Bringing Product Management to the Next Level at Livescale


Livescale is a software company in Montreal bringing brands an innovative live video shopping solution to create authentic and engaging relationships with customers. Thanks to Livescale, live shopping allows brands to monetize their social influence, promote their products on video, and sell online with live streaming solutions where orders and payment systems go right to their e-commerce platform.

Who is the face behind the innovative product management?
Meet Chanida Rayrolles, Product Manager at Livescale. Her job is to not only create and maintain a product roadmap according to business ROI but also to lead the product release plans. Chanida plays an active part in mitigating any issues that could have an impact on the completion of new feature releases.

As part of her role at Livescale, she defines product vision, roadmaps and growth opportunities as well as researches and analyzes the market. Chanida has to come face to face with Livescale’s customers, including their worst realities and pain points using the Livescale live shopping product. This helps her outline their challenges and present them to the leadership team so the product can continue to improve.

She pays close attention to Livescale’s competitors and industry trends, assesses value, develops cases, and prioritizes feature mixes, ensuring everything aligns with the product strategy. The product strategy is something that she herself helps define and refine quarterly with her company to make sure the product is up-to-date within an ever-changing landscape.

How does Chanida spend her days as a product manager? She typically starts with a weekly overview of her work to get an understanding of what lies ahead. This is broken up into three blocks:

  • Meetings: This is the perfect time for Chanida to keep stakeholders up-to-date with what’s happening in the current or upcoming quarter. She also engages with the engineering, sales, marketing and customer support teams as they act as representatives to customer pain points.
  • Product: The majority of Chanida’s time is dedicated to working on product features for the upcoming quarter using the product management methodology that Bain Public helped implement, while also reviewing the research and development of current product features.
  • Project: A smaller portion of her time is spent managing any clients in ‘project mode.’ This includes overseeing important live stream events with their premium clients (e.g. L’Oréal).

How does Chanida face her challenges as a product manager?

Chanida’s days are filled with defining and refining product vision, but like any job, her role as a product manager certainly comes with its challenges,

"My current challenges are my lack of techniques. I don’t come from an engineering background, but a business one. Sometimes it can be difficult to communicate with the research and development team and try to understand each other. It’s been a learning curve knowing how to influence people when you aren’t technically in charge of managing them."
How does Chanida handle these challenges exactly? She finds that relying on her business-oriented mindset, having a clear idea of what needs to be accomplished at the end of the quarter, and following the product management methodology that Bain Public helped implement are fundamental techniques that help.

This approach starts with identifying her product’s most important mission along with assessing its unique strategies and tactics. From there, she works with stakeholders to unpack the challenges they face, gather new insights and listen to their different perspectives.

Her technique that has proved to work best is using collaborative learning exchanges and having open discussions to welcome new mindsets and points of view. This approach helps achieve business objectives while also making sure everyone is aligned, motivated, inspired and ready to innovate.

Chanida understands the importance of bringing strategy into product planning efforts to allow for focus and direction, but sometimes colliding visions and multiple decision-makers can get in the way.

"I value everyone’s opinions and visions, but the only way to keep everyone on track is to turn their gut feelings into facts and then weigh the business value of their idea."
How Bain Public is helping Livescale reach their product goals
Part of Bain Public’s approach to helping Chanida has been to guide her toward understanding the weekly step-by-step process of managing products. All of this is done in-person with her on site at Livescale. Time in-person is fundamental as it gives us the opportunity to meet everyone on the team and work together to build strong relationships. Once you’ve met with someone IRL, they are no longer the block of text behind an email or simply a voice over the phone.

From there it becomes much easier to work and grow together. Our collaborative work has challenged Chanida to go much deeper into her thinking process and be as objective as possible. In the moments where she needs another perspective, she can always count on Bain Public to help navigate complex issues, create a well-developed strategic planning process, and achieve strategic value for the company.

"I’m still learning how to deal with people’s expectations, especially when they strongly disagree with something. It’s still quite hard to get people on board with a project, but Bain Public has helped me deal with managing different points of view and how to diffuse any grenades."

These types of grenades often come from influential individuals who aren’t bought into a project and will go out of their way so it does not gain the momentum it needs to succeed. With Chanida’s ‘go-getter’ personality, she’s learned to understand a situation from different perspectives along with when and how to communicate with the stakeholders and people on her team. Since empathy is the key to success for any product objective, Chanida is working toward adopting more of this trait to further improve workplace relationships through listening and making people feel heard and included and creating that open and safe space for brainstorming.
As for the future of Livescale, Chanida looks forward to releasing the product her and the team have been working on:

"I can’t wait to transition from a project to a product company culture and get more clarity on the next steps to become a leading live shopping platform in the industry."

Written by Loren O'Brien-Egesborg. Thanks to Paul Orthchanian and Gabrielle Drouin for reading drafts of this article and overseeing aspects of its publication. Also, if you have any feedback or criticism about this article then shoot us an email info@bainpublic.com.
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About Bain Public

Bain Public, acquired by X Machina-AI Inc. in January 2022, offers consistent roadmap planning processes & tools for business leaders and product managers organized around what motivates, inspires and improves growth. Bain Public offers a variety of articles, e-books and approaches designed to help organizations understand their digital strategies, introduce elements of roadmapping and establish product-led change amongst the senior leaders and managers. Our approach, product, expert advice and coaching helps entangle complex technology, people and roadmap dynamics.

About XMachina

X Machina-AI seeks to provide a platform for the acquisition of Artificial Intelligence ("AI") entities in North America. The company’s thesis is based on an aggregation strategy to acquire successful AI targets and make them better through the addition of growth capital, streamlining of corporate processes and human capital acquisitions. The current sector focus of the Company is on enhancing supply-chain efficiencies, logistics and manufacturing.