The Product voice at Showpad
Compiled and Edited by — Michiel Denis and Tripti Shri
Hi Stefan — Let’s start by introducing yourself. Who are you, and what do you do at Showpad?
Hi I am Stefan, I work in the product team at Showpad. I was born and raised here in Ghent and still live here with my girlfriend and 2 boys. I grew up spending too much time behind my computer screen and was always fascinated by digital products people were building. As a kid, I used to run to the local newspaper shop, buy a copy of Computerworld (an international technology magazine) and installed and played with all the demo software on the included floppy disks. That passion for digital products brought me to the software industry where I spent the last 20 years. I joined Showpad almost 3 years ago as a mobile PM. Today, I still have that fascination for digital products, I play with dozen of apps and I am always in search of that rare magic moment where you are blown away by a product and realize that from that moment on, everything will change.
As Principal PM at Showpad, what does a typical day look like to you?
As a principal product manager, I spend my time in different ways. Like everyone in the team, I am obsessed with the user. I try to learn as much as I can about what the life of a sales rep looks like by chatting with them, visiting /r/sales, listening to podcasts, etc. The better you understand them, the easier it becomes.
I drive specific products and features from ideation to production. Apart from that, I try to inspire the team when it comes down to product thinking, share my opinion when needed and question our product all the time. I try to be the glue between different parts of the product team and focus on creating a product that every sales rep wants to use on a daily basis. Sales Enablement is such a young industry, there is so much to be discovered.
What did you do before Showpad?
Before Showpad I worked at a couple of software companies, I helped to make software for the graphical industries, worked in ad tech and created a bunch of colorful fun mobile apps. One could read a cat’s mind #nojoke.
How did you learn about the company, and why did you decide to join?
Being from Ghent some friends and ex-colleagues I knew joined Showpad years ago. Also, I always saw updates on social media. I was a product person looking for a product job close to home in an international environment. Everything pointed towards Showpad. Adapting to the size of the team was pretty big coming from a 3 person start-up, but the overall atmosphere and culture made up for that.
According to you, what does it take in order to launch a feature successfully? Do you have any tips for other teams to learn from?
The magic moment for anyone working in the product is that launch moment. That is where the magic happens. To make that launch successful everything needs to fall together. Nothing is as important as listening to your users: when you add a ton of value, everything else becomes easy. Truly understanding the problem you are solving is the crucial part. Once you understand that, you need to find a solution for that problem, I personally think that is the easy part. You have that saying, ideas are for free, everybody has a dozen during their morning shower, executing that idea is a lot harder, and marketing that idea is the hardest.
Once we know how to solve the problem, we have a great team of designers and engineers that work their magic. Seeing a feature coming to life is what it is all about. The small tweaks, the intense discussions, the crazy details, the insane deadlines … all the fun.
Personally I think the most challenging part when creating software is UX. All users have these amazing B2C tools that they use day in, day out. These tools are made by the best teams in the world. The journey to that level of detail and experience for any product is super challenging. Nothing is more difficult than keeping things simple.
A somewhat different responsibility you have is to onboard new joiners about cultural perspective at Showpad. What’s important about educating new employees on this topic?
The onboarding part related to culture is a session where we focus on the cultural differences within Showpad. My colleague Roeland created this training and it is a funny session that touches some of the most essential things in a working environment. We are a global organisation with 28 nationalities, we want to make sure that no matter what background you have you feel welcome and that you get an idea of the differences between cultures that exist. We discuss items such as power distance in different countries, what your life could look like if you lived in a different part of the world, etc. We touch them in a light way but usually, these sessions turn out to be great. When I run into new joiners who attended the sessions they often refer to it.
Now let’s get a little bit more technical. Recently we’ve launched the PWA version of Showpad (congratulations!). Can you quickly explain what PWA is, and what the motivation was to start this project?
Showpad’s new desktop app uses PWA Technology. A progressive web app allows us to create a Windows App based on our current web app. The same web technologies can be used on different platforms. Customers were asking to make our Windows app more like our Web App. Our current windows app uses native technology. As we noticed that customers were using more and more hybrid windows devices and are familiar with the Web App. We decided that using our web app as a desktop app would be a good idea. At Showpad the offline use case is pretty important. Salespeople out in the field visiting prospects want to have their content stored on Showpad available offline. We decided that by using PWA technology we would take the Web App offline, an app that was not built with the offline use case in mind. This was definitely a challenge. A lot had to be re-thought, flows needed to be added and modified. Apart from that, the biggest challenge is making sure that the whole product/engineering team should be aware of the impact this project has on what they are working on and will work on. Bram, the engineering team lead working on the new Windows Desktop App, does a great job advocating this in the team.
How did you manage this dream project?
I think the hardest part of what you call a dream project was making sure that we are able to deliver a new app offering as much value as possible from the moment we go live (known as GA — General availability in Showpad).
At the beginning of the project, there were uncertainties. The engineering team made sure these were clarified asap, so we could be sure that we could deliver the app on time.
We are not building something new. Users expect the quality they are used to from day 1, which makes it challenging. Prioritizing the work was definitely the hardest exercise. The next step was making sure that we were able to test the new tech against the challenging environments from some of our customers. Our customer support team made sure that we got access to some production environments so that the engineering team could learn how massive amounts of data would be handled by the new technology.
As we cannot deliver everything at once, we made sure that we had a clear feature set defined for every stage of the process. Additionally, we made sure that we had a Beta that could go out and some customers could go hands-on to have their content stored on Showpad available offline. As we improve that version we grew the number of people that have access, working with the CS (Customer success) and the sales engineering team we gathered some feedback that helped us prioritize the next steps.
You probably have worked with various stakeholders for research. What is the most interesting thing you have learned from it?
The moment we decided on the technology we started talking to customers to confirm if what we thought was a good solution is aligned with their expectations. Bringing the Windows App this close to the Web App was a new path for us. Making sure that our customers agreed on this was essential. Customers were super enthusiastic about our consistency, so we decided to continue. Validating the priority on the feature set was also an important phase with the customers.
Another learning that I was quickly reminded of, is the big difference in OS support when you create a B2B desktop app. Having worked a lot on iOS and the web, you suddenly realise that in major enterprises, the rollout of new versions of operating systems is not super super fast *cough*.
We started validation with Showpad’s customer success and services teams. The technology required us to drop support for certain versions of the OS, did the data we had available, combined with their understanding of our customers confirm that we could go ahead with the plan? And were customers still running on these older versions planning on upgrading?
With product marketing, we defined a timeline when it would be safe to sunset the old app and when what communication would go out.
The most important learning is definitely that creating a clear picture on the impact on our customers is essential to make any decision.
Last question. What is the one piece of advice you’d give for engineering and product team members to take the Showpad platform to the next level?
Keep it simple. Sales enablement is an exciting space to be in. B2B software is catching up with B2C software. The number of sales users we have today is growing massively. Everything we create should be simple. Keep the number of different concepts low, and keep the flows easy.
