Rabea AbdelWahab

I will admit that this did not come to me naturally, as I find the milestone or feature, accomplishing the objective, yet another stepping stone to a much cooler milestone. But I was wrong, pausing to celebrate a team or a personal effort, is a great way to show appreciation and a huge morale booster, specially in remote teams. Even your celebrations, should contribute to setting your team on a clearer path to success. Whether it's a heartfelt email to everyone or giving someone a shoutout during a meeting attended by key product and business stakeholders, these gestures can serve as powerful motivators.

Video Calls - I needed to get better at knowing when a video conference call is needed, as instant messages accumulate on the same subject. So I would say this is a big one, to not lose the main discussion point and get decisions made by the end of it. For ideating or brainstorming, be ready with a collaboration tool, online drawing board, etc, so everyone's opinion is heard and logged. Instant Messaging - Managing conversations is key, so it would be very beneficial to lay the best practices from the beginning. Channels for certain products or big features of a product, threads for sub-conversations, this way people can effectively go back to a certain conversation. instead of wasting time going through the whole channel.

“It takes a village.” You might be the best communicator to your stakeholders and have done everything in the book to get more engagement from that unsupportive person or people, but still no traction. Then you might need to start looking into WHO bears the message to this stakeholder more than the message itself. It becomes a stakeholder team effort, where people sold on your vision can relay the message to the skeptical stakeholder, and this can be an effective strategy in certain scenarios.

No team would object to having the product vision communicated too frequently. I would say, over communicate the product vision so that every team member consistently understands the purpose behind their tasks and the significance of their contributions. This approach not only serves as ongoing motivation but also ingrains a clear definition of success in everyone’s mind. As a result, team members become more than just contributors; they turn into advocates both within and beyond the team.

I have been on both sides of Gamification, as a tester and user, and it is definitely a technique that is effective in certain sectors than others, not a small scope for your product, and worth A/B testing by itself to see how gamification can move the needle for your product. Gamification is heavily focused on user engagement, and to know the biggest value you get out of it, it has to be measured for relatively a long amount of time to gauge the change in behavior and engagement.

One thing i would add, as there is a lot of resources about A/B testing in general; the statistical significance between the versions you are A/B testing. you want to remove uncertainty as much as possible, so: - The sample size is important, a bigger sample size makes the results more reliable, it will drive confidence in your test. - Making sure that the allocation of users to both version A or B is as equally diverse and random as possible, it ensures that any significant difference between A and B are likely due to changes made, not external factors.