Fishing, Features, and Future Roadmaps: Spotlight on Parker Sox, VP of Product at Moovila

Meet Parker Sox, the product leader driving innovation at Moovila.

Parker Sox, VP of Product at Moovila, is the crucial link between customer needs and the engineering team’s to-do list. He makes sure that the features the team works on align with what customers want and need. For Parker, every day is different, but the goal is always the same: Get the right work done well. 

We spoke to him about his work, his background, his professional goals, and what he does when he isn’t deciding what features you will find in the next update of Moovila Perfect Project. 

How do you explain what you do to family and friends?  

I try to explain it in a non-technical context. I might say, “When you see new features and bug fixes appear on your phone, somebody had to choose which new features to introduce, which issues to address, and how those functions will appear within the application. I’m that guy.” 

I'm the connection point and translator between our customers and our engineering team. I help to determine what can be built and make sure that what we build aligns with the business goals and our clients’ needs. 

There are many career paths that lead to product management. I got to this point in my career by listening to customers.  

What does an average day as VP of Product look like?    

One of the best parts about my job is that no day is the same. I wear all the product hats!  

I might go from a strategic product meeting to a technical product meeting to heading up the quality assurance team.  

A typical day starts with an engineering stand-up meeting where I try to understand what everybody's working on and where progress is happening. From there, I might spend time thinking about the future roadmap, answer engineers’ questions, hop on a sales call, or help out the customer support teams by triaging tickets and issues. It’s a mix. One part of my day is usually strategic, but another part is almost always hands-on product work. 

How would you describe your approach to product development?  

We have a running list of feature requests that come from internal teams, leadership, and customers. This list never goes away. There are always new things people want. I try to prioritize these ideas and align them with our business goals. 

Over the years, I've learned that doing this starts with asking hard questions around the “why.” I don't consider a new feature without truly understanding why it’s needed and what problems it will solve for the user.  

A lot of times, when it comes to new features, companies simply go forth and build them. Then they are faced with feature bloat, which makes the product more complex than the client wants. That’s why I always ask, “What problems are we trying to solve? How are people doing this task now without our tools?” That helps us understand how – and if – we can build this feature into our current architecture and platform. 

What’s something about product leadership that people often misunderstand?  

There is a belief that all we do is dictate to the engineers what to build. But a lot of product management is about getting all the stakeholders in alignment.  

Product managers don't make all the ultimate decisions. We facilitate a shared vision and align the goals of the whole company. Once leadership is aligned, then we ask engineers to build the products. This role involves a lot of internal vision alignment. Setting the roadmap comes after that. 

Is there a feature or innovation in Moovila Perfect Project that you’re especially proud of?  

That’s easy. Accurate timelines. 

The biggest innovation we've been able to develop is the backbone for getting accurate timelines. And we've been able to enforce that structure throughout all our new development. 

Look at Smart Schedule and Resource Capacity Management, for example.  Not only are we pulling in a lot of data to give users a “one pane of glass” view to help them understand their capacity and their scheduling, we're also able to layer in the complexity around accurate timelines.  

I am also proud of how lean we are as a team and how much we are able to develop with significantly less head count.  

Clarity around goals is one way we accomplish this. Much of our productivity is a result of all of us understanding the roadmap and making sure everybody has a clear directive and knows the priorities. Many times, larger teams are scattered, and things get dropped. We manage to keep everyone aligned and rowing in the same direction.  

How do you incorporate user feedback into product decisions?  

User feedback is invaluable. It is the cornerstone of product management.  

We receive user feedback through feature requests, support tickets, and sales calls. It comes to us, too, from the onboarding and customer success team when they onboard new customers. Those folks are on the front line, helping clients go through their digital transformation.  

We add this feedback to the quantitative information we collect about usage, which reveals things clients aren't necessarily telling us, but that we can make inferences based on. This all drives our product roadmap. 

Sometimes we decide to make enhancements and sometimes we add new features. For example, if a request is for a functionality that already exists, we might make the user experience easier. Or we might need to build a new solution. Whatever it is, it all goes into our backlog of refinements and is weighed against user needs and the business goals. 

What’s the most valuable lesson you've learned from working in tech?  

You have to adapt. Technology is always changing. You have to be willing to pivot to meet changing needs. Innovate or die! 

But you also have to stay focused on the needs of the users and how you can incorporate change into the technology stack you have.  

For me, it is not all about coding. You can have the best developers in the world, but if you're not building functionality that helps clients save time and improve margins, the best code will never get traction. 

If you could instantly solve one challenge in the SaaS world, what would it be?  

That would be to solve the integration nightmare.  

There is no technology out there today that operates without integrations. Every industry uses different toolsets that need to work with yours. There is no single tool that solves all the needs for a business.  

Thankfully, we have an amazing VP of Integration and Automation who spearheads that here. But the magic wand I would like to have would deliver better interoperability between platforms and better integrations.  

When you’re not at work, what are you doing?  

You will usually find me outdoors, something water related is usually what I'm doing when I’m not working. Typically, that means fishing on the boat or just enjoying the scenery in Charleston, SC. I recently got scuba certified in Hawaii so you might actually find me under the water.  

If you weren’t in Product, what job would you be doing?  

I think it would be a similar role, where I am solving complex problems. I would enjoy being a detective because that’s about diving into complex issues and using your gut and intuition – along with data – to solve mysteries. I might also enjoy an analyst role. I'm a data geek at heart, so I enjoy analyzing data and understanding trends and patterns. 

Interested in what’s happening next for Parker and Moovila? Check out our features page or connect with Parker on LinkedIn.