Context-Pairing: For Long-Lasting Foundational Features
P.S. Lab Notes are written for and organized by Persona Types👤 persona types – we wanted to sort our content by the way people think and not across topics, because most topics are beneficial for people of all different backgrounds in product building. Our method allows for readers to hone in on what suits them, e.g. via perspective, lessons learned, or tangible actions to take. .
Context-pairing is a method of implementing a feature that ensures all the context known to date has been considered before starting work.
For example, our feedback form call to action was built with this approach, but not at first!
In one of the many iterations of our article pages (aka Lab Notes), we had to decide if we wanted to allow comments or not on the site. We are invested in the part of the Internet where there are humans and not bots, so we decided not to allow comments. We also felt that comments do not allow for intimate or real-time communication between author and reader. So this decision also kind of made us ask ourselves:
“How will we still enable feedback loops within this community?”
We wrestled with this concept for a while and marginally built solutions.
One of those was the feedback form – where we wanted readers to give us feedback on the article that would start an email-thread that we would be super active and committed to the conversations taking place there (that is still happening!)
Another, much later in our process, was our discord community The Juice Box (Coming soon – signup here!).
When we started the feedback form call to action at the bottom of our lab notes, we had a plain text, easy-to-miss muted sentence with an underlined link. When I showed the design to friends, I found myself scrolling past it too quickly.
How did we end up burying this thing that was very important to us, our mission, our values, our community?
Connected to company mission and values
Your feature should align to company mission, values, and all available context such as: near-term business priorities, product launches, etc. It is akin to perfecting the core shapes of a drawing before layering with details and polishing techniques like shadows and contrast.
For companies that plan to stay a while, delivering high value and on their promises.
This idea is born into long-term, sustainable approaches to developing product. Companies moving fast in hopes to sell quickly likely will not do this, but companies shipping products that will be around for years to come should implement this approach, especially for core functionality that relates to mission and values.
High upfront costs. High impact.
This context is likely highly influential but creeps the scope considerably for getting it done – which usually deters decision makers or executers from wanting to do it this way.
This purposeful scope-creep seems expensive and many people will try to convince you to do it the easy way and forget that extra context – but in actuality, it is more expensive to return to this area many times again to “fix it”.
Do not confuse with iterative processes
This is different than an iterative approach, where there is no context or data to consider before doing the task and only once that is tracked and lessons learned do you come back to this feature again.
All the tasks that impact each other. Like the feedback form, and Juice Box, and how they mention each other
Similar to the Marie Kondo thing about gathering all items of a category into one space, and then doing the task of sorting and filtering. This ensures cohesion and alignment, as well as efficiencies that avoid redundancy. With the context of ALL the books you own, you can better decide which books on project management should be kept, if any at all.
