Rick Agajanian is a product executive and former Chief Product Officer at WorkWave, a professional service software company. He began his product career at NAVTEQ before becoming Director of Product Management at Radiate Media. From there, Rick transitioned to NRG Home Solar, where he was the first product team member in the company, before taking an executive position at WorkWave.
In our conversation, Rick talks about the real impacts of working on mission-critical software for the professional service industry and why it was essential to have a refined product test and release process. He shares instances where customer feedback directly influenced the prioritization of the product roadmap, as well as how AI is influencing products in this industry.
I always fall back to a value-based roadmap approach, which is about emphasizing the value that you can provide to your end users. A value-based approach is important because each industry is a little different and each customer base has some nuance to it.
For example, when I worked in field service, our parent company created an augmented reality software that we were evaluating. At the time, a popular use case of augmented reality in field service was an older technician being able to stay in the back office, connect to the younger workers out in the field, and use augmented reality to guide them through different actions. However, for the industries that we were in, augmented reality didn’t provide a lot of value because there weren’t a lot of mechanical aspects to them — there was no guidance that somebody in the back office could offer.
Conversely, if you take that same idea of augmented reality and put that into an industry like media and advertising, the value is visually impressive, eye-catching content. Just by having that type of content, it drives clicks, viewership, and value. That’s a good example of a value-based approach.
First and foremost, get to know your industry. Meeting clients, engaging with industry organizations, attending industry events — these are all really important to immerse yourself. Also, take a look at the goals you want to have on your roadmap. What do you want to achieve and how are you providing value with the roadmap items? Finally, the metrics that surround those are critical. How are you measuring value? It could be something like time to revenue, adoption rate, or NPS. Look into how those measures fit into your industry and verify that you are providing value to your end customers.
To set the foundation for internal software, understand that a lot of times, it’s viewed as a cost center as opposed to a revenue driver. If you’re providing software that’s being sold, then you’re trying to create as much value in revenue. Part of the value is not just to the client — it’s also driving revenue for your business. With internal software, the value piece is around operational efficiency. I challenge people to think about if there are ways to drive revenue that are adjacent to what you’re doing. Driving revenue often means realizing a potential opportunity to create a new revenue stream.
Then, how do you validate those elements? When it comes to internal-facing versus client-facing products, I like to engage with users who are the decision makers. Sometimes, that involves creating advisory boards if they’re not part of your organization, or blocking off time on people’s calendars internally to interview them.
The mission-critical nature of that work was always at the forefront — companies use the software to run their business, which impacts their revenue. If the software is down, they can’t send people out into the field to complete services, and it also ties into their payroll. Those real impacts made it essential to have a refined process for releasing and testing software. Obviously, standard testing is important — when pencils go down and QA has time to thoroughly test with no new changes.
Another essential factor is communication. This refers to things like internal release notes, which would go out to everyone in the organization. A best practice is to have release readiness meetings where you pull in people from all different groups within the company so that everyone is aware of what’s coming out.
Then, there’s the customer-facing side of things. Depending on what you are releasing, you want to be super communicative with your customers. We put up banners on our website that announce new features coming out soon. We can also track usage by feature, which we can then use to recruit people to be part of a client advisory board or beta testing. Those pieces are super important, especially when you’re creating critical software for a business.
The most important part of an advisory board is the people. Part of its success involves recruiting power users and people who are engaged in the software. Also, find users who are invested in the outcome. You want them to have a stake in seeing good results. Anybody who’s actively engaging with you and asking you for updates is a potential CAB participant.
Second, it’s important to get specific insight by sending prototypes. If you send them in advance, that’s great, but it’s not always required. Sometimes, following up after is great too because you’re able to do the survey, ask questions, and then show them the results in a client advisory session. That way, you can engage in specific questions and ask follow-ups. Prototypes are a great way to get deeper involvement with these folks.
Finally, we would make sure that being on the advisory board came with value. If someone was in our CAB, they would be first in line to be a beta user. We’d support them by giving them discounts on things, such as our user conference. We would also celebrate them by having a happy hour that was exclusive to CAB members, and have them network with each other. You’re creating a dynamic environment with a board like this, so it’s important to give them value back.
A few months ago, a new mobile product manager was trying to figure out whether he should prioritize a payment feature or a customer engagement feature. I remember being in the Slack channel with him and a few others, and he said, “I was thinking about putting the payment feature above the customer engagement one, which would push the engagement one back further into the year. What do you think?” One of the other product managers popped in and said, “Actually, we just did an advisory board session about this. We had them rank their priorities, and 80 percent of them said that the customer engagement feature is going to be more impactful to them.”
This was a nice, proud moment where we could see these surveys and CAB engagements really put to use. We were driving the roadmap and making decisions based on data, so it was a great example of seeing product managers engage with each other and share that information. It inspired me to create a team folder where we could share these types of analysis so everyone could access it.
It’s your preference of how you operate, but allocating a percentage of the roadmap to these items is very helpful. In general, you always want to make sure that you are looking at growth. You want to look at retention as well as tech debt. There are particular pillars that you want to make sure that you’re hitting. Depending on where you are and what your client and company needs are, you may move the slider on any one of those to increase allocation.
Also, you don’t want to get stuck in what I call a “death spiral” of putting too much emphasis on tech debt and not enough on growth and innovation. People get stuck in this from three main causes: putting something on the roadmap that customers asked for a while ago that you haven’t gotten to yet, putting something from last year’s roadmap that you didn’t get to on this one, and filling up the roadmap with too many small features that cumulatively take up all of your time.
To avoid this, I recommend always reevaluating your roadmap every year. Don’t just automatically carry things forward — re-rank things and make sure that what’s on the roadmap now is still valuable. Also, calculate out your percentages. Whether it’s story points or hours, make sure you know what portion you’re dedicating to growth versus retention versus tech debt.
With acquisitions, product is typically one of the earliest groups involved in these discussions. Your job is to figure out the fit of the product and portfolio. Does it fit with your existing customer base, or does it fit in an extension of your customer base? Is it an add-on that could potentially work with your client base, or is it not in the portfolio altogether? And then, obviously, does it fill a need? Does it fill a need for your clients? Does it fill a need for your company and its goals?
The hardest part of M&A is figuring out how well the user experience is going to work within the portfolio, particularly when it comes to software. Sometimes it’s easier and faster to just build the feature that your competitors are winning with as opposed to acquiring the competing company. I always look for microservices. If there’s a particular feature that you need or want, is there a microservice that you could use that’s not wrapped in all this other fluff that you don’t need? That makes it a lot easier to pull it in and be part of your portfolio.
Also, is it an add-on? For example, we acquired a company with customer engagement software, which was something that WorkWave was missing. It was a nice add-on because we just pulled that product right into our portfolio. It was self-contained and a great fit for our customers, as well as a need for them. From a user experience, it just made sense. That’s an ideal acquisition.
Field service has always been evolving with an eye on efficiency, because efficiency in field service equals growth. That could mean being efficient with leads and your sales process, or in operations and job completion. Efficiency is a big thing, and AI and automation fit right in there.
I think about AI in two ways, with the first being product intelligence. To me, this is an extension of big data. Everyone needs big data because it can help them make the most profound decisions for their company. With that, AI can read this data for you and take away the cumbersome nature of doing that analysis. Larger companies may have some employees who can do this analysis, but smaller companies with less resources don’t have that kind of time. The product intelligence of AI is game-changing.
The second part of AI is automation. I always think about it as Amazon Alexa for your software. Thinking about a field service user who’s great at operations, they don’t want to be bothered. They’re on the call, somebody wants a service, and they want to be able to add it into the system and get somebody out in a truck and over to that property as soon as possible. The user experience should be as simple and easy as possible. Automation means them doing less clicks to get to that service.
I’ve now seen software companies in the field service industry are actually adding AI as part of their package — almost like the smart version of their software. You can buy the standard license or the smart version, which has more analytics and AI incorporated into it. It’s just additional features and a way for these software companies to upsell their existing products and get more value out of each license fee. It also makes their products more valuable compared to competitors. If they hit the right notes with AI, their value will grow substantially by making the customer’s life easier. That’s how I see product strategy evolving in our space.
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