6 Step Product Development process we follow at AirCTO
The product Development Process is the heart of any product company’s operational process. Every small or big company have certain product development processes and several stakeholders to get an amazing product out there for their users.
AirCTO is relatively a small startup and we churn out a lot of features and updates very often for our users. Our product revolves around 3 target users:
- Recruiters — our customers
- Candidates (Tech Talent)
- Tools for the internal Sourcing team
To build features & new products, we go through several processes to bring the best possible outcome. Here is a snapshot of our Product Development Process.
Let’s take a look at how each phase operates and helps us move things to build and launch new products at AirCTO.
Information Gathering
Every 2 weeks, our product, sales, marketing, sourcing, delivery and support team sit together to find out
- The problems which our customers or our sourcing team have been facing
- Feedback shared by potential leads and our customers
This meeting is usually 1–2 hours long and we spend debating on the problem statements and their possible solutions. We co-relate this data to see how often these issues are happening and how many customers are reporting it.
We also see if it hinders the process for our customers or if we are not able to keep up our promise.
However there are few problem statement which are simple enough to take it through the development process directly.
While there are always few complex problems (as mentioned below) which can’t be solved quickly and needs debate, data and research.
Now this is where most of the magic happens. This usually is a tough part of the product development phase, as we not only have to find a good solution for the given problem but also a better solution to what already exists in the market.
Information Processing
During the information phase, we try listing the problems and finding vague solutions for them. We make sure all the information is thoroughly processed so we could end up finding an ideal solution.
For instance, one of the complaints, we used to face from our customers was, regarding the interest of the candidate for a specific job after we share the profiles with them. The candidate wouldn’t look interested or have enough understanding about the job role when our customers would call them for an introduction — over 30% of the customers had reported this issue.
AirCTO Sourcing offers relevant, qualified and interested candidates and if interest is an issue then it questions our value proposition.
We have a job description page for individual companies which highlights required job skills, offered salary, location of the company, about the founders etc but this fully loaded one-page information was not solving this problem. Candidate would hardly read all the text and would straight-away apply to the job which we realised was a strong reason for not being able to deliver quality profiles.
In this phase, we primarily try to see if there is a problem that can be solved innovatively. We thoroughly spent time studying the existing solutions in the market and how better we can do (if there is already one).
We bring this information in front of our senior advisors and take their opinion. This greatly helps us in removing junk and making it more useful from the user and business perspective.
Sometimes we don’t have enough data to make the right call based on the existing information. So, we do surveys and ask more customers to understand them well.
We also try to on-board some early leads who are interested in the new product.
For AirCTO Select, we reached out to people through LinkedIn posts, links to lead generation form (we love Hellobar & TypeForm) on AirCTO.com, direct emails & calls to our existing customers and acquired over dozen of interested leads. This helped us to test our new idea very fast and gain insights into our product.
For AirCTO Sourcing: the candidate’s interest issue, after several consultations, we pondered over the idea that we should use our existing Chatbot technology to check the interest of the candidate. This will allow candidates to pull information gradually based on what they are looking for, instead of pushing all information in one shot. We call it FAQ Chatbot.
Consensus Building
As we find some direction through the information-gathering process, I start building consensus around the idea with individual stakeholders. All of these conversation happens informally over tea breaks and I take their inputs to see what they think and leave them with enough time to ponder over the solution and if they have better ideas or if there is scope for improvisation.
This exercise tremendously helps us in bringing the team together on the same page before we move to a formal planning phase.
We believe, if every stakeholder believes in a specific product or feature then it’s very easy to deliver — the team will do everything possible to make that happen.
Planning
Once we gather the information, process them and after building a consensus around them, we move to planning. We call up a meeting with all the stakeholders to debate the solution. We look at the data points, surveys, feedback and the proposed solution very closely.
This debate might get intense at times but it only helps us to come up with a better solution. This discussion usually goes for an hour — we do rough planning and break the tasks for the follow-up meeting. So that everyone can sleep over the solution to discuss it fresh again.
We get into another meeting within 48 hours to streamline the discussion and come to a conclusion. Every team member shares their final feedback and we reconsider those points which make sense to all of us.
We also define some measurable goals (we use the OKR framework) to vet the success of this launch. In the case of the FAQ Chatbot release, we agreed to monitor:
- How many candidates click on the Chat link
- How many candidates initiates the chat (and the number of questions they ask)
- How many candidates submit their resumes
Execution
Now comes the hardest and perhaps the most interesting part of our product development process; Execution. 😄
As they say, ideas are worthless. Execution is everything!
We call up a few tech meetings to find out the system architecture, database design, user experience and the APIs we would need and how data would communicate between the systems. We do extensive research on the best practices to solve different tech problems and what level of abstraction we would need to make it scalable.
We debate the pros & cons of certain implementations. We also look for tools (though most of them are already streamlined within our engineering process) which would move us together faster.
This leads to a few discussions, an implementation plan and then a precise development roadmap.
We encourage the Agile process and break down the release into smaller weekly sprints to monitor our progress. Depending on the complexity of the implementation, we iterate our development process and make gradual staging releases.
Once it has gone through a few levels of internal testing. At AirCTO, We don’t have a dedicated tester. So, everyone tests here. We make sure that we don’t miss the committed deadline — we take it live to our users and closely monitor the OKRs.
Joy and nervous — the mixed feeling that we get with every release. :)
Monitor Metrics
We integrate Mixpanel, Mouseflow and our Internal tracking process to see how our people are using our product so we can always improvise the product with minor or major enhancements.
And as always we keep iterating this product development process to deliver a better user experience to our customers, and candidates and offload some of the work of our sourcing team. 😄
If you’re hiring developers in India then feel free to send us an email to contact@aircto.com or browse through AirCTO.com
⭐️Check out some interesting stats on AirCTO Interview. ⭐️
⭐️Try out AirCTO Chatbot to filter candidates ⭐️
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