Blog

Most product teams see the value of product discovery but find it difficult to allocate resources to it, often ending up not doing discovery at all. In this post we show you how we integrated product discovery methods into our ways of working in three key steps. We also talk you through the benefits that we derived from this and how we used a discovery sprint to de-risk 3 ideas. Enjoy!

As a fully remote company, we have always looked for ways to keep people working together. One thing that works well for us is to run remote hackathons, where our engineers get together to work on something unusual. These have been successful enough that we have made them a quarterly event.

We have posted previously about our process on our first blog post about how we got this started and our one in October 2020. We’ve refined our process over this time, and I’d like to share some advice on what we’ve learned from running them successfully over a year and a half.

At Overleaf, we run regular retrospectives, bringing the team together in a video call to reflect on our progress and think of ways to improve ourselves as an organisation. We also like to experiment with the format of these retrospectives, changing the structure and topic of the meeting to shift our focus and see ourselves from new angles each time. For our last retrospective, I asked the team to zoom out and look at Overleaf as a full system, through the lens of the Viable System Model.

Writing LaTeX can at times be tedious and painful. At Overleaf we try to minimize that pain and provide a more enjoyable, and overall focused experience allowing you to put content over commands. In this post we begin to learn about what we are doing at Overleaf to help combat this pain by building a smarter autocomplete feature.