Go1 is the world's leading learning content expert. Trusted by over 17,000 businesses worldwide to meet their compliance and professional development needs.
Go1 customers leverage the huge content library to optimise their L&D programs. Often utilising the many integrations in their existing Learning Management or HR Systems.
While just having access to Go1 content saved customers time, another benefit is the ability to curate the content to the specific needs of their organisation, people, and programs. This could be done using Go1's search and curations tools. But, until 2023, there was still a lot of help needed from Go1's customer success and curation teams to create programs tailored to specific customer needs while also saving them time.
Discovery and curation was a continued area of focus for Go1. But with new advances in LLMs coming thick and fast, we saw a great opportunity to accelerate our vision and vastly improve the experience for our customers.
So, In 2023, we set about aligning the company on a renewed and focused vision and strategy.
Strong foundations to leverage
Thankfully, within the last year, the team and I had already clarified who our users were and what an ideal experience looked like for them. We'd done this through extensive research interviews and contextual inquiry to understand each persona, their Jobs to be done, and current journeys.
We used this research to create rich experience visions for each persona and align our teams on what an amazing experience looked like for them in the future.
Product vision and strategy
But the experience vision was still lacking some clarity on how we might make that experience possible with our product, and how it fit into our broader company strategy.
After a recent update to our company strategy, and an initial product strategy by Go1's SVP of Product (Jared Goralnick), I collaborated with Jared and other executives to create a product vision and strategy that would create the clarity our teams needed.
Being close to our different teams and their initiatives gave me the context to see how each of the areas they were working on could evolve towards a consolidated vision.
After a few iterations with stakeholders, we landed at something that excited the whole executive team enough to share it soon after to the rest of the company.
This was now something all teams could reference and know how their team was impacting the vision.
Evolving our process with first principles
Our Product Design Lead (Tara Hickman) led and kicked-off the main initiative to improve the quality and speed of curation. After some highly-collaborative discovery and ideation sessions with a team of cross-functional stakeholders, it was clear that we couldn't achieve what we want with incremental improvements to the existing feature.
Tara (Lead Product Design) and Winnie (Senior Product Designer) had been working in this space for a while and had already made a good start on what a reimagined version of search and discovery could be, that also met the our needs of being embeddable in our many integrations.
But, how could we take bolder bets, without the risk of too much time on design up front?
We re-looked at our processes and decided to leverage an old, but adaptable tool. User story mapping.
It was something we could keep consistent throughout our process, build on as we went, and keep everyone aligned. It also meant we could more clearly break down large features into small end to end tasks. Maintaining quality and building on it.
We could limit testing to smaller end to end tasks, validate, and keep moving quickly. Starting as simply as rebuilding our basic search, then adding AI improvements, then adding playlist curation, then editing, then AI enhanced playlist curation, and so on.
Improving feedback and engagement
With a large number of stakeholders and teams working on this one large initiative it was important to keep everyone in the loop and give them a voice for their departments.
We did this through weekly Product Design Reviews. With short and focused presentations, followed by a tightly facilitated feedback session.
There were many occasions where this saved us. From either making time-wasting mistakes or from misunderstanding the go-to market messaging.
Measuring success
Go1's AI search and curation was released to beta customers before it had feature parity with some of our existing features. We used the feedback to iterate and quickly become the go to feature for those users.
It's reduced manual curation time by Customer Success Managers, increased the number of assigned learning content, and ultimately increasing the north star metric of active days learning per month / per active learner.
Lessons
There were so many lessoned learned over this initiative.
At my time at Go1, it's the best example I've seen of the importance of clear and consistent communication to create alignment. Testing the message early and getting buy-in before going wider.
As for processes, after starting my time at Go1 with a very rigid process (which did help us move quickly, but often kept ideas limited) I swung too far the other way, giving too much autonomy and making it harder to set expectations with cross-functional peers. Through this initiative, I found being clear on our 1st principles and utilising simple but adaptable tools created just enough structure to work smoothly across functions.
Feel free to contact me (details below) for more info on this project. You can also explore more of my work or view my resume.