In this episode of Product Unfiltered, we sit down with Anne-Paul Nedelca, a Principal Product Manager at Workday to discuss the challenges and opportunities in the HR industry and how technology is shaping its future.
Follow us on Spotify, Amazon Music and Google Podcasts:
Summary:
Product Unfiltered: A Discussion with Anne-Paul Nedelca, a Principal Product Manager at Workday
In the latest episode of Product Unfiltered, Anne, a principal product manager at Workday, shared her insights on the challenges and opportunities in the HR industry and how technology is shaping its future. Anne brings a wealth of experience in building products and managing teams at companies such as Workday, Peakon, and Apple, making her a valuable resource for product managers looking to improve their craft.
Key Takeaways:
Solving Problems and Removing Roadblocks
Anne emphasized that the key to being a successful product manager is the ability to solve problems and remove roadblocks for engineering teams. She shared her typical journey of transitioning to product management via a different discipline and her current role at Workday, where she leads the development of People Analytics, an AI-powered product that provides insights to HR teams.
People Analytics and Augmented Analytics
Anne highlighted the importance of people analytics in helping HR teams make informed decisions through augmented analytics. It can either be purchased as an add-on or while buying the core HR system. People Analytics works as a search engine through all of the people data companies have in Workday. The algorithm searches for trends and anomalies in the data to provide insights that HR leaders might have missed in their manual analysis of the data.
Challenges of Data Privacy
Anne discussed the challenges of data privacy when working with sensitive data sets. As they built a data product, they continuously had to ask themselves who their end-users were and who they will be in the future. To expand their reach, they need to add additional layers of security that are configurable by a customer to restrict the level of insight that they present to users.
Understanding AI and ML Concepts
Anne emphasized the importance of understanding artificial intelligence and machine learning concepts, even though they don't need to know all the details. She explained the value of partnering with engineers and focusing on user experience and expectations rather than the technology's details.
Product Success Metrics
Anne explained the two ways of defining the product's success, one as a business and revenue-generating product, and the other as the product adoption of HRBPs or end-users. The latter is more important since HRBPs are the ones who will be using the product day-to-day, and it's essential that they integrate it into their routines.
Gathering Feedback and Prioritizing Features
Anne discussed how they gather feedback from different channels, including outbound product managers who work directly with customers, sales enablement, and customer feedback. They prioritize features based on criteria such as customer retention, customer satisfaction, monthly active user goals, scalability, and sellability.
Future of People Analytics
Anne talked about the future of People Analytics tools and how they will incorporate new categories of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The volume of data is continuously increasing, and the demand for greater transparency in data and wider access to it is growing as well. The guest predicts that data will be integrated into all user flows, including hiring, performance management, and diversity and inclusion issues.
Anne's insights on product management, data privacy, and the future of People Analytics tools were incredibly informative and valuable for product managers looking to improve their skills. We are grateful for her time and expertise and look forward to more insights from her in the future.
