Back in 2012, with 25 different team members spread across 4 different time zones, everything at KISSmetrics felt like it was moving glacially. Meetings were bungled and inefficient, and emails were a nightmare. It was like the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing.

This all changed dramatically when we did something super simple-we wrote down our product development process.

Our CTO John Butler put together what he called "Golden Motion Process," which made explicit the implicit product development process that we aspired to. The Golden Motion was a two-week period of time where as a company we focused on building a product feature or set of features to improve a single metric.

Our lead designer simplified the basic steps into a graphic:

This gave everyone on the team an easily digestible diagram to understand the process and refer back to.

To kick it off, and demonstrate our commitment to it, we flew team members in from around the world to a weekend summit in San Francisco. From the beginning, the focus was 100% on the idea that the Golden Motion was a "work in progress"-something that we could add to and iterate upon over time, just as we were improving our product.

Here's the beginning of the document that was passed around the team:

First off, I want to point out that the GM process is a work in progress-we learn something new from each GM and we iterate on the process every time we start a new GM. This GM is no different. We'll be testing some new ideas and getting feedback from you (and the other team) as to how the process is working. (In fact, we just made a few tweaks this afternoon as you may have noticed from the email that Steve sent out earlier today.)

That's when the remarkable happened. Before we wrote it down, we could only vaguely complain about the problems with our process and see its negative effects on the team. After we wrote it down, a switch flipped-we could actually work on, tweak and improve our process.

The next iteration of the process started out with a sketch that looked like this from one of our designers:

What started as someone's idea sketched out on the back of the napkin developed into a formal process that improved how the whole team operated. Stuck inside one person's head, it would have been useless.

The emphasis on the Golden Motion Process was constantly about shipping faster-but with an intent on learning, rather than building. By the end of the Golden Motion, we had blown our 25% OKR out of the water.

At a very basic level, the principle behind documentation is simple. It's literally about getting everyone on the same page. Everyone, from leadership down to individual team members, is essential to how product is developed. If a designer creates 5 different versions of a design, it's worth taking the extra 5-10 minutes to clarify to the next person why each version was made.

Building better products faster comes down to one guiding light: Do less and make it count for more.

This iteration introduced the problem team and the solution team:

• The Problem Team determined the direction of the product and figured out what we'd build next. It focused on conducting continuous customer development to dive into the root problems and opportunities around our product. It also was responsible for digging into the analytics around our product and A/B tests.
• The Solution Team was responsible for solving the problems identified by the Problem team. It was responsible for improving existing features and creating new ones.