Inside Zenjob: Product & Engineering Culture II
Why a product manager is a problem manager
Last week, I met our VP of Products, David Schara for a second time. I wanted to learn more about product discovery. Over sushi bowls and coffee at one of our favourite spots in Berlin-Mitte he gave me his perspective on what product discovery means — and why a product manager has to be a problem manager.
1. What is a product discovery process?
Essentially, we use product discovery in order to identify and validate product improvement ideas. Product discovery is usually not covered in traditional agile frameworks like Scrum. Often the Scrum Framework is used to improve the predictability of delivery and the team velocity for software products, This is great but also to be considered too expensive for testing a multitude of ideas. In the product discovery process, we form hypotheses about customer needs and their problems and think about potential solutions. Internally, we call these ‘bets’.
The discovery process helps us to answer a variety of questions: Do we have the customer buy-in on the idea? Can they use the product to effectively reach their goals? Can we build the right products for our customers given the time and tools at our disposal?
We also assess risk, and, finally, we run tests to learn how to reduce this risk.
2. Why is it worthwhile to invest time in the product discovery process?
We can be sure of one thing: successful products deliver value to customers.
“A product can be a fantastic technological achievement, but if no one needs it, you might as well throw it in the trash.”
3. How does product discovery work in a team setting? What are the challenges?
Product discovery is a collaborative exercise. A team typically consists of a product owner, a UX designer and an engineering lead. Led by the product owner, teams focus on discovering what’s valuable-/feasible to build, and usable by our target audience.
“One challenge is that a team is often programmed to deliver high-end software products at scale, and it is difficult to switch focus from delivering software. It is important to figure out what works and what doesn’t with just the right amount of effort.”
In general, people tend to focus on coming up with solutions more than understanding the underlying problem. It is part of how humans behave. It’s not easy to implement problem validation as a company standard. Also, ‘discovery’ needs to be a continuous activity inside teams, even if it is not generating an immediate impact.
4. What happens if you develop a product only to recognize that 95 percent of customers don’t use it?
A good product manager always has to be a good problem manager. With different tests, we have to classify the main problem. In the last product discovery process, we did different A/B tests every day for a whole week. Quantitative data shows us at which point customers jump off. The problem then is that you still don’t know the motives. You have to find out what the pain points are and why you are losing customers at particular points.
By the way: this is actually what the product discovery process is all about. You have to understand the underlying problem through, for example, qualitative interviews or customer surveys. Most time you find out the main problem through qualitative data rather than quantitative data. For engineers, this initially felt contrary to the daily job they actually do. But today, it’s a really important skill that you need to bring to the table.
5. What have you learned?
We have found that the discovery process is not repeatable. If we hadn’t rethought every discovery process, our customers would still book staff via Excel sheets instead of using an easy and intuitive app.
Also, the rapid development of new technologies is constantly creating new opportunities. Due to technological developments, the market is now more dynamic and is changing to adapt to an on-demand economy. Subsequently, our customers’ demands and the possibilities for meeting them are changing fast, too. Due to this, time periods in the discovery process must be strictly fixed and adhered to. It is very important to develop the product accordingly or to think anew — even if that means that we’ve done some work for nothing.
6. With everything changing so fast, how do you anticipate product discovery to develop in the future? Will it be influenced by AI?
It’s comparable to the future of the labour market. The labour market will certainly be influenced by the immense changes brought about by new technologies. Today, we can’t predict what kind of new jobs we will have in the future and how working life will change. But we can already see that AI will have an influence.
For example, AI technology will improve candidate matching, because AI software can do what humans can’t: the analysis of vast quantities of information about a candidate’s personality and ability can be measured by their success in the company. After years, the software can offer mathematical recommendations, such as how well an applicant fits a certain company.
In the future, we will still think about customer needs and their problems, in order to come up with new solutions. The process of problem analysis was first developed a few hundred years ago and it will continue to be important for at least the next hundred years. In general, AI could help to make the product engineering process more efficient. Over the next years, the business will be stronger and more global, with faster-changing customer needs. The consequence of this is that we will have even shorter product life cycles.
About David
Product lead with an engineering background, over 15 years experience in music tech and HR, believes that great products are the result of true collaborations, explains any context with a few sticky notes, his professional superpower is to stay positive, goes by the DJ name “Scale”!
