모멘텀 에피소드 19:
Dilem Akışık와 함께하는 Jform 팀 구축

What's it like to be in charge of developing the latest and greatest product for a SAS technology company like Jform?

For every new product we release, there is a team behind it that's been working quietly in the background for months or even years to make it ready.

Today we'll be talking to Dilem Akashik, the lead behind her newest launch, Jform Teams, to peel back the curtain on what goes into developing a product.

Welcome to Momentum, a podcast by Jform where we talk about technology, productivity tips, insights, and best practices that help us move forward in business and in life. Let's get started.

All right, welcome everyone. I'm here with Dilem Akashik. Did I pronounce that correctly?

Yes, perfect. I'm a senior product designer and team lead for the Enterprise product team here at Jotform.

Dilem, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today.

Thank you for having me here, Elliot. It's great to have you.

I think this will be really insightful for some of our users and even prospective users to hear about what goes into a product launch.

As a matter of fact, we are gearing up for the launch of Jform Teams, which will be Jform's last major launch of the year.

Can you tell us a little bit about what Jform Teams is and why it's such an important product for Jform?

Yes, of course. Jform Teams is a product, well actually it's a concept where users can create shared workspaces for their team members and allow them particular permissions and roles like team admins, creators, data collaborators, and so on so they can work together collaboratively.

This is important because for the first time we're building an Enterprise-first feature. Normally, we start with regular users and broad silver or gold plans, but this time we are building first for Enterprise users and then for regular users, so it's a very exciting project for us.

We've talked about how we will always be a small business company helping small businesses and solopreneurs, but more and more as our company has grown, we have taken on more Enterprise clients, which is very exciting from a scaling perspective.

It also entails new products and services that we need for those Enterprise clients, so it's an exciting first for us.

Can you tell me where and when the decision to create Jform Teams came from, like how long you've been working on it and how it was first decided?

Well, it was in the beginning of this year when I switched to the Enterprise product team. The concept was before me, but we started right away in January 2022.

It started with our users because it's very important to receive feature requests from them. One of our Enterprise customers said they were working on shared folders but found their system archaic because they had to share with individuals separately, which was not very autonomous.

They suggested bringing all these people together where they are working on the same form or same data, and that's how we started. It came from the request of a user, actually a solo user who identified this need.

That's really cool. I think that's been a theme with our products; all of them come from user feedback directly.

That's one of the advantages of still being a somewhat small, nimble company; we can take our time to develop these products.

How has your experience been developing Jform Teams? I'm curious because you're a senior product designer, so when you get the charge to create a product like this, what does that entail? What is your role and how does this 10 or 11-month process probably unfold?

We started with a design week, which is one of our cultural embraces. During design weeks, maybe 10 or more designers, including graphic designers, developers, and UI/UX or product designers, joined.

Not only did I work on the UI, but also on the flow of the product, which is very important. We worked on the concept and brought ideas together to decide how this should look at first.

We didn't want to intimidate our users because they have ongoing workflows, so it shouldn't disrupt their workflow but be seamless. That's why we started by putting Teams inside My Forms.

It had many challenges, and we're still tackling those, but one of the challenges was that Teams is a concept that has to work with all of our products like Tables, Formula, Apps, and everything because it covers them all.

The biggest challenge was working with all the product teams in a synchronized way, and since they have a lot on their agendas, it was hard to coordinate.

As Jform's products grow and we keep adding new great products, it's exciting because we get to deliver more value to our customers, but it also makes future products more complicated because they need to fit in with all those other products and pieces of the puzzle.

The importance of this shared workspace is especially crucial for Enterprise users because one of the benefits of Enterprise is that you can have multiple people on one account and share all that data, information, forms, and tables, which is not a need that many regular users have.

I'd be curious about some of the challenges you face. You prefaced that a little bit. Are there any others or more that you can elaborate on?

Since we have this 16-year-old product, we have to use some existing structure, which was the second challenge. It's always easier to build something from scratch because you can do whatever you want, but we had to stick with those limitations and sometimes find workarounds.

You can't always create a perfect, flawless product; you have to create and receive requests and feedback from users without waiting until it's perfect.

It was very challenging to make Teams work well with the rest of the products, but I guess we have covered most of those challenges.

I imagine that's a bit of a conflict because you want to release the best product possible but at the same time get to that minimum viable product and release it to users to get their feedback, which shapes much of the development process.

How does the development process for Jform Teams compare to some of the other products you've worked on here at Jform?

This is my fourth big product because I worked on Card Form, PDF Editor, and Smart PDF Forms. Two of them were about PDFs, and the third was about Sign before we switched to Enterprise products.

Those products were more separate, standalone products, but Jform Teams incorporates everything all into one, so it's a whole new experience.

We are really close to the release now, and by the time this episode airs, it might even be released, which is very exciting.

What are you most excited about with the release of Jform Teams?

To be honest, the hardest time is when you just launch the MVP because it's the first time users face your product.

We already did this with our Enterprise users in August, and there has been some beta testing already. We're collecting feedback, and we passed the hardest time.

I'm just excited to release this and we're working with a bunch of teams like launch and content writers, and we have ideas to improve Teams even after launch.

I just want to air it as soon as possible.

It's interesting because for launches like this, teams like yours have been working in the background for months, maybe sharing some updates internally, but then it becomes a coordinated effort from many teams to bring it to market.

It's a really cool part about being on the marketing team, especially when you launch a product like Jform Teams that you've invested so much time and effort into.

How does that feel? Will you be relieved, excited, do you celebrate, or is it just on to the next thing?

If relief is the key, then yes, because it's a milestone and then we ask what we're going to do next.

At Jform, we always improve ourselves with small implementations and work on live production, so as soon as we develop something, we meet with our users.

It's not like we launch and it's the end; it just begins because we have to maintain the product.

I don't know what we're going to do next product-wise, but for some time, I think we'll be working on Teams and continuous improvement.

From your experience as a designer, when you release a product, how long do you stay on it making improvements until you move on?

It depends on the company and the complexity of the product. It might take a few months, then we deliver the product to the maintenance team who keep working on it.

If the company has another vision about a new product, we might switch, but I don't know about that yet.

The company vision is turning a little bit to Enterprise, so I think we'll be working on more Enterprise-related features, maybe improvements on the admin console of our Enterprise servers.

Right now, the focus is on Jform Teams, making it as good as it can be, and we're all very excited.

Is there anything else related to Teams, your experience, or anything else we talked about today that you'd like to share before we end?

I'm thinking about all of our team's developers, myself, and product management. We tackle every obstacle and try to make sure everything works fine and stay in tune with all the products.

I can't wait for it to launch.

It's incredible to see how much work, blood, sweat, and tears go into products like this, and as the senior product designer, you know all that pressure.

I've seen the product; it looks great, works great, and it's only going to get better. We could not be more excited for it here at Jotform.

Thank you so much, Dilem, for taking the time to come on today. This was really insightful for me to peel back the curtain a little bit, and we hope all our users get a lot out of Jform Teams.

Thank you for having me here. It was an amazing experience, and I hope we can do this annually if there is no pandemic anymore.

I'll see you around in another Jform week.

That means a lot. Thank you so much. I hope to be here next year as well. Thank you.