Julian Della Mattia, UX Research Lead at Kiwi.com and Founder of The180 Agency, talks to Maze about how facilitation is a game-changing skill that enables product teams to solve more problems, innovate faster, and make stronger decisions.
The Optimal Path is a podcast about product decision-making from the team at Maze. Each episode brings in a product expert and looks at the stories, ideas, and frameworks they use to achieve better product decision-making—and how you can do the same.
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Ash Oliver:
Welcome to The Optimal Path, a podcast about product decision-making brought to you by Maze. I'm your host, Ash Oliver, UX Designer & Design Advocate. Great products are the result of great decisions, decisions that deliver value for customers and the organization. In this podcast, you'll hear from designers, product managers, and researchers about the ideas informing decision-making across all aspects of product development.
Ash Oliver:
Today, I'm joined by Julian Della Mattia. Julian is a multidisciplinary, combining his work across UX research, facilitation and training. He's currently a UX Research Lead at Kiwi.com, and founder of the facilitation agency the180. He's been training researchers, product designers and PMs in facilitation techniques, throughout high-growth companies around the world. Julian, thanks so much for being here.
Julian Della Mattia:
My pleasure, Ash. Thanks for having me.
Ash Oliver:
There's some natural chemistry happening for us in this episode, which is pretty cool. We know each other from back at your time at Glovo, when the team was bringing Maze onboard a couple of years ago, and then we crossed paths again in the Workshop Masters Program through AJ&Smart, which might be referenced in what we're about to talk about today. So it feels pretty kismet to be doing an episode together on this topic. I'm super looking forward to it.
Julian Della Mattia:
I'm also super excited. Yeah, thanks for having me here.
Ash Oliver:
Our topic is indeed on facilitation or workshopping and what this unlocks for product teams. Maybe we can start from a basic level set, since there might be some misconceptions or less awareness around facilitation and workshops. So, let's kick it off with your definition of facilitation.
Julian Della Mattia:
All right. Regarding facilitation, facilitating workshops, and all this family of words and concepts, I would say the first degree of misconceptions is about terminology. There's not a single definition to these things. It might mean different things to different people. I've heard, for example, people saying or thinking that facilitation is about moderating a discussion or that facilitating was also a readout of research results. I've also heard people referring to workshops as a presentation or training. So, it's super tricky to pinpoint a specific definition of all these terms.
Julian Della Mattia:
I can give my take on this. I always think of facilitation as putting people together in a room and making them go through a series of exercises within a limited timeframe to achieve a specific outcome. Those are the four pillars for a workshop. I also feel that there's this misconception that facilitation is kind of limited or more targeted to the C-suite, to put it in a way, or for big stuff. Some people think of facilitation as the big weeks where they all go one day to the woods and they all think of the company strategy. Of course, that's a type of facilitation—company retreats. That exists. But that's not the only type of facilitation.
Julian Della Mattia:
This is a little bit like music. You have the Philharmonic Orchestra, and that's music. But if you pick up your guitar and jam some blues with some friends, it's also music. It's the same with workshops. You can have it really for big stuff, or you can have it for more micro stuff or for day-to-day team dynamics. This is always about human communication. That's actually the base. At its core, it's that.
Ash Oliver:
I agree. To me, facilitation really enables teams to solve more problems, innovate faster, and make stronger decisions. And that's by using the power of workshops. So, I think the facilitation is around the experience and the delivery and the leading through that journey. And workshops are more around the actual building blocks or the content of what you're trying to accomplish. Let's look at the when. So what scenarios, challenges or decisions are good situations for facilitation or running a workshop?
Julian Della Mattia:
As I said, we have different degrees and different scopes you can use it for. It could be for something that's more company-wide, something that's strategic, that is more like the vision of the business, but you can also go micro within your team. Let's say facilitation for a specific product or a flow, or aligning on what we should do next, aligning on the roadmap. Let's say you're a researcher and you want to define, okay, what do we need to work on for the following Q? Or you can use it for ideation sessions, for example. If you're a designer and you say, okay, let's get some designers, let's get all designers from other teams together and let's just ideate and get some new ideas for this flow. Those are things that facilitation is super useful for.
Julian Della Mattia:
Other stuff, for example, sometimes you're lost as a product manager. For example, you don't know where to take your product or have different ideas. So you need to maybe prioritize what's the most impactful thing you can work on and what's the next big thing. It can even help you to learn what went well and what didn't go so well in the previous Q or for this project. For researchers, for example, as you mentioned I'm also a researcher, for putting insights into practice. Sometimes the output is lost there in a drawer somewhere. It's like, yeah, it's a nice report. I know PMs listened to it, or designers or other stakeholders listened to it, but it's not translated into the product. You can do that with facilitation, for example. You can then organize a co-creation session and kind of drag those insights into the product.
Julian Della Mattia:
As I said, facilitation is super wide. You can go from company strategy to ideation session, to co-creation session with users, to a design sprint. It's very malleable. So there are many, many cases. If you use them wisely, they're super effective. They really take your team and your product to the next level.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. When I think of workshops, for example, the first things that kind of come to mind is sprints or retros, or even like AJ&Smart coined the Lightning Decision Jams, like there's these templates that even might work well in certain scenarios. But I think that's where maybe, again, there might be this preconceived notion that you slap a template down of the Miro board and you get a meeting in place and that's supposed to be facilitation. And it goes beyond just the variation of places in which you can facilitate, but it's the actual how of being able to do that that makes it, I think, different from a meeting, as you've described.
Julian Della Mattia:
I have to say I would rather have people using templates from Miro and trying to facilitate even the wrong way than have this useless meeting. So this thing like, yeah, one-hour meeting that then leads to another one-hour meeting that then everything could've been an email. And then there's a lot of misalignment. So I would rather have them do wrong facilitation than no facilitation at all.
Ash Oliver:
Maybe that begs the question, you've made mention of some of the great opportunities and places across these different levels for the opportunity for facilitation. Do you see people potentially trying to turn everything into a workshop? Where is a workshop or facilitation maybe not the best case?
Julian Della Mattia:
Yeah. You have the thing of the new shiny object. That, yeah, okay, now we know how to do workshops, so everything becomes a workshop. This is like, the one who has a hammer sees a nail everywhere. It's kind of the same thing. When I train teams in facilitation, I try to make them aware of this. Like, okay, now that you have this skill that you can now incorporate into your skillset or your toolkit, just be mindful of how you use it. It's like this meeting could have been an email, this workshop could have been a Slack message or an email too. Facilitation and workshops are about bringing people together. So be mindful when you bring people together that you actually have a clear outcome. You need to achieve something, or you want to achieve something through a workshop. Do you need a workshop for that? That's kind of like the first question.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. So best reserved for those complex, wicked problems, perhaps the things that take multiple perspectives or lots of unwinding in order to come out the other side with something. I want to circle back to what you said about starting with the outcome because one of my questions was going to be, how would you approach constructing a workshop? You've identified that this is the opportunity for one. So what's the next step in approaching the construction?
Julian Della Mattia:
When I think of the basic elements in the course I give to companies, I mention these as key pillars. So it's like, again, going back to this definition of putting people together in a room, making them go through a series of exercises within a limited timeframe to achieve a specific outcome. Those are the four key pillars. So basically, it's the goal you want to achieve or the outcome you want to achieve, who should be involved, and then you have these two, which are the time you need for that and the exercises you include in that workshop. These kind of relate to each other. It's not that you get one before the other. So it's like, you start with the outcome. If the outcome really needs people to come together and you really need to unblock this with a workshop, then you start. So you know the goal, and you know who should be involved. If you know where you start and where you want to go, you say you need this type of exercise. Then you say, okay, we can wrap it up in two hours, to put it in a way.
Ash Oliver:
So again, working kind of backward and getting the general shape, especially around the duration and the process of moving from start to finish. When you talk about the different exercises, I think another misconception may be thinking exercises are icebreakers. And an icebreaker can be an exercise and can be very powerful when used correctly, I believe, but what exercises are you referring to here? And maybe how would someone look at the variation between them and know maybe which ones to pull in for what types of workshops?
Julian Della Mattia:
There are some layers inside this question. And so, there will be some layers inside this answer. So, first of all, about icebreakers, I'm a fan of Edward de Bono and all this lateral thinking, and he has a lot of exercises. Like connect random words, or look at a newspaper and then try to connect that with your challenge and go on YouTube, watch a random video and try to connect what you saw with the actual challenge we're actually tackling. But that's another topic. We can have an episode on Edward de Bono's work that can be applied to facilitation. It's absolutely brilliant.
Julian Della Mattia:
But then, in terms of what kind of exercises, I think workshops also have a narrative and they need to have this connecting thread. So the final picture is the outcome you wanted to achieve at the end. So you need to find the exercises that actually tackle that goal but actually go well with each other, because this is all about people. So if people are going to be sitting together for two hours, you can't really put one intense exercise after the other. So it's like, you have to be mindful of that. There are a lot of frameworks for this. We have AJ&Smart framework. You have Gamestorming. You have IDEO. But basically, I take it to a really basic level and I store exercises in two big categories, which are opening exercises and closing exercises.
Julian Della Mattia:
With opening exercises, I mean all the exercises that increase the number of ideas we have. And with closing exercises, the ones that reduce them. For example, let's say we go for an ideation session. This is a pretty popular exercise that maybe listeners know about, but it's Crazy 8's. You know when you draw ideas and you have eight ideas in eight minutes, one idea per minute. So you have a lot of ideas then. And then if you pick one or if you vote on them, you reduce the number of ideas. Of course, you can go more granular. You have exercises to evaluate ideas, you have exercises to know more about compromising or like saying, okay, I know who's taking this part of the work, who's doing this afterwards. But normally, in the course, I try to keep the basis of this is for more ideas, this is for less ideas. That's how I keep it.
Ash Oliver:
And I think the way that you've set that up is similar to that convergent and divergent thinking as well, right? So it's nice to be able to think about this as the way to generate more of those ideas and then go into the honing phase and whittle those down because ultimately at the crux of all workshops are decisions. That outcome needs to be baked into the process of the workshops. What do you think are some of the needed skills in becoming a facilitator?
Julian Della Mattia:
Okay. The skills you would need to start facilitating successfully, I would say you need to be a good communicator. That's what you said before, it's all about human communication. So yeah, that's one thing. Then you also need to have this, this is a bit of a soft skill, but you need to perceive people's energy and people's engagement. That's why researchers are actually really good facilitators because they can perceive when people are engaged, when people are losing attention. The energy levels are also super important. So having this perception is super important.
Julian Della Mattia:
Time management is key. When you go over time in a workshop, that's like a big no for me. If you plan this for two hours, then you have to be sure this is going to fit in two hours. So don't go two hours and 20 minutes. So time management and planning, which go hand in hand, are also two really good skills. And I would say that understanding the facilitator role is super important because when you are a facilitator, you're not the star of the show anymore. The group is the star of the show, and you guide them. You help them navigate something. You help them achieve something.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. It's a good guiding principle, I think, and an important note around the mindset because I think even AJ&Smart may say this, it's like, be the guide, not the hero. And the role of the facilitator is there to guide the team towards the best outcomes, uncovering the best ideas, directing them towards the best potential outcomes, not suggesting it and being the center of attention as you described. So I think that's a great holistic look at some of the skills at play in facilitating or putting on that facilitator's hat. What do you think separates the best facilitators from the average facilitator?
Julian Della Mattia:
Well, the last part, I think, what I just mentioned about understanding the role is key and that you really, really believe that and you're able to do that switch. Because when you are a professional facilitator, and you do this as a consultant, freelancer, or whoever, it's really easy because you think: "yeah, a company hires me, I just go there or I just connect with them, I don't have any clue of what they do or a very little clue of what they do, so I can't really contribute there." So for external facilitators, it's something that you grasp quite quickly if you're working with clients. But if you are in-house and you are doing this kind of micro-level or day-to-day facilitation where you're implementing different types of workshops on your process, it's hard, and it takes some time. So that's super, super important.
Julian Della Mattia:
But then I would say that good planning is what really sets you apart. Great facilitators know a handful of exercises really well, and they can combine them in ways, and they already know how stuff works, and they are realistic with time. So if you come well prepared as a facilitator and you selected the right exercise, but also catered it to the right levels of energy, you know, it's not only about the right exercise to achieve the desired outcome, but also the right exercise that pairs well in terms of energy. But if you already have that covered and you plan correctly, you're set up for success, you really have it.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, I agree. I think the best experiences that I've been part of have really felt like an experience. And I think that's what resonates with me as a designer, like in the same way that I see the parallels in amazing facilitators that are also researchers because of that natural inclination towards asking incredible questions and listening and energy awareness is the same thing with designers. I feel like every small component has been considered. And it's almost like, you know, when you get into that total state of flow, when that's engaged, there's nothing really like it and you know it when you feel it and when you're in it. And when you think about that across a group of people working together, building off of one another, there's nothing like that energy. So there's something to those right combination of factors and the skills at play that really achieve that. So let's talk about why it's so valuable. What does it enable product teams really to do? If they're not doing it now most especially, what would be the ambition to do it?
Julian Della Mattia:
Okay. We can start with a simple way of putting it. Facilitation is about bringing people together. So the first thing that facilitation can help a team achieve is collaborating more effectively and more efficiently. So from there, you can take it to any of the cases you want. It's all about, first of all, being more effective and more efficient. Sometimes you have processes that kind of stand too long and you just have to go back and forth. And there's a lot of misalignment. There's like, we're working towards some clear goals. We are not on the same page. There's like silos. So breaking all that can really take a product or a team to the next level.
Julian Della Mattia:
I've seen, for example, product teams who now implement together with researchers. They implement workshops for kickoffs. So they really state what they need and what they know and their assumptions. I've also seen, for example, designers when they want to work on something together with researchers. For example, they want to refurbish a flow and they have the input from the researchers. These are all cases or examples of teams I trained. Another case, for example, is prioritization. What are we going to tackle this quarter? Or let's craft the roadmap or a vision for our product for the following six months or the following year, how do we get there? It can help you to sort out ideas. Sometimes you have a lot of ideas and some of them are half baked. A workshop can really help you sort them out. So yeah, product teams can really benefit from doing this.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. And when you go through just all those opportunities, I mean there's so many of them that occur across the product development lifecycle and all those collaboration points between researchers, designers, and product managers. And there's, I think, like you've described, less misalignment, greater prioritization, clear next steps. I think even honing those big ideas it's very helpful for taking those big strategic sessions and then turning them into the actionable next steps. Like, how do you actually go make it happen? That's a difficult thing to do. It's definitely a difficult thing across lots of people and different competing priorities. So getting that together through workshop facilitation really streamlines the process.
Julian Della Mattia:
Yeah, definitely. I think the actionable part is actually key. Workshops are all about action and moving things forward. The energy or the drive a workshop has kind of moves things forward and prevents you from getting stuck. It really creates this drive forward.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. I mean, the speed and the alignment cannot be underestimated. And like you said, I mean the energy as well. I feel like it's not just the effectiveness, but it's the empowerment. When people are motivated and they're all motivated around the same goal and they're charting towards the same direction, that's a huge superpower. So for product teams, regardless you're a researcher, designer, or product manager, you maybe looked across the processes that are in place across your team and the points of collaboration or the friction opportunities that you might be able to start incorporating workshops for, what would you say are some of the tactical steps that you can do to get started in either implementing these things or developing the skills in order to help you implement them?
Julian Della Mattia:
Well, I would say, first of all, start small. And I think what's also important is the buy-in from other people because how do I convince my team we need to spend two hours and we need to do this two-hour workshop next week? So, that's the key part that you also need to work on. So be clear about the goal. Say, okay, this is the value it can bring. Also ask for the first chance. That's also a really useful one. It's like, hey, let's try it out. If it works, we can start doing it. But we don't know if it works, so we can try it out. The trying-out part is always the wild card for pitching something. Yeah, let's try it out once. And it normally works well. I mean, people get really excited about them if they haven't tried them before. So, that's also another thing to consider, the buy-in is critical.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. I relate to that. Seeking those opportunities to facilitate, whether that's a kickoff of a project or a retro or something, it just allows you to run it as a workshop and then blow their socks off. And then that, as you said, really helps to get the momentum behind it and show the value and it just kind of snowballs from there. Is there any surprising things that you've observed or learned through being a facilitator?
Julian Della Mattia:
Well, the thing that surprised me is that some of the coolest ideas came from people who are a little bit, I'm not going to say underestimated, but people you would not expect this caliber of ideas from them, which is actually part of the power of the workshop. Even out the terrain. So loud voices do not dominate the conversation, or hierarchies do not dominate the conversation. So what really surprised me is that some of the people who were maybe a bit outside actually had groundbreaking ideas. The charm of facilitation is that when people get together and you create the appropriate context, you can really unlock powerful stuff. Great things happen when people get together in the right setting with the right mindset and with the right framework. It's super powerful.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah, it is definitely a game changer. And I think, as you've mentioned, also an individual game changer. I can see the duality between how being a researcher has helped you be a facilitator and being a facilitator has helped you be a better researcher. And so I think there's so much opportunity for us collectively as teams, but also as individuals, as far as the skill of facilitating and creating and facilitating workshops. This is awesome. I'm going to transition into our next part of the episode, just where we ask the hat-trick questions as we call them. And these are the standard three questions that we ask every one of our guests just to get to know them a little bit. So I think I might know the answer to this, given our topic. The first question is, what's one thing you've done in your career that's helped you succeed that few others do?
Julian Della Mattia:
Okay. I'm not going to say facilitation because it would be a little bit too meta, right? I remember this advice from an old football coach. I was very young and was pissed that people would not give me the ball. And he was like, "Yeah, you need to show yourself open so people will give you the ball." And I was like, "Yeah. Okay. That makes sense." And he's like, "Your teammates will not see you if you hide." And then it really resonated with me. And then years later, I was thinking of that in terms of work. You need to show yourself and be out there. You need to ask for stuff. You need to ask for the ball. So you're out there. You talk to people, you help people out, people help you out. So, that really helped me out.
Ash Oliver:
I love that analogy. And that's sage advice for sure. My next question is, what's the industry-related book that you've given or recommended the most?
Julian Della Mattia:
Okay. For facilitation, I would say Gamestorming is a great book. But if I change hearts from facilitator to researcher, I have to say, I was also super happy to see her on this podcast, it's Erika Hall. I love her stuff. And so Just Enough Research by Erika Hall is one of my favorite books of all time, together with Think Like a UX Researcher by Dr. David Travis. Those books for me were groundbreaking like, okay, I really want to become a researcher now.
Ash Oliver:
Those are great books. Great recommendations. My last question for you is, what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Julian Della Mattia:
Okay. I have a thing for travel stuff that kind of falls in itself. So for some reason, I'm obsessed with things that you can fall and you can reuse. It's only for traveling because I would never use that where I live. It's like just for traveling.
Ash Oliver:
I love that. Yeah. The modular minimalism in the travel space, I feel like people can really nerd out about that. Amazing. Thank you so much, Julian. I really appreciate you being on the podcast and for talking about this topic.
Julian Della Mattia:
Thank you for having me, Ash. It was my pleasure. I really, really enjoyed it.
Ash Oliver:
The Optimal Path is hosted by Ash Oliver and brought to you by Maze, a product research platform designed for product teams. If you enjoyed this episode, you can find resources linked in the show notes. If you want to hear more, you can subscribe to The Optimal Path by visiting maze.co/podcast. Thanks for listening. And until next time.