Global market, global challenges — How our product team overcomes them

Developing a successful product — especially one for other teams that develop successful product s— is a challenge by itself. Bringing it to market globally and answering the needs of our diverse users continuously only make our calling even more ambitious. In this episode of our series about the life of a product company, we’d like to give you an insight into what it’s like to face global challenges day by day and how we find beauty in them.

1. High competition & saturated markets

Healthy competition is one thing, but with saturation, potential customers may simply have too many choices. They struggle to filter out valuable messages from the noise. Increasing competition is leading to a growing demand for innovation and faster innovation cycles. Consequently, the team must figure out how to invent new, creative yet truly useful things and how to work in a continuously delivering and renewing way. This dynamic, of course, creates a bit of pressure on product teams.

Therefore, a challenging environment causes product companies to be tightly focused on satisfying customer needs along with offering value for money — aka a good deal in the eye of customers.

This is what has been our primary focus, as well: we keep a close eye on our users, conduct regular user interviews to understand what value they get out of the app, what problems they try to solve with it and maybe get a new idea about how to solve those problems even better.

Following agile principles helps us, DevMads, achieve this goal with a cyclical development process. Our product team consists of creative and self-organizing teammates to ensure innovation and user-focused approach to product design and development.

2. Distance from the market

Users of StoriesOnBoard are from all over the globe: some may log in from the United States while others use the app from South Africa, Chile, India or Australia. Given that the user base of StoriesOnBoard is scattered across the globe, our product team can physically never get close enough to the market to make sure decisions are not merely based on assumptions. This is why gaining a good understanding of our users becomes both a challenge and a key factor.

How can we get close to our user base?
SaaS products usually encourage — and sometimes incentivise — users to provide feedback real-time, thus providing a constant flow of data. Since the survival of SaaS tools depends on their user base, their goal is to build a community among users, keep them highly engaged & satisfied. Of course, it’s easier said than done.

Facing this challenge and trying to come up with solutions made us think really hard about how other product teams try to overcome this issue. In the end, we ended up developing an entire tool to help solve this issue (StoriesOnBoard Feedback Management), but there were some key takeaways along the way that might be useful for a broader audience, as well:

• Even though the data might show something very different from what your gut is telling, in most cases you just have to trust the data and adjust the product or communication accordingly.
• While you should have specific roles within the organization for engaging users, for a deeper understanding in general, we advise everyone to ‘get their hands dirty’ and reach out to users every now and then.
• User personas and customers are not constant. Product teams must keep in mind that personas may change over time, so they need to research and adjust the offering constantly.

3. Communication is key both internally and externally

Face-to-face communication might be the most intuitive and wholesome method for spreading news and information, but in a world where people and teams hardly ever meet on Zoom, let alone face-to-face, efficient communication is still a challenge regardless of all the tools that empower us to work and serve our customers remotely. So what tips do we swear by when it comes to efficient communication?

• Hybrid of instant & delayed communication
  Users and potential customers may need help asap with setting up their account or they may ask for a custom quote that needs to be prepared. We believe that there is a very clear line between what must be answered instantly and what can be answered at a more appropriate time. With that in mind, we encourage our team to self-organize themselves in a way that they find comfortable and find the ratio of instant and delayed communication that works for them. Of course, our support team is ready to answer user questions during working hours in time zones of most of our users, but all other non-emergency issues can be addressed at a convenient time.
• Providing and asking for feedback constantly
  The only way to learn from one another is through feedback — and that is equally true for our users. This can be very methodical with a purpose in mind (e.g. in case of a new feature) or quite spontaneous. When we develop something new, we conduct user testing to determine whether our users can actually make us of the feature. Sometimes, however, users come up with entirely different use cases for our product. Every time we come across that, we make sure to have them explain their approach in depth and document it. A different set of eyes can have a very different perspective within the team, as well, so we regularly toss ideas around for everyone to reflect on them.
• Practicing empathy with the help of transparency
  Understanding where everyone is coming from can be hard when lack of context hinders communication remotely. Instead of starting to understand the ‘why’ somebody does what they do, we first focus on what their goal is. Making everyone’s goals and interests transparent is essential, wether we’re talking about our users, our team mates or boss. This is something that user story mapping has taught us. By making it clear for everyone who wants what, we may be able to explore alternative solutions.