Project onboarding can significantly impact the success (or failure) of your project.

Let me show you how.

So your boss hands you a new project to run and mentions that some people are already lined up to help get it done. Great, you think. You call the first one on the list, but they don’t really know anything about the project beyond the fact they’ve been ‘volunteered’ by their team leader.

This is where you switch into onboarding mode.

As a project manager, one of the first things to do is get the project team together. You need to build a team that has a common goal and that knows how the work is going to get done. That doesn’t happen overnight but you can certainly influence the speed (and willingness) of people to get involved with your project if you introduce them to the work in a structured way.

In this article, I’ll share my top tips for onboarding new people to a project team. I’ll also draw on the experience of other practicing project managers who have shared their stories so you can quickly get your projects off the ground with a team that knows what to do. To jump to a specific section click the link below.

• The stakeholder life cycle
• Project onboarding: Getting the team engaged
• Project onboarding: why the project is important
• Project onboarding: Build long-lasting, positive relationships
• Using checklists for project onboarding
• Project onboarding: Next steps

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Welcome emails are the one email you should be sending.

Why?

Because they have a 91.43% open rate, can create an 86% lift in unique open rate, and have on average 5x the click-through rate of a standard email marketing campaign. I’ve uncovered heaps more stats that I’ll share with you later in the post.

For this article I took the time to subscribe to 40 top tech blogs and applied quantitative research to categorize and break down their welcome emails. Hopefully, this article will offer some kind of insight into how to write kick-ass welcome emails.

If you’re asking yourself whether your welcome emails should include power words, links, emojis, rich formatting, or plain text, or what’s the best way to sign off a welcome email – then this post is for you. Specifically, I’ll cover:

• What are welcome emails & why are they important?
• How welcome emails have changed over time
• Welcome emails broken down
• A quantitative approach to welcome emails: The results
• Welcome email teardowns
• Email marketing & Process Street

Let’s get to it.
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“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.” – George Patton

“Once I have X, I can do Y.”

This phrase is the defining characteristic of the toolbox fallacy: thinking you can’t do something until you have the right tool.

The toolbox fallacy is self-deception disguised as excuses or a lack of “tools”. The issue with these tools is that you believe that you need them and thus, can’t (or won’t) start a project without them.

“As soon as my Apple Watch arrives, I’ll start training for the 5K.”

The problem is when X arrives, do you crack on and get started with the Y? Often times, it’s too easy to continue down the slippery slope of toolbox logic.

“My Apple Watch arrived, but now I need a coaching app – which I am yet to have downloaded.”

So, how do you overcome the toolbox fallacy? Simple: You default to action. In other words, you get the ball rolling – whether you have all the tools you think you need or not.

The solution, in a sense, is to be more agile.

In this post I’ll be looking at how to overcome the toolbox fallacy by putting the systems in place to move fast, and with virtue. I’ll try to address:

• How do you plan and structure clear action items, so you can move fast and be sure you’re making the right decisions?
• How will you move fast without breaking things (by things I mean humans)?

And, to sum things up I’ll take a look at how we at Process Street use OKRs to decide when it is we should be moving fast vs when we should be slowing down.

To jump to a specific section click the appropriate links below:

• Toolbox fallacy: Once I have X, I can do Y
• Moving fast with the toolbox fallacy
• A framework to move fast (& with virtue)
• How our OKRs help us avoid the toolbox fallacy

Let’s start by unpacking the toolbox fallacy in more depth!
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“The global property management software market size was valued at USD 1.58 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.2% from 2020 to 2027.” – Grand View Research, Property Management Software Market Size

Real estate is evolving. And technology – or to be more specific – top property management software is the driving force behind the evolution.

Fortunately for all of you real estate market players, this post is here to help you get clued up on all things tech, so you can stock your property management digital toolkit.

To find out about top property management software and to understand how it can help you mitigate human error, enhance communication, save time, and automate recurring tasks – keep on scrolling.

Or alternatively, to skip to a specific section, click the links below:

• An introduction to property management software
• How can top property management software streamline your processes
• Top property management software
• Useful real estate tools
• Further resources for your real estate toolbox

Let’s get started!
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Imagine if Google broke. That one day, it just stopped working.

I know it’s a scary thought…

In 2013, Google actually did break, although, only momentarily (for a whole 5 minutes to be exact). The outage affected all of its services, meaning Youtube, Gmail, Google search, Google Maps … everything stopped working.

The outcome?

Global web traffic plummeted by a whole 40% and the blip is estimated to have cost Google around $500,000.

If your product or service suddenly stops working as intended, then it’ll cost your organization a hefty sum, too.

That’s why, in this quick but informative Process Street post, you’ll learn all about test plan templates and how to use one yourself to ensure your product or service runs like a well-oiled machine. All-day, every day.

Alternatively, to jump to a specific section, click appropriate the link below:

• What is a test plan?
• What is a test plan template?
• Where the software test plan began
• Best practices for creating a test plan template
• Software test plans today
• How to write a test plan template

Let’s get started!
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This is a guest post from Margo Ovsiienko, you can find her website at margoleads.com. Margo is a tech enthusiast and a growth marketing strategist. She is passionate about topics related to SaaS growth, startup strategy, and IT development.

To outsource or not to outsource? The eternal tech question, and a persistent hot topic in tech communities. How do you manage your expectations against your budget and be sure you’re finding the right team for the job? This can be especially challenging for anyone lacking experience with hiring (which is not a task to take lightly).

Building an in-house team vs outsourcing those efforts can depend heavily on the kind of product you’re trying to build; how complex is the feature set? What does your roadmap look like for the next 12 months? These kinds of questions will help you to figure out whether or not your best bet would be in-house or outsourced.

For long-term, committed projects, building a trusty in-house team is almost certainly your best bet. But working with an outsourced, remote team has its place and also comes with many advantages, such as reduced set-up or training time (in the case of outsourced design and development teams) and ability to rapidly develop and tweak early stage concepts (often for a cheaper rate) when searching for the ideal product-market fit.

So, how can you build a SaaS product that gains traction fast before you run out of limited funds?

In this Process Street article, we’ll consider how to build a SaaS product that gains traction fast on a constrained budget, and kick-start your growth.

• What you need to know before you build a SaaS product
• How to validate your product idea
• Key steps of product development
• To outsource or not to outsource?
• How to build a SaaS product: Key takeaways

Let’s get started!
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According to a survey performed by KPMG and Forrester only 34% of decision-makers say they feel confident in their data …

A sad state of affairs.

Fortunately for the 66% of decision-makers who cannot rely upon their data, there is an answer *drum roll please* . . . the Enlightenment . . . of data.✨

Who would’ve known a school of thought that revolutionized the 17th and 18th centuries could be harvested to optimize our present-day data management?

“The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the sovereignty of reason.” Dorinda Outram, Panorama of the Enlightenment

Governed by a philosophy of rationality the Age of Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason) made decisions based upon a single source of power or primary source of knowledge. The source of truth and knowledge in this instance was determined by the senses.

Single Source of Truth or SSOT, the focus of this Process Street blog post, also takes the sovereign approach.

However, rather than the senses, the sovereign power for SSOT is a reliance on un-replicated, autonomous, self-contained, and enhanced data.

To find out more about SSOT and how it can enlighten your data processes, keep reading.

Alternatively, to jump to a specific section of the post, click the appropriate link below.

• The path to Data Enlightenment
• ‎What is Single Source of Truth
• The role of data for Single Source of Truth
• ‎How to obtain a Single Source of Truth
• ‎Single Source of Truth in practice
• ‎Single Source of Truth is Data Enlightenment

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This is a guest post from Adam Enfroy. He writes about how to blog like a startup to 450,000 monthly readers at www.adamenfroy.com, & teaches his audience of New School Bloggers the tactics he used to scale his blog to $80k/month MRR.

As a product marketer, increasing your landing page conversion rates through optimization has a significant impact on your bottom line.

You spend most of your time running A/B tests and tracking your conversion rates because you’re trying to optimize conversions and prove the ROI of your PPC campaigns.

Nonetheless, you still can’t seem to grasp why your visitors behave the way they do.

So, what’s your solution?

Using qualitative research to understand the reasons behind your visitors’ behavior so that you optimize your landing page and skyrocket your conversion rates.

In this article, I’ll explain the ROI of qualitative research, different methods to conduct it, and how to analyze your research data within your database. I’ll also demonstrate how Process Street’s superpowered checklists can help you perform optimized qualitative user research.

To jump to a specific section of the post click the appropriate link below. Alternatively, just keep scrolling.

• The value of qualitative user research for landing page optimization
• How to analyze your qualitative user research
• Landing page optimization in action using qualitative user research
• Use qualitative user research and boost your conversion

Ready? Let’s get started.

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This is a guest post written by Andre Pinantoan who is currently the Head of Growth at AI coaching startup, Fingerprint for Success. He was previously Head of Growth at multiple high growth companies such as Canva.

The COVID-19 pandemic has plunged a lot of us into the deep end, and many people have had to adapt to new ways of working. This includes how to effectively run remote meetings on a regular basis that actually have some productive value.

It’s one thing to hold a virtual conference once in a while. But when it’s one of your primary tools for communicating, coordinating, and just generally getting your team on the same page, it can either be the best thing for efficiency or a complete failure.

Truth be told, research shows that meetings already had a bad reputation pre-COVID. A survey conducted in 2018 with more than a thousand workers in the US showed that one in four people felt meetings are a waste of time. Add to that the “online” factor, and conducting useful meetings starts to get way harder for a lot of people.

I personally felt the steep learning curve during the initial months of adapting to our new way of working. As a team leader, I’ve always felt that being physically present and giving my time to members has been a key way of supporting them. So I had to find a way to channel my presence digitally.

Through these challenges, we’ve learned and adapted. As always, it’s crucial to understand what’s not working and try to make things better. Along the way, we even found some surprising benefits of conducting meetings virtually.

In this Process Street article, I will share the difficulties we faced when transitioning to full-time remote communication and how my team managed to overcome them.

• Problem 1: Too many unnecessary meetings
• Problem 2: Non-verbal cues are harder to express, read, and, utilize
• Problem 3: Introverts get lost in the conversation more easily, and extroverts dominate
• Problem 4: Action points get forgotten post-meeting
• Problem 5: Technological and “ways of doing things” problems
• Problem 6: People get tired and lose concentration faster”
• Collaborate, but don’t forget to connect
• Using Process Street to run remote meetings (that don’t suck)

Let’s get started!
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Once upon a time, the island nation of Sri Lanka was called “Serendip,” a word derived from Sanskrit which means Dwelling-Place-of-Lions. (Lovely, right?).

Serendip provides the setting for the Persian fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip”, who throughout their travels, stumbled upon an uncanny amount of luck.

The story of the princes and their relationship with luck is where the wonderful word Serendipity comes from. Serendipity, meaning accidental, unexpected, random, wonderful, happy, luck.

It is luck, or rather, how to make your own luck, that is the focus of this Process Street blog.

This post embraces and explains tech entrepreneur Jason Robert’s concept of “Luck Surface Area”, in the hope of helping you, the reader, increase your luck both in life and in business.

To jump to a specific section of the post click the appropriate link below. Alternatively, just keep scrolling to learn about the three lucky princes, Luck Surface Area, and how you can make your own luck.

• Serendipity and making your own luck
• How to make your own luck
• Make your own luck: The Luck Surface Area equation
• 5 actionable ways you can increase your luck surface area and make your own luck

Feelin’ lucky? ✨

Let’s get started.

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