Product pitches and user stories

A couple of years after launch, we found ourselves wondering, “why can’t we get features out the door like we used to?” We had huge backlogs, always playing catch-up with a wishlist that kept growing. Projects went on and on and nothing ever felt finished.

We took a step back and found Shape Up by Basecamp. It’s a product development process that helps teams get over the growing pains that we were feeling.

As part of this, I took on the responsibility for our customer wishlist. For each new feature, I’d write a product pitch. They’re short documents that explain the problem, appetite, solution, rabbit holes, and no-gos of a feature.

The skill in writing product pitches is distilling feedback and research to the right level of detail. I wrote documents that explained a feature well enough so that people “got it,” but didn’t box devs into a solution.

Everyone in the wider team had a chance to comment on pitches. After we presented to leadership, I’d work in strategic and monetization feedback to create a feature spec document. This doc is a single source of truth for what this feature is and what it isn’t. We used this throughout a feature’s lifecycle. It was the basis for development, but also for support docs, release comms. and marketing too.

As a result, we started shipping features in six-week cycles. Our customer community responded positively to new features, though smaller in scope. In an accompanying blog post and email, I set the tone by letting folks know that we’d be shipping smaller features more regularly. It let us talk more openly with customers, with more certainty about what was coming and when.