How we built our Product Wall at Teem

The purpose of the Product Wall at Teem is to tell a story. That story is: 1) the company vision and strategy 2) product strategy 3) who we are building for (personas) 4) what we are building (roadmap) 5) what is in research (discovery, design, test) 6) what is being built 7) what is in beta 8) what has been released. Anyone should be able to read this story from left to right / top to bottom.

We began by commandeering an area of the building which everyone had access too. We didn’t build this in an area near product development but rather, close to sales. We also selected an area which could serve as gathering place — which it ultimately did.

Our first company-wide product standup. Dal Adamson is using the Product Wall as our tool to communicate all the good stuff.

In fact, just weeks after putting up our first version of content Teem started to host town hall styles meetings with the Product Wall as a backdrop.

Our first version was really basic. We had some early stage personas (we’ve since iterated and expanded) and using a very basic board we began to describe:

Build: anything the development team is actively working on (WIP). Eventually we began to post designs to accompany each sticky. Beta: anything we are internally testing (alpha) or externally validating (beta). Release: anything we recently released to production.

This was our MVP. Later we added more detail to our Research section but this was enough to start using this new tool.

Sidebar:

The black horizontal line across the “Build” section (which, if you are curious, is actually electrical tape) was a critical piece early on in our Product Wall. If you look at an even earlier version of the wall (below) you will see that “Build” was loaded with a lot of stickies — 23 to be exact.

We had too much in WIP and had to reduce that!

Each of these large stickies represented a project and for our size of company, 23 items in WIP was insane. So, in an effort to normalize we limited the space (which explains the horizontal line) to just 7 large stickies (or 7 items in WIP). Why 7? Because it was better than 23 — there was nothing scientific about this. The result on making this decision was impactful and I’ll share that story for another day. So, by using our Product Wall we were able to visualize all the WIP and reduce the chaos everyone was struggling with. Once we got everyone comfortable with doing less that horizontal line came down.

While we were starting this project, I was meeting with the executive team to understand our company vision and strategy. I did this because we needed to find alignment between vision, strategy and work. For more on how I accomplished that check out this article.

Eventually, we added our company vision and strategy along with our product strategy, roadmap and details about items in research which you can see below.

Anyone can understand what Teem is about by taking a look at the Product Wall. It tells the company story from left to right / top to bottom.

Sidebar:

Adding a sticky to the Product Wall, particularly the Research section, only means that we are making a commitment to research this and nothing more. The likelihood that this project makes it to the Build phase is high but there’s always a chance that our research reveals a problem and we need to either delay or kill any intention to build.