You occupied the Product Owner position in two companies: OSD Group and later GeniusMarketing. How many employees worked for the companies and what is the specific nature of GeniusMarketing’s operation?
OSD Group employs about one hundred persons. GeniusMarketing — about 80. GeniusMarketing is an education project teaching digital marketing for business owners and specialists in various fields. It also fosters development in this area.
Who is the Product Owner? What is the nature of this job?
It depends on a company. In GeniusMarketing, the Product Owner manages the line of products linked by one criterion. I was the Product Owner dealing with entrepreneurs.
Our products were for entrepreneurs. Our training was about leveling up a business, about advancing in it by using internet marketing.
I was in charge of creating excellent products certain to be sold well.
It means that you worked on brand-new projects which had never existed, with ways to sell them totally unclear? Were those absolutely new projects?
It depended. There were projects previously run, but there were also new ones, which we created without knowing whether or not they would take off.
Who worked on projects with you?
Our IT team worked on creating or adjusting the platform. When preparing a launch of a marketing project, we also involved a designer, copywriter and marketer. Thus, projects were handled by mixed teams.
How did you learn about Worksection task manager?
I got to know Worksection long ago. Before the GeniusMarketing company, I worked at OSD Group, a major marketing holding. There I had a team of managers and more than ten projects which I handled simultaneously. All eleven departments were interconnected. Every department consisted of subdivisions. The subdivisions had numerous employees.
In general, we needed a system which could help us run projects in their entirety. It was 5-6 years ago. We could not lose or forget anything. We had to track deadlines. We needed to store projects constantly growing in number.
At first, we introduced Worksection in our department. It appealed to us. We scaled it up to other companies. For 18 months was I working as a Worksection-powered manager for OSD Group. In GeniusMarketing, we also came to a decision that we needed to introduce a project management system.
Worksection was the first thing that came across my mind. I recommended it. The owners considered, then tested and introduced it.
Does the entire team work based on Worksection?
The whole company switched to Worksection long ago. We have even connected our contractors in the task manager. There are teams and there are projects. In each project, I invited people needed to work on the project.
We have developed our internal guidelines to operate the system. Everything should be in Worksection. When it comes to an external contractor, the time of expenditure is to be tracked. If a task was not set in Worksection, it meant its low priority. Everything is recorded in the task manager for us to understand the extent to which the teams are loaded.
Which Worksection functions do you use?
In spring, the GeniusMarketing company switched to unit economy. The internal workflow system was fully transformed. The designers, copywriters and YOUtube managers got performance-based remuneration (project-based) instead of rated salaries. We started to prefer outsourcing and to use time tracking.
This year has shown everyone that if you are not online, it means that you and your business don’t exist basically.
We also use time consumption reports to figure out exactly how much time and money we have spent to implement a project.
What is inconvenient in Worksection?
Personally, I have no questions concerning UX. The three-minute instruction video is enough to understand how to use Worksection. You set a task, then a subtask, then you work.
What is the main reason to opt for Worksection?
Worksection offers the entire functionality necessary for a mixed team. You set a task, upload data into the Gantt chart. You make adjustments, and everything gets changed automatically. Before Worksection, we built Gantt charts in Excel with coloring them.