Cityscoot’s Product Stack
This article is a transcription from The Product Crew’s entry “Productivity of PMs”, published on 26. October 2022. Check it out here.
💡 At Cityscoot the product culture is constantly evolving and growing. Our tool stack is diverse and has been and will always be evolving. Many tools exist but to keep cost controlled, we keep a frugal approach when possible. That being said, the only strong requirement is the knowledge management across all functions (product, UX, tech, marketing…) being centralised, so whatever the tool used, there is transcription and only a single point of truth. Today the knowledge management tool at Cityscoot is Confluence.
How do we ensure productivity (i.e. quantity/speed and quality/value of final outputs that maximise the desired outcome)? What tools and methods do we use at each step of the product life cycle?
There will be a future article about the organisation, so stay tuned and keep following us to learn more!
1. PRODUCT LIFECYLE
Just for the sake of using the same terminology from this point forward, here is a simplified flow process of the product life cycle at Cityscoot.
💡 We will focus mostly on the Product Discovery phase, since once we reach Delivery, there is mainly just 1 tool on the Product side. We could write a whole new article on the Tech stack from this point forward, but that’s a story for another day 😉
1.1 Product Discovery
No surprises here, Design Thinking inspired approach are the foundation for the Product Discovery at Cityscoot. Double diamond phases to gain insights, define solutions, test and formalise.
User research and Data studies to understand and empathize
Maybe ideas and intuitions push our discovery boundaries (the exploration of the adjacents, you can read more here), but the real starting point to begin investing the company’s energy is always data… Therefore, data must be accesible to whole company and businesses. and our main data visualisation tool for that is Tableau. Data is processed by our fantastic Data team and becomes accessible company-wide to drive our decision making process at all levels.
💡 Product-related KPIs are also monitored through Tableau’s dashboards. The “Product launch strategy” is not only a product/marketing milestone deciding the marketing or communication associated with a feature launch, but also the moment to set the metrics and indicators to monitor de roll-out, success and value added of such iteration.
Note: We are currently trying out Dovetail for User research gathering and centralisation. It is a little soon to give a proper feedback on it 😉
Quantitative research relies mostly on emails (SendInBlue), forms (Typeform) and some smart automations (Zapier). These studies will feed us with data that will be crunched and analysed and later presented for visualisation and analysis.
Some tools we use for quantitative studies:
- SendInBlue: User targeting and emailing — Because emails is the traditional channel to request surveys 🦖 But also a great tool to recruit testers!
- Typeform, Google Forms: Survey creation — We prefer Typeform’s interface and flow, but sometimes a GForm just does the trick.😉
- Batch: In-app targeting — Who said product-led marketing? Yes we do! 📲
- Zapier: Automation and first step of ETL data manipulation — It is usually better to start crunching as soon as possible to ease the burden afterwards, and sometime we want to automate some action (free minutes to say “thank you”, etc.) ⚙️
- Maze: Unmoderated tests — Complementing moderated tests and user interviews, unmoderated flow testing is great at the design phase! 👩🎨 |
💡 Qualitative Studies We are in the domain of the close-human interaction… We are not equipped (yet!) with eye tracking software or fancy software for qualitative studies, but hey, our ears, eyes and empathy are our best tools here!
How often do we perform user research?
As often as possible! Every occasion is a good occasion… We introduced user research in all the touch point we have:
👉🏻 when we send a marketing campaign
👉🏻 when a client calls our customer care
👉🏻 when they participate to a free scooter driving lesson
⚠️ No feature should go into Delivery without the appropriate research validating the first value hypothesis. No contact with our customers should go to waste. Want to get it right the first time in the Delivery phase? Do your Discovery before! 😉
Formalise insights
Research and studies generate facts and information that needs to be formalised to highlight insights. Miro is the prefered tool to formalise because of its flexibility accepting different formats and flows.
Some other great tools we use at Cityscoot to formalise insights are:
- Figjam: Whiteboard and diagraming tool from Figma — Somewhat less flexible than Miro, but greatly integrated with Figma.
- GSheets: Spreadsheets and tables — Yes, sometime you don’t need fancy diagrams, a simple spreadsheet will do the trick. 😜
Ideation
We want quantity at this point, the more the merrier! One of the best tools we have found to facilitate workshops, particularly remote ones, and the preference at Cityscoot for ideation is Klaxoon. Not only is it simple to participate, but the export of data in excel format is game changing!
Experimentations, testing and validating hypothesis
Figma is our best friend for prototyping and testing! We use it to mockup interfaces, design experiences, prototype flows, test behaviors… And this is not the land of the designers alone! All our PMs know how to use Figma and they quickly see how this tool helps them accelerate the testing and learning phase.
Some other tools we use at Cityscoot to prototype faster and build great Minimum Viable Product (MVP as the minimum unit to gain knowledge, not the “beta” sense that it has acquired in some companies, here is a webinar in French where we discussed this with some colleagues from Deezer):
- Webflow: Web page builder — Usually not the final version, but easy to build “assistance” pages for testing new flows
- Tally, Typeform: Forms and sequenced flows — Another string in our bow.
- Zapier: Automation and first layer backend MVP — We can start automating and creating business logic that will feed the future backend evolution.
- Miro: White board and diagrams — We mostly use for formalisation, but it is also great for low-fi prototyping.
Roadmap, prioritisation and alignement with businesses
Roadmaps are supports with fuzzy timelines (Now, Next, Later) to have an overview of the operational Backlog.
Trello is a great tool to guarantee the followup and overview of tasks. It is easily connected with Jira and can be a great support of discussion between PMs and businesses.
Any whiteboard tool could do the trick, but at Cityscoot we use Figjam to represent our roadmap and use visual management during our cross-product meetings. Our roadmaps never go beyond 5 sprints and allow 1 extra sprint of cool-down. Activities cascade from Data studies, User research, Design to Development.
Other tools we use at Cityscoot to improve efficiency for priorisation, roadmapping and alignement:
- Miro: White board and diagraming — Some prefer a more open and visually flexible approach and use Miro to build roadmaps, link items (dependencies), etc.
- Klaxoon: Workshop and white board — Klaxoon is awesome to facilitate workshops, brainstorming, etc.
- Excel, GSheets: Tables and data — Well, good old Excel is always an option 😉
- Notion: Notes, tracking, documentation — It is hard to find something Notion doesn’t do today 😅
1.2 Product Delivery
It is up to each Feature Team to decide their preferred Agile methodology. Some prefer the framed rigidity of Scrum, some the continuous flow of Kanban… We will talk briefly at the end of the company-wide / cross-team organisation.
Specifications and ticketing
This is meeting land of our PMs and our Tech Leads in each of the Squads / Feature Teams. Our tool for specifying, tracking and following work is Jira, the defacto standard for most teams and companies.
User stories, acceptance tests and all required information to build our features is here (stored or linked).
Of course Jira tickets are linked to Confluence sheets and most of the times Figma prototypes and mockups.
2. COMMUNICATION
2.1 Written communication
Slack is the tool we chose for messaging and internal communication.
Slack is extremely flexible: sharing documents, creating channels for discussion, adding bots… Agile and Product is all about communication and interaction.
2.2 Meetings and verbal communication
Cityscoot relies on Google Workspace for office software, emails and of course, meetings with Google Meet. While less feature-rich then other alternatives, the integration with the Google Suite is just so seamless that using Gmeet is a no-brainer.
But when COVID hit us back in 2020 (and it hit us hard in the microbility sector), we had to adapt to a full remote environment while trying to keep as much contact as before. We chose Discord for verbal communication, it is extremely easy to use, flexible, and cost effective (free 😉).
This is today’s product stack… What do you think? Are we missing the killer tool? 😉
