ServiceTitan Job Confirmations | Interview With The Product Manager

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Coburger here, the blue collar nerd. I'm here in Glendale, California with Miles Gornicker at the Service Titan offices. Miles, what do you do here at Service Titan?

So I'm the senior product manager for dispatch.

So what does that mean to me?

So we think about, as a product manager, I'm thinking about what do we want the dispatch board to be looking like in five years to best serve our customers? And then how do we get it to that point?

How do we get it to that point? I mean, are you taking like feedback from clients to kind of guide you or how do you direct the product?

Yeah, it's a combination of thinking about what the businesses need, but also observing people in their natural environments. Rather than listening to people tell us what they want, I try to go on site with them and actually observe them during their everyday life. So recently I went on site with a customer and I noticed that the dispatcher was calling to confirm appointments before they sent technicians out. After every single call, she was writing down the number of the job on a piece of paper to keep track of which ones had been confirmed and which ones hadn't. And I felt really bad and guilty, and I resolved to figure out a better way to do that when I got back.

Okay. Yeah, Is that the job confirmations? Right?

Yeah, it's job confirmations. You might have seen it already because we did an open beta for it.

Yep. Yeah, I was a part of that open beta. Second, explain to me the problem that this solves. I mean, I guess it's what you just described. Right.

Well, let's split this into two pieces.

Okay.

The immediate problem that I wanted to solve was giving people a way to mark jobs as confirmed from the dispatch board. But at the same time, I really wanted to set us up for the future and make sure that if this feature was a big success, then we could build on top of it. So, you know, going into the open beta, we didn't really know how it would turn out, but. But we got huge adoption. We ended up getting 600 different companies on it within a couple of months. And because we built it in a way that other features could be layered on top of it, we're now in a position to double down on it and continue building. So this was the first step, just giving people a way to prevent double calls. But in the future, probably later this year, if all goes well, we can also shoot out messages directly to homeowners, so letting them confirm directly from their phone by replying C for confirm.

Oh, that's going to be awesome. Okay, can you show me what it looks like right now? Can you kind of give me a demo of what we've got currently?

Sure. So if you look at the dispatch board currently, you can see the same colors that there's always been, but there's also a darker blue to indicate that this job has already been confirmed.

Right.

So in order to confirm a job, I'm just right clicking on it. In this case, since it's already confirmed, it's going to show cancel confirmation and then I can just cancel it right away and that change is reflected immediately without any type of reload.

Perfect.

One of the things that we wanted to do to support dispatcher's workflow is we wanted to give them a quick way to run down the list of unconfirmed jobs so they can call them one after another. So if you go over here, you can see a list of all the unconfirmed jobs. Call the customer, mark them as confirmed, and just wrap that whole process up as quickly as possible. One of the other big things here is accountability. You know, it's really important to be able to keep an eye on what your office staff is doing. So all of the confirmation info is going to be shown on the audit trail as well.

Gotcha. Okay, so kind of explain to me the process. When you guys have an idea like this, like, you went out, you saw this problem, you saw a need that needed filling, then what? Like, I just want to understand the process. Do you then go into beta? Do you start talking like, how do.

You make this thing? Yeah. So typically we'll do a little bit of research first. We can't just assume because one customer has this problem, everyone else does as well. So I went out and talked to a bunch of our CSMs who listen to client feedback all the time. And universally they said that, you know, confirming jobs is a big part of every company's workflow.

Sure.

So we knew there was a lot of value there, especially when you consider how many calls and jobs people are doing per day. The next step was to get in a room with a designer and really let him know what we wanted out of this. Specifically, what I emphasize is that I wanted it to be very readily apparent from the dispatch board which jobs are confirmed and which ones aren't. And after that, we create some mock ups, which is basically just fake photoshopped together screens and start testing them with real people.

Cool. Okay, so you have this beta period. So what did you learn? Anything in that beta period that affected the final product. In this case, Yeah.

I learned that I made a bunch of mistakes during the initial design process.

I'll give you an example.

You know, originally I didn't realize how important being able to see a list of all the unconfirmed jobs was going to be. And during the testing period, we just saw people like scrolling up and down the dispatch board trying to find the jobs that were still in the light blue color so they could get them converted over to the firm.

The bigger your company, the more that's going to be an issue, right?

Oh yeah. And you know, I didn't want people to hate me, so I had to add that column in right away.

Gotcha. Alright.

Awesome.

Miles. So what else should people know about this feature?

So one of the common pieces of feedback I get is why don't jobs show as confirmed once they move into the dispatch or working state? The dispatch board is a really, really busy piece of software. There's a lot going on on it and as a product manager I have to be really mindful not to overload it with information. So my personal thought is that as soon as you send out a technician to someone's house, you've either confirmed that the job is happening or you know, you've decided to accept the risk that the homeowner won't be there.

Right.

So I felt like it was irrelevant and too much extra information to show that a job was confirmed after the technician is already on the way.

Right.

Yeah.

So it's kind of the company's decision to decide whether or not we're going to attempt to drive out to an unconfirmed appointment. But once it's dispatched or once it's working, we know that's now its new status.

It shouldn't have multiple statuses. Makes sense. Although if someone can come up with a better explanation for why we need it, you know, that's part of feedback. Oftentimes I'm wrong and we'll totally consider fixing it.

You heard them, hit them up. What's your email? What's your phone number? What's your address?

One other thing that I want people to know about it is that this feature is accessible from the right click menu. The right click menu has a lot of functionality packed into it and it's only going to become more important to service times workflows as we start adding in new features like the second dispatch map.

Second dispatch map.

I'm glad you asked. You know, we know right now that the dispatch map doesn't do a great job of providing information, especially for larger companies. So we wanted to reimagine it from a tool to keep track of what's going on right now and make it more of a tool for planning out the best routes for your technicians.

Okay. Okay, that sounds very interesting. Can we talk more about that? Everything?

Yeah, sounds good, Miles.

I super appreciate the time. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Richard.

Thank you.