Front End Enhancement to Improve Back End Experience
Tags: Product Management, Newbie, User Experience Design, Error Handling, Front End Development

Feel free to scroll down to the 3rd paragraph for most relevance to the article title. My name is Ellen Ma and I’m a new born product manager coming from ten years of tech consulting work experience and have been with large and small firms with the likes of Accenture, Ford Credit and smaller in house solution providers, plus 3 years of trial and error running my own O2O startup. My focus always landed on working closely with the business customers while effectively communicating their needs (and vice versa) to the development partners on our programs by acting as the business analyst, integration expert and even a stint as a scrum master at Ford Credit.

Since transitioning into my first official in-house product manager role, the perspective gained in the first 60 days on the job have been tremendous, to say the least! Without disclosing the name of my current employer, our solution relies heavily on the cohesiveness of both the hardware and software. It is based on their marriage working well and extending the collaborative atmosphere to the rest of of us working at the company, whether it is sales, product, dev, qa or support. We all contribute to the solution but at the end of the day, we are also the children being fed by the solution we provide to our clients, aren’t we all?

The first profound insight I learned in the first 60 days on the job is, to put it simply — the quality of the solution depends heavily on the well thought out nature of the backend solution, where frontend adds on to like icing on the cake. Ahah! There’s a reason why many pm job postings require the candidate to have strong background in computer science!

The first piece of work I’m leading is to improve the front-end user experience of the error handling workflow of our customer facing web application. During the initial user research phase, I made a point to solicit inputs from all key internal users of the software. That includes the frontend UI/UX team, the support specialist dealing with the clients and the developers leading the build of the solution. Of course, inputs from existing product managers were also sought after and brainstormed together. This is a critical step in that we are collecting information key to the outcome of the frontend design changes. We are currently at the stage of recreating workflow of the error-handling piece before moving on to coming up with several ideas for the wireframes, so I’m excited to see what comes up next!

One big piece of learning comes from the frequent errors encountered by our clients on our hardware, which to put simply, stops the hardware from being usable when present. This led me as the product manager to think about how much impact frontend changes would have if the backend continues to behave this way for our clients. Yes we can make the front end interface as user friendly and intuitive as possible, but when errors surface from the backend at a frequent pace, the user experience overall dwindles and I don’t blame the client to be frustrated and want to stop using the solution!

There, that’s the first ever article to be shared on Medium from me in my new role as product manager! This is also written during work hours so I will consider this career improvement part of my position :)

Until next time, hope who ever is reading this has a great day and let’s all learn to become better product managers who can work well with all key players of a functioning tech team!