Q: Please briefly introduce yourself and your work at Samsung R&D Institute Indonesia. What projects are you working on?

I am Susanto Benny, the Head of Product Management Part at Samsung R&D Institute Indonesia (SRIN). I started my career as a software engineer in 2012 when I first joined Samsung. In 2015, my role transitioned to product management to help manage the end-to-end software development life cycle in SRIN.

SRIN was established in 2012, and we are just celebrating our 10th anniversary this year. We started as Media Solution Center Indonesia (MSCI) and moved under Samsung Research in 2013. Currently, the main tech competency areas are Data Intelligence, IoT, Cloud Development, and we are contributing to Samsung business by reflecting the needs of the Indonesian market in Samsung products and services. In 2014, SRIN started to develop local services projects with Samsung Electronics Indonesia (SEIN). We created several projects to fulfill the local government regulation as a requirement for SEIN to sell smartphones in Indonesia. For example, we developed the loyalty and promotion app – Samsung Gift Indonesia (SGI), the free e-magazine, the e-newspaper reader app – Samsung Library Time (SLIME), and the Islamic lifestyle app – Salaam.

We are working closely with the SEIN and expanding our development scope. In 2015, we started supporting the retail team in managing the retail operation with incentive management for retail sales members, asset management, and retail mapping app. After successfully establishing an end-to-end product development with the local sales subsidiaries, we now apply these experiences and knowledge to other projects from the SmartThings team and the Samsung Research projects we work on.

Q: Please tell me about the importance of your research field or technology.

The role of product management is creating, defining, delivering, monitoring, and refining products. We support every step of the product life cycle from planning to launch. As product manager, we need to understand the user, business, and technology needs. With this understanding, we could define the vision and goals of the products to plan and build the products that align with the overall corporate strategy and fit with the user needs.

Product managers need to communicate with all of the product stakeholders effectively. In our case, it would be the developer, business owner, UI/UX designer, and management team. First, we need to define requirements and priorities clearly. Then, we need to create well-translated comprehensive specifications to increase the chance of the developer delivering the results on time and according to plan. This also means that we will have an excellent chance to satisfy both the user and business needs.

Q: Can you tell us about the main achievement and rewarding moment in your research or the episode?

The rewarding moment in product management is when we know that the products we shipped brought value to the user and the Samsung business.

One of our achievements was the incentive management solution for retail sales members. Together, we successfully developed this app that can make a real contribution to the business. This app is used to speed up the sales incentive calculation for Samsung store promoters in Indonesia. They could quickly monitor their sales and target performance and view the sales incentive value. This feature helped in motivating the promoters to increase their performance because they could view the reward that they would get directly from this app.

Because all store promoters are using this app, we developed a preorder device feature for it. This feature enabled the SEIN team to accept preorder devices directly from the customer that visited our store during the new product launch season. Moreover, it enabled SEIN to get more sales channels to accept the preorder request. As a result, this feature successfully helped them to obtain an outstanding result on the Galaxy S22 series preorder and the Galaxy Z Fold4 and Flip4 Series this year.

In addition, I’m very thankful that I could contribute to the SRIN patent submission as a personal achievement. Collaborating with other members across the division to brainstorm, learn, and develop the patent is a great and precious experience for me. It has given me a new perspective that we could achieve great things if we had the grit and perseverance to do it.

Q: What is your vision for the future, and what goal would you want to achieve?

My vision is building world-class products or services that are loved by the user and aligned with the company strategy and value. My goal is to expand our Product Management Part’s contribution by collaborating with many overseas teams to build more great products for the company.

<The Product Management Part and B2B Part at SRIN>