Meet Jennifer: Product Owner and Designer at Vizzia

Hi Jennifer, can you introduce yourself?

Hi, my name is Jennifer Harb, I am 28 years old and I have been working at Vizzia for about 2 years as a Product Owner and Product Designer. I first studied Cognitive Science, so I mostly specialized in psychology and neuroscience, but I quickly realized that it was not for me. I then turned to Web Design, which I really enjoyed.

Then, I started my career as a UX/UI Designer in a bank in Montreal (Canada), where I worked for two years, then I moved to England to work as a Freelancer. That's when I started working for Vizzia. As the company evolved, I took on more and more missions until they became my only client. Today, I have been working full time at Vizzia for one year.

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Can you describe your role in 3 words?

I would say:

> Vision, because you need to have a clear vision of the product, its needs and its evolution. I work closely with clients to understand their vision and to ensure that our priorities are aligned with theirs.

> Prioritization, that is to say defining and organizing priorities, whether for developers, for our backlog or for the topics to be dealt with beforehand. This work is obviously done in collaboration with customers, because their expectations directly influence our priorities, but also our business vision. I also have to take into account different information, different teams, etc.

> And finally, I would say Collaboration between all teams because I really need to collaborate with customers, developers, customer project managers, sales representatives or even Alex (our CTO) to do this work properly.

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Can you tell us what's the latest news?

The first is the release of an interactive map on which users will be able to see their cameras with addresses to better manage their video protection fleet. They will then be able to see more details, where their cameras are positioned, the various detections. The whole thing will then be much more visual.

We also have improvements in the “Procedure” tab to help the client be faster and more synthetic in creating and monitoring procedures, and to have a more concise experience. In particular, we will restructure the procedures and customers will be able to carry out mass actions to make it much more user-friendly.

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Have you had a typical day since joining Vizzia?

Today, it's quite exceptional, because normally I don't have a lot of meetings, which is quite nice (laughs); but in practice, we always start our days with a daily routine with the development team. We take stock of the progress of the tasks, we identify the obstacles and we define our priorities for the day: it's a bit of a check-in to know if everyone is doing well.

Then I manage my own priorities. At the moment, I am doing a lot of interviews because we are recruiting two future people. Otherwise, I usually check the backlog, make sure that my priorities are always up to date, that the next sprint is always well organized, I see what's missing, and on what's missing I'll go do some designs. I also see the prioritization of the design list, because there is the prioritization of things that are finished and ready to be developed, and there is the prioritization of the things that I need to design and analyze in order for us to work on.

I also talk a lot to CSMs (those in charge of customer projects), I review customer videos to get their feedback and to unlock/improve situations.

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What is your professional challenge?

Our ultimate challenge is to have a platform that everyone uses, and where all features are used. Obviously, all features will never be used to 100% (laughs).

But otherwise I would say to increase the use of our tool as much as possible in a fluid, easy and autonomous way. All the complexity lies in the difference between features vs technical restrictions and the reality of technical restrictions vs need. There is always this triangle between need, technical restrictions and then added value. So that's a bit of what complicates business, because otherwise we would develop everything, all the time, but that's not possible (laughs).

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The last question in this interview, what made you join Vizzia?

I love the team, honestly I love the project (it's a very interesting product in itself), the start-up environment is great, and there is a lot of potential to develop skills. I was able to go from UX/UI designer to Product Owner, then do both, and then take on more and more responsibilities... so startup life was really amazing. And the product represents a good mission with a responsible side to help municipalities. It's nice that there is a positive impact. So yeah, I would say all these aspects (laughs).