Two Facet – Details, episodes & analysis

When gathering feedback from your users, do you have any preferred method? User Interviews, Online Reviews, NPS, Forms… there are so many tools out there!

In this episode we dive into the world of customer feedback discussing, comparing and ranking the most popular methods. Tune in for a fun chat on what works, what doesn't, and some surprises along the way!

• Learn when to use different tools and tricks!
• Hear real life stories about our past experiences
• Find out how to mix different feedback tools for success!

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Do you like what we do?

You can buy us a coffee 🤗 ☕ http://ko-fi.com/twofacet

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We invite you to continue the conversation and give us feedback!

Twitter: @TwoFacetPodcast

Email: twofacetpodcast@gmail.com

Hosts: Juncal González, Matt Mikulski

Music: Sunlight by Lightblow

What is the role of the high fidelity prototypes when crafting Digital Products? Do we always need them? We don’t have a clear answer but in this episode we debate the purpose, risks and pitfalls of this type of prototypes, as well as concept designs. Choosing the design approach is a strategic decision that can be influenced by stakeholders, the stage of the project and the purpose we have when building our design artefact. Join us for this episode where we put prototypes in question and try to answer the design dilemma: High-fidelity or not?
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Do you like what we do? You can buy us a coffee 🤗 ☕ http://ko-fi.com/twofacet ······················································· We invite you to continue the conversation and give us feedback! Twitter: @TwoFacetPodcast Email: twofacetpodcast@gmail.com Hosts: Juncal González, Matt Mikulski Music: Sunlight by Lightblow

There are many prioritization strategies available for choosing the next features/experiments for our product… but how do you decide which one to use?

In this episode we talk about the two tools we use the most in our team: ICE (Impact Confidence Effort) scoring and OST (Opportunity Solution Tree), from the book Continuous Discovery Habits from Teresa Torres.

We compare them and discuss the similarities they have, like being collaborative and continuous tools, as well as always having a well defined goal to guide us in the process.

We also talk about what makes them different: the way they are visualized, the type of discussion they prompt and the output we get when using them.

And when to use each one of them? ICE score is more useful when we have a clear direction of the project, whereas OST is stronger when the direction is not defined. And they can be combined too! In this episode we explain how.

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If you like what we do you can buy us coffee 💜 ☕ http://ko-fi.com/twofacet

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We invite you to continue the conversation and give us feedback!
Twitter: @TwoFacetPodcast
Email:  twofacetpodcast@gmail.com
Hosts: Juncal González, Matt Mikulski
Music: Sunlight by Lightblow

Is there a moment in time for doing product discovery?

When building digital products, the problems we are facing are complex and unknown, so it’s difficult to say we can find the answers by performing a one time activity. And even more, if this activity is outsourced, it reduces the capabilities of the team to make good product decisions.

Teresa Torres in her book “Continuous Discovery Habits” explains the benefits of approaching the discovery phase as a team routine, so it becomes a regular process performed by the product trios on a weekly basis.

In this episode we explain how are we’ve been applying some of these habits inside our team, how we’ve adapted the process to our specific needs and the benefits we are getting from it.

These are the main tools and practices from the book we are currently using on a weekly basis:
- Product Trios
- Continuous Interviewing
- Opportunity Solution Tree
- Ideation and Brainstorming
- Experimentation

And we are also combining our Continuous Discovery Habits with Shape Up: using the former for the shaping track and the latter for the building track. Tune in to learn how we do it!

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If you like what we do you can buy us coffee 💜 ☕ http://ko-fi.com/twofacet

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We invite you to continue the conversation and give us feedback!
Twitter: @TwoFacetPodcastÇ
Email:  twofacetpodcast@gmail.com
Hosts: Juncal González, Matt Mikulski
Music: Sunlight by Lightblow

Best product teams are cross-disciplinary, small, and autonomous. Their composition varies from company to company and from project to project and yet they have a set of essential characteristics in common.In this episode, we discuss what is a product team, what makes it different from “classic” teams, and which are the main skills needed for a successful product team. These abilities translates into different roles depending on the company or the product:

• Understand the user:
  • UX / Product Researcher
• UX / Product Designer
• Product Manager / Product Owner
• Data Analyst
  
• Understand the market and the competitors:
• Product Manager / Product Owner
• UX / Product Researcher
• UX / Product Designer
  
• Understand the business strategy:
• Product Manager / Product Owner
• Product Strategist
  
• Understanding feasibility:
• Developers
• QA
  
• Defining, executing and delivering the solution
• UX / Product Designer
• Developers (FE, BE, etc.)
• QA
• Project Manager / Delivery Manager
  
• Market the solutions:
• Marketing specialist
• Product Manager
  
• Evaluate the outcome:
• Product Manager
• Data Analyst
• Whole team if possible

Last but not least, we talk about Product Trios: a model for collaborative product leadership that represents the intersection between the 3 key disciplines in product:

• Desirability: Design and Research
• Viability: Engineering
• Feasibility: Product

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If you like what we do you can buy us coffee 💜 ☕ http://ko-fi.com/twofacet

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We invite you to continue the conversation and give us feedback!
Twitter: @TwoFacetPodcast
Email:  twofacetpodcast@gmail.com
Hosts: Juncal González, Matt Mikulski
Music: Sunlight by Lightblow

How do you frame the first iteration/s of a product or feature? How do you decide where to start building it? We like to use the ICE scoring framework to help us prioritize our ideas based on Impact, Confidence, and Effort.

This episode is a tutorial where we show you step by step how we create an idea bank and go through the process of evaluating the different ideas using ICE scoring. We use a real example from our experience defining the first iteration of a video-consultation tool to provide telemedicine services.

For the process of ICE scoring, first, you need to define a clear outcome of the project and a target group of users for your first iteration. Then, you brainstorm the ideas of the features that your product will have. Once you are happy with the list of ideas, you have to assess them towards the outcome and target users, as well as compare them between each other based on:
- How impactful each idea can be towards our outcome
- How confident you feel about this idea based on evidence, data or intuition
- How hard you asses it will be to build  In this tutorial we use a google spreadsheet to brainstorm and score the ideas

You can use our free ICE score template  

ICE score it’s not a way to create a backlog, it’s just a tool for the team to generate, discuss, assess and prioritize your ideas! If you want to learn more about how to prioritize the features to build, check our episode How to Prioritize and Choose the Features to Build

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If you like what we do you can buy us coffee 💜 ☕ http://ko-fi.com/twofacet

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We invite you to continue the conversation and give us feedback!
Twitter: @TwoFacetPodcast
Email:  twofacetpodcast@gmail.com
Hosts: Juncal González, Matt Mikulski
Music: Sunlight by Lightblow

Lean is all about learning 🧠

Instead of committing to our ideas, first, we want to learn if the assumptions we are making about them are actually true!

Will the users really want it? Will it generate the impact we expect? Setting up rapid and continuous experiments lets us move forward faster and reduce risk!👩🏽‍🔬 🧑‍🔬

In this episode we explain how to design and plan experiments: from defining the hypothesis, to setting up both success and failure metrics and finally, measuring the outcome.

We also explain the most popular Lean Experiments:

• Smoke test
• Pre-order test
• Sales pitch & commitment experiment
• Fake functionality
• Wizard of Oz
• MVP - Minimum Valuable Product
• A/B testing

In this episode, we have our special guest Natasha that explains to us how the world can be interpreted as linear and organized, or volatile and ambiguos. Also, together with her we discuss how the triple diamond model helps us navigate the complexity and ambiguity of this world when finding solutions to complex problems.

1. HOW DO WE SEE THE WORLD?

Is our world as linear, causal, and based on rational decision-making as we might deem it to be? The traditional understanding of the world perceives humans to be rational and logical 24/7, as well as reality to be a “clock world”-- easy to figure out and simple. But, our world is not like that: we live in a VUCA world… Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous… a “cloud world”: highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.

1. WHAT ARE DOCPLANNER’S PRINCIPLES AND HOW DO WE DEAL WITH THE WORLD WE LIVE IN?

Our new understanding of the world needs new principles, and these are ours:

• People are neither rational nor irrational,
• Know your reality and its context,
• Adapt to the chaos and ambiguity,
• Collaborate to see other points of view,
• Work on the right things to reduce waste.

In more practical terms, we work with the TRIPLE DIAMOND: understanding latent user problems and needs (“doing the right thing”); building the right solutions to solve these problems (“doing the thing right”); and, this way, reducing waste and maximizing value delivered using techniques like Lean startup or Scrum.

1. PRACTICAL EXAMPLE

Our biggest learnings come from failures, right? To see our work in practice, we are going to present and analyze a real DocPlanner project that did not go so well mainly because it underestimated our new principles, as well as skipped triple diamond steps. In addition, we will look back and discuss best practices: practices we would apply if we faced this project again!

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If you like what we do you can buy us coffee 💜 ☕ http://ko-fi.com/twofacet

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We invite you to continue the conversation and give us feedback!
Twitter: @TwoFacetPodcast
Email:  twofacetpodcast@gmail.com
Hosts: Juncal González, Matt Mikulski
Special Guest: Natasha Moro
Music: Sunlight by Lightblow

“If we would only spend a bit more time on this feature before release, we could make it just perfect”... does this sound familiar?

And yet when building digital products, we work with MVPs and small improvements. Why is this better than working on more finalized features?

As startups, we are trying to figure out what’s the best thing to build as quickly as possible. That’s why early products are not meant to be perfect… we are in constant experimentation!

In this episode we talk about Lean Startup, the scientific approach proposed by Eric Ries in his book: “The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses”

We explain why Startups need a specific approach to creating products. We give an introduction to the Lean Canvas and we cover in detail the Build - Measure - Learn loop:

• How we reduce waste by avoiding building the wrong thing
• How we set up experiments that will help us validate or invalidate our hypothesis
• How we define success and failure metrics for our experiments
• How we learn based on the changes in customer behaviour that we see from our experiments

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If you like what we do you can buy us coffee 💜 ☕ http://ko-fi.com/twofacet

_____________________

We invite you to continue the conversation and give us feedback!

Twitter:@TwoFacetPodcast
Email: twofacetpodcast@gmail.com
Hosts: Juncal González, Matt Mikulski
Music: Sunlight by Lightblow

Agile is not easy for UX design. It was created to address developers' pains without considering the designers.

There are different ways to inject the design process into Scrum, as the Dual Track, but in the end, this creates a small waterfall that stops us from being really Agile.

In this episode, we talk about Lean UX, the framework that has helped us to really be Lean and Agile taking into consideration the UX Design process.

Lean UX is a combination of Lean Startup, Agile, Design Thinking, and UX Design. It transforms the UX Design process into a fully collaborative one where the whole multi-disciplinary team takes part in the UX Research and defines and co-creates the solutions together.

The deliverables and documentation are replaced by communication, common understanding, and collaboration; and instead of focusing on outputs, now the team works based on outcomes.

The UX research is embedded inside the team, with the participation of all the team members, building increasing knowledge, understanding, and empathizing our customers. We talk about tools like Proto-personas and weekly interviews.

We explain how the UX designer takes the role of a design facilitator, making the design process more collaborative with whiteboards, workshops, Design Studio sessions, or Design Sprints.

This process, together with a UI Kit or Design System, allows designers and developers to work simultaneously and in parallel to be really Agile.


We invite you to continue the conversation and give us feedback!
Twitter:@TwoFacetPodcast
Email: twofacetpodcast@gmail.com
Hosts: Juncal González, Matt Mikulski
Music: Sunlight by Lightblow