Insights and Pitches
Jacob Duval
•
Nov 19, 2024
TL;DR
Insights: Thoughts, feelings, opinions. Add them directly through Rough, or using an integration.
Pitches: Large, scoped pieces of work, including a problem statement, a proposed solution, and some wireframes.
Rough will link Insights and Pitches automatically, based on their content.
What is an Insight?
Insights are how your team contribute their thoughts, feelings and opinions about your product. Insights provide a safe space to start product discussions with low friction. Insights are always written by humans, but can be backed by data like transcripts or urls. This is important as insights represent signal and cutting through the noise of data.
Insights can be inspired from many different sources.
Sales Calls
Discovery Conversations
Support requests
Market trends
Competitor analysis
Personal opinions
Rough will automatically link insights to pitches. This naturally guides people to engage with product decisions that they are most passionate about.
Rough will also link insights to other insights. This pulls up conversations that may have happened in the past, or discussions that have already been resolved. It's totally fine for your different team members to keep posting similar insights. Rough will use these insights to guide team members to the most relevant conversations.
Leaders, Product Managers, and Decision Makers can use insights to inform their product strategy or to measure alignment across their organisation.
What is a Pitch?
A pitch is a structured document, designed to promote better decision making. At minimum, it should have a problem statement so that everyone knows what problem is being solved. Pitches are a place to bring stakeholders into a conversation and align on a solution.
Linked insights should tell the story of what brought a pitch to life. A pitch with no linked insights signals poor alignment.
Traditionally, it takes dozens of meetings to lock down the scope of a pitch. With Rough, it should take zero.
A pitch is a reasonably large piece of work. Once you begin work on a pitch, it will become a project for a group of people. Those people will use Rough to report progress, or to communicate scoping changes as they build it. This allows stakeholders to stay informed without needing to jump into sync meetings.
Rough doesn't hold strong opinions about task tracking. Use a whiteboard, or one of the many online kanban boards out there. Teams should be able to make their own decisions about how to best execute a pitch.
How are Insights and Pitches related?
Insights represent the collective understanding that your company has about the market. Pitches are what you are going to do about that understanding.
Sometimes, a single, valuable insight will be enough to inspire a pitch. Usually, it will be a collection of insights from your team that will cause you to dive deeper into a shared problem. Either way, a pitch will probably have a large number of related insights that span several months. These related insights tell the story of how this pitch came to life, and who the key individuals are.
Once a pitch has been worked on, and finished, you can use insights to find important people that may be interested in giving feedback. These may be customers, prospects, or just team members with knowledge of the area.