here are a few that can help accelerate product development:

There are important considerations to keep in mind when using any AI tool in a responsible way. Sensitivity of data uploaded into any of these systems and the originality of the content is a big one.

Policies and regulation with AI are still being figured out, so it’s wise to exercise caution when setting guidelines for your product teams. Leverage these tools as inspiration or starting points for copy, as pieces of a larger composite for images, or to get as specific as possible with prompts in order to generate something unique.

Product development succeeds when teams develop a culture of continuous learning. This is fueled by rigorous testing, analytics, and strategic iteration during key phases of the product lifecycle.

In the discovery phase, we immerse ourselves in understanding our potential early adopters' needs and motivations (see #validators). Alongside this, we work with clients to think through solid analytics strategies. This step instills a data-centric culture from the start, setting the stage for ongoing learning and adaptation. 

By aligning qualitative user insights with a framework for quantitative data capture, we ensure the product strategy we craft will continually evolve to meet user needs.

As we pivot to the alpha and beta stages, the emphasis turns to iterative improvement. We engage early adopters in testing programs. Their first-hand experiences provides invaluable feedback to detect bugs and potential enhancements. 

This feedback, bolstered by real-time analytics data, drives our evidence-based refinement process, prepping the product to be market-fit.

By investing in this cycle of continuous learning — persistent testing, data-informed analytics, and strategic iteration — we embrace a user-centric ethos in product development. This equips our clients to not just navigate, but also thrive.

‍

When Ravi Mehta (former CPO at Tinder/Product Director at Facebook) was working on the first iteration of his personalized coaching product, he validated it quickly with a paid offering he pieced together with a number of low-code tools.

Leveraging learnings from a community of early adopters, he partnered with MetaLab to help enhance, refine, and evolve the product into the Outpace app.

Outpace launched earlier this year. It provides guided programs for personalized career development designed to level up with the support of a one-on-one AI coach.

We are in a post-WeWork/Theranos era of founders promising growth without showing any profit. You need to ask yourself "What do we need to show investors?" Users are great, but how is this actually going to make money?

You have to show real numbers and an actionable monetization strategy. This means outlining your marketing and growth strategies — and the mechanisms that will bring in not only revenue but profit.

Revenue strategies can vary greatly, but the following are a few of the most common buckets of digital product monetization mechanisms:

There are many ways to monetize a product, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. The right way is the one that will resonate with your audience, so feel free to experiment and be flexible when choosing a strategy.

We’ve been supporting Modular with the release of their new AI platform and product offerings. Early in our engagement, they asked us to design a marketing site to help them grow and segment their sales pipeline. This allowed them better understand, and target, existing and potential users. We took those early learnings to ensure the product landed with their audience and supported their revenue targets.

The product lifecycle doesn’t end with a launch, it goes far beyond. Once you begin to get a better understanding of your customers and their purchase behaviours, it’s vital to adapt, being flexible with pricing, monetization strategies, and identifying unexpected revenue drivers. 

For example, you may see that your primary offering for your SaaS tool is slowly gaining traction, but over and over customers are requesting access to an API for a specific data flow. You may be sitting on a large additional untapped revenue stream and there could be more. Meet your customers where they are!

It helps to consult the people who’ve been there before. There are a million people on LinkedIn who are trying to sell you a service or product that you may not need. There are critical steps that could cost you if you miss them. There are shortcuts you may not even know exist. Trusted advisors can help you navigate this and more. There is just no substitute for experience.

Find seasoned product leaders, designers, or engineers who have launched products in the past and will be familiar with the nitty-gritty details. They will have the perspective to help you find the forest through the trees. You want people on your side who can make sure you are spending your time, efforts, and money on the right things.

These are the Product Survival Kit items that we recommend to anyone who is creating and launching a product in today's climate. It's a mix of techniques, processes, people, actions and tools that we've seen provide success to many of our clients, colleagues and partners out there. But remember — each product is different, so find the mix that worst best for you. 

It may seem daunting but it is possible to successfully bring your idea or product concept to life today.  This may even be the right moment to go after it. Companies who launch useful and impactful products during economic downturns have a history of surviving and thriving. The next one could be you.