Mclinica is a health tech platform that has regional offices located in Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines and Cambodia
I was the primary product manager managing seven (7) patient assistance programs commissioned by clients which are available in both android and iOs and deployed in the following markets: Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
Right after I entered the company (and where I found out that the person I am replacing with is leaving in 2 days 😱), two mobile app programs were in the middle of development and are scheduled to be deployed in less than a month and 1.5 months respectively.
Not only did I have to get up to speed quickly (i.e. which I did by understanding the user flow, product algorithm and reading product documents and flow diagrams) , but I also need to establish rapport and credibility with the internal team if I were to take over in leading the team. I took the time to talk to both the tech lead and to the VP of Business Development who was based in Singapore, and immediately understood what one of the primary problem was.
I found out that not only was the communication between the tech team and the business team broken leading to miscommunications (i.e. business promising delivery timelines without consulting the tech team about feasibility), but also the process of interfacing with clients need fixing as there were no clear expectations and boundaries set resulting to unlimited revisions and feature requests made by the client.
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So, we can do a mobile app in 2 weeks with 20 complex algorithms and 100 feature requests in between, right? Right? Great, thanks!
As the team already needed to deliver these two programs within the proposed timeline (to the client), I started asking for the commitment of the client to sign-off on the agreed mock-ups and user flow.
I managed clients’ expectations to understand that any changes to the user flow or minor feature requests from here onwards would have a consequence of the timeline being moved or extra fees that would be charged depending on the magnitude of the change.
I also took over minor UI and UX changes taking the burden from our tech lead, so he can just 100% focus on developing the mobile app programs.
This re-setting of client expectations curbed the many feature requests and led the clients to prioritize which ones are really important, and which ones are nice to have.
For any requests that the clients would make, I would try to understand the reason behind and the problem that they are trying to address. After understanding, I would either propose an easier workaround that would have little to minimal impact to the existing workflow and still address their concerns or push back to a later date.