Hey Andy & Marine! Could you introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about what you do at WeMaintain?
Andy: Hi I’m Andy, Field Operations Engineer in the city of London. I’ve been with WeMaintain for just over a year now. I mobilise poorly maintained sites, reduce callback rates and increase lift reliability and availability through proper maintenance solutions, whilst building strong customer relationships through great communication.
Marine: Hey I'm Marine, and I've been a Product Manager here at WeMaintain for almost 2 years.
WeMaintain's mission is to put the best of people and technology at the heart of the built environment, and the product team is here to build the tools that will enable us to deliver the best end-to-end maintenance solution to our clients.
My role is thus to understand the needs and pain points of our users (clients, engineers, operational teams), and build with our developers digital solutions that will address these needs.
How do your job roles interlink with each other?
Andy: I couldn’t carry out my role or provide the great detailed reports to our customers without the platforms Marine and the tech teams create. Communication is key and the reports have all the information needed to give our customers full transparency.
Marine: There are several Product Managers at WeMaintain, and each of us have an area of expertise. Mine are field services, so making sure our engineers' needs are met. So basically, my job is to empower Andy and bring him the tools that will enable him to do an amazing job!
This means that we have to (and want to) work hand in hand to be successful: Andy feeds us his perfect knowledge of the field and his insights on where we could bring our solution to the next level, and we bring our tech wizards to develop solutions that will be useful to Andy in his daily tasks.
Andy, what do you think of the product and tech that WeMaintain and Marine are developing?
Top notch! The app is a great platform for myself and the other engineers to showcase exactly what we are doing out in the field to the customer, and also a great tool to help engineers in their day to day lives. To be able to have an input to how the tech could work better and to see it implemented is amazing. Your feedback is taken into account and changes are actually made. The IoT and dashboard platform are a game changer for our customers, with access to live data available at a click of a button.
Marine, how do you receive insights from Andy and the other engineers? What’s the process of these insights becoming implemented?
We have two main points of entry for the insights:
- an insight form open to all the engineers where they can feed us information on their pain points and where they would like to see the app evolve
- regular site visits with the engineers to see how they use the app, where they lose time or don't have the info they need, and check on the field that everything is working the way we expected it
We then review all these insights on a weekly basis. We deep dive on the needs behind each insight, and prioritise them based on the ratio between the impact we think solving the need would have on our maintenance quality, and the effort we estimate the implementation will require (in order to quickly deliver the most value). Once the need is prioritised, we design solutions, test them with the engineers, tweak them based on their feedback and once we are confident enough with the solution, our developers work their magic to implement it!
Once the solution is released, we get feedback from the engineers, which are new insights for us to iterate!
How often do you communicate? Is it easy to reach one another?
Andy: A lot, I’ve always got something to say or pester Marine with (haha!). The platform and channels we use make communication easy and I’ll receive a reply usually within minutes from the product team - this is second to none. If Marine is unavailable there is always someone else on hand to answer your question.
Marine: The more the better! The communication is very easy: we have a dedicated communication channel with the engineers so whenever they have an issue with the app or a question for us they can message us and we answer as fast as possible. And it goes both ways: whenever I have a question for Andy or the other engineers on one of their needs, or new features I want them to test, I can just ask them directly.
Covid has made it difficult to see each other in real life since I'm located in Paris and Andy in London, but when things have improved I’ve managed to visit once to get even more insights (and beat him at mini golf while I was there).
What about the other teams, what is the communication like?
Andy: We have a weekly UK team video call and a fortnightly company-wide video call, as well as easy communication through online platforms for operations and for different departments. There is a great amount of visibility of what’s going on in all parts of the company for anyone to see. Also, we try to organise team meet ups when we can, either in the office or over a coffee or breakfast.
Marine: The communication is usually really smooth. We try to communicate as much as possible in writing to enable asynchronous communication to give everyone the possibility to organise their time as they see fit (and also because the company is in several time zones). When needed, we have video calls, but we try to keep them short and efficient.
And to make sure we continue to all talk to each other we have weekly random 1on1: you get randomly paired with someone to call them and chat and see how they are.
What do you enjoy most about working at WeMaintain?
Andy: The people; everyday someone inspires you by their care, grit and uniqueness. There’s always someone there to pick you up if you're having a tough day. Everyone is aspiring to make a difference.
Marine: The culture! Our core values (care, grit and uniqueness) are not just words but are embodied by everyone here at WeMaintain. They define the way we work together and are key to succeeding in bringing the best of people and technology at the heart of the built environment.
Want to work with Marine and Andy? Check out all our available roles here.
