Product at Bending Spoons: The recipe to our secret sauce
…after years of toying with them and enjoying a little bit of mystique, I was persuaded to lift the lid and reveal the recipe of our secret sauce. Ready?
By Sumedha Arora, Team Lead at Splice
I’m a product manager. Sounds pretty impressive, right? Like the sort of job people are eager to have. The sort of job people go to business school to get.
Except there’s a hitch: Product Manager is a really vague title!
So vague, in fact, that when my friends and family ask me what it involves, I like to wind them up with evasive answers: “Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that…” It’s fun to pretend I’m mysterious. :P
But, after years of toying with them and enjoying a little bit of mystique, I was persuaded to lift the lid and reveal the recipe of our secret sauce. Ready?
Hi, I’m Sumedha!
Hi there, nice to meet you! My name is Sumedha Arora, and I work in the Splice team.
I arrived in Italy in December 2018. A small-but-booming tech company called Bending Spoons hired me to work on a small-but-booming video editing app called Splice. They offered me the suitably vague title of Product Manager. Of course, I accepted immediately!
As we’ve established, nobody is quite sure what being a product manager entails. And, aside from a short stint managing high-value products at Uber India, I felt that I didn’t have much experience. Still, I wasn’t going to let such minor details impede an exciting opportunity!
Flash forward two-and-a-half years, and I’m still here. Splice is now one of the leading mobile video editors globally. Since I set foot in the office, it’s been my only project, and I’m still as excited about it as I was on my first day.
But… what does a product manager actually do?
OK Sumedha, enough waffle, I hear you say. Tell us what a product manager does — right now!
Alright, here goes…
Being a product manager means providing value to customers while generating value for the business in the process.
Cool. What does that mean on a day-to-day basis?
At the risk of being reductive, product management is simply a process of discovery and delivery, repeated many times over.
Discovery. In truth, it’s a fool’s errand to create products or features that are solutions searching for problems. They rarely succeed. That’s why the product manager’s first mission is to discover a problem. Then, after understanding the problem well, the PM begins with solution discovery. Some problems have obvious solutions; others, not so much. Both phases of discovery — problem and solution — involve studying the market, the competitors, and the target audience. The product manager must do this in such a way that helps them understand either the product’s opportunities and the ways to capitalize on them, or the problems the product must solve and the solutions that need to be built.
Delivery. Delivery is building a solution that you’re reasonably certain will solve the problem you’ve discovered. The certainty comes from the solution discovery process that the product manager undertakes. How the product manager delivers a solution typically depends on the following factors:
- The nature of the product or features they’re building (that is, whether they’re building something for the first time or building something tried and tested)
- The size and composition of their team
- The objectives of the business
The approach could be largely agile — delivering in increments, iterating along the way, or largely waterfall — building final-stage software sequentially. When delivering a product or feature, the product manager must also be mindful of the metrics they aim to move, and by how much. This applies both at the feature level and at the product level. They must also ensure that these metrics are being tracked. And, for solution delivery to be considered successful, it must truly solve the underlying problem.
In tech, inertia is a recipe for disaster and constant innovation is the key to success. There’s one thing you can guarantee: Superior technologies and superior ways to solve the same problems will always emerge. As such, it’s vital to repeat the discovery and delivery process. Discovery helps you develop an intimate understanding of the market and your customers. Delivery lets you deploy better solutions in terms of design and performance.
Alright, I think I get it. But how about an example?
When talking to our loyal Splicers (aka our customers — the people whose opinion matters the most), a pet peeve came up repeatedly: Making several speed changes to a single, uncut piece of footage was a nightmare. They’d have to cut up their footage at every point where they wanted to change the speed. Not exactly intuitive or user-friendly. And the solutions out there were either nonexistent, prohibitively complex, or downright over-engineered!
During solution discovery, we narrowed things down to the three most important variables for Splicers, as follows:
- The points where the speed changes had to take place
- The speed that they wanted in the segments between these points
- The ability to ease in and out of two segments of varying speed to create a smoother transition between them
We iterated a lot until we came up with a UX that let users control these three variables in a simple yet precise way. Since we were doing something new, we opted for an agile approach. We would quickly release a minimum viable version to just a smallish segment of users, and refine it drawing from the feedback we would receive along the way.
The positive feedback rained in fast. When we hit statistical significance, we rolled out the feature Splice-wide and prioritized making improvements to it. And, in true fairytale style, I’m delighted to report that it’s gotten better and better, becoming a beloved feature of Splicers everywhere!
Through the process of discovery (both of our users and of the market), plus our fast, strategic delivery, we took an incredibly frustrating, labor-intensive workflow and simplified it. Before long, all of our users were able to intuitively navigate what was previously a complex, error-prone process in a fraction of the time. With all our products at Bending Spoons, our product managers run discovery and delivery. It’s our mission to create value for our end users by providing innovative, often disruptive solutions to their problems.
One last Spoonful of product management insight
The Bending Spoons approach is ambitious and data-driven, while laser-focused on customer needs. As a product manager here, you’re a trusted resource, fully independent in your work, and responsible for making critical decisions about your product. Each Product team has its own designers, developers, quality assurance, data analysis, growth, and marketing resources. That means each team controls what it works on, its roadmap, and its product strategy and KPIs. Plus, Bending Spoons is one of the world’s top app developers — meaning that your work is enjoyed by millions of people across the globe. Imagine the impact you can have building products at that scale! Oh yeah, plus we’re based in Milan: in the heart of one of the most exciting cities in one of the most beautiful countries in the world!
Wrapping up
Before I return my focus to Splice, there’s one thing that I really need to mention — my coworkers, my fellow Spooners. The people I work with are incredible. They inspire me every day without fail. I love Splice, but it’s my colleagues who make this the greatest workplace imaginable. If any of you are reading this — you’re the best!
If you found this little glimpse into product management life exciting, you might be interested to know that we’re recruiting right now. Why not check out our open roles and send your CV our way? Go on, I dare you!
