Inside Balsamiq: our new approach to internal product training

The latest news from Balsamiq:
Streamlining our team’s product knowledge

Trouble viewing?
View it online.

Ciao friends,

Before I get into it, we’d love to know what you’d like to read in future editions of this newsletter. If you have a minute, we’d appreciate a reply with any business, product, or UX questions or topic suggestions you have for us.

Now, onto the inside scoop: our latest internal project.

Keeping your team updated on all the latest features and changes can be a real challenge. We felt this firsthand during a marketing strategy session a few months ago—we were discussing product education when we realized that even internally, there’s a varied understanding of our product.

This wasn’t surprising—everyone uses the tool differently based on their roles. But with our constant updates and improvements, it became clear that we needed a better way to keep everyone in sync. In marketing and support in particular, it’s critical that we become experts so we can help our customers do the same.

Ultimately, we had two main issues:

Different levels of tool knowledge: Team members had varying familiarity with Balsamiq, largely because of their different use cases.
Frequent updates: With all our updates and improvements, we needed a way to keep everyone in the loop.

At first, we thought of setting up a series of product demo sessions. But as an async team stretched across US and European time zones, that wasn’t the most efficient use of time. Instead, we came up with the idea of rough, internal videos filmed by our CEO & Head of Product, Peldi.

Our goals

We aimed to:

Ensure everyone knows the features: We wanted every team member to be well-versed in all functionalities.
Quickly familiarize with new updates: We needed a way to help the team quickly learn about new features.
Build an internal reference library for future use: We aimed to create initial videos to guide future customer-facing tutorials.

How we did it

Step 1: Comprehensive feature audit

First, Peldi audited over 640 features in Balsamiq. He went through each feature, the name we currently use, and what “level” he thinks it belongs to (beginner user, more advanced user, etc.).

The audit helped us identify what needed pruning and what could be improved. It was a massive task, but it laid the foundation for our next steps.

Step 2: Creating the videos

Over two months, Peldi made 50 short videos, releasing 5-6 each week in a project-specific Slack channel. These weren’t polished productions; they were quick, rough cuts designed to quickly get our team up to speed.

Here’s a sample video about real-time collaboration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWy8ArlFo3Y

Step 3: Creating an internal library & other next steps

Now that we have all the videos made, we’re organizing them on our wiki to share with the whole company. This library will be a valuable resource for current and future team members.

How this can help you

These videos have been very effective because they’re:

Quick to make: Knowing the product well, Peldi could create each video in just a few minutes. While we’re small enough to have just one main product owner, bigger companies could have several people creating videos like this.
Easy to access: Team members can watch them at their convenience, pausing and rewinding as needed.

We liked this so much that we’re likely going to keep making them in the future. It’s easy enough to add to our internal library and we have no doubts it’ll help with future launches—it might be something to add to your GTM process too.

Happy customer of the month

I sketch my SaaS ideas with @balsamiq before prototyping.
It helps me see the big picture and speeds up the process of identifying needs 🌌 It's also fun!
— Arda

Product news

If you find yourself creating many wireframes for a project, you can create a parent-child relationship between wireframes to keep things organized.

For example, you could organize your wireframes around different features, or use parent wireframes to sort your ideas (“Discarded ideas,” “Now testing,” etc.). We use both ways, depending on the project.

Two ways to get started:

Click on a wireframe thumbnail and use Tab to indent it or Shift+Tab to push it back.
Drag & drop to move wireframes around and adjust your hierarchy.

You can hide and show the children using the little arrow that shows up on the parent wireframe:

Bonus tip: If you drag a parent wireframe with the child wireframes collapsed, you’ll move the entire branch. If you drag a parent wireframe when the child wireframes are displayed, you’ll move the parent only.

Wireframing Academy news

A few articles folks have found particularly helpful this month:

How to wireframe your website copy
Designing effective data tables
Our thinking behind content-first design

Company News

We’ve been focused more on the product side of things than internal work (we have a big release coming up in the next few months). But we’ve continued making incremental improvements, like shaking up our all hands format, starting budget meetings with managers, and continued work on automating business operations when it makes sense to do so.

And if you’d like to help us make Balsamiq better, we’re always on the lookout for more research program participants.

That's it for this month!

See you next month, with more behind-the-scenes news from your friends at Balsamiq.

Arielle for the Balsamiq Team

Most new customers find Balsamiq via recommendation...

If you know someone who might enjoy this newsletter, we would be most grateful for the introduction. Could you please forward this email to them?

If this newsletter was forwarded to you, please subscribe!

View in Browser | Update your Preferences | Unsubscribe

Inside Balsamiq: our new approach to internal product training

Our goals

How we did it

How this can help you

Happy customer of the month

Product news

Wireframing Academy news

Company News

That's it for this month!

Most new customers find Balsamiq via recommendation...

Older messages

How Balsamiq does user research

How we do UX retreats at Balsamiq (+ steal our agenda!)

How Balsamiq uses AI

Ever wonder why your projects don’t go as planned?

🌟 Looking back at Balsamiq’s 2023

You Might Also Like

AD100 Designers on Battling Burnout

Accessibility Weekly #436: Evaluating Overlay-adjacent Accessibility Products

#495: Accessibility and Inclusive UX

AD Editors Share Their Favorite March Issue Moments

🐺 Did you know about this?

🐺 If you want press for your products.

How to Land a Celebrity Client

How to build an agent

Self-disruption

Accessibility Weekly #437: Another Web Access Overlay Company Sued