A journey to continuous discovery
5 weeks to redefine how the product team operates, with a shift towards a discovery-first mindset.
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By now, you know that COVID has been particularly harsh for operators in the travel industry. Unfortunately, Evaneos was not spared.
The company lost part of its staff and had to reorganise its operations to face the pandemic and its consequences.
But with challenges come opportunities.
Business being slower than usual meant the team had the headspace to invest in questioning their product practice and rethinking how they could help travellers plan for and enjoy better trips through their platform.
Audrey, Head of Product @ Evaneos reached out to us as the team embarked on a journey to redefine their ways of working.
From the very beginning, it was clear to us, one interaction after the other, that we were in a particularly benevolent organisation. This is no coincidence, Eveneos prides itself on a culture where respect and xx are the norm. People who’ve joined the company in the past have undergone Nonviolent communication training as part of their onboarding and this translates to a work culture where people are respectful of one another, great listeners and always welcome new ways of thinking about a problem.
Very early on, our focus has been to get closer to the reality of the individuals in the R&D (Product & Tech) and the leadership teams. This is a key part of our own discovery process aimed at really understanding the circumstances and struggles of team members when it comes to product development.
To get a good grasp of the practices in the R&D community, we shadowed internal product meetings, user testing sessions and playbacks. We then interviewed Product managers, Tech leads, Data analysts, UX designers, the entire C-suite and got a good sense of where the opportunities were.
Following our playback of this initial discovery phase and an opportunity-solution mapping workshop with the product team on how we could improve their practice, we landed with an 8-step recipe for how Evaneos would go from intuition to measuring impact.
The framework provides ground rules, a recommended approach, detailed activity descriptions and objectives together with who’s involved and why.
The next step of our work with Evaneos will be about taking the team to the next level in their practice. This means
- Adjusting the recipe based on what works and what doesn’t for the team in context of the business’ objectives
- Upskilling individual team members on aspects they need to (e.g. framing a discovery activity, conducting generative research or industrialising participant recruitment)
The day after our playback and sharing session on new ways of working, the team started experimenting with our proposed workflow and discovery activities.
Every initiative now starts with a team member formulating a hypothesis to ensure that the team is focused on learning and testing, thus creating time and space for discovery.
The team at Evaneos strives to have weekly interactions with travellers and agents to inform their day-to-day product decisions.
Collaboration is at a high: team members are conscious of the areas of ownership and accountability around each set of activities.
We really enjoyed working along the teams at Evaneos. We’ve rarely seen people so eager to learn and make a difference for their users.
We’re really excited to see what the future of travel looks like.
