High Tech on the Low hosted by Jordan Kastrinsky, is on a mission to make high tech accessible to the world. In my podcast, I explore the many different facets of the world of high tech from development to marketing, to sales, to entrepreneurship and more! With society turning ever more towards technological solutions to make processes more efficient and secure, it is important, now more than ever, that we unite the high-tech sector's collective resources under one roof to reap the benefits of this knowledge-sharing. There is so much opportunity out there to grow within the industry that we must provide the tools through which to do so. So, what did we discover this week?
The tech space abounds with interesting job titles, one such title, and a highly sought-after position, is that of the product manager. As those who oversee the product trajectory, product managers have the utmost control over a company's development as they decide on key features. To learn more about the position, you can even look back at a past interview with senior product manager from Yoobic, Benjamin Franck, whose episode delved into the intricacies of what it actually means to be a product manager at a high tech company.
Yet, how do you manage a product which is a software directed to product managers? It seems almost Inception-like, yet Elad Simon, CEO of Craft.io, joined the company to answer pressing issues faced by product managers at companies around the world. “Product management is one of those disciplines that is pivotal for the success of any software company, yet it does not have any clear tool or platform for the day-to-day work of product managers,” adds Elad. Seeing this need, Elad is leading the drive at Craft.io to reach these product managers to provide them the value of a centralized platform that they can use for their work, instead of the hodgepodge of tools they use today.
Yet, when Elad first joined Craft.io he saw that internally the company also had unanswered issues. “When I came into the company there was not a go-to-market team,” remarks Elad “and just like in a lot of tech companies there is this move to build a product to answer a need, but there was no way to reach the end-user.” When he joined in early 2019, he came to reignite the company. How did he do it?
First, Elad worked on reorganizing the company. Staff changed, strategies were redefined, and inevitably they had some surprise in terms of their audience that changed their outreach methodology. After carefully reviewing which companies could actually be great users, they found an additional audience to target in big enterprise companies. “We have two core types of companies we work with: software companies, medium to big companies, that need a system to manage their projects, but what was not obvious, and what we have added, were large enterprises like Danon and Kimberly Clarke, whose core industry is not building software but build software for internal processes.”
What’s truly remarkable about this shift is that it is not intuitive. Large enterprises are not necessarily software builders, yet without proper evaluation of their internal processes, Elad would have missed a big market segment that was thirsty for solutions like Craft.io. In a sense, what Elad demonstrates here is the ability of an entrepreneur to dive deeper and go beneath the obvious to understand real core issues of many businesses.
At the end of the day, this type of research methodology is critical for defining good use cases and really reaching people who want to use your solution. Of course, the expression, “don’t judge a book by its cover” is more than relevant here, but still, we can add to it that one must not only ‘not judge” but also be willing to discover more.
