Product

Value-driven product management and development.

We help companies identify, architect, and consistently build the most valuable features through our agile discovery, planning, and development life cycles. We start with a 2-8 week Discovery Workshop to identify a product roadmap, gather stakeholder input, and map out the expected business outcomes for the product. Next we use our story mapping techniques to identify the ideal customer journey, map out a functional roadmap, and often negotiate the nebulous expected business outcomes to tangible key performance indicators that can be measured in dollars and cents at the end of the product launch.

Some people shoot for minimum viable product—we launch minimum viable businesses.

Analytics

Set foundations for data-driven product improvements.

  • Targeted and Trackable KPIs - Many companies are used to collecting metrics about their product performance, but at Facet we’re all about correlated Key Performance Indicators that tie specific outcomes to specific features. We work with you to build a KPI dashboard for your product development project, and attach individual KPIs to Epics in the backlog.

  • Configure & review data collection tools - Hindsight with data collection is not always 20/20. It’s important we set up the right analytics tools, calculations and reports at the beginning of your project to make agile decision making easier for product owners. We usually recommend attaching a “report” development story to each Epic in order to ensure the appropriate outcome is reported on. This also helps developers to understand the context of the expected business outcome and optimize their work to that end.

Tooling

Product management tools that tell the right story.

  • Story Mapping as a way of life - The best stories are visually immersive and engaging. We endeavor to build engaging product stories without the frills of interpretation. User Story Mapping, Business Story Mapping, Digital Story Mapping, and more all play a role with creating engaging product roadmaps that can be sliced on an agile basis and shipped to the development team for fulfillment.

  • Easily translate from product roadmap to development - Integrated product roadmaps are key to successful agile fulfillment. Issues that arise in development must be quickly reviewed by product managers and adjusted strategies often cascade across the project. We make sure product managers are equipped to manage expectations, get stakeholders excited about new features, and drive engagement with their teams.

Process

Product development process driven by agile learning.

  • Quarterly workshops to align the creative process - Facet believes that a workshop each quarter realigns the product, design, and development teams on the short term goals.

  • Agile development that works - After realigning teams and helping them see the big picture, it’s up to your product managers to make sure that product requirements are effectively communicated and reviewed for quality assurance as developers build the product on an agile basis. Development teams need direct interfacing with the product manager, and developers need to feel like they own the pieces of the project they are building.

  • Validate product value - The final component of successful product management processes is validation. No deployment should go without business validation of its effect on the target KPIs and bottom line.

Automation

Automate product development intelligence.

  • Automated reports for product performance - Transparency and a quick feedback loop drives business growth. By setting up clearly visible performance reports tied to each release, designers, developers, product managers, and leadership all gain clear insights into the trajectory of business performance.

  • Integrated learning for maximum business outcomes - A merit-based approach to product ideas can only take the business so far without validation. Validated business outcomes provides clear feedback and educates the team.

  • Integrated tools for agile ceremonies - Reduce the overhead of agile product development operations by integrating the best tools for your learning machine. Pre-validation of the product roadmap, KPI planning, and integrated reporting takes time to set up, but eventually your project management tooling and integrated data-driven product roadmap will pay off in multiples.