Quantum Metric entered 2020 with what Director of Product John Dao described as a “clearly defined” product roadmap. But when COVID-19 lockdowns started to affect customers, it was an outcomes-focused approach that let the company stay nimble.
“Customers sought help to better understand this shift in behavior and grow their business,” Dao said. “We reprioritized our roadmap to satisfy these needs and meet increased user expectations around fast, efficient user journeys.”
When it comes to introducing new products or features, both Dao and Sharvari Nerurkar, a group product manager at Zoom, said that they prioritize outcomes over outputs. Specifically, the two product professionals said that this approach allowed their teams to adapt fluidly to customer needs during the pandemic.
Additionally, a long-view focus on outcomes helps shore up the immediate efforts needed to ultimately win over users. “Our approach has earned us our customers’ trust and open feedback, which we value very highly,” Nerurkar said when explaining product decisions undertaken by her colleagues on the Zoom Chat team focused on improving user collaboration.
Below, Nerurkar and Dao explain why they’re laser-focused on outcomes at their respective organizations — and the wins yielded as a result.
Pivoting to Emerging Needs — Quickly
“Focusing on outcomes versus outputs has helped Zoom be responsive and adaptable to changing customer requirements. For example, last Thanksgiving, Zoom lifted the 40-minute limit on meetings so that families could meet virtually during travel restrictions. The desire was to focus on delivering happiness, not just shipping another feature.
My team on Zoom Chat is currently focusing on helping our users improve their collaboration through chat with useful and easy-to-use features. Zoom Chat has threaded conversations, emojis and GIFs to help people be more expressive and have fun. Our approach has earned us our customers’ trust and open feedback, which we very highly value.”
Sharvari Nerurkar is a group product manager at video communications provider Zoom.
Roadmap Flexibility in Real Time
“We engage with customers and immerse ourselves in their pain points. This focus creates alignment for product and engineering to prioritize the most important problems to solve.
We kicked off last year with a clearly defined roadmap. However, the COVID-19 pandemic changed consumer behavior, shifting our customers’ needs. Customers sought help to better understand this shift in behavior and grow their business. We reprioritized our roadmap to satisfy these needs and meet increased user expectations around fast, efficient user journeys. Among the platform improvements, our anomaly detection proactively alerted DevOps teams when critical incidents affected their business. With the digital shift, the impact from critical incidents became magnified and customers needed observability to resolve issues faster. We introduced features to enable lean product teams to do more with fewer resources and make faster decisions.
In a time of uncertainty for many businesses, our customers gained confidence to iterate faster knowing Quantum Metric was their safety net to uncover issues and insights. As a result, we had phenomenal customer retention and rapid growth in our customer base.”
John Dao is director of product at Quantum Metric, which uses digital analytics to help companies inform product decisions.
