How to Get that Product Manager Job

Product Management roles are practically new in Indonesia, but there is a surprisingly high demand for them in companies nowadays. The fact that almost every startup now requires a Product Manager (PM) makes it an extremely attractive career path.

Apiary hosted two brilliant Apiary Academy Mentors who have much experience in product management roles in our event on 26th August: Gilang Ramadhan, Product Manager in Swift and Radika Prabu, Lead Product Manager in Pinhome. They provided great insights for you students, fresh graduates or even professionals who are thinking of pursuing a product management career, on the skills you need to prepare as a PM, and how to stand out among competitors so that you will be chosen by your dream company.

Firstly, understand what A Product Manager is.

A Product Manager is a person who identifies the customer need and business objectives and can visualize it to a product or features, defining what is the success matrix, motivate & manage the team to turn that vision into a reality, and help the company to make a successful & useful product (reference: Atlassian).

A level above the PM, a Lead Product Manager is a position in charge of a product consisting of several individual components or applications, who is responsible for driving the development of new products and their strategies as well as managing and mentoring other PMs.

To be one of them, you need to understand that product management is a field of planning, forecasting, marketing, and production of a product that meets the customers’ needs.

So, what skills do you need as a PM?

Fundamentally, there are 2 most important skills which you should have as a PM, namely Communication and Critical Thinking.

Communication skill is needed because a PM always deals with people – more accurately the stakeholders in a company (the customers, the management team, the marketing and engineering team) to negotiate the best outcome of a product. Whereas critical thinking is required to analyze and solve problems that arise when developing a product.

In addition, you also need to have analytical, production, and execution senses. An analytical sense means the ability to formulate the right questions, evaluate problems and simulate results based on data. A product sense means the ability to make decisions to create the right products with empathy and creativity. An execution sense means the ability to harmonize the team to achieve the goal. 

As time goes by and your career path is getting higher, you would be required to scale up and have more skills in Product Management.

Courtesy: Presentation from Gilang Ramadhan

It’s quite difficult to master so many skills at the same time, but you can try to use the 10-20-50 PM skills framework system to be able to improve your skills and not get stuck on the career treadmill.

Courtesy: Presentation from Gilang Ramadhan

Additional PM skills that would make you stand out from your competitors:

  • Analytical skills where critical thinking plays a crucial role here.
  • Collaboration in groups and problem-solving.
  • Growth mindset where technology is currently growing.
  • Leadership and attention to details in making documents and managing projects well and on time.
  • Hard skills such as making a Product Requirements Document (PRD).
  • Technical & Design Skills are nice to have to help you communicate more clearly to your stakeholders

Those are all the tips from Radika and Gilang! 

By joining our upcoming Product Management Training, you will get the chance to be mentored by them and the opportunity to acquire the skills mentioned in this article. 

Apiary Academy PM Training is a 12-week cohort-based training taught by Product Leaders from top startups, which allows you to experience working as a Product Manager in a real startup. 

We are now opening applications to the PM Training in October! Learn more about the training here: https://academy.apiary.id/

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Omni-Channel Customer Experience Best Practices for Successful Startups

Every successful startup has the best Customer Experience, that’s why their customers stay loyal to the company. They can have the best Customer Experience because they know how to manage, treat and make their customer happy. 

On August 12th, 2021, Apiary held an amazing webinar with three speakers who are experts in Customer Experience. They are Mardiansyah Putra as Head of Business Growth at TADA Indonesia, Irwing Antonio as Mid-Market Account Executive at Twilio, and Helmy Rianda as Co-Founder & COO at Doogether.

They shared about how the companies implement Omni-channel to have the best Customer Experience. So here’s the summary of the event that will be useful for you.

Improve Customer Experience Through Omni-channel.

Omni-channel is an attempt to interact with customers anywhere and anytime, both online and offline. It has multiple touchpoints that help raise awareness and improve customer experience while supporting companies to generate more revenue. According to a study, multiple channel shoppers have a 30% higher value in life than those who buy through only one sales channel. One of the best ways to attract customers through multiple channels is using a point system that encourages customers to use multiple channels. One of the metrics you can use is the AARRR method, which stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referrals.

If you’re wondering when is the right time to use omni-channel, you can use it as soon as possible once you start your business and have customers. Also, it depends on your budget, channel, stage, and customer. Every business today is a relationship business. So it is crucial to strengthen and maintain relationships with your customers. The more you know about your customers, the more you improve your customer experience and achieve their needs and goals.

Maintain Customer Engagement and Retention, be constant & consistent

Engage with customers has to be constant and consistent. From the first time your customer is interested in your product, you have to give the best experience to ensure they come again later. You also can create a campaign strategy based on your customer needs and interest, don’t forget to look at your form database or latest campaign report. Analyze the impact and create a new campaign that will bring more new customers as well as maintain current customers. The strategy is to use the successful campaign multiple times until they stop producing results before making a new campaign. Campaigns need to generate revenue, not expenses.

This strategy requires a good technology partner to run Omni-channel in order to know your customer’s preference such as email, WhatsApp, SMS, or any other channel. You can find these features available in Twilio, a cloud communications platform to help your company communicate and strengthen customer relationships across your business – from marketing and sales to customer service and operations.

Also, you can learn more about best practices on how to scale customer engagement and provide advice for organizations planning on implementing Twilio WhatsApp Business API through a fireside chat with Twilio experts. Register now to book your seat

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Retail & eCommerce Sales in Southeast Asia
Customer Experience Strategies for Retail & eCommerce (Indonesia)

Retail and eCommerce Trend in Indonesia

The global fluctuating sales growth of retail industry depict that the pandemic has played a huge impact on the sector, especially in Indonesia. In order to keep up, businesses have to start implementing a Customer Experience strategy through a customer-centric mindset.

In the past 4 years, eCommerce has rapidly grow, contributing to 20% of the retail market value in 2020 (12x volume increment vs 2016). The shifting of customer behaviour from offline to online requires retail industry to change their business fundamental in two aspects:

  1. Business Model – Fully transformed to digital (eCommerce) and omni-channel strategy
  2. Customer Experience Strategy 

Fact: Brands with customer-centric value will gain 2,7x more recommendations and 90% loyal customers.

How Important is Customer Experience? And How Do We Implement Them to Our Business?

The key is to be customer-centric at all times, understand well how our business works, have a clear SOP, and a seamless customer journey.

Customer Experience Pyramid can help guide you throughout the planning & creation process, which consists of 3 key elements:

  1. Useful: Your service should attain different values.
  2. Easy: Easy to use and understand.
  3. Fun: Engage with customers and provide something that makes them happy (with the campaign, process, customer service, etc.)
Customer-centric value

To achieve the whole pyramid hierarchy, you must have 3 blending components:

  1. People: Gather the best team; who are resilient, data-driven, customer-centric, and agile.
  2. Research & Data: Gather feedback & listen to the voice of your customer.
  3. Technology: Technology can help support and make all the experience easier and seamless for your customers.

“Customer Experience is like a car battery, it can run out in a certain period. Before the car breaks down, we need to routinely replace the battery.”

Eight key elements of great customer experience.

  1. Logistics
  2. Platform Governance
  3. Business Risk
  4. Traffic & Seller Engagement
  5. Finance
  6. Product & Tech
  7. Customer Experience
  8. Campaign and Commercial

After knowing those components, then how do we do cross-functional collaboration? Here’s an example of Customer Experience collaboration’s flow:

  • Focus on gathering data from survey, NPS, social media, etc
  • Listen to their feedback: Create a priority-based action items
  • From there, create a project management that has a clear timeline, KPI, and roadmap

Last but not least, don’t forget to use technology and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) which can support your entire Customer Experience strategy efficiently. To choose what technology and CRM you need is based on your business model & resources, but there are some good channels you can use such as Email, SMS, Push Apps, Whatsapp API, etc. You can find these features available in Twilio, a cloud communications platform to help your company communicate and strengthen customer relationships across your business – from marketing and sales to customer service and operations.


Get full insight on Customer Experience strategies for Retail & eCommerce on our latest webinar with Twilio. And join our community to catch up on future events!

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The Ultimate Guide to Customer Experience for Startup Growth
The Ultimate Guide to Customer Experience for Startup Growth

Apiary together with Twilio, a cloud communications platform as a service company based in San Francisco held a Webinar series to enlighten business owners and professionals in the growth and marketing fields to serve their customers better. In this webinar, there are four speakers who are experts in Customer Experience.  The speakers are Mahardi as Head of Business Development and Growth at TADA Indonesia, Fri Rasyidi as Co-Founder of Farmacare, and Ferdi as Merchant Marketing at Gojek, and Irwing Antonio as Mid-Market Account Executive at Twilio.

Here’s the summary of the event that will useful for you. Happy reading!

1. How Do You Define a Good Customer Experience.

A good customer experience should be seamless and easy, giving us balance between the customer (who gets a comfortable experience) and business (who gets enough data to carry out the retention process).

Besides that, we need to know what our customers need & want through various touchpoints to convince them that we are the best solution to achieve their goals. This can be done by having a proper planning, strategy, and the right communication channel based on their preference.

Using the right communication channel, we will be able to do personalization and manage data entry to get actionable impact and improve customer experience.

2. How CRM Software or Tools Can Help the Process of Improving Customer Experience

Using a software or tool could help us personalize and determine the right strategy, understand the “signal” that customers give, so that we can create conversion and increase loyalty.

It is important to remember that it is not about the gun, but the person behind the gun. Therefore, before determining the software or tools to use, determine your objective, parameter, and budget.

3. How a Good Customer Experience Can Help Start-up Growth

Fact: A 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%. – Bain and Co

With a good Customer Experience, there are three impacts to the company:

  1. Increase frequency of transaction
  2. Increase spending (upgrade product)
  3. Support cross-selling product

Tips to improve: Don’t forget to prepare and pay attention to 6 P’s of marketing (product, price, place, promotion, process, people), combined with customer experience strategy.

Other than that, with optimized data and the right human touch, we could increase the transaction and reduce CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). With more customer transactions, the cost will automatically decrease and make the company more profitable.

And this is also related to what communication channel you choose based on customer preferences and company priority stage.

In the end, “Business should be profitable, bring a good revenue, and for doing so, you need to have a good customer experience.”

Watch full session of the webinar here

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Proven Strategies for Customer Acquisition and Retention

by Apiary Coworking and Jatis Mobile

Customer acquisition adalah proses membawa customer baru ke bisnis Anda. Selain membawa customer baru, customer acquisition juga berguna untuk menciptakan strategi akuisisi yang sistematis dan berkelanjutan yang dapat berkembang dengan tren dan perubahan baru di masa depan. 

Hal ini merupakan hal yang penting untuk dipelajari untuk seluruh bisnis di bidang apapun. Namun sayangnya banyak bisnis yang belum menyadari pentingnya membuat strategi customer acquisition yang tepat. 

26 Mei 2021 lalu, Apiary Coworking Space dan Jatis Mobile mengadakan Customer Relationship Masterclass bertema “Proven Strategies for Customer Acquisition and Retention” untuk membantu para pebisnis membuat strategi customer acquisition yang tepat. Berikut adalah beberapa strategi yang bisa pebisnis lakukan:

  1. Menggunakan tools untuk customer acquisition

Ada banyak sekali tools yang bisa digunakan oleh para pebisnis untuk melakukan akuisisi customer seperti SMS, Email, Whatsapp, dan lain-lain. Whatsapp sendiri merupakan tools yang memiliki potensi yang sangat besar. Berdasarkan survei, Whatsapp adalah platform chatting nomor 1 di Indonesia. Dan selain yang tadi disebutkan, tentunya banyak platform sosial media lain yang dapat digunakan sebagai tools menyesuaikan dengan strategi Anda. 

  1. Mengklasifikasikan customer

Penting sekali untuk mengetahui tipe-tipe customer dari bisnis yang kita miliki karena hal ini akan mempengaruhi strategi kita. Contohnya bila 70% dari customer kita menyukai promo discount, maka kita dapat memberikan discount kepada mereka. Kemudian untuk 30% customer yang tidak menyukai discount, kita dapat memberikan hadiah seperti akses gratis ke events di bisnis kita.

  1. Membuat strategi sampai proses akuisisi customer selesai

Ferdi Anggriawan, Head of Digital Marketing, Growth & Intelligence – Merchant at Gojek mengatakan bahwa setelah dievaluasi, salah satu kendala besar dalam proses akuisisi merchant Gojek sendiri adalah dokumen yang dikirim seringkali buram. Melihat hal ini, Gojek membuat strategi untuk memberitahukan para merchant yang mendaftar bahwa banyak sekali merchant yang gagal di pendaftaran karena dokumen yang dikirimkan buram. Setelah pemberitahuan ini dilakukan, jumlah merchant yang mendaftar dengan sukses hingga akhir pun meningkat karena para merchant menjadi lebih hati-hati dalam proses pendaftaran.

  1. Bangun engagement di event-event yang diadakan

Pada acara-acara yang diadakan, sebuah bisnis diharapkan dapat keep-in-track dengan orang-orang yang datang. Karena dengan mendatangi event sebenarnya telah menunjukkan ketertarikan customer terhadap produk bisnis kita. Maka dari itu, engagement dengan orang-orang ini harus ditingkatkan karena mereka adalah potential customer.

  1. Melakukan evaluasi

Tentunya setelah melakukan strategi-strategi di atas perlu dilakukan evaluasi. Karena setiap bisnis itu berbeda-beda dan tentunya strategi yang digunakan juga tidak bisa 100% sama. Sebuah bisnis harus mengevaluasi dan menemukan sendiri strategi yang paling tepat dan sesuai dengan bisnis dan target customer mereka. 

Info lebih lanjut cek instagram kami di @apiary.coworking

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Event Recap Customer Relationship Masterclass: Creating a Customer Journey Mapping 19 May 2021

Powered by Apiary Coworking and Jatis Mobile

Customer journey map adalah sebuah representasi visual dimana semua customer engagements dan customer touchpoints terdapat di situ. Customer journey map biasanya terdiri dari bagan awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, dan advocacy. Dengan menggunakan customer journey map, kita bisa melihat sebuah cerita tentang pengalaman konsumen ini dengan jelas mulai dari pertama mereka mengenal sebuah brand hingga akhirnya menjadi pelanggan setia untuk waktu yang lama. Memahami hubungan dengan customer dapat memberikan arahan dalam perancangan proses yang paling tepat untuk para pengguna agar tujuan bisnis dapat tercapai.

  • Manfaat membuat customer journey map

Customer journey map membantu kita memahami apa yang dibutuhkan customer, apa yang membuat mereka ragu, dan apa kekhawatiran mereka sebelum memutuskan untuk membeli suatu produk. Customer journey map juga berguna untuk brand kita agar kedepannya dapat menciptakan produk yang sesuai dengan kebutuhan pengguna, karena pada customer journey map ini kita dapat melihat pengalaman pengguna terhadap produk yang kita ciptakan.

  • Mengidentifikasi customer melalui digital touchpoints

Mengidentifikasi customer melalui digital touchpoints juga berkaitan dengan The Lean marketing Funnel yaitu dimulai dari awareness, consideration, conversion, dan retention. Awareness tentunya adalah langkah utama dimana kita membuat customer mengetahui keberadaan product dan brand kita. Awareness sendiri biasanya dicapai dengan digital marketing yang dilakukan misalnya seperti ads di social media. Kemudian consideration ini adalah ketika customer mulai mempertimbangkan untuk membeli produk tersebut, misalnya pada product berbasis aplikasi hal ini dapat dilihat ketika customer mulai sign up. Kemudian conversion adalah ketika customer membeli untuk yang pertama kali. Dan retention adalah ketika customer melakukan repurchase

  • Meningkatnya social commerce

Social commerce sendiri adalah penjualan produk yang dilakukan secara langsung di sosial media seperti Instagram ataupun Whatsapp. Hal ini digunakan karena masyarakat pun sangat aktif dalam menggunakan sosial media setiap harinya. Contohnya seperti brand yang mengajak audiensnya untuk menghubungi Whatsapp mereka dan bergabung sebagai member untuk mendapatkan harga yang lebih murah. 

  • Penggunaan Whatsapp dalam pemasaran

Berdasarkan data, Whatsapp merupakan sosial media nomor 3 yang paling aktif di Indonesia. Banyak sekali perusahaan yang telah menggunakan Whatsapp untuk mempermudah customer mereka. Misalnya seperti Tokopedia yang menggunakan Whatsapp sebagai platform untuk mengirim kode verifikasi. Dan kemudian BCA juga menggunakan Whatsapp sebagai platform bagi para customer untuk terhubung dengan customer service BCA.

Untuk mengetahui lebih banyak tentang bagaimana mengembangkan bisnis Anda, Anda dapat mengikuti Free Masterclass powered by Apiary Coworking dan Jatis Mobile di tanggal 26 May dan 27 May 2021. 

Info lebih lanjut cek instagram kami di @apiary.coworking

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