As a contract Senior Product Manager Ben worked with the Director of App Development (later Director of My EE Service) to help evolve the team and the practices of the inexperienced product management team for the newly in-house products.
Initial emphasis was placed on improving the app rating in the App Store and user perception of the app. In only one year reviews changed from:
What a waste of time. Utter utter rubbish. - Ahaaheehee, Apr 2017, v4.3.0
To being really positive, resulting in EE being the number one app in the App Store Utility category.
Easy to use and access my account information via the EE app. Best decision I made was to switch to EE! - Boo0898, Jul 2018, v4.17
This improvement in the app store was also strategic within the business to garner more support for the apps (iOS & Android) which, like apps for many businesses, quickly grew in audience and soon became the number one channel in the business to engage with customers.
So a key part of the evolution of the team and the role of product management in the business was to create, manage and understand a roadmap to help deliver the highest impact, most important features for users to improve their experience.
Also a key stakeholder management technique was developed to use requirement gathering and click-prototyping to engage with various departments and visualise and understand the scope for new initiatives.
Using this quick prototyping approach it allowed the team to gather feedback, and discuss ideas, early and without engaging the product delivery team who were working on delivering sprints of product development from the defined backlog.