Product Management at Cyrkl.com #1: Status, limits and proposition

This is my first deep dive into how we do product at Cyrkl.com. Enjoy!

Why deep dive into our product?

Innovation and product management are my life-long passions which I like to share.

I also like to be as transparent as possible. When you see the process behind all this - the decisions, missteps, building blocks, customer stories etc. - it takes away the artificial magic that comes when you tell the story as an overnight success in retrospect. And that might be discouraging or misleading for many people. I believe there is indeed magic and deep satisfaction in product management, but it comes with hard work, stress, failures and doubts as well.?

Moreover, transparency allows you to compare with your practices and critique mine which helps me think harder and do better.

I believe longer texts are better for this. I write in English although my Czech writing skills are more precise. But we have a very international team and Andrew Gray from Thilia Ventures as an investor so I see this as a better way to share.

Product at Cyrkl.com and business development at Atmoskop.cz

For the past three months, I work on Cyrkl.com, a marketplace for industrial waste in Europe. The idea is simple: Sell and buy large quantities of waste online. Like in many other industries, what was done via telephone and personal connections - thus creating a lot of information asymmetry - is being disrupted, brought to light and made more global and transparent. The key challenge for us is to make the digital solution work on a global scale. The company is in 12 European countries and has around 70 people. Roughly a third of them are in the marketplace team which is a combination of customer support and sales. Product team has a CTO plus five devs and me as product manager/CPO. We get UX from an external agency (good enough solution for now) and do not have a UX researcher yet (high on my wishlist). We share BI capacity and closely work with the marketing team.

My previous project was Atmoskop.cz, a Czech version of GlassDoor. Our vision was to build a better way of finding a job based on culture matching. In five years, we built it from scratch (inside a major corporation) to almost 200 000 employee reviews, thousands of users a day and hundreds of clients with about 60%+ yoy invoicing growth and high retention rates. I was responsible for the whole project: strategy, development, marketing, P&L. The team had six devs, two PMs, a marketer, a UX person and we shared delivery manager, customer care and BI analyst with other product teams. Sales was done via a shared sales force pool along with other corporate products. We focused mainly on the Czech market. In a way, all the practice I learnt in business development and innovation comes from Atmoskop.

What is a product? Customer factory, substitutes, expiry date and that every bit of value matters

Customer factory

So let's break down the basics first. What do I see as a product? The best depiction I have seen so far comes from Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean. (I attended his three-day workshop, one of the best on innovation I've experienced so far!) Ash describes a product as a customer factory. Product creates value for clients. It serves a purpose. It does something the client needs. If it does its purpose well, people use it and pay for it.?

When you look at a digital product as a factory, it boils down to a couple of conversion rates and health metrics. Clients come in, do something, get value and stay or leave. Your goal is to make the visit as useful as possible to keep them. So you look at how many register, how many do transactions, how many come back, how many pay and how much, how long they stay as customers. And you see weak spots that need to be improved.

It is already there, so why should I care about you?

One difficult idea to process around a product is that it has substitutes. That is another way of serving the client. If you need to travel, you can take a cab, rent a car or walk. So the key question for you is also: Why should people use your product and not the existing alternatives which are most probably also fine?

You cannot win this in the end

All products will be replaced by better ones, most probably produced by someone else than you. So it has an expiration date, shorter or longer. You can be winning just for some time, as Simon Sinek superbly notes.

“Everything is outdated, when looked at 10 years from now,” said ex-SpaceX, ex-Netflix David Pavlik during a lecture I attended. I like that a lot.

Tough, so what?

It is all tough to realize, but shouldn't be discouraging. Even a couple of years of existence of a great product delivers a lot of value to people and the company. And web development is so fast that you can improve value and experience from week to week. I am not the kind of person who thinks that only completely delivered radical vision is when the product is ready. I believe every client that gets served even with just a partially functioning product is valuable. I believe that you made great progress if your product serves people better next month. Centimeter by centimeter, onwards! “Immer besser” as they say at Miele. That is my philosophy.

Shredded PETs, "Fire the IT guy", but also a very tangible progress

Reality is messier than theory, of course. Product at Cyrkl has a long to-do list. We are finishing redesign from the very old version of the web written by an external agency. Hence we are getting rid of 12 sec loading times, 404s, data inconsistencies, we don't measure a lot of crucial things yet and we over-measure in other areas. We maintain 10 language versions and so we have many tickets of this or that version not being right enough or beautifully creepy outcomes of automated translations (imagine “Shredded PET” or “Turkey” being blindly translated to other languages; yeap, that happened recently on my watch). We spent 30% of development capacity last month on redesign, 20% on maintenance and just 3 % on innovation that is adding new value.

It is no surprise we got this email below. The language is colorful, but we were important to the client and we screwed up. Many others will think the same. I am always saving things like this one for the future and it makes me think.

So what can we do about this? Well, the first thing was to stabilize delivery. There was no delivery manager, no product manager, the velocity was up and down, little prioritization took place. But it worked nonetheless and it worked actually very well. There was and is a great dev team, led by Peter Kisel , a superhero in my eyes. I have never seen development speed like this, or the agility, sometimes from day to day.

So just a little organizational nudge gave us huge boost even in those two months:

• Velocity is stable and predictable.
• We deployed new marketplace, new offer detail on Next and optimized the old PHP; the load times dropped to about 4 secs at the old technology and are at about 1 sec on the new.
• We did couple of data pumps that rid almost all the 404s.
• We made our blacklist for words that are not translated more robust.

Now we need to innovate more and hence we plan Q1 as a split between what needs to be done and new stuff. We still need to work on redesign, improve data stability and support our client teams, but there needs to be a conscious ceiling for that.

There is a value differentiator behind a great product

Now it is time to dive deeper into the selling proposition to have a compass for development. Where do we have the biggest holes? Where do we under-deliver against expectations?

I like three ideas here: breakdown of value parameters; value benchmark; and system of progress.

Breakdown of value

When we were discovering the business model for Atmoskop, we had a trial period of seven months with 20 clients. We visited them each month and asked the same questions all over again: Which of these parameters do you value most (presentation of your company, visits, applications, …)? And how is Atmoskop delivering on these??

From that we saw that brand visibility and number of applicants were crucial. And we also learnt that we delivered on brand but not on job applications. That gave us a clear set of priorities. (Interesting side-note: I learnt that value for clients consisted of both hard criteria such as number of candidates, but also soft ones such as how the company was presented).?

For Cyrkl, I expect to discover something similar. My first version for research is this table:?

Benchmark

But this is not enough. You have to put your product in a competitive context. HR people were using other jobboards and ways to find employees. Why should they use Atmoskop? And more importantly, why shall they use it as their first choice? How to be a must-have, not a nice-to-have? Tough questions, but key to a great product I believe. Very useful tool here is the benchmarking of key value parameters described in the Blue Ocean Strategy.

It is not just the parameters, stupid!

Finally, it is not about parameters people require, they are after solutions to their problems and needs. You may have built a cash cow from one solution, say jobboard, and optimized the application process to death. You fortified this with brand investment and incremental innovation. You became the new standard. And yet after a while people will require more. Alan Klement calls this system of progress in his book on jobs to be done: You introduce a better, more comfortable reality and people get used to it; then you need to bring something even better or more nuanced. We learnt this with Atmoskop. It wasn't enough for white- and gold-collar workers to browse job descriptions. They wanted to see and feel the authentic culture and vision of the companies before sending CVs.

So although in essence I base my reasoning on breakdown of value, I never forget the story for the clients is much bigger, may change over time and takes time to sink in. Delivering a great product is just part of that bigger story. But an important (perhaps the most important) part. A part that is worth doing with love.

See you next time!