Gary Murray – Product Lead

  • Engineering Happiness

    As part of joining Automattic – you are required to spend your first three weeks in product support. I was recently part of the first group of the WooThemes team to do the 3 week Support Rotation and it gave me some key insights into customer behaviour – as well as my own behaviour  – and the way one markets/presents a product:

    Engineer customer happiness and reduce open tickets.

    As a happiness engineer – you are given all the tools at your disposal to help a customer with a query – as such your job it to engineer happiness for that customer using the tools at your disposal. But having said that you have to also weigh up customer happiness vs business interests – i.e. you would not just be able to refund every customer who asked for a refund with the line ‘but it will make them happy!” and realistically feel you are doing a good job. When I thought about this as a product manager I felt I could apply this same thinking to bring clarity to an often ‘grey’ job title: engineer customer happiness in a product while reducing the number of feature requests either through inclusion or exclusion.

    Just because there is information online – don’t assume the customer will actually try find it first, and if they have found it, don’t expect them to have read it. And if they have read it don’t expect them to have understood it.

    As a Happiness Engineer it’s your job to find the answers to the questions a customer has – often this means referencing articles that they could have as easily found as you. But, you can never expect your customer to have found these articles, let alone read it, and how about understanding them? So if you start finding that you replying to the same questions over and over again – maybe you should have a look at how and where you are addressing these issues in your products design and or messaging.

    Don’t assume you have the answer to a customers question until you fully understand the problem they are facing.

    We can often start telling a customer what we think they want to hear, or even more so what we want them to hear – rather than actually first trying to understand what it is a customer is asking, or why are they asking this question. I heard this line during my support rotation and it really struck me: You can put a bandaid on the problem – or you can try address the cause now.

    Customers come with an expectation of what they think your product can do – and often will actually buy or use the product still fully expectant that it will do what they wanted it to do – even if it can’t.

    I had a support query where a customer had a very valid idea for a website he was trying to create – but the catch was that although it was a really good idea – the way he wanted to use some of our products was just not relevant to 99% of our customers. Maintaining your products focus amongst a sea of good ideas is key, you need stay focused on your product goals and keep working towards them.

  • WooCago

    25 hours of flying, 9 hours of layover and 6 movies. That’s what it took to get from South Africa to Chicago for my first team meetup since starting at WooThemes. Over the course of two days, 15 WooThemes employees flew to Chicago from around the world. One of the benefits of working for WooThemes – and now subsequently Automattic – is that we are a remote team, which allows us to work from anywhere in the world. But, being able to spend 8 days together as a team and meet the people outside of Slack and Google Hangouts is hugely valuable.

    NEW BUFFALO

    We started our team meetup in a small coastal town called New Buffalo – about an hour and a half outside of Chicago on the other side of Lake Michigan. We rented an awesome 8000ft² home for the weekend for some fun social time, just getting to know each other and played a crazy game with chocolate as an icebreaker!

    Unfortunately the weather did not play along – so we did not get to do as much as we had planned, but when the weather did clear for a short while a group of us hired some bicycles from a local shop and headed off on about a 20-30km ride exploring the area. We did have some discussions about whether or not this amount of exercise could lead to a heart attack by certain members of our newly formed ‘bicycle gang’ – but we all managed to get back to town – even if at one stage it might have appeared we were lost.

    TEAM GROWTH

    Originally our meetup was held as a joint meetup between both the Marketing and Business Development teams – but by the end of the week we had merged into the newly formed Team Growth. In all my time working with and in various companies I have never worked with such a diverse group of people – but to me that diversity brings with it a real strength that I feel WooThemes have done well to foster and grow within the company and our recent acquisition by Automattic only further serves to enhance that diversity and strength.

    THE COOK-OFF

    On our second last night of the weekend we had a fun ‘Cook-Off’ style competition mixed in with some Cutthroat kitchen style sabotages. Unfortunately my team started with a handicap as we were one man down at the start (no names mentioned) and we also ended up being on the receiving end of 3 out of the 4 sabotages – but we did manage to come a close second – so congrats to Team Bud on the win!

    CHICAGO

    After an amazing weekend spent together we headed into Chicago to attend the IRCE conference where we had an exhibitor stand for the remainder of the week. It was a crazy week with the team split up into various groups to ‘man’ the stand, as well as all of us attending the first ever WooCommerce meetup in Chicago. I managed to get out on one morning and capture a few photos of the city – Chicago really is a beautiful city and well worth a longer visit

    THE LAST DAY

    As with any trip there is always a last day. Slowly over the course of the morning we said sad farewells to teammates and new friends as we all headed back home again. A group of 5 of us were left to wait out the day really as our flights left late in the evening and we managed one last outing to Best Buy – which was apparently just around the corner and down the street – we ended up walking for miles! But I have to say my flight home was a whole lot better after that!

  • One size does not fit all

    While spending a rather large amount of time in airplanes recently, including one rather uncomfortably long flight from Dubai to Chicago it got me thinking about the idea of one size fits all – and it’s application to the airline industry.

    Unless you fortunate enough to be able to fly business class (never mind first class) and you are tall you will know the discomfort I am talking about. We (us tall people) have to make do with economy class – which sadly just adopts a one size fits all approach to passenger comfort. It amazes me that no airline has taken the opportunity to create a custom option for taller passengers in economy class. I know that you can try book a seat at the emergency exits to try gain some extra leg room – but getting one is still very much based on ‘luck’. I would happily pay a little extra for my economy class ticket if an airline would include one or two rows with seats that are larger and have more legroom, which could be set aside for taller passengers – surely this is not something which would decrease overall revenue but rather increase it through slightly higher ticket prices combined with greater customer loyalty?

    Or are all people over 6 foot ‘rich’ and able to afford business or first class? Or is it that the demand for tickets is just so high that they don’t actually have to care?

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    Update: Since writing this I have found that both British Airways and Lufthansa offer a premium economy option as well as a few other airlines. Seems I was unlucky in my choice of airline!

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  • Emotions and design

    I read this post by my colleague Jesse Friedman at Automattic during the week:

    Don’t become emotionally invested in your design until the people who use it do.

    I often feel that most of my time studying design was spent learning to disassociate my personal emotions from my work and be able to look at it objectively and from the perspective of the customer – and it’s something I think as a designer one has to continually fight against. It’s very easy to just open up a new canvas and start designing something that looks great vs designing something that people will use – and don’t get my wrong – I’m not saying the two are mutually exclusive.

    Just this week at WooThemes, we put out a ‘small’ additional page needed on the site – and that quote was very relevant. The success of the new design was enabled by the fact that no-one on the team involved tried to over-control their specific role or contribution. Everyone was open to input – or as Jesse said – no-one became emotionally invested in their specific contribution.

    I think the same could be applied to MVPs as I wrote about last week – the more time you spend working on something – especially in isolation – creates a greater chance that you will become emotionally ‘over-involved’ in your design or product. Rather involve others, get feedback and stay open to criticism.

  • Mountain biking and MVPs

    So it seems spending time exercising gives me time to think about what I’m going to write about. I spent some time this week reading a few varying views on Minimum Viable Products. One of my own personal favourite descriptions of this term has been Josh Longs Smallest Viable Product from his book Execute. But it still gets tricky to decide what is minimum vs loveable vs smallest – and that’s where my afternoon ride gave me some personal clarity on this topic.

    It’s nearly one year to the date that I won my first mountain bike race – now you may be asking what has this got to do with MVPs, MLPs or SVPs for that matter? Let me explain my view.

    Last year (2014) I had been doing a ‘reasonable’ amount of training again after spending nearly 4 years off my mountain bike after an injury. By nature, I am competitive, and so using Strava enabled me to quickly see where my fitness levels were when compared to other riders in my city and area.

    So when I saw this race – close to my home town – I knew that my Strava logs over the same distance in training were comparative to the winning times of the previous years race – bar a few minutes or so. At this time I considered entering – but still thought that maybe I was not quite ready yet to race – so put it off. Finally on the day before the race I thought, Ah – why not – so I entered (late entry fee and all). I drove up early in the morning to take part in the race – with a strategy of starting from the back (literally) to not get caught up in any early racing and rather ride the race at my own pace and just see what happened. To cut a long story short, it did not take me long to pass most of the riders in the race – with most bombing on the first big climb and I progressively caught the remaining few riders, and finally the race leader with about 3km to go before the finish where I out sprinted him to win the race.

    So as I was riding today and remembering that race it made me think of this term MVP, and what does it mean to me – and that’s where my race comes into it. Eventually, I had to make a decision to go ‘race’ – I could not continue just training and using my Strava times to work out if I could have won that race or not had I entered. I had to actually put myself out there and take a chance and see what happened in the ‘real’ world. I think this is much the same for MVPs – there comes a time where trying to push the design just that little but further or including that latest feature you’ve thought of stops you from getting your product out there and seeing how it compares. You are never going to know just how fit or strong you are – or in the product world how good your product is or if it answers an actual user need unless you ‘put it’ out there – or as our industry likes to say – ship it.