As your internal teams begin working together to build out your Appcues flows, it’s important to consider how your team, and your flows, will stay organized in a way that’s clear and makes sense. Here are some best practices for using Appcues across teams!

Tips for managing your team

• Have a plan: Internally, have a plan to track all experiences that are in development, live, and archived, assigned with corresponding details such as experience name, goal & success metric, targeted audience, POC, date/timeline. You can use the Appcues Team Template to foster the right discussions and keep you and your team focused and organized. Having a central place to see the content in progress, live or executed previously, along with their corresponding goals is a great resource not just for you, but for anyone in your company who wants to see a snapshot of what's going on in Appcues.
• Train everyone! You may think only a handful of individuals within your organization need to use Appcues, however, we often see several teams and departments wanting to take advantage of the Appcues tool once it's implemented. To get ahead of this, we recommend training any teams and individuals who may want to take advantage of Appcues to ensure you are all starting off on the same foot.
• Leverage Permissions. Give all your teams access to the Appcues account and flow creation, or monitor by Editor, Publisher, and Administrator roles (roles will vary by plan) to balance access, flexibility, and oversight all at once.
• Establish one "Appcues Lead" per team. This person should generally be responsible for all campaigns for the team, managing their teammates, and ensuring that content plays well with others. In many organizations, this individual is part of the Product, CX, or Marketing team, but choose the team and individual who best aligns with your overall goals.
• Quarterly strategy reviews. Outside of regular touchpoints on your experiences, you may also find it helpful to revisit your product-led strategy quarterly either after or alongside your regular business quarterly planning to see how and where Appcues can help drive your goals and outcomes.
• Have an internal communication channel. Whether your organization uses Slack, Teams, or another chat platform, make communicating fast and easy by creating a dedicated Appcues channel for discussing, posting updates, and sharing details about your content. A slack channel, wiki-style page, or internal system can make collaboration with other team leads easy and transparent. For example, our Growth Team (who own Appcues) has a channel specific to this topic where they'll post "Hey, I'm going to publish X Flow to Y segment tomorrow. Let me know if you have any objections or want to provide feedback ahead of launch".

Tips for managing your process

• Define your goals.  This seems obvious but many fail to define the end goals they hope to achieve. For some, this might be clarifying the User Onboarding process, deflecting support tickets, or providing usage expansion tracks. Whatever you ultimately want to see as the outcome, define that and form a measurable metric around it.
• Create a meeting cadence. Meeting weekly or biweekly to review new requests and interactions, and assessing the performance of your current experiences prevents a backlog and ensures your user experience is on point.
• Define an approval process anchored in goals. Once you have defined your goals and measurable metrics, it’s a great idea to establish an approval process that aligns with those goals. For example, you may create an internal request form for new or updated Appcues flows and on this form, ask the requestor to define how this request will support and align to company goals.
• Determine a process for requesting new experiences. There are many ways to track requests, but it’s helpful to determine how your internal teams will stay organized early on. Many customers opt for spreadsheets, Slack channels, or project tracking tools like Asana, Clubhouse, or Jira. For example, when someone wants to build/publish a new Flow, use a Typeform to collect details about the Flow. The Appcues owner(s) can manage submissions and ultimately determine whether to approve or deny the requested Flow and help manage next steps.

Tips for a great end-user experience

• Utilize Flow diagnostics. When multiple teams are involved, it's important to have a clear picture of who you are displaying a Flow to and why. The Diagnostics Tool can help you and your teams identify why a Flow is not showing to an intended user(s) and provide options for fixing it.
• Set design guidelines.  Having an internally agreed-upon design outline for things like fonts, colors, styling, etc. will help all team members stay on-brand and maintain a unified design experience for all end-users.
• Establish copy guidelines. Similar to having a design guideline, you may also consider creating a brief, internal guideline on copy, phrasing, and terminology to ensure all creators are using clear and consistent phrasing.
• Know your audience.  Are your users less-than-tech savvy, on tight timelines, or need consultative assistance? Provide added layers of assistance or an option to contact someone on your team to get to the core of what your audience needs and wants. Understanding who your content is targeting and what they want to get out of their experience will help you when creating/updating your content.
• Get some inspiration and Good UX. Looking for ideas or curious about how other organizations have created cohesive experiences? Check out the Good UX space to get creative and aligned as a team!
• Connect with professional services to consult on guidelines. Have a great idea but lack the time, knowledge, or resources to get this out the door? No sweat! Our in-house Professional Services team can consult or help you build your ideal user experience in Appcues!
• Collect feedback. Once content goes live, be sure to collect internal and external feedback on how users are interacting with it.

Tips for leveraging Appcues tools

• Embrace Tags. Use tags for the different teams, and have them "tag" their flows accordingly. Create a tag for "Production" and "QA/Test" to keep track of where your flows are within the publishing process. Create a tag for lifecycle, so you can easily see which flows are geared toward different audiences, such as "trialer", "paid users" or "advanced user". Using tags will allow your team to easily sort and see only the flows that are useful to them.
• Test drive. Appcues provides tools to review and share your flows with others on your team before they go live to an end-user. Take advantage of Preview Mode, Test Mode, Publishing to an internal environment, and/or Creating internal segments to get the full end-user experience before you go live.
• Offer a resource hub with Launchpad.  Launchpad allows you to provide on-demand tutorials and announcements in a compartmentalized area without intruding on the user's experience.
• Snooze a flow. If you find that you need several Flows to satisfy all of your teams and initiatives, you may also consider using ‘snooze a flow’ through the use of custom buttons and tracked events. This allows your end-users to be prompted with your Flow at a later time when they aren't as occupied.
• Create a (required) naming convention. Being able to easily read an experience's title and know what it is can increase your team's efficiency and keep your content organized. Consider creating a naming convention that all users will adopt to maintain consistency across teams, such as [SURVEY]Usability task survey: Understand Analytics (Feb23) (Tristan).

Looking for more training content? Check out Appcues University for the Appcues Basics Certification and sign up for upcoming webinars!