PM Spotlight: Taplytics Product Manager, Shirley Javier

We chatted with Taplytics resident star Product Manager, Shirley Javier. Shirley is a bit of a celebrity around these parts – she was previously a Senior Technical Support Specialist who worked directly with our clients with implementation, solutions architecture, best practices, and as an all-round technical guru who knows the product inside and out.

We talked about what’s led to her success as a product manager, how empathy plays a key role in her product scoping process, and how she effectively works with her team through retros and using tools like Notion. Shirley recently led a webinar on feature management and experimentation which you can check out here!

 

You’re a big proponent for  “ideas come from everywhere and everyone”. What are some things that have helped you effectively collaborate in a remote setting?

I stepped into the role right during the start of the pandemic. One of the things that have really helped and almost challenged me as a PM is understanding how we can ideate and brainstorm in a remote setting. We use tools like Notion, whiteboarding through Slack, and screen sharing to be able to communicate ideas. It has been a challenge but has also enabled me to communicate in ways that I wouldn’t have thought of if we weren’t for working in a remote setting.

I wanted to avoid recreating the in-person experience of everyone sitting in a room and being forced to be there. If our team was trying to ideate what a new feature will look like pre-2020, we’d sit in a room and we’ll have a limited amount of time to kind of come up with ideas and put it to paper.

Alternatively, in a remote setting, you have a lot more flexibility as people can sit on an idea, sleep on it or take those thoughts away over lunch or during their walk and come back with a refreshed mind. What we do instead of sitting down and having a whiteboarding session for two or three hours is creating specific feature channels on Slack where people can have an open and ongoing conversation to talk through the problems that we’re solving. We can discuss ideas like who we’re building this for, and what are some cases and issues that we foresee with the implementation. This way it’s more of an open-ended conversation as opposed to forcing everyone in the same room and coming up with everything right then and there. (In the event a Slack thread gets too unruly, we even have a bot that triggers a Zoom call).

I can’t stress enough how important it is to spend time with the people using your product – it’s invaluable. 

 

How has working so closely with clients and end users influenced how you prioritize development work? 

I think one of the critical things that has been really helpful with this role is that I came from the support side of Taplytics. I’ve spent a lot of time in the weeds with our clients, understanding what value means to them, the struggles, or the successes that they’ve had with our product, so I understand their needs.

One of the biggest parts of my role is listening to client feedback. I like to take some of the lessons that we’ve learned and translate those into product stories in Jira. I’ll look through Salesforce notes, comb through product feedback in Zendesk, jump on client calls, and build the backlog. From there, I’ll prioritize what aligns most with our product vision and what we think will be important for our clients going forward. I will dedicate most of my time to making sure that our product experience is great. I want to be dedicated to creating an experience for the customers that is as seamless as possible.

I’m so grateful for the relationships I’ve built with our users. If I’m stuck on coming up with the MVI for a new feature or if I hit a fork in the road between going one path or the other, I’ve been able to open up communication lines by going straight to the end-users and ask them which path appeals to them most. I can’t stress enough how important it is to spend time with the people using your product – it’s invaluable.

 

What’s your thought process from taking an idea and turning it into something ready for production? 

I actually start by working backward and creating release notes first. The idea behind this is if I were to communicate this finished feature to clients, what would that look like in one line? That’s the start of every single product scope that I make. As a team, we ask ourselves, what is a compelling way of summarizing this for clients so they’d be interested in using it? So, you start by creating the release notes. 

It goes without saying, we also need to ask, what’s the problem we’re trying to solve? We think about who our intended users are and what is our goal for what their user experience will be. We need to be able to define exactly what the user would need to be able to execute on for the new feature and the new flow.

We also ask ourselves what success looks like for a feature. This can be internal KPIs and metrics, but then it can also be just something as general as a client being able to execute an experiment in less than five minutes from start to end on the dashboard.

We focus on the product and engineering team member. For example, we’re making sure that the ease of implementation is seamless, QA teams have the appropriate error handling functions, and constantly looking to optimize SDK speeds. We want to make sure that developers are enabled to get builds out faster and iterate quickly.

We also want to enable and democratize the experimentation ability of product and marketing by creating a robust code-free experimentation platform that they use on their own without needing additional engineering resources. As a result, developers can write less code. 

 

How do you go about closing the feedback loop internally?

We run a meeting once a month with EasyRetro. We create a board once a month for the team where everyone can contribute to three different columns: Went Well, To Improve, and Action Items. The “Went Well” and “To Improve” columns are filled up prior to the meeting. During the meeting, we’ll vote on topics from each column to address. Each person gets 5 votes. The votes get tallied up and we have an open discussion about the top picks.

As we talk through the cards, everyone shares their opinion on if they agree or don’t agree with it, and why and why not. From those ideas, we’ll start populating the Action Items column. Then we make action items that we will execute on from those ideas. So if, for example, a card in the “To Improve” column says that our deployment process takes too long, we’ll create some action items that we can do to shave down our time. This encourages the team to always view our process with a critical lens and that we don’t become complacent to any issues while making sure that we’re always iterating and aiming to make things better.

I actually took our Visual Web Editor and injected our SDK onto my wedding website to run some experiments!

 

Any other tips or best practices that you’ve found helpful? 

Empowering not just yourself, but the rest of your engineering team to use your product and view it through the lens of a customer is really important. Spending time going through your product first hand is critical to understanding how your end users will use it. I actually took our Visual Web Editor and injected our SDK onto my wedding website to run some experiments!

Slack meetings have also been really helpful for us. Creating specific feature channels and ideation channels, as opposed to forcing everybody to sit in a room together and ideate has saved time and been really helpful to us in keeping continuous conversations.

Finally, spending one-on-one time with the engineering team has been really helpful for me. Getting to know your team members, what interests them, and putting them on specific projects that reflects those interests is one of the best parts of the role.

 

How much do you love Notion?

Notion has been a lifesaver! The best part about Notion is the ability to create mini databases within it, so data can be linked from different places. You can take the same data, create different views out of it and make it more digestible to different types of users. I think the integrations that we have with Notion, like the ability to post updates in Slack or send emails have streamlined our workflow. You can pick the most amazing tool, but it only works if the team uses it and Notion is a tool that stuck with our team. It’s simple, intuitive, and works. I’m always getting links from the engineers saying, “hey, I put all my thoughts down onto this Notion page”. Why this never happened in a Google doc is beyond me. 

 

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Taplytics is the most comprehensive feature management and experimentation platform for the modern enterprise. We help engineering, product, data, and marketing teams grow their products by deploying server and client-side A/B tests, reducing deployment risk through controlled feature rollouts, and reducing development time through code-free experimentation. 

We’ve got you covered with flexible deployment options via API,  private cloud, or on-premise so you can take full control of your releases. Instantly test and roll out new features with the fastest feature management and experimentation platform.

Want to learn more about Taplytics? We’d love to chat!