Vendors in a Product trio
Have you often found yourself in a position wherein you cannot share ALL the information you need with people. As part of your discovery, you are likely to engage with your engineering manager, UX and few folks of your commercial teams so that you have a practical solution for your customer’s pain points. But what if in part, few team members are vendors. The way you engage totally changes. Their job function might not change but then based on the contractual agreements, they may or may not be able to do the same things. In other words, let us say they are a product manager on the vendor side but they will not get to interact with the end user and will have to go via their customer manager to get their questions answered.
Here are few of my experiences
Understand why the vendor has been hired?
My group didn’t have the bandwidth to pick up an opportunity, which we couldn’t afford to miss out on. Longer term, missing out on this opportunity would lead to data issues. We also realized that this opportunity wouldn’t take more than 6-7 months to build and we wouldn’t need that type of effort after that.
How do we understand our customer base?
Data plays a huge role here. While we had GDPR rules to get thru in Europe, we were able to understand our end-users better in Americas and Asia. So, apart from the vendor folks, I had to engage a European developer to run the same queries in Europe. We had to have unique sessions here - 1. Most of the folks were from the vendor side and few were from our company. We had to brainstorm the opportunity before we went to the customer. With some vendors, we couldn’t directly have them meet with the end-user but for others, we could. 2. Same thing happened with recording the sessions. Some end-users were open to recording the sessions while others were not. We had to write up the meeting notes etc. Felt like the 90s!
Design sprints
Based on all the inputs, we did our design sprints wherein we came up with ideas and workflows. But here again, the final designs were possible only for the employee to review with the customer. We of course shared the feedback with the vendor on whether the customer liked our designs.
Delivery
In many of my companies including the current one, I write up the confluence page, in which we have the requirements. The teams (employees and vendors) get the E2E idea of why we are building what we are building. I write the high level epic(s) and then we conduct workshops for the teams to suggest stories/tasks/spikes etc.
Final Thoughts
Contractual agreements determine how you operate. But that being said, you can get creative with the way you operate. At the end of the day, you need to have an overlap wherein the vendor understands the requirements. Especially, if they are not located in the same city, it gets harder and communication (both asynchronous and calls) are important for the initiative to be successful. ALso, just because they are vendors it doesn’t mean that they do all the heavy-lifting. For instance, if only they work late hours then it is likely that they will leave in a few months. Let them feel comfortable with you and want to work for you. Trust works both ways!