Product Team Experience

Near and far

After Sphero acquired our startup called Specdrums, I was brought on at Sphero as a Marketing Specialist. For the first 6 months, I worked closely with Sphero’s product managers, designers, and engineers through the redevelopment of Specdrums hardware and software. In that time we worked with an outside software development team based in Argentina to redevelop our application where I experienced the value add that nearshoring provides. Some days I would join in on late-night calls with our manufacturing team in Hong Kong, and participated in needlessly drawn-out email chains about even minor challenges related to packaging.

Real-time collaboration with the team in Argentina during mutually shared business hours was critical for us to solve complex problems around audio latency across different mobile devices. We were doing something unique and faced truly unique challenges. From an entrepreneurial perspective, the overall flexibility afforded by having talent on-demand and within one’s time zone made brilliant sense.

During my time at Sphero, I officially fell in love with product development and its processes. It was clear to me that I wanted to have a formalized connection between development and any future role of mine in marketing. I’ve studied product management on my own time, completing over a dozen online courses, attending networking events across Denver, and watching many hours of videos from conferences and tutorials.

In my next role as a Product Marketing Specialist at Bang the Table, I worked closely with our product management team in India and Australia. I have first-hand experience with the downsides of collaborating across distant time zones. It was what ultimately led Bang the Table to remove product marketing as a function in the US. To be in closer step with the newly restructured product leadership team, product marketing will now be housed exclusively in Australia. Since then, I have continued to produce marketing content for the company in a contract-based relationship.

View the certification courses and resources I leveraged to expand my understanding of agile software development, product management, and product marketing.

I have worked with Zane at Bang the Table and got to know him as a highly-skilled and knowledgable marketer and fun colleague. We worked on various product initiatives together in which Zane helped me to position our product and features to extract the maximum value for our users. This included product vision, strategy, release and content creation. His video content, in particular, was always outstanding! I wish him all the best in his future endeavours.

- Johannes Kresling | Product Manager at Bang the Table in Brisbane, Australia.

More references and recommendations from product team members are available from Sphero or Bang the Table.

Pushing My Comfort Zone

2020 was not a typical year. A central pillar to my first 90-days as a Product Marketer was to interact with as many clients as I could in order to harvest user stories, extract testimonials, and gather intangible insights toward becoming the voice of our customers. Unsurprisingly, this plan was tossed due to Covid-19.

Historically, my strength as a content creator thrived upon the facilitation of interviews and dialogue with subject matter experts. I began the job proud of my ability to facilitate natural conversation into strategic communications that felt organic. In March, in-person interaction was out of the question, my colleagues across the globe were stretched thin, and each client began to face a historic crisis within their organization and communities. I had nobody to talk with.

My response was to step up, write my own scripts, and narrate them too. It took a few bloopers and a little bit of grit, yet my colleagues in sales, existing business, product, and leadership celebrated what I released. A single project quickly became a regular responsibility.

Over time I’ve improved consistency and quality. And even translated our four minute demo video into French. 

The easiest way to preview my past social media posts is to view any video posted to Bang the Table’s LinkedIn page.
Click the image below to view the full list of posts.

Prior to Bang the Table, I grew Specdrums social media presence from nothing into an engine that drove sales. At Sphero I managed social in an interim capacity during the holiday season of 2018.

Software landscape

I’ve been geeking out on Uberflip and would love to hear how you all are leveraging it within your operation.

At Bang the Table I worked with:

• Hubspot (we began the transition to it from Marketo / Salesforce during my tenure).

• Trello, Jira, Product Board, Asana, Slack.

• Google Analytics (plus some months with Heap).

• Intercom (Our marketing team was a fan of Drift and their thought leadership.)

• WordPress

• Wistia

• Adobe (PS, ID, AI)

• G-Suite

• Zendesk

• Sprout social

• Appcues

• Final Cut Pro X

At Sphero:

• Brandfolder

• Sprout Social

• G-Suite and Google Analytics

• Adobe (PS, ID, AI, AE, )

• Slack and Jira

• Shopify and Magento 2

• Final Cut Pro X

• More.

My favorite rule of thumb is the rule of three. Like all great designs, less is more. If visitors of the Sphero Specdrums product page did not grasp these three things, they wouldn’t have a foundation of understanding to view any other information about the product. (Another great example is this blog post.)

Sphero’s original intent for this prominent visual section on Specdrums product page was to discuss the technical specifications of the light sensor, accelerometer, firmware, and more. During a pre-launch meeting, I generated a consensus around repurposing the section to provide the product’s essential elevator pitch. In about 20 minutes following the meeting, I drafted what would become this section of copy.