Bienvenidos a The Ethnic Podcast, el podcast en el que discutimos tecnologías y startups
y invito algunas de las personas más inteligentes en Barcelona para compartir sus insights.
El tema de hoy es para demistir el rol de la managería del producto y cómo se convirtió en uno.
Para discutir, invitamos a tres personas con el conocimiento de la managería del producto.
Primero, Jordi Romero, currently CEO y founder de Factorial.
También tenemos experiencias de otras empresas como Teambox y Redbooth, así que bienvenido.
Gracias, Sandra.
La segunda que tenemos es Idemar Giliad.
Tienes sido la managería del departamento en Google durante 6 años y también trabajaste en varias otras empresas.
Hace los últimos 6 años en Google, principalmente en Gmail, con un poco de YouTube también,
antes que estaba en Israel, trabajando en startups, trabajando en grandes empresas.
He trabajado por Microsoft, por un tiempo como manager del producto, pero originalmente es un ingeniero.
Pero ahora estás en Barcelona.
Sí, estoy muy feliz, estoy muy emocionado de estar aquí.
Muy bien, y la última persona que tenemos es Roger de Baño,
founder y CEO de Kipu, Accounting SAS,
y currently you're the CEO and the Product Manager,
so you have a special role, so welcome to you as well.
Gracias, a pleasure.
So, to get it started, I was wondering, because I've been studying the Product Manager role
over the last 6 months, and I've been trying to...
Is there a definition, is there a true definition, a one sentence definition
to define the Product Manager role?
What do you think, Idemar?
There's no one definition.
Every company has a slightly different variation of it,
since we had Agile, we added also Product Owner.
The definition that I like the most today, honestly,
of all the many things that Product Manager was expected to do,
is the person that is kind of becoming the expert on the users,
the customers, the ecosystem, the competition,
and that manages to deliver this context to the team
that is building the product, the designers, the engineers, etc.
And manages to help them build a really good solution,
and eventually also manages to help launch this product,
to track this performance.
It's a superman, basically, but the customer emphasis and expertise
are really for me the core, core Product Manager skill.
Right, and I mean, like customer-centric companies
have been around for a while, but especially with emerging tech companies
the last 10, 20 years, I mean the customer-centric companies
has really grown and has the Product Manager role
also grown in popularity and usage.
I mean, we hear the term Product Manager much more today
than we did maybe 10 years ago.
Absolutely, I think the first time I heard of Product Manager
was in the 90s, it was a novelty back then,
and it's kind of evolved over the years.
Back then we were kind of product-centric.
We thought that our engineering,
wizardry, and later also the Product Manager
we will just overwhelm the world by ingenuity.
And I think later we started realizing
it's not so much about us, it's more about the customers.
So I think the product role changed more
in that direction over the years.
Now I think a lot of companies
are aware of Product Management,
but I'm not sure a lot of companies
have a very modern perception of what it is.
Some companies still think it's just the person
you give the instructions to
and that person generates a spec
based on your insight.
I think one thing you said
made me remember a lot of fights
we had at my previous company
because we defined ourselves as a product company
and whatever that means.
It basically meant back then engineering first company
and then the CEO was saying
no, we're a sales-driven company
because we care about the customers.
So at the end we were fighting to say
we're a product company, a sales-driven company
or a customer-first company
and I think it turns out
that product company means
a product to serve our customers
and then the product team is just there
to represent the customers inside the company.
So it's kind of a messy terminology
I think, especially with
whatever startups and kind of companies
that change roles and definitions
of parts of the business often.
But I think that's something that we still need
to properly define, I guess.
¿Has definido?
Quería que todo sponge
de su nuevo product
orgánico te düşe
¿Puedes dejarlo Frogman al elevator?
Es que para mí el cambio que viene recientemente es básicamente porque uno de los grandes advertencia competidas de cualquier startup es el producto que está construyendo para la tecnología o para construir una disrupción de valor propósito al mercado.
Así que básicamente esto no es solo sobre construir un producto con una gran experiencia de usuario y con la tercera tecnología en el mercado.
Es sobre poder servir problemas a sus clientes.
Finalmente, el producto que estás construyendo tiene que tener un impacto real para el mercado.
Aunque puedes definirlo como una compañía de salida, probablemente si estás construyendo un producto disruptivo, no es tan simple.
Si puedes resolver ese problema bien, podrás construir una compañía de salida, que es algo que tienes que tener si quieres escalar bien.
Pero desde el very beginning, entiendo que una compañía de salida es algo que es...
Estás construyendo algo diferente, algo disruptivo, así que tienes que construir tus advertencias competidas.
Así que es por eso que, en mi experiencia, que es muy corto, ser un CEO de producto, es para mí bastante fácil tener esta visión de la compañía, porque es mi trabajo.
Entonces, para mí lo importante es construir procesos en la compañía cuando se escale,
y es importante transmitir toda esta conocida y estas mejores prácticas culturales para el manejo del producto de futuro.
Estás en una situación en la que hay muchos startups, donde no puedes comprar a una persona de producto dedicada.
Puedes ir a Google o a grandes corporaciones, y tienes que cuidar a la visión del CEO, pero también el desarrollo del producto.
¿Cómo manejas esos roles? ¿Y qué prioritices?
Bueno, creo que hay que... Una cosa es poder deliberar al mercado nuestra visión del producto.
Esta es una de las principales cosas que tenemos que combinar.
Y esto implica poder informar a tu equipo qué son esos roles y todo lo que estamos haciendo en el producto,
es para servir una visión, que en nuestro caso es para automatizar los procesos administrativos.
Entonces, todo lo que estamos haciendo debe ser de esa manera, y la gente debe entender eso.
Y luego, la otra cosa que tenemos que hacer es que es más la parte operacional,
que es bastante complicada para mí, para estar en la monitoración de nuestros procesos.
Entonces, lo que hemos hecho en Kipu, es para empoderar a nuestro equipo.
Por ejemplo, implementar metodologías escramas, pero no de mí directamente.
Soy el que ha tomado la decisión, pero en los términos operacionales, el equipo de desarrollo ayuda con ello.
Entonces, lo que he hecho progresivamente, es para empoderar a mi equipo,
para que podamos lidiar con los problemas operacionales,
que es que ayudan a hacer el negocio de día a día.
Creo que es...
Perdón, no sé si estamos en la misma cuestión o no.
Pero lo que has dicho, y también lo has mencionado en Scrum,
en el juego de la persona del producto,
un error que he visto muy a veces en el pasado,
es que los manejadores del producto se han convertido en manejadores del producto,
que no es lo que están intentando hacer.
Entonces, terminan de hacer el manejo del proyecto del equipo.
Entonces, terminan de,
ordenar el trabajo de un equipo de ingeniería, un equipo de diseño, y así así.
Y luego, por default, crean esta jerarquía,
donde están en una layer,
y luego los ejecutores están en una otra layer.
Y creo que esto rompe la comunicación,
el círculo de feedback,
y, no sé, el ambiente colaborativo,
que necesita el producto rápido, como cualquier compañía,
o al comienzo, lo quiera hacer en general.
Entonces, creo que Agile ha tried to rename it as Product Owner,
I think to remove the management side of things.
I don't know that that fixes anything.
I think it's more an organizational issue,
and not so much naming.
But Product Manager should, in my opinion,
should not be managing the product team that's executing that.
I've heard several times over the last weeks,
that Product Managers, they have responsibility, but not authority.
What do you think of that? Do you have a lead product team?
That's always the case.
I think, as it may be,
in a privileged position of the CEO and Product Manager,
which is probably the right thing to do in a startup in the initial phases,
because honestly, you don't need the Product Manager on day one,
or even when the team is 20, it's still very much,
I think the Product Management function can be,
it can be owned by the entrepreneurs.
And it's kind of like how much time you're willing to devote
to actual Product Management versus fundraising and all this stuff.
And also, how confident you feel with the Product Management.
But it's fine.
Back to your question.
The normal situation is that the Product Manager is someone
that is kind of inserted into the team,
usually the engineering team, the design team.
He works very closely with marketing, with sales,
with the business units as well, and with customer support.
But that person doesn't manage any of those groups.
And what we accomplish, we accomplish through partnership,
through influence, through all the soft skills
that are very important to Product Managers,
through communicating vision, through back and forth discussions,
through gathering data, business data,
making data decision, data driven decisions,
through user research, through all of these tools,
we manage to get everyone into a good place,
which is not necessarily our vision.
Sometimes Product Managers lead a product
where the vision comes from someone else.
It's better if the Product Manager is also the visioner,
but it's not always the case.
I think the discussion will just be for sales driven,
product driven, I've seen companies where it's
design driven, it's more modern, it's very typical.
And all of these things are good,
but if you overdo them, if you over emphasize the business side,
over emphasize the engineering side,
you tend to get distracted from the main thing.
And the main thing is the value delivery to users,
the value you can capture from the market,
and the value you give to the employees at the end of the day,
because the employees also need to really benefit from working.
And I think the Product Manager is in a unique position
to combine these three and kind of find this win-win-win solution
where you deliver value, capture value,
and do all of these things.
For the CEO, it's sometimes hard,
because you're very much pressed to deliver numbers,
to make money, to raise funds.
Sometimes CEOs are being pushed to the business side much more.
In your opinion, just to answer this,
is there a fixed answer for when a startup
should hire a Product Manager?
I think once you start saying a lot of...
you spend a lot of time in discussions about
what engineering needs to do,
and you start saying friction between the business side
and which you as a founder don't have enough cycles to control,
that's usually a sign that you need someone.
O, if engineering comes to you and says,
we just don't know what to do.
We talk with you sporadically,
you give us guidance,
but we really need someone to work with us today.
That's a time to actually hire a Product Manager,
and not necessarily a VP of Product,
someone with 10 years experience,
sometimes mid-level, PM,
or even a junior can do tremendous things for a small company.
I also think you can promote from within.
I was reflecting on how we're doing it now at Factorial,
we're 7 people right now,
and I think we have 3 people doing a product role.
I was thinking about what areas of product
I think influence the company,
and there is a business side of things,
I think there is a technology side of things,
and there is a design or UX side of things,
so if you combine the 3 of them,
then the company flourishes,
and actually the CTO would be somehow a Product Manager,
and he's obviously engineering oriented,
then our designer, whose official title is Product Designer,
so he's leading the UX and the user's perspective,
and then myself as a CEO,
as well kind of influence the product
with the business perspective in mind.
I think in our case we have like one Product Manager
with 3 heads, so the 3 of us meet often
and we discuss together,
and then maybe the Product Designer,
Cesar actually executes as Product Manager
and you know like works on specs,
and then negotiates with the rest of the team
to make sure that what we're doing
is the writing for the business and so on,
but he consults often on me,
or on Paul for instance,
for the 2 areas where he's not so much experienced yet.
It makes sense, I mean,
that's always surprised me with the Product Manager role
that you have to combine all this knowledge
into one position,
3 different, as you say,
you focus on what you know best,
you focus on business,
and your CTO focus on the technical stuff,
but I mean,
no Product Manager,
I mean, what kind of skills should you inherit?
What is your opinion?
So I think these 3 areas,
and I've seen...
I think you should know enough
about these 3 areas, and for instance,
I've managed Product Managers,
and I did Product Management in the past,
and I always lacked UX,
I don't have any training,
or any knowledge around user experience,
and I always felt like I couldn't deliver
a good product because I lacked this,
or it wasn't the same.
So I think Product Managers often come
from either MBAs
or engineering backgrounds,
or design backgrounds, at least the ones I met,
either started from one of those 3 sources.
I don't know which one is the best,
I think that's gonna be a long debate,
but I've seen good in either of them.
When you at least have 2 of them
very strong in the DNA of a person,
then I think you're on to something.
What do you think?
Product for a long time.
Yeah, and I've been interviewing
a lot of Product Managers,
so I think it's...
beyond...
there's 2 levels, there's education,
like where this person comes from,
or their education is,
where companies like Microsoft,
Google, I think also Facebook
strongly prefer engineering,
like if you don't have this computer science
degree, you will not get hired
probably, or it's extremely hard
to get hired.
But what I want is not pure engineering,
I want engineers that are very user centric
with empathy for the customers
and have business smarts
and understand a little bit of design.
And can also work with people
and have good communication skills
and have all of this.
It's like a really hard job to fill.
Yeah.
In Google we interviewed a lot of people
before we made a second hire.
It's a very tough job to really find someone.
So, back to your point,
if you find someone in your team
that has this naturally, and you can see the tendency,
they are very interested in the customer, etc.,
that's great, you can
let them grow into the role,
but sometimes you need to hire someone
from the outside, someone who
really is like this, and you need to interview a lot of people.
It's not very easy.
Credentials like experiences
Product Manager don't necessarily mean much.
I'm a bit hesitant about the CTO
being the Product Manager, to be honest.
Because the CTO
really
needs to spend most of the cycles
about how to launch the product right.
How to do the software,
to design it, to make sure qualities there.
While the Product Manager
needs to think how to do the right product.
And it's sometimes conflict.
Sometimes you just push back.
And then the CTO,
the person wearing these two hats
needs to be really a special person
to be able to completely be
the CTO.
What do you think about this?
I totally agree.
I think in this case we're talking about the founder.
So there has to be a very special
person at the finish.
Needs to care about business, product,
people, team, hiring, everything.
But I agree.
I have a question for you.
Who should the Product Manager report to
in a very small startup?
In a very small startup.
I think one of the founders
like either the CTO or the CTO.
So you should report to the CTO.
That's what I was going for.
But not to the head of business.
Because that's usually not a good weeks.
For me,
the CTO, especially
in our case as a software company,
then it's
not important to have this input
from direct to my Product Manager.
So the thing is that
your definition about the Product Manager
is a unicorn, finally,
it's quite complicated to find this kind of profiles.
But the thing is,
for example, in our case,
I do agree that I would like
to have a Product Manager
who has a computer science background.
Why?
Basically because I think
in my case it's my lack.
I'm not an engineer so I've got this lack
so I would like to strengthen
that part with someone who has
this skill.
But in my case
it's what I would like to look for.
But on the other way around
one of the things
that we have done here in Kipu
is basically to empower each person
on that team. So the thing is that
I need someone who leads
technology, which is in that case the CTO
and it's someone who can help
with the customers
and understanding
and these people that is on support team.
So and
my goal was always to
set up appropriate communication flows
so that everyone is aware
of what's going on and finally
I'm the one who delivers
all this information to the whole team.
Somehow
we have relation to promote
someone from within because basically
what we are doing is to empower
each one of the team
and I'm the one who finally gets
that information and translates it into the people.
So in our case
somehow we are promoting
my team
into this product manager role
although none of them are
product manager by definition
but that's why for example in probably
our
designer, the situation is similar
to what Jordi has in factorial
it's also the one who leads
with design
and I was looking for someone who
can take this challenge
if not it makes no sense for me in a small start
although we are just 14 people
I cannot
expect that I lead with everything
what's going on into the company
have to empower them
but they have a definition for me
I think the product manager should have
computers
software skills
basically because it's
one of the main competitive advantages
I would have in the future
so that's why I would like to
to strengthen this part.
Do you think he needs to be able to
program or he or she
I mean for me he who should be able
to this product manager should be able to do that
one thing is to
to have program
skills the other thing is to implement it
because I think the development team is the one
who finally will implement whatever it is
but he would be able to
to create at least a prototype
and
and spend some time with risky technologies
and for me
for me what I'm looking for
is someone who is able to spend that time
on trying to develop
things that are not that obvious to develop
so that before
it turns out to be a
task into an sprint with their specs
and everything that guy should be able
to prototype it to try it out
see if it makes sense and then when it's validated
then ok he
then he's the city of art
no where he has to
to deliver
this final product with all
specs necessary
so on the same token
maybe this person needs to be able to design as well
or maybe he needs to
he or she needs to do spreadsheets
or business plans
or sales goals
run analytics, talk to customers
I agree, that's a problem
I think I've always seen
product managers go in one of these areas more
so maybe some people go
back into the cave and then they do a prototype
but then they didn't do enough
market research, they didn't talk enough to customers
they didn't make it usable
so it's
that's one point but if you forget the other four
then you're kind of
incomplete, it's a challenge
I think it varies, if what you're developing
is an API and your customers
or developers having
a PN that can program is a huge advantage
that's absolutely because that makes it
so much easier for that person
to identify with the users
if what you need is someone to talk
diligently with the engineering team
about technical terms
then you need someone with a technical background
or technical aptitude
that can read, that can learn
doesn't necessarily need to be able to code
or understand all the intricacies
of the coding
differently architecture is good
looking at like a box diagram of your system
and offending is a good thing
but that person needs
to be able to talk to sales also
and talk to marketing
about retention
so I wouldn't look just for someone
who is a coder
it seems to me that the soft skills
are super super important
especially dealing with a development team
with a lot of different personalities
and that's a topic
by itself, I mean how to deal
with an engineering team
or a design team or a business team
you're dealing with so many different personalities
how do you do it
you have been dealing
with a product
and I've been talking with different departments
you've been in sales talking with customers
developing, I mean how do you do this
the soft skills
I don't know how to
describe where they come from
I think that's one of the things
you need to look for this role
the first, like if you have somebody
who's a genius but they cannot
defend their ideas in front of customers
or they cannot convince a stubborn engineer
that this is really a priority
and this is really what they should be focusing
focusing on before
say a refactor or a technology
change or something like that
or he's not able to deal with
an angry customer that found an issue with a product
and you need to figure out what the issue is
by asking the right questions and so on
then all the talent behind that is useless
so
I just think like the
I don't really know how to answer your question
but the first thing you should look for
is this ability to negotiate
to listen
to carefully build a relationship with everybody
with super hardcore
nerdy developers
and with very pissed
strong executives
or customers
and all at the same level
but for me this is by definition
what a good manager should be
I mean they have to
there's different roles because
someone who's ahead of sales their roles are totally different
from a CTO
de definición
as a manager
should be able to negotiate
to communicate, to have an analytical view
and there are some skills
that for me are the same
in each management position
and then ok we can go into detail
of a given position what are the strengths
that they should be but there are some
this kind of soft skills
for me by definition every manager should have it
especially in a startup
where communication is much more important
cultural field
it's important
and this kind of stuff
for me mix a must have
and then it comes the position
but this kind of skills
it's definitely
you've been working as you said
with different products such as
Gmail and YouTube as we know
I mean for you
this is experience that
not many product managers have
I mean just let's face it
from your experience
can you give us some insight
I mean what was your biggest
challenges
running these teams
the same challenges these guys are facing
actually it's the people challenges
that are usually
that's actually one of my biggest
favorite question when I interview
at PM's like what's the biggest challenges you face
and they usually name two classes
one is understanding the customers
and coming up with the right product
ideas to help these
people which is
an objective challenge
and the other one is internally
getting everyone on the same page
convincing or being convinced
and moving everyone
pulling in the same direction
and in Google it's a very good company
it's full of super smart people
much smarter than me
and very positive, very helpful
but the same kind of vectors exist
engineering is pulling in this direction
marketing
these features to be added
plus we have a lot more exposure
even if we change a few pixels
someone will hate it
a shade of blue right
exactly
so we need to be much
a bit more cautious and test things
a bit more
just to go back to your question
about soft skills
super important
much more important than a lot of other things
people think
and I really like the answer
which is about relationships
that's the best way to convince people
to get into a good relationship
with a partnership
where basically you understand
what they're about, how to achieve
what they're optimizing for
and you can tell them here's how I'm gonna help you
get to that point
in the end it's not about
being an engineer, it's about being a manager
which is the most important thing
and how do you evaluate these
skills or how
you filter candidates
which is the process
first before I answer this
just to
the engineers that are watching this
feel a little bit better
some of the best product ideas
I ever delivered came from engineering
we're your engineer, I'm an engineer
they're represented here
not nothing there
no I'm not
but not from this engineer
I put together a spec
and I worked with a designer
and we came up and the engineer
came to me and said
actually I think that's a better way to do this
and the natural reaction is
I'm the product manager
who are you to tell me
but actually if you listen
you find the engineers have great ideas
and salespeople have great ideas
everyone can come up with a great idea
and you need to be actually more humble
the trick
for interviewing people
that I can give is
try to give them in the interview
product management design
question
for example find a market niche
like people over 65
and older and find a product
and say design toaster for elderly people
or design toaster for blind people
or any of these
where you force them a little bit
into
thinking about the user
thinking about product
thinking about how they will deliver this
within 15 minutes you can learn a lot about
the creativity
the customer
and the two things to look for
engineers
like hardcore engineers will jump to the bit level
and they'll say oh I can do this
and then I'll install this system
and the communication
will go with this protocol
great
mba type
sorry mba
this is great product managers that are mba
it comes
this is how we penetrate the market
and this is a competitive advantage etc
it's all high level and you never get any product details
from them
I mean
we're talking about a lot about
analyzing the market
talking with customers and this is a big job
in the product manager role to understand
your customers and your clients
sometimes especially in the beginning
of a company
you don't know
the full market you don't know the potential
and I'm just a bit curious
and I think other people are curious as well
I mean
you guys are quite fresh
I mean 6 months plus
and
how many times do you make product decisions
based on your gut
and how many times do you do it
based on analytics
honestly
or who's listening now
I mean
I think we need to
so I don't think we have a lot
of gut decisions
and if we do the first thing we do is
we run out of the office and go talk
to a handful of customers at least
and try to be very objective
and very honest with ourselves
like never tell only ask
and make sure their answers are aligned
with what we thought or what we guessed
being very honest
at our stage it's very hard to run
a metrics driven
or analytics driven business
because the base of
metrics we have
the corpus of data is so small
that it doesn't really allow us to
optimize for things and so on
we can look at the analytics in the universe
in the market which are useful
but they are not detailed enough for us
to take specific decisions
so we have to kind of combine both
these qualitative data
we do a lot of talking to customers
that's one thing that for me is a mantra
is whenever we don't know something
it's like everybody shut up right now
who talk to a customer here
should we do this feature or this other one
and then everybody has an opinion
but then it's clear when they don't really know
what has to be done
who talk to a customer recently
nobody then let's stop this meeting
let's all talk to customers and then let's have this meeting again
and it's not a ton of metrics but it's something
I'm also curious
you're super fresh but
you worked in a super established company
where you said that a small decision
can generate a million haters
around the world
did you ever do
go with your gut as well
you have maybe one of the biggest data pools
in the world to base your
products on
but a lot of brilliant people
I can imagine people have these amazing ideas
what's the next thing at Google
what do you think
well there's a lot of pressure also
on Google to come up with
next big thing and internally
that's something that Google really wants
to do always invent the future
just to balance this
I was in small startups as well
in the past so I was sitting in you guys position
right
I think even if you have a product
like Gmail where you have ton of data
established users has been around since
2004
when you do this next kind of
more revolutionary feature
you're still
peering into the abyss
you don't really know what's going to happen in the future
and sometimes your prediction
is as good as mine
the experts, the people that have been working on this for years
sometimes they don't know really
we may think we know
and there's a lot of psychological mechanism
to convince us that we know
we remember only our right decisions
sometimes we haven't subconsciously
remember that we chose the right decision
even when we chose the wrong one
there's a lot of mechanism
this genius
entrepreneur
genius inventor
phenomena where we attribute to other people
ability to peer into the future
and the visioner doesn't really
I think it's not really a thing
it's like some people are very lucky
and very good at building teams around
a very good at building process
to invent the future
so
I think the industry in general
in the past 5, 6, 10 years
is starting to move away from this opinion based
intuition based development
into more
hypothesis
testing based
I think the question you always have to ask yourself
is like I have a good idea
that's intuition super important
we should not throw it away
I have something that I really think is a good idea
what's the minimal test I can invent now
validating it
and am I
when I look at the result of the tests
are there going to be conclusive enough
that I can convince myself and others
that this is either a good idea or a bad idea
doesn't need to be a full conviction
just need to take you to the next step
but that's hard
even in Google sometimes to convince people
sometimes people come from the top
and say wow this is the future
I don't think this is going to change everything
and I go
but with this kind of logical
did you say wave
was it a pan there or
was it you
I met some of the people
and the very smart, very capable people
maybe they were a bit ahead of their time
so it's hard to kind of come
but if you have data
everyone, even the most opinionated manager
will shut up and say ok you're right
so really important
ok, in our case what we always did
is first sell
and then produce
especially for the more obvious things
what we always did
in Kippu was to first
translate our
idea of our product idea
or feature idea whatever it is to the market
see if they will buy it or not
and then produce it
now with the time that we have more data
we know more knowledge
about our customers
we always
this information we just
we gather it through support
and one of the things
that our support team
support for me is not about
solving incidences
or issues, it's about
talking to the customer
understanding their needs so that's why
one of the most
the things that we always have is that
support team should
listen to the customer and then
it's our job to translate it into the product
and then
with something it has to be aligned
with our vision, then if it's not
and we don't do it
because we can do a thousand features
but in our case if it's not
in order to automatize administrative processes
then we don't do it, that's the idea
and in the past
we took a lot of decisions
but we're not wrong
not completely wrong but the results
were not as good
as we expect
but we had a
first validation exercise
then the thing is that it was not the right market
fit or not the optimal market fit
but it's alright
and we learned from that and we learned
to take less
schizophrenical decisions
but this is a part of the process
it's difficult especially
to have
full picture and information
especially because
you don't have enough customers probably
to validate and it's not that simple
then it turns to be easier
when you've got more customers
but it's about intuition for me as well
because in the end
we are trying to produce
things that are more obvious
that people ask for it
but I'm more interested in solving
any problem which is not that obvious
and build a technology or a product
that is not that obvious
and you won't get that word for the customer
that's why we try to explain
to them our idea, our vision
and then see if we can make it or not
So
very interesting but we have to come to an end
so before we
I want to take a last round
and ask each one of you
if you were to manage a product
that's not your own, tomorrow
what kind of product would you
love to manage
what would be interesting to manage
So we can start with you Jordi
I was hoping you didn't start with me
I have no idea
I'm so deep inside
the product I am
That's a good sign
you can't think of any other product
It's hard to step out
I think anything that has a big
big impact
Businesses operate
is something that I'm really into
I've been working on this
in different angles in the past
but it's very interesting to
look at a company with 10
or 10,000 employees
and then kind of change
how they work through a product
can be services, can be technology
can be software, mobile apps, whatever
Definitely one that gives me the opportunity
to impact more businesses
would be something very interesting
to work on
Do you have something specific?
Not so specific
but it's kind of
much more ambitious
There's a theory
that every few years
it shortens
there's a new medium
that subsumes the old medium
and it changes
it antagonizes the old generation
and changes everything
I'll give an example
Around the campfire
but then books came and started putting
the stories into books
and then movies came
and started putting books into movies
and then TV started putting
movies into TV
and then the internet came
and started putting TV
and each one of these waves
and the web etc
So finding the next wave
of the next medium
that will subsume the web
and then
content companies
will change everything
I don't know how to
what it is
but I'm willing to start exploring
Interesting answer, not very specific still
let's move on
No, for me
it's quite similar
to what Jordi says
because I'm working for
in a B2B business
and I really enjoy
B2B and B2C
because I think they have a stronger impact
on society
for me
I would love to
deal with a product that helps to take
better decisions
and basically what we know that nowadays
we've got a lot of data available
too much data, it's what happens to us
sometimes we generate more data
than we are able in our company
to analyze and understand
and to take right decisions
you have to look at data
and then take decisions
but this takes a lot of time
sometimes it takes so much time
that then you come up with an intuition
so for me it makes sense
to create a software
who helps dealing with
this huge amount of data
and for me it's not about
big data issues
it's more about
things more practical
I would love to open my computer
and see
a bunch of data that helps
me as a CEO or other
salesman or whatever
in order to take decisions
so for me it will probably be
a company that deals with that
right
so we need to finish
thank you so much for coming
both Roger Eubanio
Ed Ammar
Giliad
Jody Romero
Majority Ethnic
every month we have this podcast
so please feel free to
subscribe to our channel
and also you'll find a video
en our youtube channel