I’m biased, but we have the best product managers (PMs) in the world. We really do. Not only are they brilliant in the work that they do, but they are also the most generous with their time in helping novices such as myself understand the ins and outs of our product. More so, they are extremely engaged with our customers and spend a lot of time on the front lines understanding how the products they design and build get used in practice. They make it easy to be a product marketer.
To showcase our product leaders and the work that they do, we are pleased to launch the first two chapters of our Product Spotlight Series. In these short videos, we chat with the PMs about products, features, and applications within the ServiceMax portfolio that solve real business challenges and drive real results. Our first chapter featured Lacy Cotton-Hodgson, who talked with Wendy Tai about service contracts in Asset 360. In our second chapter, I had the opportunity to chat with Archana Krishnan, our resident expert in all our mobile applications and the product lead on DataGuide.
DataGuide brings Advanced forms and Document Generation capabilities to ServiceMax Core with the specific intent of helping technicians navigate complex data collection and presentation tasks within ServiceMax Go. These required tasks often pile up in routine inspection, maintenance, and safety scenarios and while the tasks in themselves are extremely critical, their documentation can be very time-consuming for technicians. In an environment, where technicians are in short supply and the demands on their time quite acute, it becomes incredibly important to build solutions that enable quick, efficient, and accurate data capture.
In speaking to Archana, it’s quite evident that her passion for this product comes from a desire to help and support technicians, who quite often are the ultimate customer when it comes to ServiceMax’s products.
“Focusing on technician experience becomes so critical in our product philosophy, and it’s why we build more and more capabilities to improve technician utilization. We have feedback loops and frequent touch points with our customers which help make our products better and more useful for them. We try to make the technician’s process a lot simpler in the field for them so they focus and spend their energy on what they do the best, which is to keep the world running,” said Archana Krishnan, Sr. Product Manager
In the interview, Archana talks about the data dilemma that she sees being faced by most organizations. Leaders recognize those service employees on the front lines present a great opportunity to capture critical customer and asset data that can be used for a variety of purposes – operational, commercial, and strategic.
In response, technicians and others on the front lines can often get inundated with data capture requests, some necessary for the safe and compliant completion of work and others for a variety of purposes. This data collection can often become a burden that minimizes the impact and value of digital tools that were implemented to make their lives easier. The value of this additional investment in data and technology becomes unclear in the minds of the technician, which then creates an additional barrier to technology acceptance and adoption.
As Archana states, “When building DataGuide we had to look at the functionality, level of automation, and overall experience through the eyes of the technician and make sure that we were making things easier. The product must be fully functional offline; it has to work in the workflow of the technician; and it has to remove redundant asks based on the context of the work and asset data available within ServiceMax.”
While the technician has a more streamlined experience, the data capture, management, and analysis capabilities within the ServiceMax platform are incredibly amplified through Form Actions and other DataGuide features.
There’s a lot more to learn about DataGuide, now in Version 3.0 as per our latest ServiceMax Core release. I encourage you to listen in to Archana’s story on DataGuide and stay tuned for many more introductions to our amazing product management team.
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