Structure Your Workspace

How Many Workspaces Should You Use?

TLDR; you should probably use one workspace unless you have multiple separate products

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 connection day-to-day product work to customer outcomes and better business results. If you split your teams work across several different workspaces, there’s not way to get a unified view of how everyone’s work fits together.

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 (aka Driver Tree)

Start by modeling important business metrics into a KPI Tree so you can see how they connect and influence one another.

This is a good start, but these businesses metrics (like ARR, or 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 out the steps that users take as they try, purchase, and continue to use your product.

Example - the team found these three leading indicators are strong predictors of trialers converting 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.

Get Buy-in From Leadership

As a product manager, it can be nerve-wracking to ask for help or feedback from your boss (or even the CEO) when you’re drafting a KPI tree. You might feel like you’re putting your neck on the line, but involving leadership in this process can actually build trust in a big way.

By reaching out, you’re showing that you’re serious about aligning your work with the company’s goals, and you’re open to learning.

It might feel risky at first, but it’s a great opportunity to strengthen relationships with leadership and get the support you need to drive real impact.

Invite them to the workspace and work together on the KPI Tree portion of getting started.

More Resources

Some of our favorite articles by other folks creating KPI Trees and identifying the leading indicators of growth:

KPI Trees: How to Bridge the Gap Between Customer Behavior, Product Metrics, and Company Goals by Petra Willie and Shaun Russell
Driver Trees — How and Why to use them to Improve your Business by Curtis Stanier
Leading and Lagging Indicators: How to Measure the Progress of Product OKRs by Tim Herbig
To Find Outcomes, Follow The User Journey by Josh Seiden
Why You Should Break Down Outcomes, NOT Initiatives by Ant Murphy

Step Two: One Outcome (or Key Result) Per Trio

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

These goals that measurable, are focused on improving some user behavior (remember, they’re the things you have to actually impact because they’re upstream of business results), and are timebound, are called Outcomes.

This process is the crux 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.

If you’re trying to get your Product team working in a more Outcomes-focused way, some books that will help coworkers and leadership get excited about this way of working are:

Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres
Outcomes over Ouput by Josh Seiden
Empowered by Marty Cagan
Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri

Vistaly Features To Navigate Workspaces Faster

Adding this structure to your workspace will allow teams to focus on the Outcome they’re working on. Here are a few more Vistaly features that can help you concentrate on the areas of your workspace that are important:

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 key result), 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 you what’s new in the workspace, or showing you all the cards you’re responsible for.

Some popular ways to use filters are:

only show work assigned to your trio
only show high value opportunities
only show work in progress

Create complex filters and save them to quickly get at the data you need.

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.