How Lemonade's tech team connects strategy to execution in Fibery

👋  My name is Shlomi and I lead the product operations at Lemonade. As part of my role, I work with product and R&D to find ways for them to maximize their potential. That’s why I love finding tools and developing processes that are efficient and beneficial to all the stakeholders involved.

If you want to hear more, you can DM me via LinkedIn.

About two years ago we were on the search for a tool that would manage our planning and execution. We were looking for something to replace the execution tool we were using (Kanbanize), and the many tools each group used for planning (Google Sheets, Asana, Airtable).

It wasn’t easy. We reviewed more than 40 tools, from classic ones like Jira, Asana, and Monday to newer ones (back then) like Linear, Shortcut, and Clickup.

We found many tools that were excellent at doing one or two of the many things we were looking for. Some were great for planning, but the execution wasn’t covered at all. Some were great for tracking dev work, but couldn’t effectively manage planning beyond a few squads. In Fibery we found the ability to do both at scale.

How do you track OKRs?

Fibery supports us through our entire lifecycle from the objective to the dev task. Each initiative is connected to a specific KR and tracked accordingly. This gives us a high-level view of our OKRs, and the ability to zoom in on the progress in each area. In addition, we can also see how many of our tasks and how much of our time are actually spent on OKRs vs work to run the business.

How do you use Fibery for Feedback Management?

We started to manage both our bug reporting process and feature requests in Slack, and it worked at a small scale, but now it requires a more scalable process as Lemonade continues to grow.

We were trying to create something that, on the one hand, would be as accessible and as easy as Slack was for our team, but on the other hand, something that would fit in the dev squads’ current processes. That's why it was clear we needed Fibery.

It started with a form in Slack that connects to one of the ticket types in Fibery. But with a bit of help from our devs, and with Fibery Automations, we made the process much more efficient and user-friendly:

• We connected the comments section in Fibery to the Slack thread so every comment is sent in the thread and everything added to the thread is documented in the ticket.
• We created automatic updates in Slack for every status change in the ticket.
• We created an auto-triage process that assigns the ticket to the right squad.
• We added automation so that if the squad decides a bug/request needs development it automatically creates a dev ticket.

The great thing is that even today we keep adding more automations to the process where we see improvement opportunities.

How do you use Fibery for Software Development?

Fibery is instrumental from OKRs to minor tasks. It’s a huge part of how we succeed.

Each KR is pushed by an Initiative, which is broken into Features. The Features are broken into development Tasks by the developers. Once a week the squad leads review the different tasks and add new ones to the sprint. At the end of each sprint, we use a Fibery Report to review what percentage of what we planned to do we actually did.

Without a doubt, it’s the flexibility. This is what allows us to support different processes and evolve existing ones as the company grows and changes.

Other tools are great in supporting one specific process, e.g. OKRs setting, customer feedback, and more, but they usually limit you to a very structured way of working. This might be good for a specific stage in a company’s development, but eventually, it becomes a problem. Fibery has a great advantage. It provides the ability to connect everything — both processes and information.

The other big thing is how great the Fibery Support team is. Always ready to help, and very receptive to feedback and requests.

After the latest improvements (such as the ability to add Views to Docs, Relation Boards, and Navigation Panel updates), the next thing we would love to see getting some attention is the Roadmap view. The current view serves some basic needs but can be improved to be on par with other parts of Fibery. Currently, there is no way to present planned vs actual, and show dependency. And the view is not easy to read and handle.

We also think creating some well-defined dependency mechanisms would be great. While it is possible to create some connection between entities it would be great to have a more structured way to manage and view it.

Well since my current position is Product Operations I will give a tip to my fellow product ops: never be too in love with a process/tool/framework you created because before you know it, your org will change and the processes you created need to change with it.