Strategies to Help You Develop and Iterate on Your Product or Offer with Becca Berg and Sam Gioia of Dubsado
Episode 569: Show Notes
Today on the podcast, we are joined by our good friends from Dubsado, co-founder and CEO, Becca Berg and Sam Gioia from their product department. Most of our listeners are well aware that we are big fans of Dubsado and how they help businesses thrive by taking away the busywork. Dubsado is a fantastic platform, especially for small businesses! They have created an all-in-one system that helps you stay in motion, build relationships, schedule appointments, and create workflows to streamline your projects from start to finish.
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In this episode, we chat with Becca and Sam about the many new features Dubsado has in store for its users. We hear about how they’re finding innovative ways to interrogate and test the usability of their platform, and the pressure and sense of overwhelm that comes with a desire to make your software, service, and product perfect before releasing it to the public. As a response to this challenge, we examine how you can break that intimidating perfection down into tangible goals and steps, allowing you to accurately view the progress you’re making on the elements you want to improve for your clients, students, or anyone else you may be working with.
We cover a host of concepts in this episode that are relevant to anyone, not just software companies, making this an excellent listen for anyone interested in improving products and services for their clients! Dubsado has an ethos of service, which resonates strongly with Abagail and Emylee as ex-service-based owners. At our core, we are both driven by how to best serve our clients and customers, but this episode offers some excellent ideas that can be implemented in any business and is also an exciting behind-the-scenes look at Dubsado’s new features that they’ll be rolling out soon. Be sure to tune in to this information-packed episode on all things development, customer service, and so much more!
The Product Team and How They Operate
Having a dedicated product team can make a huge difference to your process and your product. We were eager to learn about what makes Dubsado’s product team so effective, and Sam and Becca share how they operate and come up with new ideas. For the past year, Dubsado has had a dedicated product team for the first time in the history of their company, and it has helped them grow in several ways. One of their most notable developments has been the implementation of a more iterative process where they come up with ideas. Often, these ideas come from Becca’s reviewing of the excellent feedback that they receive from their users. Part of their checklist is that they are always listening to new ideas that are coming in. Based on this, they can envision what they’d like to develop next and start working on that idea with their team by going through different versions of what might work.
Testing also plays a vital role, and their beta group is incredibly helpful to the process. By taking a step back, you too can gain perspective and do the necessary research and reflective work to validate it, before investing a sizable chunk of developmental resources.
How to Build and Test your Product Efficiently
Building an app can be a long and arduous process, especially if you want to test it thoroughly and make it as user-friendly as possible! It requires hours of design, technical expertise, and feedback from users. Becca and Sam explain how they have been able to utilize their design team to optimize the process, with one essential contribution coming from some of their UI and UX designers: the introduction of an interactive prototype. Creating an interactive prototype is incredibly useful when building an app. It allows your designers to produce an interactive design that can give an accurate indication of what the future product would look like and how it would function. More specifically, it gives you the ability to click on specific areas and guide yourself through what it might look like once it’s functional.
This process is much faster and this allows designers to create an interactive and clickable mockup so the company can get a feel for it before committing to the more substantial development work. This approach is also applicable to other types of businesses that may not be building an app. By initially testing with smaller audiences and getting feedback before committing to a big launch, you can do the necessary groundwork before committing to the final outcome. It may seem intimidating, but there are so many benefits to getting your product in from testers early to allow you to tweak the product and make adjustments; it provides a valuable learning opportunity to go through the process with a select group of folks that you trust, resulting in a product that is much improved from what you had imagined on the front end! Users are also often able to spot things that insiders are likely to overlook. Plus, when your customers become part of development from the ground up, that forms an incredible sense of trust and participation.
How to Break Down Your Vision into Manageable Goals
Sometimes, the expertise or amount of hours required for a vision can seem insurmountable, especially when a project is expected to take many months or even years! Breaking your project down into manageable goals is a key strategy to achieving your vision. For this reason, an essential part of Dubsado’s strategy usually involves coming up with a minimum viable product (MVP). By implementing this, they can assess the minimum requirements necessary to ensure that it works, while also bringing the functionality that their users expect. This allows them to return and make bigger changes to the foundational aspect of the software, helping them form an excellent foundation for future changes and additions. It’s also a useful preventative measure for perfectionist tendencies and getting stuck in the process, because you know it will eventually be overhauled and doesn’t need to be perfect.
Obtaining Helpful Feedback for Product Development and How to Implement it
When looking for helpful feedback, it can be difficult to know where to start. Luckily, now more than ever, the answer is often just a few clicks away. Becca shares how she can use Facebook groups to gain useful insights into the topic of her business, namely management solutions, to hear the needs of people who run a business and what they are struggling with. Another useful source is your users. By honing in on communicating with your users through your various channels, you can get first-hand accounts of what they are struggling with, what ideas they might have, and what they’re excited about.
Survey data is a source that can also be incredibly useful. Similar to Facebook groups and user feedback on your social media channels, it’s useful to immerse yourself in feedback every so often to stay in touch with their needs, since running a business takes up so much of your attention. Dubsado can use survey information from diverse sources like exit surveys, cancellations, and others, to identify trends, both positive and negative. Whether it’s the same issue popping up multiple times or a feature customers are particularly enjoying, it’s a useful way for staying in touch with your customer needs and identifying where there is room for development and improvement!
A Sneak Peek of New Features
It’s no secret that we are massive fans of Dubsado, which is why we were so excited to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of the new features that they have on the horizon! Becca and Sam expand on some of the updates we can expect from the app in the not too distant future. One of the things you can look forward to with absolute certainty is an app that’s even more beautiful to look at and also more intuitive to use. Becca and Sam share what they are most excited about, namely their new form builder, which they have spent many painstaking months developing. Their new form builder will make it much easier for new people to get into Dubsado and start using it immediately, as well as increased flexibility for existing users. Other exciting developments include new customization and feature options for users, as well as updates to their scheduler, plus a whole lot more!
Why Dubsado is Excited to Grow Alongside Their Users
Dubsado is a small independent company and, as such, shares a great sense of solidarity with their users. Sam shares how she was a business owner and user of Dubsado before she came to work at Dubsado, and explains how that experience informs her job every single day, thanks to her deeply felt understanding that people are entrusting Dubsado’s software with the running of their business. They are dedicated to serving their customers, especially during the difficult challenges that have come to define the past 18 months, which is why they are so excited to continue to bring you useful and exciting changes to their platform!
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It's just exciting to be able to serve, and help them grow their business and just being here to support them and cheer them on and carry them into the next phase of business.
Highlights
The Product Team and How They Operate [0:06:49]
How to Build and Test your Product Efficiently [0:09:13]
How to Break Down Your Vision into Manageable Goals [0:15:31]
Obtaining Helpful Feedback for Product Development and How to Implement It [0:24:23]
A Sneak Peek of New Features [0:31:15]
Why Dubsado is Excited to Grow Alongside Their Users [0:38:38]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Becca Berg and Sam Gioia
Dubsado
LinkedIn: Becca Berg | LinkedIn: Sam Gioia
Website | Instagram | Facebook
Becca Berg is the CEO, Co-founder, and Head of Product at Dubsado. Sam Gioia is the Product Manager at Dubsado.
