Leader Spotlight: Building product experiences for QR codes, with Moritz Hoffmann
Moritz Hoffmann is Senior Director, Global Product Management at 1WorldSync GmbH, by Syndigo, based in Cologne, Germany, where he leads a team of product managers, product owners, and data analysts. His path there wasn’t a straight line. He spent years in PR, marketing, and sales — including PR Manager, Marketing Manager, and Regional Manager roles at ENTEGA AG — before moving into product management, later holding product leadership roles at Verivox GmbH and 1&1.
In this conversation, Hoffmann talks about the global shift from barcodes to QR codes under the Digital Link standard, a transition he expected to take a decade that’s now happening in a fraction of that time. He explains why packaging is becoming the start of the customer experience rather than the end of it, walks through real examples of brands using dynamic QR redirects for everything from sustainability messaging to Super Bowl content, and makes the case for why product managers need a more commercial, customer-facing skill set to keep up.
The accelerating shift from barcodes to Digital Link
Walk us through what’s going to happen in the coming years as we transition from barcodes to QR codes.
The barcode is a very established code, but it’s more than 50 years old. There’s a global initiative going on that describes the transition away from a barcode to QR code. The reason why this happens is you can store so much more information behind a QR code rather than behind a barcode. More and more brands and retailers are adapting the new QR code standard.
When we started working in that space, if you would ask me about one and a half years ago, I would’ve probably said I’m expecting a transition phase from a barcode to the QR code experience over the next, I don’t know, decade or something. It appears to happen much faster. We do have a bunch of retailers in the world that completely skipped the transition period for some of their products (not the entire shelf) — they’re already done with moving from barcodes to QR codes. Some of them are still transitioning, so everyone’s going at their own speed, but it’s definitely happening. This opens up completely new product experiences, completely new brand experiences, and there’s a huge potential for us as product managers behind that.
Packaging becomes the starting point, not the end
Product teams have traditionally treated packaging as the end of the customer experience. How do QR codes change where the product experience begins and ends?
That’s going to shift the order a little bit. Packaging will not be at the end of the customer experience anymore because it’s tremendously important to start strategizing around that new opportunity. When we talk to our customers, the companies that have started strategizing around that — what content they want to leverage, what customer experiences they want to build — will have a huge jumpstart against competitors who just wanted to execute or who go directly to the execution. Packaging creation has to be an essential part of the customer experience right from the start. First of all, you need to put a QR code on the package. Then it goes to the question, where are you putting a QR code on the package? It requires a little bit of space. Space on packages is limited, so you have to start thinking about how your package design would fit into that.
You also have to think about what will be behind the QR code. We recommend to our customers to really start thinking about that at the earliest possible stage. It can just start with creating a strategy — what brand and product experience you want to leverage. That’s always the first point.
What does a QR code do that a barcode can’t do?
First I’ll talk about what the barcode does. The barcode that we all know literally stores a number, which is the GTIN, the Global Trade Item Number, and that identifies a product. The QR does something similar — it also hosts a GTIN — but a QR that you scan with your mobile phone directs you to a link.
That link follows a taxonomy — that’s a global standard. Every link that fulfills this Digital Link standard, when you scan a QR code, has to follow a specific taxonomy, and that includes the GTIN that still identifies a product. But the difference between a QR code and a barcode is that the link can redirect you dynamically. You can scan a QR code while you’re at a Target in, let’s say, Chicago, and I can scan the same barcode in a Walgreens in New York City. We’re scanning the same barcode, so we’re opening the same link, but we’ll get different redirects. For example, you could get a promotion from Target — buy this product, buy two, get one free. I could be getting sustainability information. It can be completely different information. It opens up a new product and brand experience, because the content you put behind the QR code is completely up to you, and that’s where the magic happens.
New responsibilities for product managers
If every product becomes a live digital touchpoint with a QR code, what new responsibilities does that create for a PM that they didn’t have in the barcode era?
It’s another customer touchpoint and another channel to deliver unfiltered brand content directly to the consumer. Typically, if you try to create some brand content in any other channel, it would go through a retailer filter, where the retailer decides what they put on the shelf. This is one of the very few opportunities to deliver content you want directly to a consumer without getting filtered.
Product managers should be part of that strategy process. What content makes sense? What content is relevant for my target audience? Typically, looking at the role of product management from a traditional perspective, they would know their customer segments, and they would know their personas. This can be very valuable information in the process of creating the content that’s behind the QR code.
You’ve talked about creating different experiences for different customers using the same QR code. How do you decide which use case is actually worth building first?
That’s one of the topics that really excites me the most. The amount of use cases that you can create or leverage are endless. Whenever a customer comes up with a new use case or idea, in almost every case, the answer is, “Yes, that’s possible!”
We’re talking to customers every day about possible use cases. Typically the conversation with the customer goes to a little bit of brainstorming around their specific needs and ideas. You can do so much. It starts with a very simple landing page about sustainability information or brand information. Think about gamification — you can do a little micro game. You can do a raffle. If you’re sponsoring an event, you can display the content that’s relevant for your customers.
One of our customers sponsored the Super Bowl, and they displayed specific Super Bowl content before and during the game. After the game was done, the packages were still out in the market in stores, and they just changed the redirect — they said, “Congratulations, team X, Y, Z. Really great game.” They can change it right on the spot. It takes 30 seconds. That could have been done with changing the content on the landing page, too, but maybe you want to apply more changes than just text.
A successful Digital Link experience involves content, commerce, engineering, and customer experience. How should a PM bring all those disciplines together?
The role of a product manager is trending more and more into a commercial role. When dealing with topics like the QR code transition, you really have to know your customers. And you can only achieve that by working directly with customers. You can’t just hide behind your sales forces or your customer success management teams — that’s not an option anymore. A product manager needs to be customer-facing and hear directly from customers about what they’re trying to achieve and what their goals are. The role of a product manager is to think about how we can transition those goals and rough ideas into customer experiences.
When I started working in product management, the role of a product manager was very much tied to the tech teams, and that’s still valid, but the customer perspective comes on top of it. It’s tremendously important that you know your customer, your customer segments, and your personas, because then you can try to adapt to that to determine the best way forward.
Let’s talk about the tech side. What technical decisions need to be considered with the Digital Link?
First of all, there has to be a decision to transition — not only from a technical perspective, but companywide. Then you would need to have something that we call a resolver. The resolver looks up the link that sits behind the QR code and redirects the scan dynamically to a target URL. Either you build this capability on your own — I’m not really recommending this because there’s a global standard, but there might be changes in the future so you have to be on top of it — or you work with a company like ours that offers a resolver. The promise that we make to our customers is if you use our software, you don’t have to read the document about the global standard. You just use the software, and then you can be 100% sure that you comply with these global standards.
Why a background in PR, marketing, and sales matters now
You worked in PR, marketing, and sales before product management. What skills outside of traditional product management will become important with the Digital Link transition?
When I started working in the PR space and in the marketing space, no matter what company I worked for, I always wanted to be as close as I could be to our customers. That’s why I stepped away from PR and marketing — for me, that wasn’t close enough to customers. I moved into sales, and then transitioned into product management about a decade ago. I think this path shaped my view on being customer-facing. People often criticize — and they might not be wrong — that I’m too close to sales. But I actually think that’s a good thing, because product management is a commercial role.
Being a product manager is 80% communication. Having worked in marketing, sales, and PR builds your communication skills. It’s important when you’re working with customers and doing stakeholder management, but communication also determines whether you’re successful in building products. The same is true when you’re creating use cases for QR code experiences.
In PR and marketing, content creation is the focus. How does that carry over to the Digital Link?
The tech part becomes less important because it’s pretty straightforward. It’s more about the content, and having worked in PR and marketing brings you as close to content as you can be. In those fields, you are thinking about what content is relevant for your customers. You think about how you write articles or how you position your products or your brands. It’s the same with the QR code experience — it’s literally brand and product positioning. I think my background was really helpful.
Lessons learned and advice for PMs today
Can you walk us through a customer implementation that changed your thinking?
A customer implementation typically starts with something very straightforward, because you have to convince multiple functions within an organization, like marketing, sales, logistics, and the production teams. So we always recommend starting with something easy, like a sustainability page. Everyone speaks about sustainability, so if you’re working in certain industries, that can be very relevant to you and your customers. We always recommend setting the entry barrier as low as you can, and then doing the analytics — check if the content is relevant for your customers, and then adapt.
What surprises me during an implementation process is how quickly companies learn. If they start with a sustainability landing page, they learn quickly — we thought this content is relevant but, effectively, it’s not; we see in the analytics that no one’s interested, or no one scrolls. So we change it. We do a little bit of research, we experiment, we do A/B testing. The pace at which brands learn about what’s relevant has been kind of surprising to me. They learn much more about their customers this way, on top of whatever methodologies they already have to learn about their customers.
Did you have any early fails that you learned from?
A bunch of them — I think every product manager does. One of the big fails is misaligned go-to-market and missing product-market fit. If there’s a misalignment, it doesn’t show up on a board. You can work with JIRA, you can work with any roadmap tool, but if you haven’t thought about how to market the product, or whether there’s a real product-market fit, it’s hard to fix that at a later stage, because you’ve already put in the effort. We started developing our own software, and we thought it’s great, everyone wants to have it. No one actually wanted to have it. That’s changed significantly over the last two years, but we might’ve been a little bit ahead. If I could turn back time, I would love to have spent more effort and time on product-market fit and thought about go-to-market a little bit harder, because I think that would’ve saved us a bunch of internal conversations.
They’re important and hard to surface. JIRA tells you a lot about velocity, or if you’re delayed in a sprint, for example, but it doesn’t say anything about whether your go-to-market strategy is nuts. You have to determine that.
As brands prepare for the transition to Digital Link over the next few years, what should PMs be doing today to make sure they’re ready?
This is a new topic, and I think this relates to every new movement in an industry: PMs should really know what they’re talking about. That sounds simple, but in reality it’s not. Customers rely on what PMs are saying because it’s completely new to them too. They want to learn more about what’s happening in the industry. PMs build a relationship with the customers, and one prerequisite of building a relationship is building trust. Trust builds if you rely on each other, if you provide value.
Also work actively with customers. Don’t sit there until a customer sends an email, but working with them if possible on a daily basis, learning from them, being open to new use cases, to new opportunities a customer might bring up that the PM didn’t see coming. And work with sales. That’s tremendously important, because in times of AI, code is commoditized. Running a business is not, and PMs are part of that running-a-business process. They should know their customers, they should work with sales, they should know about the business cases behind it.
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