For the Week Ending on Nov 7, 2020
Recap:
This week was quite heavy on change management and communication for me at work. Why? you may ask. Well, I’ve come to rediscover the importance of internal stakeholder management and empathizing with customer-facing teams. We seem to always talk about “customer empathy” or “user empathy” in product management but what happens when there is a team that serves as a proxy to your customers? I’m still trying to figure that out.
When deadlines shift, priorities change or even when there are uncertainties around what we are building for valid reasons, customer-facing teams are always in a position to manage customer relationships in line with these changes. Honestly, sometimes, product managers who are not constantly in the face of customers, usually because of how some big organizations are structured, cannot relate to the direct pressure from customers, because well, the pressure is not directly on them. It takes a little extra effort to realize that customer-facing teams need the right amount of information, in a timely manner in order to properly manage the relationships with (your) customers. Hence, it is sometimes important to treat the customer-facing teams as you would the customer and not just another person within the organization making inquiries.
Did anyone notice that Savvy Within was on an unusual content roll this week?
That was the question I asked my small Product Managers’ Circle led by Tobi Ogunsina. Gladly, The response to that question sounded like “Yassss! “
I hardly ever use Facebook but earlier this week, I enjoyed using Facebook business and creators tools to manage and preschedule content for my Career Community (Savvy Within)’s Instagram and Facebook pages. There is nothing as sweet as sipping your hot cup of tea and getting notified that your Instagram and Facebook posts have been uploaded. I would recommend Facebook’s tools for growing businesses and creators. The insights are great but Facebook’s user experience is bleh though😕Â
I should give some credit to my small Product Managers’ circle though (keyword – small. we wanna keep the group small, close and familiar). The accountability to this group helps me knock off many of the seemingly small milestones that add up to my career and business in the long run.
Virtual Reality (VR) + educational curricula content-matching for Scolish is still ongoing. This actually breaks the record for the most manual task I have embarked on in recent times. I am 3 subjects in and beginning to discover that there is not so much VR content that is in line with academic curricula. Maybe the time to build well-crafted custom educational content is coming close.
Burning Question(s):
- How do I transfer empathy to and for my customers via the people that directly face them?
- When and how do you start building Virtual Reality content easily?
