HARSH BUT TRUE
Your Customers Think Their Software Stinks
The majority of end users do not believe technology has made their jobs easier. This is true whether they are using something built internally by IT, or a vendor product like a CRM, ERP, EHR or ATS. If these were applications the end user was paying for, they would never put up with it. But because they have to use these tools for their jobs, company leadership does not prioritize ease of use when making an expensive new application decision. End users believe they are powerless to ask for change under these circumstances. Should they be?
Product Management
Whether managing products for internal use only, or as the primary revenue stream for the company, a good product manager spends most of their time on the following tasks.
- Understanding and representing the user.
- Defining a vison for the product.
- Aligning, promoting, and sharing the vision with the company and users.
- Monitoring the market and competition.
- Prioritizing product capabilities and features.
They must balance the needs of the user, the business, and the technical reality, and then make tough decisions and trade-offs.
Every Company Is Different
Cover All Your Bases
Whether as a Product Executive or a Chief Product Owner, Jeff has made sure both strategy and day-to-day activities are covered. Put Jeff to work for your organization and experience what a great product leader can do for you.
- Passionate About the End-User Experience
- Forward Thinking
- Influential with both IT and Business
- Able to Take All Levels on the Journey
You ask, Jeff answers
Jeff has always believed in technology making lives and jobs better, helping to free up time for human interactions by taking care of more mundane tasks.
Although Jeff has spent most of his career in IT, he has always filled the gap of less than robust Product departments in the businesses where he has been a leader or a consultant.
Ideally, IT is not the right place for the Product Manager, who needs to stand independent of all business units in order to make the best decisions on behalf of the entire company.
- Users have to jump between multiple systems to perform a single task. Data once captured and found on a single handwritten sheet, now can only be found by visiting multiple screens.
- Users prefer flexibility when capturing information in order to tell the story of what is happening. Those analyzing data prefer distinct values as found in a drop down or check box. What do you do when no accommodation exists for what the user believes needs to be captured?
- The software was not developed with the end user in mind, it was developed to achieve specific company goals. If the CFO is getting good financial reports, he probably does not see the connection between turnover and the software’s lack of usability.
When creating new software or implementing a vendor program, the product manager should be examining what the business process will look like for each role interacting with the new software. It is always the most cost effective to do this up front. It is always the most expensive to do this after the software is live in production.
Storyboard the new process so everybody involved can see and approve what the user interaction will look like. Often executives, years down the road, are surprised to find how challenging software has been for front line associates. Every role should be able to perform their tasks in as few screens with as few clicks as possible.
- In the Specialty and Surplus insurance market, the company who can produce a quote first usually gets the business. The fastest one could answer all the questions to request a quote in one system was 22.5 minutes. On the hardware infrastructure with the pages and questions rearranged for fewer calls back to the server, Jeff was able to reduce the time down to 7 minutes entering the exact same data.
- When Covid-19 hit and the company turned from Medicare assessments to supply chain Covid testing, a CRM solution was stood up in a couple of weeks. However, as the program took off, and hundreds of practitioners across the US needed to be trained, learning and using a CRM became a stumbling block. Instead, Jeff’s product and IT team designed and built a simple power app to simply follow the check-in and testing process. Not only did this speed up testing, it also eliminated all of the ways errors were being introduced through the CRM interface. It also reduced the cost to administer the program for the company, because no training was necessary. The CRM was still used by a handful of administrators to schedule and report off the data.
- Product Management defines the product vision, creates a product roadmap, prioritizes features and capabilities, collaborates with cross-functional teams including IT, and ensures the product aligns with business goals.
- Marketing conducts market research, creates marketing plans, develops promotional materials, manages advertising and public relations, executes campaigns including social media, and analyzes customer feedback.