At Gearset we’re focused on being an approachable, customer-centric company with an easy-to-use product. Our product team is responsible for setting the strategy for the development of our platform, making sure we’re building the most impactful things for our users, and our business.
Our product team is laser focused on delighting our users by making Gearset the most effective DevOps solution. They work closely with engineering to bring our product roadmap vision to life, typically with a UX designer and a product manager working with each engineering team. They also partner with marketing on positioning new products and features, and are close with our customers, getting involved in specialist webinars and creating content for future launches.
Our product function has seen massive growth over the last year, and is split into two core teams: User Experience (UX) and Product Management.
UX
Our focus on great user experience has been one of the main reasons for our success–it differentiates us from the competition. User experience is at the core of our development process. We spend time talking to our users to understand the problems they’re facing, and to validate the solutions we design, rather than blindly building features.
Product management
Our product management folks make sure that we’re solving the right problems in a way that’s valuable to the user, and compatible with our business constraints and goals.
The journey to solving our users problems
Our users are at the heart of everything we do. We’re in constant communication with them to understand areas of improvement that’ll positively impact them using our platform.
Identify a user problem that’s valuable and viable to solve Typically, a new project starts with our product managers identifying a user problem that’s valuable and viable to solve. At Gearset, this normally comes from product managers spending a lot of time talking to current and prospective users. However, multiple business areas can flag any potential user issue, as we’re always in constant communication with our users.
Refine understanding of user problem After identifying the user problem, the next task is to get a deep understanding of that problem. At this stage, we assemble a project team of at least one engineer, somebody responsible for product management, and a user experience designer. This group will run a series of detailed research calls to really dig into the user problem, using a lot of open-ended questions, and listening a lot.
Prototype solutions and validate with users When the team has a good understanding of the user problem, they can start to design possible solutions. It might be that there’s an obvious and well-understood solution to the problem we’re trying to solve for the user, or it might need something completely novel. In the latter case, the team starts mocking up solutions and testing them with users.
Define smallest next slice that adds value When the team’s confident they’ve found a good solution and they’ve validated it with a bunch of users, then usually the team wants to start building! But some products or features might take a really long time to build, and that brings with it a bunch of risk which is why we put the product or feature in the hands of users as quickly as possible. So instead of building the whole thing behind closed doors, we break it into slices - sure, we can’t solve the whole problem for the user in the first slice, but we can identify something that adds value to the user, and release that.
Build and ship the next slice We then continue to build and ship a slice at a time so that we can get feedback from the user quickly about what they like and don’t like, and whether we’re heading in the right direction. We also get people thoroughly exercising our code in production, so we can find and fix bugs more easily and we don’t have to do big, risky releases, because we’re always pushing slices of features out to our users. All the way through this process, engineering, PM and UX are working super closely together and iterating all the time based on user feedback.
You’ll make a difference at Gearset
Our product team has a clear strategy with some big plans to shape and deliver and we’re always looking for great people to help us achieve them! The solutions they help build revolutionise development processes for thousands of businesses around the world.
We take great pride in user research, and go above and beyond to understand the challenges our customers are facing so that they can create solutions to solve their issues, from inception through to release and beyond.
As a new member of the product team, you’re able to have a big impact from the moment you join Gearset. Setting product strategy, defining the product roadmap and supporting feature delivery.
Growing your career in the product team at Gearset
With our growing customer base and platform, there are plenty of opportunities for people working in product to develop new skills and add more value for our customers. Personal development is really important at Gearset, whether it’s building on strengths, or filling gaps in your skillset, we’ll support you with this.
We don’t have specialist roles within the Product teams, everyone takes ownership for pieces of work, working autonomously and are supported to try new things. We recognise when people go the extra mile to help our customers and Gearset.