Product Discovery Aha Moments - Esmar Mesic CPO @Trueprofile

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Product Bakery. Today here with a guest, a guest from actually a little bit further away than Berlin where me and Christian are recording. We have here Asmar Mezek from Dubai currently, where he's heading the product team of TrueProfile.io. I mean, Asmar has quite a bit of experience in the product space. It's like 15 years that he's working in product across a large variety of companies from Fortune 500 to smaller startups, Fintechs and I mean with TrueProfile now MedTech. And yeah, Asmar, I mean, I think what is definitely interesting, I mean, you moved to a new country, you started a new job, you're responsible for the product overall. So how did you approach that? Like how did you jump into this new career managing the whole product organization of TrueProfile? Well, first, hello, hello. Thanks for having me. It was a bit challenging. Definitely, I'm not going to lie to you. What I did when I joined the TrueProfile, it's pretty much an observation period for I need to say a month or so trying to understand what the team was doing before and what are the business goals eventually and what we kind of need to do to achieve them, right? I need to say that I always prepare when I join the new company some sort of a gap analysis, what usually used to work in my previous endeavors and what I actually treat as a successful thing versus is team doing that or not. And from that point of view, I usually prepare a new roadmap or a vision if you want to call it and jump on the execution, right? So I really believe I like to strategize, I like incepting division, but I also believe in execution as a vital part of it. Yeah, I mean, you spoke about gap analysis. Maybe you can also elaborate a little bit more like how if someone would want to do the same, how do you approach it? Sure. So I guess it's starting from team to team, right? Again, from my previous experience, starting from design team, I'm always asking the design team, when is the last time they conduct a user interview? Do they do it regularly? What is the cadence? How they're implementing this feedback which they are getting? Who is going on the sessions? Usually the answer is we're not doing that or we have a very poor response from our users. Either way, we are incentivizing them to join the sessions. So design would be the first thing, right? Are they using the right tools? So for example, we switched from InVision to Figma, which was also a big project which we did in our organization. And we cut the cost, by the way. From engineering point of view, it's pretty much how frequent they deploy in the production. What is the cycle time, lead time? How would the sprint health usually works? What's the velocity? So all of these, again, deployment frequency per week or so. And from the QA would be what's happening on a critical basis per week. Do you report something which is really unstable? Do we have something to fix on an urgent basis? And from product itself, I guess that's the most important. Usually what I find out is that it's, again, such a poor alignment between product and business. What I'm trying to do is to explain that product is the business, right? So there is no IT or whatnot, or engineering team or tech team. Product is the business and you earn the money or revenue inside in your company by you're selling the product or whatnot. So that's the thing, right? And it's usually like a big PowerPoint deck with action items or pitch deck or Google Slides, whatever, with action items which we need to execute. And this would be something which is going in the next year. I had a lot to join when the new fiscal year started. So I also had a chance to influence very early on the product decision and where we need to go. And you mentioned that you looked at how many interviews the team was doing, for example, which the first thing that is coming to my mind is the whole topic around product discovery. Yeah, and I'm curious to hear what kind of gaps you have analyzed and actually tried to, yeah, tackle. Exactly. So TrueProfile is a pretty niche product, right? Recruiting healthcare professionals from, I would say, two key markets, India and Philippines, to come and work abroad, mostly in GCC area and Middle East, UK and USA. So we are selling a dream to these people. But the first thing which we did was, again, product discovery or user persona workshop, right? We didn't know exactly who our personas are when I joined. So when I started to ask around, who is the one who is using our product? No one was able to give me a full answer, right? And we literally hire a new team, or we augmented the team, the design team itself, to do this. We hire a user researcher. We prepare ourselves to go out there and start interviewing people. And what we realized is actually that most of our people, most of our audience are mobile friendly. And at that point, we didn't even have a mobile app. So 90% of the traffic was coming from mobile. Second of all, they didn't have a time to look for the job actively. So they rather actually get notified on the job itself, right? This is where the push notification engine will come in place if they have a mobile. And the third was the most important finding is that they are, the audience isn't that tech savvy, because they are mostly from 35 to 55 doctors and nurses who likes to move abroad, right? Because what we did back then is, of course, we tailored the app from the beginning. When we decided to build mobile app, we include all of these elements. So our key thing was, of course, to push for the push notifications, to make a very simple onboarding, and as well, a very simple, the most simple option to apply for the job. So we introduce like a dating app, swiping mechanism left and right. So if they are interested in the job, they're going to swipe left. If they're not, they're going to swipe right. And so far, it's working good. People are shifting existing users from web experience. Again, when you know your user, the person who is probably pulling a 12-hour shift in hospital, they don't have a time to look for the job. So right now, they receive push notification, they react or react on push notification, and they can easily just spending literally a second on their mobile app, on TrueProfile mobile app to apply for the job or ditch the interest in the job. So I guess that's a big win for us. We just launched the mobile app. We have a big hope this year in terms of making mobile app as a key acquisition engine, because one of our main KPIs, of course, user growth. And yeah, mobile app is a big bet. So just to summarize, so the first thing you did was doing this workshop in order to identify and understand who is using your product, right? And by doing that, you understood, okay, people are pretty much on mobile, but they're not that tech savvy. And based on that, you started creating this customer experience, which is mobile. And you're betting now on increasing customers using the application as well as building a strong revenue stream, so to say. Exactly, exactly. And definitely, when you say it right now, when you summarize it, it's pretty obvious, right? But before... It's more obvious when you have data. Yeah, exactly. That's also one of the discoveries which I encounter, we didn't have a unique place to look, right? We actually introduced myself coming into the team Amplitude as a main source of truth. We have everything there. We have also Locker or Google Data Studio as well. So internally, as a product team, you look at Amplitude charts every day and comparing them. So we have a rule in the company, product team is not... They're not allowed to launch any feature before we have Amplitude events ready in staging environment, that we test everything is working fine, and we have the baseline of where are we right now. So if you're launching a referral program, for example, we need to know how many users we have at the moment, how many of them will come throughout referral program as a source, and will this initiative be successful or not, let's say a couple of months using. If referral rate, it's, let's say again, 5% growth rate in healthcare job referrals market. This is how we usually do the benchmark, set ourselves with the baseline and measure what we do. So that was one of the additional discoveries as we did that. Pretty much people are... These days, companies are claiming they are data-driven, but when you just ask them, show me your single dashboard, any tool, right? Mixpanel, Kissmetric, Pendo, Heap, whatever, Amplitude, Google Data Studio, they don't have anything to show. They can show you the traffic on their website from GA. Yeah. I mean, I love that you approach it really from a user perspective. I mean, as a designer, I think I would love to have all the product leaders out there to approach like that. And I mean, I think like obviously, having the possibility to do all this discovery right at the beginning when joining a company helps you also extremely in terms of like getting on board to the company, understanding the business, understanding the users. So I'm wondering like just along the way, like, have there been any surprises or things that made you completely change also the direction along the way? Or did the initial discovery pretty much help you or already set you up for the success that you had? So that's an awesome question, because during the discovery phase, we realized that we totally do not need our B2B or partnership sides in equation, right? And that hit us hard when we were closing this fiscal year, because we didn't meet our goals. And we actually realized that we don't have enough jobs on our platform. And if you want to have a job, you need to get dozens of partnerships per year, if you wish, or even per month. So you have enough jobs, so people can come to the platform and apply for them. That was one thing which we completely missed and neglected because of the previous strategies which were there. And I didn't also focus on that one, to be honest, because we hit the full throttle in terms of the mobile app development and covering this B2C side. But we see right now that when you ask yourself who actually is there to use your product daily, it's not the job seeker. He is coming probably occasionally. It's definitely a recruitment company coming there to browse for Christian from Alex. If they have this checkmark on their profile saying, hey, I want to work abroad, I'm eligible to be contacted. I'm open to work. And this is right now where we are doing. We are moving pretty quickly on the B2B side by offering our product for free. And I'm glad that this, on the long run, will bring additional revenue to the company, because it's something which we kind of totally neglected or didn't believe that it has a potential. But so when we actually checked again, the pipeline, the tool which we're using for the lead generation, we can see literally tens of leads per day. Interesting to use our product from the B2B side. It's really good. And we are starting right now to nurture these leads in order to earn some money. And I really appreciate that you share your mistakes, so to say. And I definitely like using the quotes here, the one you can see, because I mean, how many times do you focus on the end customer and assume also, and that's an assumption that I used to have too, that the end customers are the people who are regularly using the app, which is kind of true. But still, I mean, as you said, right, in B2B, people who are looking for people and who want to hire, for sure they use it on a day-to-day business. And even though you know your customer, it's always important to look between those personas, right? Which persona is the real power user here? And I think like, to me, that's a good learning and also a good reminder for our audience, especially when you work in B2C, for example, to have like this 360 degree view on both sides and not only focusing on the people who are using the end product. Yeah. And I mean, especially like in this segment, right? I mean, as someone who's not working in healthcare, right? Like I, the closest to me is probably LinkedIn. And just like also there, right? Like, I mean, we're all end users. We're all on there. It is a social media platform that lives by users actually coming back every day. But still, the money sits with the sales navigators, it's with the recruiting, sits with all the advertisers on the platform, right? So I think like, while it's obviously important to have a product that gets people on the platform, you need to also nurture the other side, right? So I think like, I mean, if you're saying the job seeker is not there a ton of time, like, is it something where you also intend, like, would it be helpful for you to get them more regularly on the platform through, I don't know, content or something? This is definitely what we will do. Maybe not this year, but it's in the plan. We are going, this year is the idea, of course, to utilize the data points which we have and build the most simplest AI matching algorithm for the jobs. And then the community aspect of what's happening around and inside the True Profile, we definitely want to bring in. So if Alex is referring, let's say, Christian for the job, this event is going to be there. And Alex is going to earn some money, of course, and this will be our hook and good stuff for the applicants to come back and use it as well on a daily basis. We know that it's hard to retain the people who are looking for the job because even in the healthcare market, it's not like in IT. The turnover of employees is not that high. The average tenure is probably three to five years, which is in IT might be, I don't know, even two years these days is a max, right? So that's also something which we're looking for. But I really believe in a constant interviewing thing and speaking with your users, going out there, do a quick prototyping, high fidelity one if possible. I know that's an overload for the designers usually, but it's unbelievable learnings and really the only thing in this design ops, as I call the team or product designers in total. And that's why I like the discipline so much for the product design itself, because it's such a powerful, powerful thing, right? I rather spend the days and weeks and even months contemplating on something and trying to get the prototype in front of the users. Luckily, these days you can run it on your mobile app. They don't even know if it's a prototype or not, right? So just do that. I mean, it's such an obvious and simple thing, but still, people are not doing that. Either they will say, we don't have a budget, there's a loan to be hired, or we don't have a time because of the day to day operations, but believe me, it's just a lousy excuse. Yeah, I agree. I think everyone should do and everyone can do research. I mean, it's obviously good to have someone there to just like quality control also. Because the one thing that you want to avoid is to obviously have a certain bias through research that's conducted the wrong way, because that could also lead you down the wrong path. But I think it's budget and time and so on is a poor excuse, because at the end, research can help you save a ton of time. Like the time you spent in developing something that you could validate quickly for a prototype, as you say. And yeah, it could be higher fidelity. Alex, believe me, I used to attach the Figma links of high fidelity prototypes on user testing.com and pay from my pocket. The sessions, five sessions just to understand how we're doing honestly, because I really, I mean, you need to get the response, right? Yeah. And I mean, you mentioned user testing.com. Actually, another thing that I was curious about, like, especially looking at through profile. I mean, it sounds like a quite niche and specific target audience. Like, do you find the right users for testing on platforms like user testing? Or how do you approach the recruiting for research? Super hard. So we retry usertesting.com. It's pretty generic. When you complain to them and asking to have a more specific testing group, again, they will not give you the best one. So we find one trick, to be honest, we are actually hiring nurses from Upwork. And they're real nurses. And we are telling them upfront that they're going to do the mobile app testing. And we use Maze. And on the Maze, we upload their profile. And we also create the list of the tasks which they need to execute. Like, for example, when we were redesigning the homepage, we had a big, big discussion inside the company. Shall we continue running our homepage on illustrations, where we have this, as we like to call her, flying rocket lady with a briefcase, which didn't resonate at all with the healthcare, versus the real images of the real people, actually, we hired abroad. And when we run the A-B test, you wouldn't believe it was always 50-50. So we couldn't decide on the winning variant. And we said, why don't you actually go ahead and ask people what would resonate better, right? And this is where the Maze tool helped us. Because a couple of quick usability tasks or orientation tasks for the users was, for example, five seconds test, right? What do you see after looking five seconds in the website, right? And definitely, when you have a smiling nurse, versus when you have illustrations, everyone will say, I see a smiling nurse. Then when we compared the text itself and the heading, which we used to have, the heading was also wrong. Then the call to action on the site, it was just, it was something like join or something which wasn't exactly that we wanted wanted to have. And we have this. So I'm right now pitching through profile as LinkedIn on LinkedIn for web 3.0, as LinkedIn was actually pitching themselves 2.0. Because we really use a blockchain layer on Polygon to store the verifications of our users. That's so cool. I love it. And it's for life for them, right? So that's what they're also coming because of that. And yeah, I mean, eventually, the Maze helped us, they gave us the very good feedback. We're paying them, of course, to recruit. It's, I don't know, maybe $10 per session, which, and we need to pay Maze as well. But this is the only thing which used to work. By the way, we try everything. We even try a Starbucks thing that we go in Manila and interview people in Starbucks or in the coffee shops near the hospitals. It didn't work to be honest. And this for some reason is working because, and again, it's so specific because just looking at the India, for example, which is also our key market, it's a different, so there is a state in India called Kerala. It's in southwest part of the India. And we also have a lot of users coming from Kerala, but they don't speak Hindi, predominantly over there. So they have different language and they speak English, right? And we have also Tamil Nadu, which is against now southeast, which they also speak Sinhala, which is again, not Hindi and predominantly not English all the time. So it's super hard in terms of getting down at their level, right? Asking them what actually they want to do, right? Even sometimes, why actually I want to move abroad? They might even ask you this question. So I'm telling you it's super hard, but you know that. Yeah, absolutely. And there's like a strategic question that I'm not able to get out of my head, because you said that you decided to focus on the customer app back then, right? And for sure, now you have to make sure that you focus more on the B2B set. But I'm just wondering, I mean, let's imagine you would have done it the other way around, right? Focusing on the B2B part, but not on the end customer parts. I mean, for sure, there are multiple ways how you can approach it. But I'm just asking myself, was it actually a good definition to still focus on the customer side first? Or what do you believe would have been the better choice? No, honestly, awesome question. Because we had a similar discussion last week with my group CEO, because initially, the platform started as a B2B platform, but we couldn't able to bring a lot of jobs on the platform. So it was always, let's bring the people, then we're going to bring the jobs. It's like chicken and egg problem, right? Yeah, that's what I'm asking. Yeah. So right now, we think that we have enough users, we have a large user base. And again, during the discovery, people are complaining that there are not enough jobs. It's actually a problem, actually, right? Yeah, it's supply and demand right now. It's supply and demand thing right now. So we were able to prove that job applicants will come. But right now, we definitely lack a lot of jobs, which should be provided by healthcare companies, right? So this is where we need to work on this year, for sure. I mean, of course, continue to work on acquisition of job application and our members. And then we see what's going to happen. I mean, yeah. I mean, the idea that I have in my mind is also looking back at Airbnb back then, it's like, I mean, you have now a good foundation to scale, right? By having a mobile application, for sure, you have like customer acquisition costs, I assume, right? But Yes. Correct me if I'm wrong. I guess still the most people are using the product for free while the companies who are looking for applicants. That's true. I guess it's the better way, right? To start getting people on the platform and then adding the people who are actually paying instead of the other way around having them paid and not having any applicants. I think like, I mean, you know, you just mentioned that you didn't manage to hit the financial goals. But still, I mean, setting up for scaling is to me still a good investment, even though you do not manage to. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I agree the board doesn't agree. For sure. Yeah, but let's see. I mean, we are pretty positive as a whole team for the upcoming years. And we definitely are right now augmenting our list of OKRs for upcoming year. So we have a jobs as a maybe second number of jobs listed on the platform as a secondary OKR, which we didn't have at all before. So everyone is right now becoming conscious of that. It's not just user acquisition, which and the revenue eventually, which are the two main key pillars, rather than there are a lot of things around which people need to accomplish, even including CSAT score and whatnot on the platform, right? I mean, a bit is also is like this problem that a lot of marketplaces have, and it sounds like you managed to find a really good way still, or you have good foundations in place, even though you didn't reach the financial goals. It's a bit also this initial investment that you need to take, right? Now that you have enough offering on the platform, you, well, or enough people on the platform, now you can approach those companies that are then actually willing to pay. So I mean, I think it's just, it's obviously too late for your board. Maybe for many other people. I mean, at the beginning, you need to decide where to invest. You might not like break even right away. You need to work until you can become profitable, right? So it's like a question of where do we invest your initial time? And I mean, in your case, I think it was probably a good idea to focus on the end user first to have them on the platform and now get those people in that are interested in the end users. I think the other way around it would be way harder. Yeah. Yeah, I really believe that we are on a good path because this year was a full of experiments and a lot of previous ideas, which as people were thinking something should be working or not, we literally, that was also one of the parts of the discovery phase, which I did, how frequently we are running A-B tests. We didn't have a list of the A-B tests, which we were conducting. And we also hire a growth marketing manager at some point. We are keeping the simple list of the growth initiatives in Airtable. And we have a deadline tied to each one of them. And again, we have inside this card on the Kanban bond of the Airtable, we have a simple to do in progress and done. That usually means that either experiment was successful or it failed. And really, whatever we do, there are at least four to five variants of what we are testing. So each email, for example, which is going out, each email campaign has five subject lines, five CTAs, five different images. And after the first round, we are picking the variant. Then again, we are testing until at least two to three rounds of the testing are there. So we are perfectly sure that, for example, experiment work or did not work. We had a lot of fail experiments, to be honest, because, for example, we're trying to find the most optimized channel for the user acquisition in this case. My bet was that email isn't the one, again, because of our audience, know your audience thing, right? And that's why I really cannot wait that we hit the throttle or push the throttle for the push notifications, where definitely we, again, believe that they're going to have the benefits of it. So yeah, that's definitely something which is also on my radar and something which myself and the team are working on to achieve this year. And everything is tied, by the way, with the main OKR switch companies having so. Wow. Well, Esma, I mean, we have covered a lot of things today from joining a product team, introducing new processes, product discovery, persona definition, and also figuring out how to scale the platform in your particular way, how you're doing it at TrueProfile. So I'm just wondering, what is your summary of the three most important things that you would recommend doing for product heads who are joining a new job? Well, definitely, I wouldn't rush to making decisions in a couple of first months. I would observe, again, create the gap analysis, try to do a full fledged product discovery to see where the product might get improved. Also, if possible, try to involve yourself in user interviews and in a simple user research to understand what your user personas are and work. At least that's my idea, to be hands-off in a couple of first months until you understand the in and out operations and how usually team operates. And you already have a feeling when everything starts to fit in place, probably after a couple of months again. I'm right now already a year in this role. And just a couple of weeks ago, we went completely in a full async mode. We actually don't have any calls or whatsoever. We try fully to collaborate using all the tools out there, which are, of course, at our disposal. So yeah, again, definitely observe, be patient, do the gap analysis, get yourself in the trenches, and just wait for the good things to happen. Well, that sounds very positive. Yeah. Great. So, Esmer, it was a pleasure. And we're definitely going to link your contact information in the podcast description. So in case you want to connect with Esmer and have some follow-up conversations, feel free to reach out to him. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure having you here. Have a good day. Have a good day. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye.