Productwise: Recent Episodes
Alexandra Di Nella
Join the executive Headhunter Alexandra Di Nella in Productwise Podcast as she and her guests unpack the secrets of what it takes to build and grow a successful product in web2 and web3 domains.
It's my pleasure to invite Lauren Treasure, a Co-Founder of Higa to speak today and give her perspective on leading the product in start-up or scale-up vs leading product in your own venture. Lauren has a wealth of experience in B2C space and shared some amazing learnings around:
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The differences in founding a company vs. leading a product team,
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Building a product zero to one at an existing company vs. building a company zero to one,
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How it takes a smaller team than it ever has to start a company
Product people who are eyeing the path of the Co-Founder (which I am seeing an increase in!), this episode is a must listen for you!
Check out Higa and connect with Lauren on Linkedin!
Francis Brero is the Founder and Product leader in MadKudu, a data heavy product allowing companies to manipulate and use first party data to customise the buying experience for b2b buyers.
Our question of the day: how do we improve customer centricity as your product scales?
Francis shares that 1 big change was to introduce Gong, a call recording tool, to bring the voice of customer into the front of the decision making. Francis uses snippets of the recordings through the process of adjustment and improvement of the product on ongoing basis. "You get an amazing pulse from the customer and the way they are reacting". Team also includes relevant snippets with feedback on product roadmap and product experience on board memos. This tool alone allowed MadKudu team to implement multiple improvements in the product, such as better match the customer journey and deepen partnership strategy, and significantly reduce bias in collecting feedback.
Connect with Francis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francisbrero/
Check out MadKudu: https://www.madkudu.com/
Love interviewing first time founders and CPOs on the podcast. Why? Because they both help us all go back to the essence of product management and recap on some of the bias we are all prone to. If you are a first time or repeat product lead, scale up product person or a founder working out the solution - these learnings are for you.
Few weeks ago I sat down for a chat with Matheus Beltrami, Co-Founder and CPO of deX Labs to talk about his journey to product from functional field of data and analytics. deX Labs is a vertically focused state of the art platform designed to seamlessly integrate every aspect of data handling.
Matheus talks about 3 main learning areas along building deX Labs:
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developing a deep understanding of the problem you are tackling by keeping focus on your user group and problem you are solving for them. He outlines the need to separate yourself from your perception of the problem (and your opinion) and what customers are saying and experiencing. This is easier said than done!
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collecting and prompting information. Digging (really) deep into the problems. Being attentive and allowing ample time to truly understand the day to day of your user in order to gain a better insight into the problem. These days product leads are inundated with many meetings causing them to get lost in details sometimes and put the big picture questions on the back burner. Create "thinking" time pockets to counteract that. This point was also brought up by Millie Zah from DAZN on ProductCon few weeks back and is a talking pain point for product leaders I am talking to.
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accept that you'll have to compromise. Group and cluster ideas, put those into backlog and prioritise. Rigourously.
Best of luck to Matheus Beltrami and the deX Labs team on growing the product further!
Dig into the story of development of WeDu, a community of endurance athletes united around the belief that the true path forward is forged by breakthroughs of body and mind. WeDu naturally grew with its community and expanded horizontally to become a platform, brining together creators, brands, and fans, scaling operations with the help of AI, offering highly curated experience for their niche customer base. Dylan Casey also talks about the "flow of the dollar", tackling the cost implications of scaling the b2c business, and keeping the focus narrow and being one thing to a specific group of people.
Love when product people build the product for product people! Focused on assisting large and complex product teams to improve on collaboration, communication and results, airfocus recently successfully closed a $7.5M fundraising round, led by Newion with the participation of XAnge, Nauta, Riverside Acceleration Capital, and Picea Capital. In this session we break down the components of building successful products and double click on one of them - building empowered and self guided product teams.
Tune in to hear key learnings from the Co-Founder, CEO and CPO of airfocus, Malte Scholz!
As a talent professional and in my conversations with the founders and CEOs, stage appropriate hiring comes up 100% of the time. That is why I am so glad that we are covering this very topic as the first episode of the new 10 minute series. We had been running longer here, as the subject in question is so vast that myself and Natalie can hold a 2 day conference on this.
Natalie had been working as an early stage PeopleOps leader for over a decade and had been shaping the organisations of many startups across Boldstart VC portfolio and outside of it. Her straightforward approach, clear focus on her niche and experience make her one of the top people seed and Series A ventures need to have onboard. Join me as we summarise this massive theme into a 22 minute discussion on who to hire and, most importantly, when.
Connect with Natalie Ledbetter over Linkedin, follow her latest talks, and don't forget to check out her article for Fast Company.
Making the new "10 minute podcast" series available for everyone to enjoy. Each episode in these series is focused on 1 prominent question for the tech community today. I'll be interviewing Founders, CEOs and Product & Engineering leaders, sharing their latest learnings.
Join the "Thought Leaders: An In-person Roundtable Series" to broaden your knowledge, exchange ideas, and engage with accomplished professionals and experts in their respective fields. This event in Seattle focused on the theme of "Women in Leadership Building Industry-leading products in the Age of AI" and was hosted by F5 and Productwise Talent. This recording is a recap of 2.5h of active discussions with leaders from the field.
Joining us today is Amanda Kozlowski Stanley, a fractional head of product and co-founder of Sound Products NW. She partners with founders and business leaders to build and test product ideas that are deeply rooted in customer needs.
Amanda returned to the West Coast after a decade in Washington, DC and Hong Kong. She's led strategy and innovation projects for private- and public-sector organizations on five continents, including a former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, the CEO of one of Germany’s largest conglomerates, and Starbucks.
Professional and experienced product mind is needed in the organization from the moment you have an idea, yet many pre-seed and seed stage startups cannot afford to hire a full time experienced resource. The market found a solution to this challenge with a Fractional Head of Product leaders who are stepping in to help the founders and first time product CEOs realise their potential, reach initial PMF and set the critical foundation for product organisation. Who doesn't love 0-1 journeys!
In this episode we cover common pitfalls, learnings and, of course, the ways to identify, screen and engage a fractional product leader.
Our guest today is Roxy Stimpson, Head of Innovation, Vice President of Engineering in the Office of the CTO at F5, who leads a charter to accelerate the pace and impact of innovation at F5. Before F5, Roxy was the CTO of IoT World Labs leading global teams to create, build, and launch an innovative digital data transformation SaaS platform serving various industries, including transportation, manufacturing, and supply chain.
Her mission is to inspire and empower individuals to become more effective communicators and leaders.
She advocates leveraging technology, lean-agile processes, and machine and human connections to deliver tangible positive impacts.
This awesome episode is filled with golden nuggets on how to crate a culture of inclusion and support, where asking questions is welcomed.
In this episode we talk about:
- The importance of mentorship
- Diversity as a solution to building better products
- The ripple effect of good and bad leadership
- Importance of the right set up when getting higher in your career
- Train the trainer model
- Creating the muscle - calling out things that are not right. The “Yes and” tactic
- Being the first anchor: if you in minority - does not mean you do not belong. Means you can create the tribe.
Soak in the learnings and approach to leadership from Roxy!
Lucky enough to be in Washington state? Check out Women's Leadership Academy in University of Washington
Sarah is Global Product Manager with over 20 years experience in FinTech, currently Head of Products at interop.io (prior Finsemble). She began her career as a Help Desk Manager at a FinTech startup and have held numerous roles over the years in both Engineering and Product Management. Sarah holds a BA in Mathematics from Boston College and an MS in Applied Math and Statistics from Stony Brook University. She is also on the Leadership counsel for a non-profit and was co-chair for 5 years.
In this episode with Sarah we are talking about:
- Her trajectory from engineering into product management
- Keeping up with latest tech trends and learning new ways to improve your work
- Mentoring more junior women entering tech space
Connect with Sarah
Shruti Goli is a Co founder and CPO in Trymata, a product analytics company (previously known as TryMyUI). Shruti started working at Microsoft as a Product Manager. She went on to bootstrap a product analytics company, Stitchology.ai, and was 24 years old when she sold it last year in May 2022.
In this Ep. 16 we are going to talk about:
1) building Stitchology.ai while working at Microsoft
2) selling Stitchology.ai at 24 years old to Trymata (usability testing company)
3) merging TryMyUI + Stitchology.ai into 1 product to expand on product proposition
Lauren Treasure is a consumer product leader who loves to build and develop teams as much as products. She started her career as a researcher and then pivoted to product at Orca Health, a startup focused on building 3D software products to improve the patient experience.
She then joined Ancestry to help build the AncestryDNA product, which grew from 300k to over 10 million customers during her tenure.
In 2018, she joined Chatbooks to build a product organization and help the company scale. She is currently the Chief Product Officer, leading the product development, UX design and research teams who are helping millions of happy Chatbookers print, share and celebrate their everyday memories.
In this episode we are talking about:
- B2C product development: specificities of the b2c product rollout and criticality of testing with examples from Ancestry and Chatbooks. Falling in love with the problem.
- Products with long lead times - seeing a long term perspective and keeping the motivation
- Creating a healthy and successful remote workplace: finding balance between the async and in-sync work. Holding more efficient meetings. Promoting flexibility, yet setting and meeting deadlines.
Noa Reikhav is vice president of product at Skai, an award-winning omnichannel marketing platform for performance media. Noa brings her unique background in psychology and communication to her role as an innovator in adtech. Responsible for the ideation and development of some of Skai’s most revolutionary AI features, her impact is felt by Skai clients throughout the world.
Beginning her career as a product manager in her native Israel, Noa has since held a variety of roles at adtech companies and startups leading DSP, mobile advertising, and search teams before moving to the U.S. to lead Skai’s retail media and omnichannel efforts.
Common threads throughout her 12 years in the industry are Noa’s focus on creating technology that helps marketers and her legacy building and scaling product teams that have revolutionized digital marketing.
Today we are going to talk about:
- Tel Aviv vs NYC tech ecosystem: being “in” the market
- Banking on growth and building super teams: developing personal and professional growth plans to take you and your team further in your career
- Product Management methodologies & best implementations
- Addressing Life Change management
Julia is the Chief Product Officer at Flatfox, a web-based platform that digitalizes all steps of the rental cycle. Julia started her product management career five years ago as an Intrapreneur within the Swiss Mobiliar. She worked as a product manager on multiple projects within different industries. Since 2018 she focuses on the real estate industry first at the PropTech start-up aroov and currently at Flatfox. She holds a wealth of experience when it comes to understanding and representing user needs, defining a product vision and strategy, aligning stakeholders and of course how to launch and communicate a product.
Today we are going to talk about:
- Product innovation within a corporate
- Product mergers
- Tuning your users into advocates
Episode highlights:
[2.40] Flatfox as a product
[4.30] Merger of Flatfox and Aroov - improving user journey for renters and landlords and managing the transition
[10.15] Developing the innovative products within a corporate
[13.10] Starting in product leadership and launching Aroov
[16.46] Scaling through brand advocates
Connect with Julia Bitschnau
Flora is a CPO of CaptainContrat -the legal and administrative companion for SMB's, for any of their steps, helping them grow their business. Be it writing articles of incorporation, asking a lawyer before signing a contract under commercial law or dealing with administrative duties.
Flora stepped into the CPO role 3.5 years ago from a position of the marketing executive. She previously worked in L’Oreal both as a director of marketing and a a CPO for physical products.
Flora is also a teacher of yoga focusing on yin and vinyasa, and mentors and coaches in NUMA.
Today we are going to talk about:
- Continuous testing and continuous discovery
- Moving to product from marketing field
- Building teams in a tech hungry talent market
Connect with Flora Vidal.
Geraldine Corrales is a Product Management professional with more than 15 years of experience in a wide range of industries from consumer to high-tech products. She has spent most of her career working for multinational companies in France, the US, the UK, and Mexico and speaks French, English and Spanish.
In 2019, she joined CityTaps, a French startup dedicated to bringing running water into every home by supporting water utilities in emerging countries. She was recruited to drive the Product Management activities but soon extended her responsibilities to lead the entire Product Development team composed of software developers, electronics engineers and telecommunications experts. She currently resides in Mexico and works for CityTaps remotely.
Today we are going to talk about:
- Product management as a career path
- Reinventing oneself through different industries, countries and products and
- Overcoming the imposter syndrome
Episode highlights
[7.30] Product management as a hub of the wheel - the valuable experience you can bring from other industries
[11.30] Transferrable skills and Geraldine’s core learning
[17.50] Overcoming the imposter syndrome and owning your role
[28.45] Overcoming the biggest challenges in customer insight collection
[38.15] Geraldine’s advice to her younger self
Related Links
Connect with Geraldine
https://ucesco.org/donate/ (This is a charity that Geraldine supports in Kenya. She had the opportunity to volunteer with them and she is still supporting them through donations as well as organizational advice. )
PS I’ll be taking a leaf out of Geraldine’s book - expect a New Year themed email from me!
Leonie is a Chief Product Officer in Riverlane and is responsible for building, commercialising and marketing Riverlane's product lines. Leonie is passionate about helping Riverlane's customers move quickly and easily to quantum advantage.
She brings eight years’ experience in quantum technologies and business development, with a PhD in quantum chemistry from the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz in Germany. After her PhD, she held senior editorial roles at Nature and Nature Communications where she was responsible for covering quantum computing and other topics in physics. An ardent supporter of Open Science, Leonie then joined PLOS ONE, building and leading a physical sciences and engineering division in a fast-paced environment.
Leonie is a huge supporter of diversity in STEM and has previously served on NumFOCUS’s diversity and inclusion committee. Outside of work, she enjoys playing the violin and spending time with her family.
Today we are going to talk about:
- The importance of product management in deep tech
- Quantum computing and understanding who the users are for deep tech product
- Getting to “fail” fast and benefits of such approach
Episode highlights
[2.00] Introduction to quantum computing
[5.30] Experimental applications of quantum computing to propel the innovation in selected fields
[10.12 ] Customer discovery in quantum computing
[14.49] Leonie’s journey into product management and her mindset of embracing failures and learning from them
[20.05] Getting the timing right: closing or parking products
[27.30] DE&I: inclusion as a place to start
Related Links
Connect with Leonie on Linkedin and Twitter
Namrata is the Chief Product Officer at INTO University Partnerships - a Higher Education company that works with top Universities in the UK, US, and Australia, and a student community from all across the world. Previously, she was the CPO at iPlato Healthcare where she led an expansive portfolio of digital products and worked closely with NHS Primary Care. She has worked in product leadership roles at ViacomCBS, Babylon Health and a number of other exciting global companies.
Namrata is a strong supporter of Diversity & Inclusion in the workplace, and is a popular voice in the Women in Product & Tech community.
She sits on the board of The Open University Business School, and is an Advisor at Antler - an early stage VC firm.
Namrata is an alumni of Manchester Business School and is trained in global leadership from Harvard Business School.
Today we are going to talk about:
- Building scalable high performing product teams
- Climbing the career ladder in product management
- And diversity and inclusion in the field
Episode highlights
[1.49] Nam’s start of the career in product management as a product owner
[9.12] Her experience of being a CPO and going through the acquisition of a Healthtech venture
[13.37] Differences in approaches to the market and metrics of b2b and b2c products
[16.54] Positive disruption in traditional sector: helping to define future for today’s students both on academic and non-academic side
[27.00] Nam’s take on diversity and inclusion in the workplace
[34.00] Nam’s advice to a younger self
Disrupting the traditional sector
Nam shares her experience in the role of a product lead in the healthtech space where the product served a sector disruptor. She found the journey extremely rewarding and the transformation necessary for the field. Nam shares that every day she learnt so much, and the impact in fields of education and healthcare is massive as these products form the pillar for the everyday consumer and form a fundament for actually changing all of our lives and the way we live each day.
Nam shares that for a product person challenges is what keeps you awake and energised and both these sectors offer these types of challenges. When disrupting the traditional sector, a transformation related opportunity is a dream and being a change agent is a gift in itself.
Going through acquisition in healthtech
In this experience Nam shared how a lot of structural and process related changes needed to happen, most centric to it is product mindset. Moving to become a product led organization and focusing on user problems - embedding the different mindset, also, s a result, corresponded with different structure of the organization. As iPlato had b2b and b2c products, she learnt the full scope of product journey from consumer to enterprise and the differences in approaching the market. Nam outlines the difference in experience when working in company of 20, a scale up and the corporate - the learnings, challenges, and journeys are very different.
Nam’s take on diversity and inclusion in technical field
Nam shares that D&I and product goals go hand in hand. People who build the product and people who use the product need to be in sync. Individuals with different points of view, experience and sectors help build superb products. Multi-sector knowledge is very powerful. She also reflects that now there are thankfully more women in product and engineering than 5-6 years ago and its more motivating for junior PMs and engineers to see the way forward when you see someone who resonates with your values, background, and identity.
Nam on Linkedin
Alexandra is a Product leader and a current CPO @ uptime.ac with over 14 years of diverse global ecosystem, working in start-ups, scale-ups, consultancy and enterprise. Alongside founders and exec teams, she builds a vision and an inspiring story, and breaks these down into actionable steps for the product and design teams she manage. She is a big fan of Lean, different forms of Agile and User Centred Design when it comes to solving user problems and delivering business outcomes. She uses a mix of quantitative & qualitative insights in order to de-risk product direction fast and create a learning organisations that drive product led growth.
As a people manager, Alexandra believes coaching, mentorship and constructive feedback are key aspects of good management today.
Today we are going to talk about:
- Building and growing products teams at different stages of the organisation growth
- The importance of post talent acquisition work for new hires, specifically onboarding and mentorship
- And empowering your team to create the best products out there
Episode Highlights
[2.30] Coming into the role of a CPO from engineering background
[7.48] Cross industry product management skillset transfer
[11.30] Learnings from different stages of product maturity
[15.20] Keeping everyone aligned on the same vision when in high growth mode
[18.40] Successful onboarding in the remote environment
[23.00] Mentorship of Junior PMs
[27.50] Alexandra’s 3 core learnings
Cross industry transfer of product management skillset
Product mindset and being strategic are two competencies that remain to be central in working with any product organization, irrespective of product maturity and focus of the product itself. Every product ad product organization will face different challenges, even if within the same industry, making your journey as a CPO/Product lead unique every time.
And your product organization grows and matures, CPOs need to keep the clear direction of the product and communicate the vision and next in line priorities for the team. That affects the product organization structure and hiring plan, allowing you to focus on the skillset in the incoming PMs that will allow you to get to that next stage of the product growth. Alexandra took time to define the global strategy and define the roles in detail.
Alignment of product teams in period of growth
As a product leader, Alexandra shares, that you need to keep a high level vision in sight at all times, the North Star should always be visible. What is more tricky is managing the “in-between” moments of team growth, keeping in mind the onboarding time for new hires and managing the transitions.
Alexandra shares the importance of the onboarding process. Some things she saw working well are :
- Managing expectations from the role from Day 1
- Mandatory attendance of client meetings/demos
- User research and discovery to help understand the user base better
Connect with Alexandra on LinkedIn and on her site
Audrey Pedro is currently the Chief Product Officer at Scaleway, a complete cloud solution trusted by more than 25k businesses. Audrey’s experience spans over 10 years in product management, overseeing the company’s product roadmap, from strategy and design to general distribution, as well as quality of execution.
Prior to Scaleway, Audrey held product management positions at DocuSign, as well as serving as lead product manager for P&C fraud detection at Shift Technology.
Today we are going to talk about:
- Joys and learnings from working with startup founders
- Building product mindset in early stage ventures
- And hiring and creating a great product team
Episode highlights
[6.33] Evolution of product management in French product startup ecosystem
[13.20] Series B raise as a pivoting time in a product journey and the skill of letting go of product team as a Founder
[22.00] Scaling up journey and managing expectations from product leader
[29.46] Building product culture - identifying the impact points and centring the view on the value to user
[40.00] Building high functioning product teams that are diverse and equitable
Importance of trust between the incoming CPO and Founder
Audrey outlines the need for the alignment between the expectations of founder from the incoming CPO and the CPO him/herself already at the role definition process and interview stages. Audrey advises to have the tough discussions early on, preferably in the interview process to gauge the understanding of expectations. When growing, creating space and doing gap analysis will help identify the widening gaps in the company and product offer or product service, which will allow to focus on the user and centralise the efforts of all teams. As you grow and doubling in numbers, Audrey brings the example of how product management can be the saviour in helping one to focus on right features, therefore not wasting the time and effort of engineering team, aligning everyone to the same goal - this journey, Audrey says, starts with observation and communication.
M&M’s dilemma - coating vs peanut; Big picture, then details
Audrey shares that focusing on the end user and challenges you are solving for the user, rather than processes first is the approach she takes with her teams. This allows to focus on user experience and core value creation, ensuring the loyal user base and supporting all facets of the organization from product teams to engineering to customer success. This is a key for businesses relying on community and retention, and in situations where you need to have a strong value based differentiator to grow in the market.
Connect with Audrey in Linkedin and Twitter
View Scaleway's offering
Anushree is a running CPO at NUW, the world's first clothes sharing and swapping app. She is a passionate product leader with experience across a range of product roles at various early stage start-ups. Her experience is spanning across e-commerce, healthcare, travel and fashion in America, India and now in the UK.
Today we are going to talk about:
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user centric design
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learnings point from building products across a variety of countries
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and sustainable future
Episode outline and highlights
[2.00] Anushree’s start in product management
[3.50] NUW’s mission and creating the sustainable world
[10.50] Insights on Gen Z consumers and their shopping behaviours
[19.20] User centric design
[28.20] International experience and core learnings of building products in the US, UK, and India
Building products for Gen Z
How do we achieve the sustainable future when the main consumer base has less purchasing power? How do we follow the data driven approach to catch the rising needs of the Gen Z consumer?
NUW is expanding into b2b segment, allowing the secondary market of large clothing brands to create the loyal crowd of consumers and focus on sustainability element, pushing for the quality of the produce up.
Gen Z consumer base differ in the way they find information, how aware they are of the composition, materials and consequences of their purchasing choices. Transactions in NUW are happening faster, spurred by the “first upload, then swap" logic on the platform. That way the coin is spent faster, allowing the users to change their wardrobes faster.
Key learnings from Anushree’s experience
Anushree worked across multiple geographies, yet outlined India as the most fast paced, demanding and price sensitive market, that makes the challenge of building products for that market extremely interesting. That experience, she found, was very rewarding and dynamic. That pushes the product leader to prioritise rigorously and keep the eye sharp on the consumer. As a comparison, in the US the process of bussing early stage startups was structured and mature.
Anushree on Linkedin
NUW on Apple Store
As a product leader in a highly regulated market, how do you continue with testing and refining the solution before the product goes live? How do you balance up the role of the CPO in an early stage startup and a 4 month old? Christiane's experience shows multiple times that its possible to land your successful role in product no matter what field you are coming from.
Christiane is Franco-German, 31 years old and is a graduate from Sciences Po in Paris. After first experiences working for a UNESCO-sponsored NGO she joined Swiss largest bank, UBS, where she spent 5 years building innovative digital banking products in multiple roles – often as the only woman in the room.
From playing rugby in university to putting out literal fires as a volunteer firefighter and also being the only female in the room with 30 men in the IT department: she doesn't take no for an answer, and opens the door to females in other ways such as mentoring, developing and running webinars and leading a workshop for the University of St. Gallen.
In 2019, she joined Awina as CPO with the goal to use her newly acquired knowledge and tech skills to effect positive social change. She brought the company from a vague idea all the way to its first concrete product in the heavily regulated Swiss financial market. Awina launched in the fall of 2021 and aims to guide families through the Rush Hour of Life by providing a variety of products and services.
Today we are going to talk about:
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working as a female in traditionally male fields
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moving from a non-tech background into tech / product
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building product in young vs mature companies
Episode outline and highlights
[2.08] Finding a balance as a new mom
[5.56] Moving from IT in banking to product in a social impact field
[16.50] Following a journey of your customer and how that translates into product and relevant product features
[27.00] Christiane's path to product management and her experience in Israel
[39.18] Christiane's 3 core advice points
The learnings from building a product 0-1 in a heavily regulated FinTech
Think customer centric all the time. It's a natural thing to want to shy away from your customers - because they bring uncomfortable truths. The core is not to delay talking to your customers, even if you are in the regulated market and cannot launch within a short period of time.
You are not your customer. Especially if you build something that you may be using, you may fall into the trap of "thinking for the customer". As a PM you need to focus on the actual use case, continue with a discovery, and remove the layer of thinking of that pushes you to make shortcuts in developing the product. The worst thing that can happen is that you are building a product for several years that noone wants or needs. Christiane outlines the essential (and difficult) skills to keep your mind sharp on the needs of your consumer base and test all hypothesis before entering the "build" mode.
3 key take-aways from Christiane's experience
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Trust yourself, it will all work out. You can set a certain path by your early life choices but you can always move and tint it to what you want to be
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Stay open to possible opportunities- its good to know where you want to go, and also keep in mind that the world changes at a tremendous pace so we may now have new technologies in the 5-10 years period
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Make space to make fun and for things that are not just work
Christiane on Linkedin
Follow Awina on Instagram
As a product leader, how do you build a diverse and high-performing team that is excellent in executing and also has fun? My special guest, Amber Foucault, shares her insight on building great teams and capitalizing on momentum. We also discussed her journey on transferring product management skillset to different industries as well as balancing the science and art in product management itself.
Amber is the CPO of Drop. Drop is the first flexible, consumer-led intelligent mobile rewards platform focusing on personalized member experiences. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Drop is comprised of top-tier, passionate, and diverse talent from a wide range of professional backgrounds, including fellow startups like Ritual and Shopify, to Fortune 500 companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and Airbnb.
Episode Outline and Highlights
[3:50] Discussion on scaling – how to build a high-functioning team that can deliver and executes.
[9:10] Amber’s approach to addressing female representation in the product development and management business.
[14:26] Launching over 70 products across multiple industries - Amber shares her three core learnings
[22:43] Having an engaged and “fun” workplace - how having a people-centric approach can result in better team performance.
[26:05] An innovative approach to product management – Amber shared an added a gamified feature in their product to engage users.
Scaling and Building a Great Team
Amber and I discussed building high-performing product a team that executes quickly. With background in marketing, she has a strong focus on execution. Amber shared her thought process when creating bigger teams as well as insights on her approach to address female representation in the product management as a profession.
Transferring Product Management Skillset to Different Industries
With the launch of over 70 products across multiple industries under her belt, what are Amber’s three core learnings? Here are main takeaways:
- Having an unwavering belief in yourself.
- Believing in people and creating an environment of empowerment.
- Amber’s realization on having a balanced workplace: “I am better when I am having fun”
Amber elaborated on each item. We had a very interesting discussion on what is meant by having fun in the workplace. This was also applied with how they are managing and enhancing the product at Drop. You will hear about a gamified approach on their product to engage users and even introduce them to the world of cryptocurrency. Here is a clue: digital collectibles.
About Amber Foucault
Amber is the Chief Product Officer at Drop. With the launch of over 70 products under her belt, her specialty is turning divergent thinking into convergent action. She is using her product mindset to approach strategic solutions at Drop, with a focus on building democratized access to web3 concepts for everyday users. Amber has built products spanning countless industries, drawing expertise from each build and solving strategic problems and processes to ensure execution is always possible as a company scales. She is also a big believer that technology isn’t about tech, its about people. So she has spent her career understanding people and behaviours. “Think of technology as a verb, not a noun. It’s a subtle but important difference.” (Red Burns, 1925 - 2013)
Amber on Linkedin
Resources mentioned
The Trevor Project
Drop
How do you build an amazing product from scratch? How do you invite diversity and inclusion when building your team?
Kelly McDonald is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Cipio. The world's first community influencer marketing platform. Prior to joining Cipio Kelly was the founder and CEO of Kyndoo. A data platform for social commerce that was acquired by Cipio in September of 2021. Prior to founding Kyndoo, Kelly was the Senior Vice President of Revenue, Operations, and People at RealtyShares. An entrepreneur at heart, Kelly loves working on big problems at the earliest stages of a company. She is driven by her passion for the people she leads, and the journey toward the greater vision they share.
Today we are going to talk about:
- Building Products from scratch,
- The importance of talking to customers before you build, and
- Building diverse teams
Episode highlights
[1.30] Building Kyndoo from scratch and building the strong client relationship with Cipio
[12.35] Her start in product management
[17.23] Being a solo not tech female founder and getting the funding from VCs
[22.00] asking for help from your investors
[23.20] Equalising the gender split in the teams and diversity of teams
[32.30] 3 pieces of advice from Kelly
Strengthening your product proposition to your customers though acquisition of the company
Kelly shares how the internal data science team in Cipio enabled Kyndoo as a product to go the extra mile and strengthen the presence in the market. Since the merger they saw an NPS jump 20%. New tools built in Cipio since the merger are focused on AI an ML utilisation for enhancing the real reach of the audience with image to image search. Since the introduction they saw the usability shot up and user reaction in 90% of cases was purely “wow”.
Currently the team is looking at enabling brands to build the communities with web3, something they are testing right now.
Lessons from raising from VCs
Kelly shares that having the experience and the past “portfolio to show” instilled more trust in her ability to lead and start the product from scratch when speakign with investors. In her experience investors are looking at strong execution and she was able to showcase that.
Kelly outlined that it took her longer to raise and found the right investment partner, and she admits that it might be a longer journey for the underrepresented founders but those investors who stick through the journey are undeniably the right partners that will bring a great value to the startup, the “capital with capability”.
She also notes that founders need to learn to ask for help and support from investors proactively in order to receive support.
Building diverse teams and reducing bias
Diversity starts at the top - if diversity and inclusiveness is not taken seriously at sourcing level, we wont get anywhere. Reflecting on the AI tool out there - AI does what it was told to do - its still built by humans who have bias. Diverse experiences allows you to see uniques insights and knowledge which brings a ton of value. If in doubt and when able to do a side by side comparison, Kelly follows the thinking of - if all things are equal, choose diversity.
Connect with Kelly McDonald on Linkedin
People and Resources Mentioned:
https://cipio.ai/
https://www.instagram.com/cipiocommunity/
Alexandra on Linkedin
Connect with Alexandra for
Building products 0-1 is tough, building and scaling a new product organization within a mature business might be tougher. On the one hand, one has the advantage of tremendous volumes of data and potential insight to be generated from that data, on the other, changing the culture to being customer-focused and product-driven is a complex process that can take years to implement.Natalie Seatter has worked in tech for the last decade in payments, NFP, lottery, and data. She describes herself as industry-agnostic enjoying the learning experience of working in new sectors. Natalie has led large digital transformations, the development of product portfolios, and product delivery, and is currently Chief Product Officer at OAG where she has transformed the product organization over the last two years by introducing lean start-up principles into a 90-year-old business. She calls it "the 90-year-old start-up".
Episode Outline and Highlights
[1:31] Natalie shares how she has worked in a number of sectors really specializing in product delivery, and in leading large digital transformations focusing on what has always been working at that intersection of commercial and tech.
[11:07] Finding the right fit of people: attracting internal talent to product management career path.
[15:53] Challenges of the ever-evolving mix of professional career and life: Natalie shares her personal struggles of balancing work and family and still attaining success.
[21:07] The importance of forward-thinking and immediate feedback in learning and developing in your career and how this helped her in her journey.
Injecting the latest product management trends and ideas into an established business
A recent achievement that Natalie shared was being able to incorporate fresh ideas and be forward-thinking with her success at OAG - she calls it "The 90-year-old Startup”. Here her diverse experience across multiple industries and continuous focus on delivery were key to ensuring the success of transforming the organization to a product-centric one and continuously driving value to the end-user.
Attracting internal talent into the team and rigorous prioritization
One of her core achievements in OAG is building the product team by hiring individuals within the company into her team who had been keeping close to the end customer and therefore understand in depth the needs of the user and the target market. By moving away from the traditional expert-focused recruitment to selecting individuals focused on the end-user she embedded customer-driven development as a practice. This resulted in prioritization of features that the customers wanted to see, improving user satisfaction and product usage, as well as smarter investments into the product, as the team builds POCs, collects customer feedback, and validates the features before any big investments in the product development is made.
Connect with Natalie Seatter
Natalie Seatter on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalieseatter/
People and Resources Mentioned
OAG
https://www.linkedin.com/company/oag/
Connect with Alexandra Di Nella
Alexandra on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandradinella/
Connect with Alexandra over a discovery call:
https://calendly.com/productwise1/30min?back=1&month=2022-06
Want to reach PMF faster and cheaper by adopting the 0-1 entrepreneurial mindset?
Then, you’ll love my interview with Shinyoung Park - Shinyoung Park is a tech investor, advisor, and executive. She is currently a Chief Product Officer at Spoon Radio, the audio streaming app with over 30M downloads around the world. She has invested in various startups such as MagicBus (YCW16), Farmstead (YCS16), and Stonks.
Prior to that, Shinyoung founded a mobile gaming studio, which saw 3 million downloads in 2 months reaching top-grossing no. 45 on iOS. She also devised a GTM strategy for the $3B MMORPG franchise, Lineage, and managed a new mobile game called AION at NCSOFT. She has led teams to release and manage over 6 titles at Playfirst and Kixeye, 3 of them stayed above top-grossing no. 100 in the US most of their lifetime.
Previously, Shinyoung founded a company that raised an angel round from the founder of Krafton, the maker of PUBG, which won Fbfund 2009 to build a virtual community on mobile, and was selected as one of the most influential women in tech by Fast Company in 2010. In her early days, Shinyoung raised $1.5M from Samsung and sold a childcare community to Edutopia, Inc in 2000.
Episode Outline and Highlights
Today we are going to talk about :
- reaching product-market fit without spending millions of dollars,
- building a global product with people in different countries and
- navigating through the uncertainty with a 0-1 entrepreneur mindset.
Connect with Shinyoung
Shinyoung on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/shinyoungp/
Shinyoung on Medium https://shinyoung-p.medium.com/
People and Resources Mentioned
https://pmf.ck.page/
Spoonradio.co
Rooftop.club
https://500.co/
Competing against luck: the story of innovation and customer choice by Clayton M. Christensen
Connect with Alexandra Di Nella
Get your FREE 30-minute discovery call https://calendly.com/productwise1/30min?back=1&month=2022-06
Alexandra on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandradinella/