Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. If you’ve been reading Product Talk for a while, you probably already know that the majority of the stories we share in the Product in Practice series focus on how product teams are adopting continuous discovery habits in their work. The details vary, but we generally speak with members of the product trio to learn how they’re putting these concepts into practice.
But not today.
For this edition of Product in Practice, we’re not talking with a product manager, a designer, a UX researcher, or even an engineer.
Nope, today’s story involves a Head of Operations and People. While Eva Spexard’s work doesn’t fit into the typical “product” mold, she’s found ways of applying a continuous discovery mindset, including conducting customer interviews, building opportunity solution trees, and making iterative improvements over time.
Ready? Let’s dive in to hear directly from Eva.
Do you have a Product in Practice story you’d like to share? You can submit yours here.
Meet the Continuous Discovery Champion, Eva Spexard
Meet Eva Spexard, the Head of Operations and People at Passion.io.
Eva Spexard is the Head of Operations and People at Passion.io, a mobile app builder for creators. Passion.io helps its customers monetize their passion and skills and reach their audiences with their own app.
Eva has been the Head of People at Passion.io for the past two and half years. She recently added Head of Operations to her title while still overseeing the People Experience/Operations team. She describes her mission as attracting, retaining, enabling, and engaging the best talent for her company.
“We think of People Experience as a subscription product,” explains Eva. What exactly does this mean? Eva says, “In a previous role, I realized through my work on [employee] retention and regrettable attrition that we really have to do more to understand our employees as customers that we recruit (the equivalent to marketing/sales) and then they subscribe to our product (the employee experience) until they leave and are not with the company anymore. During their experience we have to ensure they stay engaged through ‘customer success and support.’”
We need to understand our employees as customers that we recruit (the equivalent to marketing/sales) and then they subscribe to our product (the employee experience) until they are not with the company anymore. – Tweet This
When you consider employee experience to be a product and People Ops to be the product team, this impacts how you frame other teams like recruiting and employer branding.
Eva was originally inspired by the writing and work, and most recently the book Built for People: Transform Your Employee Experience Using Product Management Principles by Jessica Zwaan, COO at Talentful and Eva’s mentor. This book helped create the foundation of framing the employee experience with a product perspective. It emphasizes the importance of understanding users and building, testing, and iterating quickly.
Introducing Continuous Discovery Habits to Passion.io
Another inflection point for Eva occurred after the CEO of Passion.io, Matthias Bellmann, read Continuous Discovery Habits. “He got very excited about the great, practical advice in the book and we talked about how we should all read the book to make sure we all have a common understanding and can reorganize the company in alignment with the principles,” says Eva.
For Eva, reading the book also unlocked a new perspective. “The fact that we started reading Continuous Discovery Habits at Passion was an accelerator for the idea to treat the people experience as a subscription product and gave me the opportunity to learn more about product management principles and implement them into our work in the People Team,” she says.
The fact that we started reading Continuous Discovery Habits at Passion was an accelerator for the idea to treat the people experience as a subscription product. – Tweet This
Matthias’s enthusiasm and the discussions he had with Eva led them to make it a company-wide initiative to read the book. They started by setting a deadline for when everyone needed to finish reading it and Matt and Eva worked together to design a quiz that covered core concepts from the book.
These are some of the questions on the quiz that Eva and her CEO created to test employees’ understanding of Continuous Discovery Habits. Click the image to see a larger version.
But the quiz wasn’t only designed to test people’s understanding—Eva and Matthias also wanted to give employees the opportunity to share their key takeaways and unanswered questions.
Questions from the Continuous Discovery Habits quiz also allowed Passion.io employees to share their own perspective on the material. Click the image to see a larger version.
Eva and Matthias also encouraged Passion.io employees to read blog articles on Product Talk, conduct customer interviews, and create their respective opportunity solution trees.
Applying Discovery Concepts to the Operations/People Team
After this introduction to continuous discovery, Eva began to think about how to apply the concepts to her own team. “I quickly discovered that we could benefit a lot from applying continuous discovery habits to our work in the people space as well,” she explains. “We decided to create our own opportunity solution tree and do customer interviews with our employees to understand their journey and find out how our product, Passion.io’s People Experience, can get better.”
I quickly discovered that we could benefit a lot from applying continuous discovery habits to our work in the people space as well. – Tweet This
Eva created an interview snapshot and employee experience journey map to capture learnings from “customer” interviews with employees. Click the image to see a larger version.
Building a habit of regular customer interviews
Eva explains that there are two ways her team approaches interviewing their customers. One method involves reaching out to team members and keeping track of them with a simple Google Sheet that makes note of how long the person has been with the company, which team they’re on, and if they’re a manager. Eva’s goal is 13 interviews per quarter, which works out to be 1 interview per week. “Realistically, it varies a lot depending on what we work on and comes in cycles,” says Eva.
The second method involves inviting team members to book a customer interview through a link in the company’s People Hub on Notion. “We realized that team members love to be part of this process and be ‘heard’ in that way, so we open the booking link up for anyone to book an interview and we usually follow the JTBD interview or do assumption testing with the respective team member,” explains Eva.
Eva added links to the People Hub Notion document so any employee can proactively book a customer interview with the People team. Click the image to see a larger version.
When it comes to the specific questions they ask during the interviews, Eva says, “What we did was really learn from the product team’s interviews and questions and adjust them to our needs.”
Some of the general discovery questions they ask include:
- Tell me about a time you felt truly valued at work. What specifically made you feel that way?
- Describe a situation where misalignment with your team’s goals created tension. How did communication play a role?
- Describe how performance reviews currently connect to your long-term career aspirations.
- Tell me about a workplace interaction that made you reconsider your commitment to your current role.
- Tell me about a time when you didn’t understand our goals and strategy as an organization. What did you do about it? Whom did you speak to?
As they began to speak with their customers (Passion.io’s employees), Eva and her team started to uncover several opportunities.
Opportunity #1: Clarifying role requirements and performance expectations
Once they began implementing the continuous discovery mindset and framework across the company, they learned that this created some uncertainty when it comes to role requirements and performance expectations.
They came up with the outcome “Passioneers are engaged and positive and clear on their role and responsibilities” based on the feedback survey and quiz related to Continuous Discovery Habits. During several integration meetings they had to change the way they worked in the different departments, they began to identify opportunities like “I don’t know how the company is doing” and “I don’t know why we are doing what we’re doing.”
The opportunity solution tree related to a lack of role clarity at Passion.io. Click the image to see a larger version.
After identifying more related opportunities, they started coming up with some assumptions and testing solutions.
Once they’d built an opportunity solution tree, Eva and her team started to identify and map their assumptions. Click the image to see a larger version.
While this work is ongoing, Eva says they started by updating role descriptions in Notion in terms of role and job family. They are now working on updating every single role description and making it part of the monthly check-ins with the managers.
Opportunity #2: Carving out more time for learning
Once Eva and her team heard that employees couldn’t find time for learning, they started building an opportunity solution tree related to professional development at Passion.io. Click the image to see a larger version.
Through regular customer interviews, Eva and her team identified several opportunities related to professional development, including “I don’t have time to read or do courses due to my workload” and “Learning and development is not talked about often so it’s not a priority.”
While Passion.io was already providing support in the form of books and courses, they hadn’t considered that employees also needed time to learn. “In one interview, we found that one of the main reasons not to do professional development was that there was no dedicated time, which made it difficult to be unavailable during the workday for professional development,” Eva explains.
We found that one of the main reasons not to do professional development was that there was no dedicated time, which made it difficult to be unavailable during the workday for professional development. – Tweet This
The questions they asked in these interviews included:
- Describe a moment when you felt your professional development was being overlooked.
- Tell me about a skill you’ve wanted to develop but your current workplace hasn’t supported.
- Describe a moment when you realized you needed additional training to advance in your role. What did you do about it?
- Describe the most meaningful learning opportunities a company has ever provided to you.
After validating this opportunity in a few more interviews, they decided to create some simple tests. Passion.io started offering “Level-Up Fridays” where they would block four hours of the second Friday of each month in everyone’s calendar to give people the time and space for personal and professional development.
They also decided to launch a pilot mentorship program and track participant satisfaction and skill development over time.
The initial results were promising. “We saw an increase in not only learning activities, but we also created a Slack channel around it where now team members share what they did during this time. This motivates others to use the time and share their learnings,” says Eva.
The pilot mentorship program also gave an onboarding specialist who was interested in product design the opportunity to gain more experience and eventually move into a junior product designer role at the company.
Opportunity #3: Making improvements to the performance review process
Eva also learned that she could use discovery to gain more confidence in what the People team was offering. “Instead of working six months on a new process, we now involve the team early on and test so we can learn and iterate quickly,” she explains.
Instead of working six months on a new process, we now involve the team early on and test so we can learn and iterate quickly. – Tweet This
Sharing one specific example, Eva says that they had been struggling with their 360 review process. It was too complicated and required too many touchpoints. They were about to re-launch it completely with a new tool, but during a customer interview with an engineer, they learned that the real issue was that it was another context switch from where they usually communicate and work.
To dig more into this opportunity, they asked questions like:
- Describe a moment when you struggled to communicate feedback to your manager effectively. What barriers existed?
- Share an experience where you received feedback that genuinely helped your professional growth. What made it impactful?
- Walk me through the last performance review that left you feeling motivated or demotivated. What specific elements triggered your reaction?
- Explain a time when anonymous feedback would have been valuable but wasn’t available.
- How do current feedback mechanisms in your organization support or hinder your professional growth?
Conducting these customer interviews led to a key realization. “The new tool would not have solved the problem,” Eva says. “Instead, we created a custom app in Slack that now enables everyone to give feedback simply by typing “/performancefeedback” into any channel in Slack. This gets sent to a Google Sheet for the respective team member and manager.” While they’re still testing this process, so far the feedback has been very positive.
Key Learnings and Takeaways
Eva says their motivation for adopting continuous discovery on the People team was to align the people experience with the company’s business objectives. “We need to enable our team to work as seamlessly together as possible and adapt product management principles to do so.” And because they’re asking people across the company to start working this way, it only makes sense that the People team would take the same approach.
She’s pleased with their results so far, explaining that they regularly measure their employee net promoter score (ENPS) and are in the 99th percentile compared to 600 other startups (she is using peoplemetrics.fyi to benchmark their metrics).
Here are a few of the key learnings and takeaways Eva shares about Passion.io’s continuous discovery journey.
Adapt discovery to your specific situation.
As Eva and her team have gained more practice, they’ve evolved their approach to discovery. When they first started, they felt it was important to follow the book very closely. “That was good to learn and understand the principles, but we later identified different aspects that work better for us and some that are not applicable, like the ‘engineer’ role in interviews,” explains Eva.
Don’t assume you know your customers and their needs.
The goal of discovery is to be open to learning unexpected things from your customers, not simply using it to validate your existing ideas. And this can be challenging if you’re in a discipline like HR that typically assumes it knows what its customers need. “We’ve learned a lot about ‘traditional’ HR coming from a place of ‘We know what needs to be done’—and how that’s not working anymore. Our customers/employees know what they need to do their best job,” says Eva.
We’ve learned a lot about ‘traditional’ HR coming from a place of ‘We know what needs to be done’—and how that’s not working anymore. Our customers/employees know what they need to do their best job. – Tweet This
Manage your customers’ expectations when they share requests during interviews.
You should always make an effort to manage your customers’ expectations about what will happen after an interview, but especially when your customers are employees who you see and speak with regularly. “It was important for us to help everyone understand what we do and that it doesn’t mean we will now ‘build that feature’ just because they asked for it in a customer interview,” says Eva.
Are you inspired by Eva’s story? We know we are. Share it with your HR/People Operations team. We’d love to see this idea spread.
