Interview with Doodle’s Senior Product Manager Büşra

Last week I sat down with Büşra Coşkuner, Doodle’s Senior Product Manager, who’s been heading up the development of the newest scheduling tool in the Doodle universe.  

What is Doodle 1:1 and why is it so cool?

That’s so interesting. You say Doodle one TO one and we say Doodle one ON one. Seeing how people would pronounce it was one of the assumptions we had when we started working on the tool. There are always lots of question marks when you start making a new product.

It’s totally stress free for you, the organizer. You offer the times that might be nice, and then you never think about it again. 

So how does it work? How is it different from Doodle groups?

Your meeting invites start in the same way as with Doodle groups. The difference is what happens after. With Doodle 1:1, you just send it to one person you want to meet with and this person picks a time and that’s it. Both of you have the event in your calendar. It’s scheduled. You need only two steps.

With Doodle Groups you’d choose the options and then you’d still have to go back to the invite and choose the final time. So you still have to think about going back and doing some action. For Doodle groups it makes sense to have three steps, because there are more people involved.

So awesome. 

Totally. The best part is you don't have to care about times that get busy in the meantime. If you have a meeting and one of the time slots you’ve offered to your participants is suddenly taken, the tool just won’t offer that time to your participant any more. Zero stress on your end. 

Your calendar really does take care of everything. 

Yes, this is why we ask you to connect your calendar, otherwise if a meeting came up you’d have to edit the time slots in your invite manually, and then you’d have to remove it from the invite. Like this you don't have to do it. 

Any other features that make this tool super unique or cool?

It’s super easy to use, both for the organizer and for the participant. For every second invite I send out, I get enthusiastic feedback what a cool and simple solution this is. (For each and every invite I get a 1:1 meeting set up ;) )

Obvious features are time zone support, an overview of all invites in your dashboard and as mentioned above, the calendar sync.

How has the process of building Doodle 1:1 been so far?

We work with user feedback. We started with a prototype, an MVP, something that is useful and that gets the problem solved. Then we started to collect feedback.

It makes us really proud that we’re working on this tool together with the users. We started getting feedback from users during the closed beta and it’s still coming in. It’s amazing. 

That’s so interesting. You really had to figure out the best solution for the users.

That’s our job. Users don’t have to think up the solution. They can just tell us what they expect from a tool and how they would like to use it or why. What's not working for them. These kinds of things they know really well.  

My next question was about the biggest challenges in creating a tool like this.

The biggest challenge is that the concept is new. There are solutions for a  permanent calendar mindset already out there. Doodle’s dated MeetMe is such one and has been there for almost eight years. This new tool is the opposite - you create a Doodle 1:1 invite and then you can forget about it. And this has some implications that are pretty tricky. 

It’s also a challenge to read and consider every piece of feedback we get. It’s not easy to find the time to reply to each one, so I apologize to everyone that we couldn’t get back to. It's just so much feedback and we try to answer as many users as we can.

I’m sure you have spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of feedback. 

We use Airtable to collect the feedback.  It’s a huge list of feedback, it’s really nice to see how many people give us feedback. And this is what you wish to have. I love it that we have such an active user base, it’s really amazing. 

Many thanks to everyone who gives us feedback. 

It’s not easy to find the time to talk to every single one, so I apologize to everyone that we couldn’t get back to, it’s just so much feedback and we try to answer as many users as we can.

What’s on deck for the next release? What’s the future of Doodle 1:1?

We’re working on a way that you can reuse the same link. Some of our users from the closed beta asked about this. Working with great feedback is part of the process of building a useful product. 

Are there any other exciting features upcoming?

We are in exciting times, in a big transformation from an ads-based consumer tool to a subscription-based business tool. We’re exploring and building tool after tool to solve scheduling problems that the “busy professional” how we call our main target group, encounters every day. Doodle 1:1 is a big step into that direction and, yes, there will be more game changing features come soon. We’ll talk about them once there :)

Thanks so much Büşra for your insight into creating the latest and greatest tool from Doodle. 

Set up your first Doodle 1:1 today and save yourself all the back and forth busy work of setting one on one meetings.