Ooma’s Jagmeet Sekhon wants you to bring us your enterprise communication problems

Jagmeet Sekhon, Senior Manager, Product for Ooma Enterprise, had always been focused on the customer journey. From her time at Canadian airline WestJet to telecom Shaw Communications, a part of Rogers, she enjoyed customer journey mapping.

How does customer journey mapping work? Sekhon explains it like this: Imagine that someone wakes up and wants a cup of coffee. What does that mean? How does that person answer getting a cup of coffee? Do they brew their coffee on weekdays and go to a coffee shop on the weekends? Do they go to a coffee shop on the way to the office?

“There are so many micro decisions that someone makes that we often think when we’re trying to solve a problem is just ‘how are you getting coffee?’ and that’s not it,” she said.

Keeping those micro decisions in mind is a critical park of building product at Ooma. Sekhon says product managers work closely with engineers, designers and technical talent to make sure everyone understands what the customer’s journey is.

Mapping customer journeys is a mindset Sekhon has carried her entire career, drawing from her own experiences. “Myself as a customer I’m always like ‘I have this grievance what I started to do in my career was to flip it in terms of ‘well, if it’s this customer what are they going through? What’s the problem they’re experiencing that we need to solve?’”

Solving problems is exactly what drew her to product management, specifically at Ooma, where she said they always put the customer at the forefront of every decision they make. In fact, she said it’s not just solving problems for customers, but how they can solve problems with customers.

“Because our customers have such a unique set of problems our white glove solution is where we are able to respond to those issues,” she said. “Our customers are not cookie cutter customers, our customers are very sophisticated and we have a lot of levers we can pull to solve those problems.”

What does that mean? Think of Ooma Enterprise as giant control panel. There are a thousand buttons and some of them are switches and levers. Ooma can work with a businesses and tell them which 10 or 15 tools that can solve specific problems for their business. This is white glove service, essentially. Ooma can cater its Enterprise product & service offering for each individual business, as no two enterprise businesses always have the same exact service or feature set requirements.

Creating a diverse set of tools that can be narrowed down to any type of business is hard work, and Sekhon says visualization and trying to solve small pieces of the problem and working up can help in addition to taking a step back and asking why they’re building something in the first place.

Sekhon said Ooma doesn’t want to ask customers to change the way they do their business so they can use Ooma products. Instead, she said it’s about Ooma bringing enterprise products to customers to solve issues.

“We don’t force you to fit into one box. You want to be able to run your own system, you want us to be hands off, we’ll give you that. Or, you might bring us a set of problems, like ‘I don’t know how to get this done, can you help me?’ we’ll give you the white glove treatment. It’s really a sense of all those different pieces we can bundle together to give you the solution you’re looking for that differentiates us.”

Building all these tools and mapping customer journeys to make sure you’re accounting for all the different ways a business might need to use an enterprise phone system isn’t just on one person. Sekhon says success isn’t based on herself, but the collaboration of the people she gets to work with at Ooma – including top talent of engineers, quality assurance, product designers, customer success implementation and support individuals, sales engineerings and many more.

It’s something she noticed when she first started, saying that it was the first company where she came in and worked with really strong women engineers who were in leadership positions making important decisions. It extends to her team, which is young. She said half of them hasn’t even used a landline, but the new thought of approaching a legacy industry with fresh ideas and new ways to solve problems is a lot of fun.

Even further, she pointed that many of the teams she works with at Ooma are stationed all over the world, not just at home base in Sunnyvale, California. Ooma demonstrates its values to keeping people connected because it knows how to work together remotely, she said.

If there’s one message Sekhon wanted to customers to know, it’s that Ooma wants to help solve their problems.

“Bring us your problems. Literally. It’s not just product, it’s customer success, it’s our sales, it’s our engineers. The complex problems are fun things we enjoy solving. We know our product can solve it, it’s just a matter of figuring out what your problem is and how we’re going to use our product to solve that.”