Structure Your Workspace

How Many Workspaces Should You Use?

Vistaly supports creating multiple workspaces.

We often get asked: “Should I have one workspace or multiple workspaces?”

This decision has many downstream effects, so let’s start here. Structuring your workspace is fairly straightforward when only you have one product trio using it. It’s more complicated when entire product teams (i.e. multiple product trios) use Vistaly, each focusing on their own outcome and doing their own discovery.

The magic of Vistaly is being able to connect day-to-day product work to customer outcomes and better business results. So if you have one product, you’re better off having just one workspace.

The danger of having your whole team work out of one workspace is the workspace can get pretty big. But with a bit of structure, we can get the best of both worlds.

Step One: Start With A KPI Tree

Model important business metrics to see how they connect and influence one another.

This is a good start, but these business metrics (like ARR, retention rate, or ARPU) are lagging indicators, and they actually happen as a result of your product creating value for your customers.

The next step is to identify and extend the KPI tree with the leading indicators. To do this, take a look at the user/customer journey and detail the steps that users take as they try, purchase, and continue to use your product.

Example - three leading indicators that are strong predictors of whether or not trialing users convert to paid subscriptions.

This will help you see which behaviors or moments of value are good predictors of the parent KPI.

Add these leading indicators to the KPI tree to create a complete picture of the levers you can pull to help grow the company.

Step Two: One Outcome Per Trio

The next step is to pick which of these leading indicators, if improved, would drive the most growth for the company and create a SMART around for improving it.

These are called Outcomes, and this process is the crux of becoming a more Outcome-oriented product team.

Ideally, you would assign one Outcome to each product trio. These Outcomes are enabling constraints that focus the trio on improvements you are confident will lead to growth within the company, while still giving them the freedom to figure out the best way to achieve them.

The end result is you can have the whole team’s work in one workspace, while still allowing trios to focus on just the parts of the tree they’re actively working on.

Vistaly Pro-tips for Making Large Workspaces Feel Small

Show/Hide Only The Areas You’re Working On

Vistaly has an advanced system for showing and hiding content. It’s pretty simple: if you’re working on improving one outcome (or OKR), hide everything above it so you’re only looking at the opportunities and solutions for that outcome. Vistaly will remember where you left off when you leave and come back.

Use filters

Filters are great for showing only a small portion of your tree. There are some use cases where they are particularly useful like:

Show me only what’s new in the workspace.
Show me only the areas I’m responsible for.
Show me only the areas where a particular label is applied.

Search

cmd+k or win+k will be your best friend. Use it to search across all your cards and insights to find what you need, and jump right to it.

Archive Opportunities Once They’re Addressed

A bulk of the tree size will come from the discovery work a trio conducts and all of the ideas and experiments they run. These are helpful to keep in the tree while the outcome is being worked one, but archiving when you move on will keep the tree clean and relevant.

Read more on how to use archiving effectively.