Superhuman ·
Teams

The purpose of this project was to create features and a strategy to grow Teams

Overview

Team:

  • 1 Product Manager, 2 FE Engineer, 2 BE Engineers

Stakeholders:

  • CEO, President, Head of Design

Responsibilities:

  • Research, hi-fi design, and strategy

What did I do?

I’ve designed multiple horizontal teams features (coworker scheduling, shared read statuses, and reply indicators), sales teams features, and I worked on a teams strategy.

Why did we target teams?

We observe negative churn in teams so the hypothesis is that developing more team features will increase team size, team retention, and overall Teams ARR.

The
Process

Feature Planning

I worked with the PM to assess features across multiple criteria:

  • Consolidated teams vs. Contracted teams

  • Horizontal teams vs vertical teams

  • Network effects

  • Product-led growth

  • RICE evaluation

Competitive Analysis

For each project, we looked at several tools and analyzed how they approach the problem. We noted things they did well as well as gaps in their experience.

Design Exploration

I did design explorations for each project. Coworker scheduling needed several explorations while share read statuses and reply indicators were much more straightforward. The explorations were reviewed with stakeholders and a direction was chosen.

Final Design & Spec

The PM and I worked closely to come up with the final designs and detail the specs.

Implementation & QA

The most notable challenge for engineering was creating the concept of a team in the backend and coming up with an approach for sharing data between teammates. I worked with engineers as they built each feature and did thorough testing during the QA phase before launch.

Launch Announcement

Lastly I worked on the storyboard, video recording, and video animation for the announcement of each feature.

Coworker
Scheduling

Final Designs

The primary task that I wanted to make extremely quick was finding an open slot to schedule a meeting. The secondary task was to see meeting details in order to make other decisions (such as booking over a meeting or asking a meeting to be moved).

The way I designed this feature enables a user to add several meeting participants and see their availability without getting overwhelmed by an onslaught of colors and/or high information density.

Final Designs

Reply indicators are all about preventing email collisions. The main challenge to solve was addressing the edge cases when multiple people are drafting replies and/or if someone has scheduled a reply.

Reply Indicators

Shared
Read Statuses

Final Designs

Shared read statuses allows teammates to know when external recipients opened an email that was sent by their coworker.

Teams
Strategy

Customer Interviews

I interviewed 9 customers apart of teams to understand their biggest challenges and synthesized the insights.

Keeping track of the details (7)

  • People note down two types of content: Information & Tasks

  • Note objects: Threads, Reminds, Calls

  • Current solutions: Apple Notes, CRM, Notion, Email draft to self

Catching up on existing content (5)

  • Reading forwarded content is often difficult (when several emails are quoted)

  • Summaries can be very helpful

  • The onus is oft on the sender to provide a summary or reason for forwarding

Managing sidebar conversations (5)

  • It is incredibly challenging to know if an email is internal only

  • It is also difficult to respond to the correct email with varying recipient groups

  • Getting this wrong can be a security issue or a big look foolish issue

Keeping track of conversation threads (4)

  • A way to group threads is appealing to some.

    • One customer labels project specific emails and then creates a split based off of that label

    • (one customer mentioned that she used to tag all emails, but that it was a habit leftover from previously being on Outlook and foldering).

  • Customers rely on search to find related threads

Strategy Approaches

I took the insights and thought about three different approaches for the company to build teams features and expand the teams user base. I created a high level overview that covered the target audience, approach, suggested features, competitive landscape, marketing strategy, revenue details, and success metrics.

Double down on email

Address an additional productivity area

Tackle internal communication

I reviewed the strategy approaches with the CEO and President and refined the strategy. Now I’m working with the PM to vet the proposed features and sequence them to contribute to Q4 and Q1 planning.