They say “A picture is worth a thousand words”. If this picture is on people’s computers or mobile phones while they are not looking at it, it’s worth nothing. Just imagine if that picture is printed and pasted on a physical wall which they see every day, it’s worth a million words.

Now take this analogy and think about Physical walls with a lot of visuals, sticky notes, story cards etc. on those vs Digital boards (created in a software tool, e.g. JIRA, Trello etc.) used for your product.

Digital boards and detailed documentation in some wiki are excellent, but Physical walls/product boards have a more significant and positive cultural and emotional impact on teams.

I’m not going to make a comparison of both in this article, but I’ve used both physical and Digital walls in parallel. Though it may increase your work (as an iteration manager/scrum master/product owner) as you need to maintain information at two places, it’s worth the effort.

As per my experience, when my teams have had a physical wall with some of the critical artefacts visible on that, everybody:

• Understood what they’re developing / building
• Why’re they working on it
• Who they’re building it for
• What benefits does their work bring for the customers
• When are they delivering it

For this article, I’m assuming that team members are co-located, and everybody has access to a physical product wall with ample space. Even if there are a few team members offshore or at a different location, this still helps. I’m also assuming that you work in a product-based team.

I recommend making these 8 (or 10) key product artefacts visible on your Physical wall.

• 1. Product vision
• 2. Product goals along with Success Metrics
• 3.Product roadmap
• 4.Customer personas
• 5.Customer Journeys
• 6.User story map (if there’s an MVP being delivered first or the stories which are part of the next big release) / Product Backlog
• 7.Customer behaviour and interaction with the product (If your product is already available for customers, you want to know how are they interacting with it, and which features they use the most and the least.)
• 8.Current sprint progress board/wall
• 9.Wireframes/designs (talking about your main customer journey)
• 10. Product release plan

Having these artefacts visible on the wall helps the team understand:

• 1.Who, what, how for a Product (vision)
• 2.What does the product need to become, which will ultimately benefit the product team to achieve the product vision (goals)? It could be for the current phase of product development
• 3.Quantifiable metrics to measure success
• 4.Who’re the product customers, and how do they interact with the product? (customer personas and journeys help the team understand this)
• 5.What features is the team delivering? (is there any Beta, MVP? How does the current phase of development look? User story map helps the team understand this)
• 6.What are the next things team might be doing for the customers? (Product roadmap talks about this)
• 7.What is the team doing in the current sprint? (Sprint board helps the team understand the sprint goal, work in progress, issues and blockers which are impacting now, etc.)
• 8.What are the issues, risks, and blockers (risks, issues, and blockers can be made visible on the current Sprint board or the Product roadmap board or the User story map)
• 9.How are the customers using the product, what features they use the most and which they don’t interact with (Artefacts displayed for this could be heat maps, Cohort analysis, GA reports, A/B testing results etc.)

Some benefits of making these artefacts visible are as follows.

• 1.Teams talk about it and are bought into it (these artefacts are a continuous reminder for them, they know what customer problems they are solving)
• 2.Everybody has a common and shared understanding of the product
• 3.The team knows how the success of their work is measured. It helps them stay focused and do the important and required thingsQuantifiable metrics to measure success
• 4.Who’re the product customers, and how do they interact with the product? (customer personas and journeys help the team understand this)
• 5.Continuous collaboration — whenever people want to talk about specific parts of the product development plan, they can go to this wall, ask questions, update information etc.
• 6.If done correctly and updated continuously, the Agile wall becomes the living and breathing document and saves the team from extensive documentation of any sorts
• 7.Single source of truth — this one area becomes the only source of truth, and people don’t have to update information at multiple places
• 8.It provides a more personalised way of working with your product development as you can move cards/stickies around, create new ones, etc.

Visibility, however, is not a silver bullet; it alone doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get all the benefits. But all the discussions and collaboration which happen around the wall help heaps. Moreover, if you do make these artefacts visible just for the sake of doing it and don’t continuously update these, it’ll not have any positive impact on teams as the information will be outdated.

This article talks explicitly about Product / Business artefacts (which I found very useful) as I’ve not mentioned any technical artefacts such as architecture diagram, infrastructure/pipeline details, API design, etc.

Have you seen and used some other Product Artefacts which helped you and the team?

With love and coffee,
SK

This article was originally published by the author on Medium.