“What problem are you referring to exactly?” you may ask. Well, let me back-track for a minute, I’d like to share a personal story with you, an experience from a past job.
As product managers, we utilize many tools and software to develop our products and manage our teams as efficiently as possible. So, as many of you are probably well aware, one of the most important tools that we use on a day to day basis is task management software. Task management software is used for project planning, budget managing, scheduling, and so much more.
This software is what we rely on for an efficient and productive workday, however unfortunately we spend much of our time trying to understand just how to use it.
A major issue that I seemed to continuously encounter in my last position was user confusion among my team in regards to our task management software. From missed alerts, to overbooked meetings, the software was not working as efficiently as it promised–to say the least. I found that my team members were spending hours trying to figure out the ins and outs of the software, instead of dedicating their time and energy to developing our products.
One example of lost productivity stands out significantly in my mind. One of my team members didn’t know how to assign a project task to another employee via the popular software we were using at that time (I’ll leave it unnamed). This meant that the time she spent trying (and failing) to implement this feature left very little time under the deadline to complete the actual project.
While my employee had lost valuable time attempting to remedy her mistake, the damage was already done and the time was wasted. Unfortunately, we experienced these occurrences all too often, with no solution in sight.
With the short eight hours a day allocated for production, internal onboarding issues should not be a factor hindering development. Yet it was, and it was surprisingly a universally accepted factor.
Fast forward to present day. I currently work for a company which actually offers users a solution to the issue I struggled with for so long. When I first began working at WalkMe, I realized that many users didn’t know that this frustration wasn’t necessary when using various software. In fact, many people aren’t necessarily aware that there is a solution to this widespread issue.
Looking back, if this solution had been offered to me in my previous position I would have taken it in a heartbeat!