Meet Team Testomato: Lukas
Who are you and what is your role at Testomato?
Hi, I’m Lukaš Burkoň, and I’m the product owner of Testomato. Basically, I spend my days at the office finding ways to make our service awesome as well as profitable.
My daily routine consists of strategy planning, user research, feature specification, design and testing, marketing, and pricing decisions.
What’s your favorite part of working on this project?
I really enjoy designing new features and working on each step with our development team as we create them. I’m also extremely interested in any data analytics that help me gain a better understanding of our users and reveal new ways we can push our product forward.
How do you think a product owner differs from a traditional project manager?
Ian McAllister (the GM and product leader at Amazon) had a great answer for this question on Quora that I think does a wonderful job of describing the difference between the two roles:
Product managers own “What” and “Why”.
Project managers own “How” and “When”.
– Ian McAllister
How do you decide what to build?
That’s a great question, but it’s not an easy one for me to answer.
Our sources of inspiration include a mix of our own thoughts and strategy, customer feedback, competitor analysis, and industry trends. We have a lot of ideas of what we’d like to develop and how we’d like to get there, but it can be tough for me to prioritize what to develop and when.
I make a lot of decisions based on how much value a feature will add to Testomato, the complexity involved in the development, and whether it fits with our overall strategy.
When it starts to come together, it feels a little like magic.
What’s your least favorite error?
I have to admit that I’m pretty dependent on (or even addicted to) the Internet, so I really hate when the network I’m on either goes down or gets really slow.
I feel bad for anyone who has to be around me when this happens – let’s just say it’s not pretty!
What do you think is the most challenging aspect of your work?
Personally, I think the most difficult aspect for every startup is getting the ingredients right and creating a quality product that people are willing to pay for. Finding a balance between customer needs, product features, and pricing is a tall order for any team.
I feel that my primary responsibility is to try and discover the perfect recipe, and frankly, it’s not the easiest task in the world.
Tell us one geeky fact about yourself.
My greatest passion is actually music. If you could see my audio setup at home, you’d get what a geek I am about it :)!
Have more questions for Lukas? Tweet to him @lukasburkon.
