ISSUE #12 - DECEMBER 15, 2022

Product Lessons Learned in 2022

Ten product leaders from US, UK and Greek startups, scale-ups and Big Tech share their greatest learnings for the past year.

The Christmas festive season has traditionally been a time of reflection and retrospect for everyone. What have we learned this year? What are our goals for 2023? How can we deliver even more value in the future? We highlight the most critical learnings and utilize them to formulate more effective plans to contribute to our personal growth.

This first newsletter of "The Product Notebook" was sent out a year ago, aiming to share my own learnings in the area of product with other like-minded individuals or people who wanted to break into the craft. Reaching this one-year milestone, one of the ideas I explored for this newsletter was to share my learnings for the past twelve months.

But then I asked myself, "what would be more powerful than that"? People like to favor quality over quantity; however, magic happens when those two are combined.

So, I invited ten exceptional product leaders from startups, scale-ups, and Big Tech across the US, UK, and Greece to share their learnings of the past year with me.

I am incredibly grateful to Michael Antoniou (CPO, Hellas Direct), Maria Arnaoutaki (Product Lead, Spotify), Georgios Alexandros Balafoutis (Senior Product Manager, Microsoft), Maria Dalavika (Lead Product Manager, TIER Mobility), Lefteris Economides (Product Lead, Plum Fintech), Evangelos Foutakoglou (Director of Product Management: Consumer, Delivery Hero), Thanos Karachalios (Senior Product Manager, Grafana Labs), Olga Mavi (Product Director: Ecommerce, Upstream), Alisa Poliakova (Senior Product Manager, Deel), and Sakis Triantafyllakis, (Director of Product Growth, Orfium) for sharing their insights, time, and stories that made this newsletter possible.

Let's jump straight into it!

Turning disagreement into collaborative problem-solving

A simple phrase can turn competitive disagreement between team members into collaborative problem-solving: "What would have to be true?"

Even extremely smart, sensible people can hit a roadblock when arguing about the best option. So rather than trying to convince each other that option A is better than option B, a better way to frame the problem is, "What would have to be true for option A to be the best option?".

Disagreements between people happen when one or both of the following conditions are met:

They have different logical structures for decision-making (i.e., the "function" they use in their calculation).
They use different data to inform their logical structures (i.e., the variables they use as inputs to the function).

In other words, people disagree on the final outcome either because they share the same logic but use different data inputs or use the same inputs, but their logic is different.

Let's take the following hypothesis as an example: "For feature X to be a success, at least 15% of the users would have to exhibit behavior Y." What are the potential sources of disagreement based on this hypothesis? Could it be the number of people that need to exhibit behavior Y? Or whether the feature depends on the behavior in the first place?

Asking, "What would have to be true for feature X to be a success?" turns clashing views into a collaboration to get to the truth.

Michael Antoniou, CPO, Hellas Direct

Managing changing group dynamics in a growing team

Cultivating a culture of resilience, empathy, and transparency in a constantly growing (and changing) product team has been an interesting challenge for me this year. Understanding whether the team performs at its best, what are the blind spots in communication, and where the new and existing team members can complement each other's efforts is complex. Adding new members to a team might seem like a way to supercharge productivity. Still, there is a hidden cost of re-calibrating decision-making, division of labor, and understanding priorities during the onboarding phase. That includes any reactive mechanisms the team has developed to respond to priorities that now need to be re-evaluated.

That made me realize how important it is to be intentional and prepared when team dynamics change. For instance, having a reusable structured, self-service onboarding flow saves a ton of time for new members as they get up to speed. Mapping out the current skills (e.g., a PM with strong data skills pairing with a PM with solid industry knowledge to work on a business case) and areas of development for the whole team helps to understand gaps and cultivate collaboration. Asking the team openly: How do we want to make decisions? How do we want to work with this X stakeholder? How do we respond to sudden changes? How do we work without design/tech counterparts? You need to document the answers to create a shared understanding.

Overall, being intentional and communicating openly about these ways of working - which sometimes we take for granted or expect to happen "organically" - sets the scene for a more resilient team with the foundation to adjust to changing team dynamics.

Maria Arnaoutaki, Product Lead, Spotify

Transitioning from the world of startups to Big Tech

Last year, I moved from a professional lifetime of working in startups to the Big Tech world. Of all the factors that influenced that decision, the most critical one was to experience how the product lifecycle differs in a larger organization compared to startups. To me, this has always been a mystery. What are the extra steps required? Αnd what is less or more important when you deliver features that can now be used by millions of users? How can you find the right people internally in a huge organization to talk to and properly connect the dots?

As it turns out, the differences were even more than I expected and certainly more than I can cover here. Out of all this year's learnings, the most valuable has been the need for a higher level of cross-team and even cross-org consensus and coordination for everything you build. They could be summarized in the following points:

Your additions and changes can affect more teams than in a startup
Your ultimate goal is for your features to be also leveraged from other company products and/or organizations.

As a result, after a couple of large releases, 2022 was the year that I started feeling confident that I can now deliver new high-quality features and products in any setup, from small startups to the largest tech organizations.

Georgios Alexandros Balafoutis, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

Focusing on product strategy to respond to an economy in turmoil

During 2022, businesses face challenges like inflation and economic downturn that put at risk even their existence. Product Managers are now expected more than ever to execute quickly. This means launching a new feature or product quickly for most companies. While the "time to value" is one of the most critical factors that lead to the success of a product, the "what" to execute fast is vital.

Shifting the mindset from backlog execution to product strategy execution was my most important learning this year. And the competition among the learnings in 2022 was really high!

Focusing on product strategy will help you to:

Stay focused on how to achieve the strategic company goals
Enhance transparency for the stakeholders about how the product success will be achieved

A simplified process of defining the product strategy and then communicating it in more detail via the most popular product strategy communication tool, the product roadmap, is the following:

Define the vision: this is the aspirational goal, the purpose of your product
Work together with the key stakeholders and the development team on the strategy:
1. Specify the users and their needs - for who are you building the product, and what problems do you solve?
2. List the key features - this is not your backlog
3. Map the business goals - answer the question about how your product will benefit the company
Create the product roadmap
Review the strategy to ensure it remains relevant - e.g., quarterly

Maria Dalavika, Lead Product Manager, TIER Mobility

Plans are meant to be changed

2022 sent me back to the basics. Let me put it in a controversial way:

You don't always need to do what you have committed to!

What do I mean? Plans are there to be broken. And this year I was constantly reminded of that. This is a key and fundamental learning, especially in startups, which we sometimes forget.

In 2022 markets changed fast and in multiple ways, not only in fintech but in other industries too. Therefore, you should adjust your plan to the environmental signals and the needs arising.

There are times that we hold to our positions. We execute and deliver to prove that the promises were kept. We selfishly maintain our stance, afraid that we are not determined enough to deliver the project. But why should you deliver something that is not needed anymore?

Evaluate your plan as the environment is changing. Do not hold back, even for a second, because of personal bias or egoistic motives. Resisting change is in our nature, after all.

Tear everything apart and rebuild your plan. Do others call it a failure? Then, fail quickly and fail often. Even if you just realized that you should have changed your plan 3 months ago, don't hesitate. This is your second best chance to do it.

At the end of the day, nobody knows what will happen in markets in the forthcoming months. So keep your eyes open, re-evaluate, and redefine. Again and again.

Lefteris Economides, Product Lead, Plum Fintech

2022: the first year after covid-19

Modern product management set its foundations along the biggest bull run in history, combined with the founder's economy and the boom of high-growth products and businesses.

The pandemic halted the real economy but boosted digital businesses even further. At the end of the pandemic, inflation and the structural problems of the global economy (e.g. energy, logistics, chipset industry etc.) shaped a new reality. One where profitability - and not growth - is the key, and one where businesses lack the luxury to take many bets.

Product management strategy could be no exception to this trend. This has been the first year after over a decade in which product management serves businesses that must deliver efficiency and profits rather than rapid growth at all costs.

My most significant learning as a Product Manager this year has been the importance of building products in solid foundations, with modular architecture and scaling capabilities. Digital products that utilize clever design systems need fewer work hours in wireframing and coding to deliver new features. Software written in a consistent manner that minimizes technical debt, and QA needs while at the same time allows for more efficient and cheap scaling.

The implications don't stop there; they go as far as hiring product teams. The opening of many product jobs over the last years has allowed great talent to enter the field. Still, at the same time, it has created a trend toward specialization. This trend goes directly against the very essence of the product manager role, a position that traditionally favors generalists. This trend will be reverted in the new reality, and new product manager hires will be people that can empathize equally with the user and the salesperson of a SaaS platform, individuals who can understand both the financial and the tech implications of the products they develop.

Evangelos Foutakoglou, Director of Product Management: Consumer, Delivery Hero

Optimizing Product Operations powering fast and consistent delivery

During the past year, I have been part of a team in a fast-growing organization with excellent product market fit, a well-defined strategy, and vision. Given the circumstances, we operated in a relatively robust macroeconomic environment and had significant traction in revenue and other key metrics. Given this context, my most important learnings were around Product Operations.

Challenges included anything from instilling in the team the need for change to discovering efficient and sustainable ways to deliver value, especially in a group where each junior or senior member was bringing different operating perspectives and expectations that meant different mental anchors.

I started by configuring our external context as a team, not so much from a product roadmap perspective but primarily through efficiently communicating product vision, strategy, and business objectives. This shifted the focus from anchoring ourselves to specific deliverables to establish a sense of accountability and outcomes. This allowed us to act and incorporate any feedback obtained along the way into our process. Observing certain events and patterns, I tried to augment a series of team habits time-bounded into two-week sprints. This helped to form a set of loose mechanisms of operation that the squad would adopt in the most frictionless possible way. Those operations mechanisms were along the axes of:

Consuming and acting upon user insights
Understanding design as part of usability testing and discovery prototype techniques
Consuming and acting upon Product Analytics insights
Communicate win-loss analysis

Through this systems-thinking approach, we have quickly adopted an operational model endorsed by the squad members as it grew organically within. Most importantly, it allowed us to deliver value quickly and steadily.

Thanos Karachalios, Senior Product Manager, Grafana Labs

Product Management: a versatile craft across different environments

The past year has been a thrilling adventure in my product management journey. After years of working in a small startup team where most things concern you and require your attention, you have visibility through the farthest corners of the business and are called on to craft your own definition of what product management is in the context of your team, I transitioned into a much larger organization.

The mandate was exciting, being part of a new promising project in a new market, working in an entirely new structure with new people (and anyone who has joined a large organization knows so many new unknown words).

My biggest learning in the past year has been how versatile product management can be in each business context, even within the same business across different projects. The real challenge for me has been trying to stick to my previously crafted definition of product management within a much different context and organizational structure, working with very different people.

What helped me in this challenge was pushing myself to have an open mind in taking a step back. This allowed me to observe and understand the new context I find myself in now, understanding how different teams work and why, without imposing my own perception and opinions of how things should be.

Also, reaching out to other people within the organization to get their take on what works, why, and where we could improve by collectively creating a new definition of what product management is, what its contribution should be and what the processes would look like.

Every new challenge calls on us to step into it with an open mind and re-evaluate our previous definitions and preconceptions. In a versatile craft such as product management, how we will mold it to have the maximum impact for the success of the project is the guiding principle.

Olga Mavi, Product Director: Ecommerce, Upstream

A shared team culture of growth

I have always perceived Product management as conducting the orchestra of users, UX designers, analysts, engineers, product operations, product marketing, and stakeholders. It has always been about people & people management.

Just recently I realized that you don't need to build proper product processes or products yourself or set an endless list of tasks for your team members. It is way more efficient (and pleasant) to inspire all the teammates to set higher bars for themselves. When you share the vision with them and believe they can set an absolutely new target in their professional area, and spend quality time on your 1-1 visualizing how you see them one year from now, they start to believe in this shared dream. Then, all the processes and product quality adjust accordingly to this new mutually set direction.

Alisa Poliakova, Senior Product Manager, Deel

Prioritization in a sales-led organization

Prioritization is an essential skill for any product leader, as it allows us to focus our efforts on the most important tasks and features and ensure that our team is working on the right things at the right time. The sales and business development teams affect the product development roadmap and strategy as priorities might change accordingly to their focus and opportunities. In fact, the usual "excuse" we hear is that since they are talking directly to potential customers, they know better.

Usually, an experienced product leader can handle these requests, but unfortunately, this is not the case for every company and especially for sales-led companies. In sales-led companies where sales and BizDev teams have a lot of authority, and sales cycles can be long (one year or more), it's tough to say "no" to an opportunity to close a deal.

In my case, after realizing the cold truth that closing a big deal is the company's top priority, it was clear that I needed to create rapport and empathy with our sales & BizDev people. I had to educate them on how prioritization can help increase efficiency and productivity, leading to better products and better outcomes for both the product team and the customer. I had to invest a lot of time and train them to ask one simple but important question before committing to anything: Is our team working on the things that will have the greatest impact and deliver the most value? After some time, our internal communication was far more efficient, and there were very few urgent requests from the Sales & BizDev teams.

Last but not least, effective prioritization can help product leaders align their team's efforts with the overall business strategy and goals and ensure that the product meets the market and customer needs.

Sakis Triantafyllakis, Director of Product Growth, Orfium

Past Newsletters

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ISSUE #11 - NOVEMBER 14, 2022

Creating an experimentation-driven product culture

How to create an experimentation-driven culture within your product team? What are the steps to set this up? How to manage & prioritize your experiments?

Read here