From internal user to product manager — in Photomath
“Hey! Currently, I’m working on developing an internal tool that could speed up our process of creating visual math explanations and replace classic code programming. Do you want to try it? No one is using it at this point, and you would be the first one” — Hell yeah!
That question came at a perfect moment because I was looking for a new challenge in my career. Until then, I spent four years working as a Math R&D Specialist in the Math R&D team, where we researched math standards worldwide. In the last year of my work in that team, we started working on something new. We introduced Animated Tutorials — detailed animations that explain the math concepts, just like a real tutor would.
I spent some time programming Animated Tutorials using an internal programming language. That was challenging because I did not have much programming experience and because I had to learn a new syntax. After some time, we noticed that the creation of Animated Tutorials takes a very long time, so we began to think about how to speed up production because Animated Tutorials have proven to be very useful for Photomath’s end users.
Internal tool for creating Animated Tutorials
Thus, the tool from the beginning of this story was born. So, it is an internal tool in which Animated Tutorials are programmed using blocks, i.e., the so-called block programming language. Because of my history with creating Animated Tutorials, I was sure that I was the person for this project. I was also intrigued by the fact that it is about block programming because it was the topic of my dissertation where I researched several tools.
After I agreed, I got to work and built a list with ideas for improvement. Back then, only one developer was working on tool development. He and I would meet once a week to go through the ideas and see what made sense to develop and what didn’t. After about three months of using the tool and finally creating something that fit the content we wanted to get, it was time to see if developing the tool further and looking for new people to join us makes sense. For me, there was no doubt that we should continue with the project. Some rough estimates were that by using the tool, one average Animated Tutorial could be finished twice as fast compared to the old way. After considering these facts, the leadership gave the green light to develop this tool further.
Soon after, new users of the tool began to arrive, the so-called creators, and we started building a team that would create Animated Tutorials. Initially, my role in that team was mentoring, and since I had the most knowledge about the tool, I was also the one who passed ideas and suggestions for improvements to the developers. Back then, we were a team of three people, and every day we thought of new ways to make the tool better.
As time went on, the number of creators grew, and in the meantime, we got a Team lead. As the team needed one dedicated person to research and communicate ideas to developers and research and report bugs, I became a person who no longer used the tool regularly but listened to ideas and discussed them. Obviously, my perspective has changed since I’m no longer an active user, but I’m still actively involved in the process.
Then what am I?
Am I a Product Owner? Am I a Product Manager?
Do I want this for my career? Great help and support were provided by the Team lead, who initiated a discussion about naming my position. After discussing and analyzing, we concluded that the position I’m currently working in has its name. So I woke up one morning as Junior Product Manager of our internal tool.
Then, I had some new challenges. We can start from the fact that I hadn’t heard of Product Management until two years ago, so it was pretty unknown to me what was in the scope of one Product Manager’s work. In an attempt to find some educational materials in Croatian, I mostly came across job advertisements for Product Managers. There are a lot of materials written in English, which is not surprising considering that Product Management was initially developed in Silicon Valley.
Of course, I also needed a mentor, and since I was the only Product Manager in the Croatian office, I could not get one in Croatia. Official mentorship I received from a colleague who is a Senior Product Manager and part of our US team. For me, the time difference meant I couldn’t bother my mentor at any time and that a high level of independence was required from me.
Learning requires practice — and understanding from colleagues
It is extremely exciting to learn and work on tool development “from scratch.” Along with that, of course, come some challenges. Since the beginning, I think my biggest challenge, something I still struggle with, was to change my mindset. At first, I was too focused on the solution instead of the problem we wanted to solve. For example, I would ask developers to add some new button that would do something without communicating the reasoning behind that conclusion. In that case, we would start from the beginning and conclude with some more elegant solutions.
Another mistake I used to make is that I didn’t spend enough time thinking about different use cases, so after implementation, we would realize that the existing solution might not be the best one. In these situations, I have the support and understanding from all team members because they are aware that I’m a beginner and that such situations are important to us. After all, we can learn something from them and use that in the future.
One time-consuming process was getting the developers used to work with the Product Manager. At one end of the process, we have developers without experience in other companies, who have been in the company since the Start-up phase and who have not worked with a Product Manager so far and may not even be sure what its role is. On the other end, we have me, a Junior Product Manager, trying to figure out her own tasks and getting used to a different way of working. Because of that, sometimes it was unclear where the line was and whose job is what, but with communicating and giving feedback, we have come to the point where we are one functional team.
I learn something new with each situation, and I try to apply it in the future. One of the biggest rewards is hearing the users that new functionalities really help them, and they are happy to have them finally.
Last year in June, we celebrated our tool’s first birthday. The tool is still very young, and a lot of work needs to be done. However, in the year of its existence, we have made a lot of progress. For comparison, at the beginning of the development, the tool had about 30 blocks, and today it has around 350. We accomplished that by thinking from the start about how we could simplify the creation of Animated Tutorials as much as possible. The fact that the creators can create a block themselves also plays a significant role. In this way, they directly contribute to making that tool better every day.
The most important indicator that we are on the right track is that we have reduced the time needed to create one Animated Tutorial by three times, which is even better than expected. Also, people onboard on the development process much faster since there is no need to learn some internal programming language. That is why it makes sense to continue to work on improving the tools, and the ideas for improvement are certainly not lacking.
Just as it took Apple several years to develop the Copy & Paste functionality for iOS, it also took us more than a year to add that functionality to our tool. Almost every new creator would try to copy something after a few hours of working on the tool and be surprised when they realized that we still don’t have it. While it may sound simple, the developers had to implement many things before even talking about Copy & Paste.
The team of creators is constantly growing, and today we count about 20 active users of the tool. In order for everyone to have the opportunity to express their ideas and opinions, we try to have regular meetings dedicated to just that. We see every significant new functionality in the tool as a serious reason to celebrate. I’m sure you haven’t heard by now that someone had a party because they can use Copy, Paste in some tool.
I learned a lot through the new role. The creator has one goal: to create fantastic Animated Tutorials, and I’m here to listen to their needs. The fact that I was a tool user helps me a lot because I can “put myself in their shoes” and quickly understand what they need. What I wasn’t too aware of as a creator is that there are a lot of other sides that depend on how the tool will progress. We have a high-level goal as a company, we have a team of developers who work on other projects also, we have a lot of ideas from different sides that need to be wisely prioritized and spend time on the most valuable ones.
I believe that Product Management in Croatia is just looking for its place under the sun. The IT sector has only just begun to develop in Croatia. Lately, we can often hear news about Croatian companies such as Infobip, Microblink, Nanobit, Infinum, etc., that are constantly expanding. Therefore, the demand for Product Managers has increased, so in the future, I hope for the development, recognition, and acceptance of Product Management as a function within IT companies. Product Management’s primary focus is identifying and prioritizing problems to solve, collaborating with other teams in the organization to develop solutions, and creating great products for end-users that define the overall trajectory of the business. That’s why Product Management plays an important part in organizations and is the missing piece that many less mature IT companies don’t realize they need but can make or break them.
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