#406 – Design Through Play

This week, Parabol’s CEO Jordan Husney discusses how product innovation is being led through play.

Ever since Parabol was founded, I had a vision as a founder to build a tool that could orchestrate any collaborative activity benefiting from structure. When our team was itty bitty (like, 4 people), we had to focus on a set of activities that we could build upon. These activities needed to be relatively fixed in form and common enough for people to adopt our software and benefit from it. That’s how Parabol got into the Agile business.

About three years ago, as CEO, I began pushing for us to explore developing a more open-ended solution with our larger team. I suggested several activities we could help with: processing customer feedback into insights, employee reviews, decision-making, etc. To motivate our team, I needed to be specific and speak in pictures. Unfortunately, nothing I proposed really resonated. The team couldn’t see what I could see. Meanwhile, our existing customers kept asking for more features on what we had already built—more integrations with Agile backlogs, different Agile ceremonies, etc. It was the middle of the pandemic, and people were still trying to figure out how to operate their software teams remotely.

Last year, I began working earnestly with a small team to explore how to broaden our product. Our goal was to create a real means of creative expression for solving any high-intensity collaborative challenge a team might face. We’re still not at a solution we’re happy with, but we’re getting closer.

I dusted off an old passion of mine: prioritization. Figuring out how to agree on how to spend a team’s resources and committing to a course is at the heart of teamwork. We studied dozens of teams, their frameworks, and processes.

Rather than design solutions head on, I decided to take a new tact: design through play. Each month for the past several months I’ve come up with a new, playful prompt:

I’ve invited the full company to contribute candidate answers to these prompts to try different frameworks together to determine the ultimate answer (the best bird is the hummingbird and the best sandwich is Katz’s Pastrami on Rye…we’re working on determining the best breakfast now.)

The prompts are intentionally playful but the work is serious: each time we run a framework we learn where the real friction points are and how we could break the problem of prioritization into a series of smaller, low-friction interactions to help a team collaborate. This has led to a Cambrian Explosion of potential solutions that we’re raising in fidelity to interactive prototypes.

Innovation is always hard. This whole process has been a good reminder for me that sometimes, play is the answer.

Reasonably good metrics this week. The last weeks of July and the month of August are generally when we observe a signup and usage slow down. While MAU are down slightly this week, we’ve been noting strong signup and meeting activity growth. We’re hoping this portends for a strong fall season.

…held a board meeting with Parabol’s investors.

…began designing a prototype prioritization activity.

…staged a new version of Parabol for release.

…continued implementing our new AI-driven Team Insights feature.

…ship a new version of Parabol to production. This version will contain several fixes, including allowing @-mentions to work across all meeting types. Plus, we’re continuing to iterate on how to users can navigate between different organizations.

Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Please write to us.