🚨 Highlight of the month
Can you believe it? We’re approaching the end of Season 1 of the Build Further podcast. So we’ve rounded up some of the most unique pieces of advice we’ve heard on the show for you:
Advice #1: Growth teams should be responsible for the entire customer journey, instead of breaking them up into acquisition, retention, or monetisation. We need a true customer-centric model that involves teams working together to solve problems for the customer, regardless of the channel they use. Currently, if a customer encounters an issue on our website, we expect the product team responsible for the website to fix it. But we need to have teams that can respond independently of the channel and bring those that are best equipped to solve the problem. This means leveraging marketing, customer success, sales, and product at the same time. Although this is challenging to implement on an organizational level, it will provide a better experience for our customers.
Who said it? Leah Tharin, Head of Product at Jua.ai.
Advice #2: You need to blurry the lines between your organization and your users. The most successful companies are the ones that involve their users at every step of the process, from market research to product research. This helps them learn faster, deliver value faster, prioritize the right bets, and optimize the cost of being wrong and the time to being right. And this is regardless of the stage you’re at. For early-stage startups, talking to users constantly helps you get to the product market fit faster. For large-scale organizations, the ROI is about saving costs and operational expenses. The value of communities is infinite and acts as the perfect compass for your roadmap. Find your tribe online and turn them into multipliers, QA technicians, and trusted council for your product.
Who said it? Jonathan Widawski, CEO & Co-Founder at Maze.
Advice #3: Give your product managers full ownership and responsibility over their scope and roadmap, empowering them to act as startups within a larger organization. They shouldn’t be trying to solve a product problem, but a problem. Full stop. And product is one of the answers to the solution. By providing product owners with access to data, infrastructure, and a streamlined design process, you enable them to define and solve problems on their own, with the validation and support of higher management. This approach has enabled Revolut to ship two or three times faster than the rest of the industry and maintain a balance between agility and control.
Who said it? Pierre Cahuzac, Head of Product at Revolut.
Learn from the best of the best.
What makes our ❤️ beat
🌍 Running Remote Conference
Lisbon is hosting the Running Remote conference this week. If like us you couldn’t attend, Travel & Tapas shares the highlights from day one in this post. These include:
- Liam Martin, the co-founder of Running Remote, focused his opening speech on “how remote work lets us put focus on our lives beyond professional when we need it the most”
- Ryan Chartrand, the ex-CEO of X-Team, shared his predictions about remote work, like “new concepts of working spaces, focused on community-building”
- Tara Vasdani, Managing Partner at Remote Law Canada, shared her insights on legal implications of remote work, including contracting, working hours, payroll, and many more.
🎓 The benefits from leveling up through collaborative learning
360Learning put together this insightful carousel about the 5 benefits of upskilling from within through collaborative learning. They are democratization, speed, impact, relevance, and iteration. If you want a deep dive on the topic, David James 360Learning Chief Learning Officer is hosting a seminar on May 3rd, register here: https://bit.ly/3o4oRaB
🤔 Should a Product Manager be one of your first hires?
Adrien Montcoudiol from Mozza thinks not and his discussion brought up good arguments from the community:
- long hiring cycles
- Insufficient knowledge on the market and the solution you’re building
- Can create conflicts with the founders when finding PMF should be the focus
Add your take to the discussion here.
That’s all! And remember…
Get in touch if you have cool things to share or would like to feature what you’re working on 😊
The Claap team.