Written by Avery Komlofske
Published on November 17, 2022
Turns out that tech companies can have New Year’s Resolutions, too.
As the last quarter of the past fiscal year comes to a close, companies have an opportunity to reflect on previous choices and determine their capabilities for the year ahead. They can evaluate old goals and set new ones, and allocate the necessary resources for those goals. For a product team, this means figuring out what new features or products will best serve their customers, and plotting out a roadmap to make them happen.
Given this renewal, joining the team of a company around the turn of the calendar can be especially exciting. After all, new projects will often require new expertise or a larger team. Every company’s needs will be different — but if they’ve set and evaluated their goals well, they’ll have a strong idea of what those needs are.
Built In Colorado sat down with four companies with ambitious and exciting 2023 goals. As expected, they vary substantially: VIZIO is advancing the capabilities of its data and analytics team, Sunday is aiming to expand its customer base, Eventus Solutions Group is starting a new client contract and BombBomb is building a brand new product. What they all have in common, though, is the need to expand one or more of their teams to achieve their new year ambitions.
What projects does your product team have lined up for 2023, and how do they fit into your company's overall strategic goals for the year?
BombBomb's product offerings have been anchored around our one-to-one, asynchronous video product for the past decade. This year, we found repeated themes emerging in our sales process and customer interviews of our mortgage business segment, asking for increased ability in our software’s guidance, automation and scalability with video. As the Fed raises interest rates to combat inflation, our mortgage customers are compelled to respond with significant adjustments to their business. In light of these factors, BombBomb will build, release and iterate on our solution to these challenges with a new product called Vist.
Vist deepens our integration with Total Expert, a leading fintech software company that delivers purpose-built CRM and customer engagement for modern financial institutions. In our development of Vist, BombBomb has developed a patented technology that enables a marketing leader to review and edit email workflows, find the most appropriate spots for videos and make it easy for a mortgage team member to send them.
What makes these projects particularly interesting, challenging or exciting for product professionals to work on?
Product professionals at BombBomb are interested in the challenge of building into a broad scope of our technology all at once — whether on our video services, API development or product-led onboarding efforts. Vist product development allows the familiarity of working within a known technical space while permitting the reimagination of the user experience and technical solutions. This work is set in the context of BombBomb’s product ethos: Ship small, learn quickly and respond even faster. Product professionals at BombBomb have thrived within this product ethos and grown exponentially in their careers.
We carefully balance new product innovation with keeping our core products up to date in the market as asynchronous video becomes more widely adopted in our social network workflows. As a result, our product roadmap includes a 60 percent allocation to new product development and 40 percent toward refining existing technologies.
This work is set in the context of BombBomb’s product ethos: Ship small, learn quickly and respond even faster.” -Michael Park
How is your team growing to help meet those goals?
BombBomb currently has seven product teams, organized into areas of concentration: growth, foundational technologies, innovation, security and compliance, and platform. In addition, these efforts are supported by quality assurance and business intelligence teams. The construction of BombBomb’s product teams is influenced by Marty Cagan’s Inspired model — comprising product management, UX design and engineering.
We do not anticipate adding additional product team members in 2023 — our investments will likely be in disciplines like data engineering, product analytics, technical infrastructure and automated testing. We continue to invest in professional development programs for our team members, such as Reforge, Passionate Product Leadership and Scrum Alliance, ensuring our team is growing in areas they are interested in and passionate about. BombBomb provides formal and informal mentorship of our product team members, giving business intelligence and context to our technical team. We are committed to developing these aspects in our organization and investing in flexible PTO and first Friday off mental health initiatives, supporting a holistic career development methodology.