Jesse Dennis Sheather

Enterprise Search Page

Shinydocs: The best enterprise search

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by

Jesse Sheather
in

Shinydocs was my first formal role as a Product Manager – Enterprise Search – My first PM title product managed

  • Metrics & Success
    • Searches resulting in Interactions per user per week
      • Northstar Metric
        • Cumulative interaction of users resulting in success
      • My impact: Increase from 42 to 136 average
        • 223% increase
    • Average deployment user engagement
      • 270% increase
    • Total Daily Searches
      • 34% growth
    • Time spent in application
      • My impact: Increase from 55 minutes to 73 minutes average
        • 33% increase
    • Time between search query and clicking/actioning a result
      • My impact: Decrease from 8s to 5s
        • 60% decrease
    • Clicks/interactions per major feature group
      • My impact: 2 features deprecated due to no usage + 3 features improved due to high usage
    • Searches per user vs Time to action a result
      • My impact: Improvement from 42:8 to 136:5
        • >5X improvement
      • This means that users on average spent less time per search and searched more often

Where I started:

  • First Product Manager title
  • Referred to the role by a past colleague
  • First externally hired product manager – longest PM term in the company
  • This meant taking over all product operations for Enterprise Search within days
  • This also meant taking over multiple other products in quick succession
  • Within 30 days I was managing 3 products and helping with 2 others

Enterprise Search:

  • When I started Search was only sold in a handful of deals but was our only product with notable UI/UX
  • I started by auditing everything: backlog, support tickets, team opinions, ELT goals, and above all else; client/user feedback
  • It was obvious that Search could be more than it was with a focused development path
  • Our core product was highly powerful but only accessible via a technical CLI
  • Search made all the data produced by our core technologies accessible, usable, and ultimately valuable.
  • My goals
    • Win over a specific set of company defined “tough customers”
    • Have search sold in every deal
    • Mature search to be truly class-leading with 2-3 first-to-market features
  • My success pillars
    • Fundamental technology improvements
    • Roles-Based-Access to serve a diverse set of possible users
    • Data actionability within search
    • Interoperability and internationalization
  • My Ownership (at various times – some roles were created to take over some duties)
    • Product Vision
    • Product marketing (later hired specific role)
    • Sales demos and solutions engineering
    • Sales and cost strategy
    • Advertisement campaings
    • Funding and grant responses/submissions
    • Backlog refinement and cleaning
    • Backlog planning
    • User story creation
    • Support ticket delegation
    • UI/UX design (later hired specific role)
    • Developer management
    • Scrum adoption and process implementation
    • Stakeholder management
    • Product team hiring matrix and competencies
    • Product team hiring interviews
    • Many more (we were a scale-up, if it regarded the product, it probably hit my plate)

My Success:

  • Some details cannot be shared due to NDAs – this is my best summary – contact me to learn more
  • Search is now sold with all deals
  • Search helped clients win awards for innovative usage
  • Search was not just renewed but expanded in usage for “tough customers”
  • Roles allowed us to actively serve users from the CEO to a junior new hire in a position unrelated to data management
  • Search was proven to save users 45 minutes average per day per user during a case study with a government organization
  • The development team was more empowered to participate in product development
  • We adopted an improved development strategy with coordination and expansion of development and QA management
  • The known issues list was greatly reduced
  • Demos were streamlined to be rapidly deployable
  • A full course and certification was created for search
  • Documentation was greatly improved
  • Many grants, new markets, new users, and funding obtained
  • Notable NPS ratings
  • Notable directly linked profits
  • And more…

Shinydocs changes:

  • Due to notable changes in August 2023 the entire product team among other teams was terminated without notice or cause
  • I do have an NDA in place and will not be able to share many details
  • I am left hunting for a true product opportunity today
  • I am spending more time on reviving HanDIY through the offshoot: PROjector leveraging all I learned from the first iteration of HanDIY – learn more in my other blog posts!