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Veem’s Head of Engineering speaks at SaaS North in Ottawa

3 min read

On Wednesday, November 27th, Ralf Dagher, Director of Engineering at Veem, took the stage at SaaS North with Sameer Gulati, CEO and Co-Founder of Ordway Labs, for the Breakout session: Your Winning Product Playbook.

The panel, moderated by Mallorie Brodie of Bridgit Solutions, allowed these SaaS leaders to answer questions and discuss the proven tactics that have helped them launch and scale new products and product categories.

Product market innovation and fit is a crucial aspect for SaaS businesses trying to succeed and grow in the industry. This breakout session spoke to the tried and true tools that these companies use to deliver high quality features that are beneficial to their customers.

Our product is a huge component to the ever growing success of Veem. For Dagher, it was a privilege to share the strategies used to improve product rollout and response.

Dagher spoke to many aspects of product rollout like the market, Veem’s unique multi-rail technology, and his methodology about “failing fast.”

“You should never be afraid to take chances,” he says. “You just need to be able to control the scope of the change. Never rollout without being able to measure how it [the product] is doing. Don’t wait till the whole thing is ready for everybody, you’re killing yourself.”

Dagher says it is crucial to have a continuous delivery model so that you can make changes and adapt as needed. Once a product is doing well, “Push it out to the rest of your customer base, take chances and be ready to fail fast (if it does fail). You need to be able to kill it, learn from that experience, have a nice retrospect and then build your next success from that.”

Veem was born from a need found in the payments market. The problem founder Marwan Forzley discovered was innovative payment networks were built for consumers only. Forzley took the payment network concept and applied it to businesses.

Dagher went on to compare Veem’s unique multi-rail technology to the amplitude of transit systems in existence.

One mode of transport doesn’t always fit the situation. By having the opportunity to choose the most successful method, you can get to your destination faster, cheaper, and with less stress. The same methodology applies to payments.

Speaking to the tensions that arise in the product roadmap, Dagher explained the internal and external fixings of Veem.

“We have several channels,” he says. “On the external side, we have a great product marketing team that reaches out to customers for opinions. Our customer success team is the frontline, they understand the pain points. Then there is our sales team, who have close relationships with customers and an understanding for what they’re looking for.”

On the internal side of things, Dagher mentioned an ‘ideation’ Slack channel that allows everyone in the organization to pitch ideas, and ‘hackathons’ for Veemers to build out their ideas and showcase them. Veem also capitalizes on two-week Sprint Cycles that encourage engineers to develop new features and fix defects.

Overall, Veem taps into all of its resources to ensure that product rollout is fresh and in-demand. And on that note, to end the presentation, Dagher of course plugged that Veem is currently hiring.

If you think you’re innovative, have ideas, and would generally be a great fit at Veem, click on this link to find out more about life at Veem and how to apply.

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