Two years ago, businesses around the world had to adapt to remote and hybrid working models at the height of the COVID pandemic. For Lucid, this meant moving to 100% remote work virtually overnight.
This transition to remote work revealed an urgent market need for technology solutions that could replicate and improve in-person collaboration and creativity in a virtual setting. Lucid saw an opportunity to build an innovative solution that could better enable our customers with distributed teams to brainstorm together and seamlessly move from ideation to planning.
But remote product development is difficult to accomplish. From working cross-functionally to aligning on a shared vision, remote work presents unique challenges to the traditional development model.
Despite these challenges, the team at Lucid set and met the ambitious goal to develop and launch Lucidspark—a virtual whiteboard and infinite collaborative canvas—in less than six months.
So, how did we do it?
Here are three takeaways our team had during our remote product development on Lucidspark.
3 takeaways for remote product development teams
1. Lean into and celebrate wins.
Building Lucidspark remotely on a tight deadline was an ambitious undertaking. Getting the product over the finish line required a massive shift in priorities and collective support across the company.
“Many existing teams across the organization had to push back other projects to support these efforts, and a new product meant major changes to existing areas like licensing and subscriptions, new domains, admin settings, and more,” said Margaret Kamerath, senior software engineer at Lucid. “It was really a team effort to adapt to this new priority on our roadmaps.”
Celebrating team wins and connecting the product to the real-world impact it had for customers was key to sustaining innovation and team motivation month over month.
Here are three ways to lean into team successes:
Connect the work to customer feedback.
What insights did you gain from a customer feedback cycle? What worked well for them?
Keeping the work closely tied to customer feedback not only improves the final product but helps motivate the team when they see the benefits their work is having for real people who will use it.
Show appreciation for teams who innovate and work hard to bring a feature or product to market quickly.
Recognition was critical for the Lucidspark development team. With such a tight timeline, engineers were working longer hours under pressure—a recipe for burnout.
“We rewarded people with additional incentives and tried to recognize the effort and sacrifices they were making in other places,” said Lindsey Martin, director of user experience at Lucid.
“For example, we had a design review that went from 10 am to noon on Fridays, and then everyone was expected to take the rest of the afternoon off. So you might have put in extra hours during the week, but we tried to offset that with a Friday afternoon that was free.”
Do a retrospective after launch to showcase what worked really well, including any lessons learned for next time.
A retrospective is a valuable tool for highlighting team wins and showcasing great work individually and collectively.
”You can ideate right in Lucidspark. It's perfect for pretty much every step of our process,” said Kamerath. “Our retrospective template makes it easy to facilitate a brainstorming session with the team and come out of it with real action items.”
