Hi! I'm Adriana Urrego,
Product Manager

Product Management

As a Product Manager, I have had the opportunity to work in the development of digital B2C and B2B products for a couple of years.

Lead the development of digital products is a job that I really enjoy every day, this is because it allows me to work hand-by-hand with a cross-functional team, know deeply our user's problems and create useful products.

To me, the most important in product management is to fall in love with the problems not with the solutions, because only a deep understanding of the problems will allow you to create really effective solutions that can easily iterate when the market conditions change.

Some of the products that I have worked on are:

Quicker App:

A B2C application that is used for more than 1000 drivers in Latin America to track first and last-mile logistics services.

Operation App:

A web platform to make internal logistics control. On this platform, the users have an overview of what is happening now with dashboards and maps, and also they can generate historical information to make decisions that help them with continuous improvement.

All in one app:

A web application B2B that offers different logistics services in one single platform, so the customers can have holistic control of their operations. The final goal was to integrate four business units, I worked on the integration of three of them.

Project Management

During almost 6 years I had the opportunity to lead different hardware and software projects, which allowed me to begin my professional career in the tech world and work agile frameworks that I’m still using in my day-to-day job as a Product Manager.

These are some of the projects I lead:

Fuel Control Systems projects:

As a product manager in SCI, I had the opportunity to lead around 50 different projects to produce and install Fuel Control Systems in the Middle East, Latin America, and Central America. 90% of these projects were handled remotely, using PMP as a standard to accomplish the schedule and budget defined by the customer.

FleetSAP:

A Fuel Control Platform developed to track the data generated by the Fuel Control Systems installed, that provides real-time information to the customers about their fuel consumption, stock, and fleet location. I worked closely with the development team, in order to turn requirements into features; our main goal was to give customers a tool to optimize their fuel consumption.

Logistic web and mobile applications:

I was fortunate to work as project lead for the last development stage of the MVP for a mobile and web application in order to create, control, and track logistics services, such as Freight Forwarding, Long Haul, First Mile, and Last Mile.

To do that I lead more than 20 developers using the Agile methodology to fulfill the schedule planned. We created weekly sprints with small deliverables for each one of the platforms for 4 months until we finished the whole MVP. After that, we continued working with SCRUM to handle the continuous release of features.

Design

Design is one of the skills I used every day when creating products, it has a lot of techniques that we can use during the product life cycle:

• To find the user’s the pain points
• To test different solutions of the problem we are working on
• To validate a hypothesis
• To evaluate the customer experience (CX) of released products

The techniques that I use the most are:

User research

It have showed me a set of tools that allow me to deeply know the users of the products I’m working on; I really enjoy talking to the users and empathize with their pain points.

Usability test

This is a powerful technique that we, product managers, have to check if the hypotheses we have established are correct or not, so I’m very familiar with this kind of test.

I believe that using tests like these is a best practice to guarantee that the products we develop are useful to our users, and also it has helped me to save money for the company by avoiding to work on unnecessary or incomprehensible features (fast learning).

Prototyping

I have discovered an ability to design high and low-fidelity prototypes for user interaction; I don’t have a strong background in design techniques but I continue to learn about best practices and tools to prototype software interfaces.

I have been working with Adobe XD, Figma, InVision, Sketch, and recently Adobe Illustrator.

Web Development

I’m not an expert on this matter; in fact, I have never worked as a developer in a professional team, but development is one of the highest challenges I’ve had to face in my professional career, that is why last year (2020) I challenged myself to gain all the knowledge needed to complete a whole development project on my own.

Creating my personal web site was my first objective; it was proudly designed and developed by me (if you want you can take a look at the code in my GitHub profile). But now I’m facing new projects in order to practice my recently acquired knowledge in JavaScript and Python. I will update this post with the results of these new projects.