The company
Artsper is the European leader for selling contemporary arts online with more than 2000 partner's galleries. Its goal is to make art accessible to most people with all different budget.
Job role
Working as a Product Owner / Product Manager with a team of 8 developers divided into 2 feature teams (Marketplace & SaaS)
- Daily team management and facilitator role using the KABAN methodology.
- Features development management from discovering user needs to quality assurance and KPIs monitoring.
- Responsible for communicating with internal teams and customers, deploying product marketing strategy.
- Progressive building of the product team working with the CEO & the CTO, building flexible process to quickly create a feedback loop.
Story
I arrived at Artsper at a key moment in their evolution. Launched in 2013, the company developed fast to become one of the leaders on the art marketplace business, nonetheless, the company had ups and downs and were looking for a strong product management scaling.
After surfing on the COVID lockdown to offer a digital experience to art galleries, the team needed a Product Manager to build foundations for a scalable product and development team. Product Management was owned between the CEO & the CTO role. I started to work with them step by step to align priorities and create ownership for the product team.
The process was experimental, not a strong written product culture, and the dev team had always questions about tickets. We started to work on delivery management to ensure that velocity improves and victory by victory build a discovery strategy to put users’ feedback at the center of our product strategy.
Kick start an experimental user discovery strategy takes time and need to go through certain steps before reaching an optimal phase. I proceeded as follow to build up discovery strategy:
- 1 to 2 first months → Point out discovery benefits when assessing features failures or users negative feedbacks and explain its process to be installed
- After 3 months → Implement discovery sprints with accessible ressources to gain primal user feedbacks
- After 6 months → Point out victories of the discovery sprints and build up with key stakeholders foundations of continuous user discovery
After few iterations, Artsper product team has now abilities to create user discovery sprints when needed and has stable channels to capture user discovery in a continous way:
- Harvestr as a tool to collect and gather users feedbacks from slack, intercom or emails
- Automatic user forms sent according to specific workflow (features feedback, pre buy, post buy, referral…)
- Notion templates to quickly and efficiently deploy user interviews and one-pager analysis of them.
- Panel of users built with the sales and support team to contact when needed according to their buyers personas
When I left Artsper in 2022, the product team has now 2 Product Managers that I trained working in the marketplace environment and the SaaS environment. Product processes are visible, transparent, and open to comments and improvements.
KPIs
- Features delivery improved x3, more features delivered does not mean value but means that development velocity is more stable.
- Global CVR progression of 0.5 points between December 2020 and May 2022
- 100% of features started in 2021 were built on data quantitative analysis
- From 0 in 2020 to 30 in 2021 and up to 80 in 2022 users interviews to archive user discovery strategy
Key takeways and learnings
- Adapting to PM Pressure is a progressive process that needs maturity.
- Implementing a discovery strategy step by step is effective. At first, it seems that the most effective idea is to kick start something new and put everything on the side: it does not work. Stakeholders need to build trust with product managers and this can be implemented when working with them and reusing their habits and processes.
- PM ownership vs CEO ownership, lines are naturally blurred on some projects but communication is the key to avoiding confusing situations. I found myself communicating more than I expected to suit my level of clarity on ownership. It’s always about the way you adapt to others.
