Future of Work 2020: Taking a step back can be the quickest way forward, says Tina Ngo of Influx Worldwide
At YourStory’s Future of Work 2020 conference, Tina Ngo, VP Products, Influx Worldwide, advises product managers to not lose sight of the larger picture and the customer’s journey while building a product.
Tina Ngo, the Vice President of Products at Influx Worldwide, calls herself a ‘product person in the day and an artist by night’. At the third edition of YourStory’s Future of Work, India’s largest product-tech-design conference, Tina, who is a designer herself, tackled the topic of ‘The Art of Product: Using Your Left Brain the Right Way’.
“The left side of your brain can be used for logic and structure the right way so that you could apply the creativity associated with it,” she said.
But how does one deal with the overload of information and the need for constant data analysis? Tina believes that as the left brain is processing all this data and information, one should tread cautiously while putting processes in place. “We adapt to a certain methodology to such an extent where it completely destroys your creativity,” she added.
Tina Ngo
Whatever may be the situation at your company, Tina advocated not losing focus or sight of the larger picture and what the company wants to achieve in the long run.
“Taking a step back can be the quickest way forward,” she added.
Tina, who works with tape art—where art is created using adhesive tape—described the product map structuring through the process of taping. A product map should be created in a similar way to a tape painting, where one takes very fine and small pieces of tapes to place them in a structured order.
“Here again, the question we need to ask ourselves is how do we know the focus area and where to paste it. It is necessary to step back to see if we are going in the right path or not. If needed, one needs to pivot to try something else to know the feeling or to view how the customers would need to see them,” Tina said.
This is where the need for a list and visual representation comes in to provide a flow to better understanding and mapping your customer journey. The customer journey can include discovery, decision and selection, purchase, and post-purchase actions.
Tina, therefore, asked product managers to take their list and then apply it to their customer journey map to know how each aspect will flow into the other. This will also enable the product managers to understand the customer pain points at each step of the journey, according to which they can craft the MVP. This would also dictate changes to what you are going to build next and help the product or development team understand whether it is going in the right direction.
“Hence, it is necessary to marry both logic and visualisation to know what you are building today, and ultimately whether it fits into the customer journey. The ultimate goal is to know the holistic journey, so you have an idea of where you are going to be,” she added.
(Edited by Evelyn Ratnakumar)
A big shout out to our Future of Work 2020 Sponsors: Alibaba Cloud, Larksuite, Vodafone Idea Limited, Gojek, Adobe, Udaan, Pocket Aces, Junglee Games, Sharechat, Open, VestaSpace Technology, Maharashtra State Innovation Society, Kristal.AI and GetToWork; and our Knowledge Partner: Ascend Harvard Business Review
