Information Architecture & Product Development Penny Goodwin, Head of Product, Optimal Workshop

Product Manager

A Product Managers perspective on how we can embed Information Architecture into the product development life cycle

🚧 Current problems & barriers 🕸 Where the opportunity of Information Architecture is for PMs 🚀 Approaches to help and what you can do about it! Topics!

Trying to get work into the backlog od roadmap Trying to improve the product development process And… making Information Architecture part of normal development The problem 🛣 ♻ 🤝 There is a lack of understanding IA is often not considered when building product or services Or retrospectively, when things haven’t gone well… after the fact! For Information Architecture specifically:

Is there hope for IA?

Opportunity of Information Architecture Words Concepts Space

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Your product: A garden of weeds or flowers? Intentional or unintentional, Information Architecture is going to be a part of your product

Barriers 😄 Me! i.e. the role of a Product Manager ● Understanding your Product Manager ● Communicating with Product Managers 🏢 And: Lack of ownership ● Who is going to champion the IA for your organization?

Understanding your Product Manager 🤔 Why? Main gate keeper to the roadmap, backlog and the product development process

Communicating with your Product Manager

“We want to do some discovery and exploratory research. …including understanding our users ontology and taxonomy. After this we plan on modeling our users key abstractions and concepts. We will also complete a heuristic evaluation of key pages.” 🔍 🗣 🧠 🔨

“We want to do some discovery and exploratory research. Understand user problems …including understanding our users ontology and taxonomy. What words they use After this we plan on modeling our users key abstractions and concepts. How they make sense of these concepts We will also complete a heuristic evaluation of key pages.” Make changes based on best practices 🔍 🗣 🧠 🔨

Talk to your PM about: Strategy User story Data & metrics Simple plan with hypothesis

Let’s do an example

2002

2002 “Amazon on Wednesday will also begin to bundle products to encourage customers to buy more items. The program--which will typically pair a hot-selling product such as the movie "Gladiator" with an older title, such as "Spartacus"--offers consumers a discount if they buy the products together. Amazon will begin the initiative in its DVD department, but plans to expand it to other stores in the near future.” Company strategy

2002 Company Strategy: Bundle products Find the story: Interview customers who are completing a purchasing task Talk Data to me: e.g. right now bundling happens 2% of the time

Initiative: Improve bundling by testing variations with customers Hypothesis/Assumption: Improvements to our information architecture can increase the bundling rate from 2% to 3% 2002 Steps ● Interview customers on to understand what they think of key words and ideas on this page ● Map this out, compared to the ideas and words we use ● Design and test some prototypes ● Provide you with results and suggested information architecture improvements ○ Any changes could be run as an A/B experiment

2023

Who owns Information Architecture of the product?

● Brief reminder of IA, and/or maybe go into one aspect or concept within IA ● Give an example story from a person who uses our product or service/ 📚 How: Regularly Report on the IA of parts of your product/service How can we champion Information Architecture? ● Give the context of this key flow and metric within the company/product strategy ● Invite people (including leadership) to come listen to a customer

A Product Managers perspective on how we can embed Information Architecture into the product development life cycle To revisit:

Understand the opportunity 25 IA helps us build in a way that works with humans ○ Everything has an IA so you may as well be intentional about it ○ IA work can be an opportunity for business value too 💃 🕺

Work on the framing 26 PM’s can be a key gatekeeper to this work so focus on: ○ Understanding the role and your relationship with us ○ Communication & language you use ○ Framing it 🔑

Champion the work 27 Champion the IA in your organisation by adopting it as a faculty and becoming responsible for it ○ Report on IA, with stories, data and tying it to company product strategy ○ Help others see their part to play 🏅

Thank you! Special thanks to: Peter Harvey