A little while back, my design partner and I rolled out an app we built that we are really proud of. Without getting into too many details, the app has profile contextual awareness and tells product delivery team members exactly what they need to do in order to hit their critical timing milestones. There is also an awesome chat component that acts as an AI coach to give you contextually aware responses to any questions you might have. The coach knows who you are, what your role is, what program you are working on, and where you are in the timing cadence of that program's delivery milestones. It also has the base knowledge of every document the company has in regards to the standard operating procedures.

As cool as the app is, the features aren't what sold our customers on the product. What sold them is proof that we did the hard work.

The organization we built this product for was dealing with intense pressure. There was more work to do than hours in a day and on top of that, teams were pressured to scale their output while cutting delivery times in half. You can imagine the apetite they had for experimenting with a new app. Especially when these folks had already been strung along being forced to test new tools that didnt get the job done and pushed them further off track of their already aggressive timing requirements.

So how did we win over their trust? Let's back up a bit.

Before we built anything, we knew that we needed to collect some data. Not just usage data. Data that takes effort to collect. We needed to get out there and talk to real people experiencing the problem. We asked questions like: What was the current process? What were the pain points? Why did these pain points exist to begin with? What would make a difference for you specifically in the role you're currently in? How do you find the information you need now? What do you do if the information is missing?

Getting answers to those questions via virtual and in person interviews helped us to uncover some real opportunity areas. We recognized an opportunity to simplify a complex process and rally around the mission of making the path to great work impossible to miss. We would do that by giving our customers the right information at exactly the right time.

With that mission in mind, we purposely iterated through rapid product design sprints. At the end of each one, we'd test it with folks from our original target audience. Every iteration included the ability to track usage statistics so that we could go a layer deeper than spoken feedback during interviews. We needed to know if they'd actually use it. If they would come back and use it again later because it was resonating. We also built in fast feedback loops into every core feature of the app so that users could leave their feedback right then and there when they experienced something thought provoking.

Everything was progressing really well and my partner and I felt really confident that we'd hit the mark with this app.

Then came the rollout. We had some folks that we were going to need to win over. Our targeted pilot program was running behind schedule on critical delivery milestones. We knew this was going to be a tough sell and every second spent on something other than hitting that milestone was going to be viewed as a distraction. We also knew that in order to have success, we needed them to actually want to use this product. Sure we could get leadership to tell them they are going to use it, but what kind of feedback do we really expect in that scenario. We were proud of what we built and knew it was revolutionary to the teams that would use it.

We decided we'd find a way to deliver our sales pitch pitch in 5 minutes or less. Something they could watch in passing with a call to action so easy, they actually want to try it. What better way to do that than with a self sufficient walkthrough video that can play on repeat and cover all of the material. A classic case of show dont tell.

So we did exactly that.

Our 30 minute kickoff meeting started with late arrivals, 17 minutes of pushback, followed by a sliver of an opening for us to nail our pitch. We empathized with every pain point they expressed. We even shared datapoints we'd collected during our discover phase that reiterated those same pain points they were sharing. We were on the same team, and they felt it. We told them how every feature was built specifically to address those documented pain points, and we could see on their faces that we were winning their trust. Then we hit play. The video maneuvered through the key features, briefly explaining what they did, and why they were created in the first place. We gave a simple call to action that could be completed in 2-5 minute and offered an opportunity for all of us to share a success story together.

A meeting that started as a full court press to deflect new work ended with the most satisfying sentence of the whole journey:

"Can you share the link to this app?"

"Yes, we can."