Can you briefly describe your role as Product Manager?

I'm the Product Manager responsible for our Track pillar, which encompasses the entire user journey from when users create their trip, start traveling, finish the trip, and how they interact with their trip. It also includes how they keep in contact with their loved ones at home.

My job within that scope involves looking at how users interact with the app, what we observe in the market with competitors, and what we want as a business in terms of growth and vision. I strategize which improvements we want to make, and based on that, I determine what we're going to do. Then, together with designers and engineers, we build what will get us there.

How is your team structured?

We have a cross-functional team with engineers from different platforms — Android, iOS, backend, and web (both desktop and mobile) — plus a product designer.

What does a typical day look like for you?

I'm an early bird and start my day around 8am so I can go through messages and set up my to-do list for the day. I start by looking at what I want to finish that day, what kind of meetings I have, and whether I need to prep anything. I also do a health check of what's going on within my product scope — do we see changes in how people add steps? Changes in the percentage of travel buddies added to trips? How active are users? Are the Community and Support team receiving any new bug reports?

Then meetings start, and while I try not to have a full day of meetings, when I'm in the office, that's often the case. I like to shift between focus moments of work where I deep dive into prepping features or experiments, and more collaborative time where I’m sending messages, asking questions, sitting with engineers or designers, and generally moving forward on our goals. 

Can you tell us about a project you've worked on that you're really proud of?

I'm very proud of Travel Together, which launched about a year ago. It was something that users had really wanted for a long time — I think that's what made it so special. Users had been asking to add multiple people to a single trip for about six years, and we hadn't touched it for a while because it had a lot of technical challenges.

The complexity came from multi-device scenarios — people using multiple devices already adds challenges, and when traveling together, you have even more different devices. There was also the UX challenge of how to make it easiest for users and give them what they actually want and need. How do they want to travel together? What does that mean? Is it sharing your trip, or is it also sharing your story? How do we visualize it?

We carried out deep-dive research with users about how they wanted to track a trip with multiple people, and looked into what kind of travelers we have. Based on that research, we identified the biggest user group and what problem we needed to solve first. That's how we scoped it into a more feasible solution. From beginning to end, it took about four months to build.

What was the impact and feedback from that project?

We had a lot of positive feedback from users. We emailed users who had asked for this feature over the years, and it was really cool to hear them say how happy they were. 

We also saw people picking it up and using it right away. Now we see that quite a big percentage of trips are Travel Together trips. Plus, there's kind of a snowball effect where people invite friends without an account to join their trip — they sign up and it impacts our user growth, which is really cool.

Do you have any examples of smaller projects that made an impact?

Yes! Last December, we implemented the ability to like comments. I think every traveler who uses Polarsteps can relate to this — people comment "enjoy your trip" on your step, and you don't necessarily want to comment back, but you want to let them know you saw their message. So we implemented the ability to like comments. It's small, but it makes users feel more engaged.

You won the 'Dedication to Craft' award in the company's Values Awards last year. What does that value mean to you?

Dedication to Craft for me means that I keep being curious to improve, and I don't take things for granted. I don't just think, "Okay, I always did it this way, so let's not innovate." I'm also open to feedback on what I do.

I feel if we all have Dedication to Craft, we also take each other's feedback seriously, and we can make the best product. For me, it means doing what you do with enthusiasm, but also being open to improving when needed. It means you're never done learning.

What advice would you give to someone just starting as product manager at Polarsteps?

Ask as many questions as you can and start using the app. I still see new things popping up and discover features I didn't know about. That's the first thing.

Talk with everyone in your team and dive into what users are saying about the element you're responsible for. Those are the two really important things.

Then, after you've covered the qualitative side, also dive into the data and try to get a feeling for the product. I think you get the best feeling by using it yourself, but don't be biased about that because you're not the only user.