Product Love Podcast: Anneliese Olson, General Manager & Global Head, Printing Category at HP

This week on Product Love, I picked up my previous conversation with Anneliese Olson, General Manager & Global Head of Printing Category at HP.

If you haven’t checked out that episode, we talked about her experience in doing product marketing and management projects in 25 countries. You can learn about her experience abroad and journey into the product management industry.

In this week’s episode, we dove deep into digital transformation and the future of work.

COVID-19, and the acceleration of digital

While COVID-19 has completely changed the world and flipped many of our roadmaps over — it also brought in a new challenge. With companies announcing their hybrid work model as offices open up, we’ve begun to ask ourselves: how has work changed? How has the way people interacted change in the last year? What workflows and collaborations have changed?

The answer is, it’s changed a lot. At HP, Anneliese has seen a 125% growth in mobile pages scanned. Their mobile app boasts an incredible 50 million active users due to a huge emergence in mobile and app-based solutions. But a more important question is, what does hybrid work mean for security?

When Anneliese talks to CTOs and small businesses, she finds out that they can’t monitor what people are doing. This isn’t in the context of spying security, but it’s the way that user security, device security, and data security have all been changed. People’s general workflows have been upended on an axis — what happens when your users are stuck in an app? How do you know which document is protected, and who is allowed to print it?

These are some of the questions she raises, and they’re all the right ones to ask as if we figure out what the future of work looks like.

Along with that, the nature of product leaders is to scenario plan. They’re in charge of the roadmaps for those exact reasons — they’re always planning for the near term, midterm, and even years out. Anneliese advises that anchoring your assumptions for the future of work is very important in how you interact with your customers.

If you want to learn how Anneliese is approaching the customer experience in the hybrid world and her digital transformation principles, check out the episode below.