Short on Time, High on Output - Speed, Strategy, and Success as an Interim Product Manager

Speaker A: Welcome back to Practical Product Management, a podcast where we talk about practical product management instead of theoretical product management. That's really our focus here. Um, today we have a special guest. We're, we're interviewing Mirella. We're talking to Mirella. It's not really an interview as much as a chat. Um, so I would love for you to introduce yourself, tell us about yourself and what you do and then we'll dive in and, and talk about that in more depth.

Speaker B: Happy to be speaking again, Lea. I'm Mirela, founder of Product People. We do interim product management as a service. Uh, started this company a few years back, uh, with having a background in product management which I've been doing for about 12 years, half of that in a leadership role. And before that I had a computer science degree and I have had a few other jobs in tech. Like everyone who doesn't directly come into product management or at least didn't used to do that. And the type of clients we focus on are mostly post product market fit, uh, digital first companies. Uh, we also had a goal to work with some of the biggest or most interesting companies in, in Europe that were doing things right. And uh, this also motivated uh, a lot of smart and ambitious people to join us so that they could see behind the scene in Europe's greatest companies.

Speaker A: Nice. Love it. I have sort of a starting question like how do you view the role of one of your product people? The same and differently than sort of an in house hired in product manager.

Speaker B: That's a great question. Uh, because our people are not exactly like the in house product managers and we also don't aim to compete with uh, in house folks. Uh, so we come in for 3, 6, 9, 12 months onwards. It's either triggered by a staff absence, uh, like a parental leave, sick leave, uh, or just a hiring gap. Either someone is leaving the company or there's a new role that is getting spinned up or sometimes it's unsure that that certain role would be needed. So then it's better to test how long this problem or this capacity surge is going to be there for before your um, taking someone uh, out of the job market, uh, for something that may not not work out. Uh, which means that also the pressure and incentives for us are a bit different. For us the incentive is to get brought in again, uh, not necessarily to extend the mission there if there's no real uh, reason to extend it if let's say the full time employee comes back. Uh, but of course as an agency we want to work again and Again, again with the, the people that um, have brought us in and also all the people that we've met there. And, and that has been also a successful growth strategy by just doing good work because there are lots of agencies out there and a lot of them do this hit and run and uh, put us a lot of pressure for us to deliver very fast because most um, employees kind of onboard in six months but sometimes we only have three months at the client. So we need to get very tactical. We need to understand uh, which fires we're putting out, which things do we get out of or like not take on at all. And uh, how do we figure out the terrain very fast. You know, who, who are the helpful people? Who are the competent people? Who's going to um, be supportive in what uh, we're doing there. And at the same time we also trust a lot in the person who brings us in. So if that person points us in a direction, uh, in the beginning we have no other useful info so we'll just go in that direction. And later on we start understanding a little bit more about the, the space and the challenges there. And we can also give meaningful feedback to uh, that specific budget owner, um, which can also be like at, at the same company we may be working with different people. So uh, sometimes um, different product uh, people, employees who call each other onigiris would just go in different quests there sent by the different budget owners who brought us in. And sometimes these quests can even clash with each other a little bit. Uh, or, or have like coming from different incentives or different point of view, um, which has all been very peaceful and fruitful and fun. Uh, so we kind of never had something that was completely fighting with each other because just some different departments put us as. So we didn't have that experience yet, hope to avoid it.

Speaker C: I love that you call it a quest, um, especially because it is a fixed period of time. So it does feel like a quest. I'm really curious uh, because product management can encompass so many different types of activities, do you find that um, you're brought in for like the strategy work or is it really execution work? Is it a mix of both? What does that look like?

Speaker B: So if you kind of spread it out, you would have on the, on the high end the strategy consulting firms, uh, I, I don't think we are nowhere near getting the, their business and ah, they will stay there, right? They, they intervene ah, at board member or sea level, um, and they're more on the general direction. Right. Should we go in These markets and so on. When we come in it would be potentially after these strategies or if we give input it goes all the way up but it can also becoming from different departments uh and so on. So as smaller companies potentially yes. Um, but I wouldn't flatter ourselves. We, we don't brand or don't sell strategy consulting. So, so that's a different part. Uh and if you also listen to people who did strategy consulting and are full time in some companies they're like why would you bring externals to like tell you your direction? This should be like your jobs. You should either bring externals to help you execute or, or help shape something up. But it's still like the future of your company. This is also sometimes why we don't advise founders to work with us before product market fit. It could be an exception in the zero to one scenarios that are corporate ventures because the corporate people themselves cannot do it right. It's not something they have the experience or the bandwidth. Uh so that could work but uh, for a founder to delegate product management to someone else wouldn't be a wise decision unless they have product market fit. And now you're trying to scale or you're trying to uh, replicate some things um and it's a better investment of the time and also less of a risk for the company. Does this help? Uh so then we cover strategy and then the other part would be mix of discovery and delivery. So I would say sometimes some, some of our missions are just discovery. Should we build this product line, should we double down on a certain capacity or let's your uh, large e commerce company and you're seeing that um, I mean this is also what already happened in the market. You're seeing the pre owned trend take over. So uh, and each PM and each capability has their part of the funnel. But no one deals with the pre owned experience overall or the luxury experience. And then you see on the market there are all these competitors that are just uh selling luxury goods uh, or any type of beauty products from perfumes and cosmetics. So that would be let's say another line. You could kick start with one of ours and then this type of work stream starts blending in to the other capabilities like search or product detail page or checkout and then the warehousing and supply side. But in the beginning someone kind of needs to take over the end to end part when it's not covered by a specific PM because PMs also like working within their teams and their scopes and so on. Uh and that sometimes also in Other cases is more of a program management part like we had the Digital Service act or other type of compliance. Things that need to happen all across multiple um, markets and product capabilities. So that is also what we do. And other times it's just also pure delivery because that happens, right? You have a platform migration, you're switching from Stripe to Adyen or Vicha Versa, which happened in multiple locations. Um, and you need someone to do that because the existing PMs are overwhelmed or missing or there's something happening. Ideal cases, it has the dual track discovery and delivery. But, but many times also the clients see that happening where they kind of get disappointed by either the internal delivery or a mix of internal, external or just external. Uh, and they're like okay, we need to bring someone in here to understand what's going on uh, and get things going. And sometimes it's just cutting scope or deferring that scope or giving more clarity. So, so it's not even, let's say, I wouldn't say it's like rocket science, but it's more of sorting things out and having someone with just the bandwidth and energy to do it.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I would assume that some product managers that come along and are, you know, you think about that maybe want to come work with you or for you, um, aren't cut out for it. So what do you find is, are the skill sets that just don't fit.

Speaker B: It's uh, it's pretty hard working with us because you need to unlearn things. And I understand going back to the strategy consultancy is why they take people right out of college because they don't come biased with like certain workplace. Right. It's, it's like this thing with uh, explaining water to the fish. They, you know, they haven't seen. This is all they see and, and then they kind of get used to it. Um, and we did notice that experienced hires sometimes had a harder time adjusting than the, the junior hires because also the junior hires had more time to see how uh, so we work in these trios where we have a mid ah level or a senior that's client facing and they come in with an associate pm. And this is also how we build the next mid level PMs who then become seniors and yeah so on and so forth. And then the third part of this trio is uh, someone with my seniority or our VP of product or product lead that supervises uh, multiple engagements, how the team is doing their from quality of service, but also just support when things get a bit more political or Tricky or confusing because usually the directors, VPs, CPOs who bring us in don't have time to handhold and sometimes they don't even have time to explain their thoughts or they kind of want something, but you uh, don't put the effort to say what that is. So we will need to anticipate and translate from them and also see if, if they're going in the right direction or if they contradict themselves. And all these other parts, a lot of it is managing expectations and m. Managing the environment as well as like checking uh, are we doing the right thing aside from, you know, just going through the motions?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, so that part, of course, ideally we will just build people up across this. We did find experienced hires, uh, coming to us so that they don't get pigeonholed in an industry or a role. So if someone has just done B2B products, products, um, most recruiters and hiring managers look at CV bullet points, right? You've, you've done E Commerce and we will just uh, shortlist you for E Commerce place if you've done this or that. Whereas with us you will do everything. So then it's easier for people to dive into an area that they like. Um, and we noticed this as well when, when people leave. Uh, for example, we had a senior PM who stayed with us for a while and then discovered through their mission at tpel that they liked high traffic products and, and then um, went on to another one where they're just handling the top of the funnel. So everything from um, until activation. And I think that that was a good outcome for both us and, and the PM, because before that uh, he, the person was doing B2B. So, so, so definitely not high traffic B2C. And that's like an immense pivot in a short amount of time. And uh, it's very unlikely certain companies would have taken that risk on a person because they would be. No, you haven. Uh, why should we take you and not take someone else who's been with uh, ebay or Olax or Zalando and was at High Traffic Products? And I did see this as well when we were trying to replace ourselves at the client. Sometimes we're involved in the hiring funnel, uh, and try to make that better. So we don't do sourcing, we don't compete with recruiting, uh, agencies, but we can help funnel these candidates through and make sure our replacement survives and it's the right fit. And, and many times we had to have these conversations where they wanted to dismiss candidates just on CV bullet points. And we thought, no, I think this, this candidate has good judgment, has analytic skills. This is what you need in the role. And they will be like, no, but they don't have this specific domain experience. And we'll be like, neither did we.

Speaker A: A lot of them.

Speaker B: Um, but yeah, that's, it's uh, it's very often the case that uh, especially in some places, uh, hiring managers won't bulge. There's like, okay, you didn't do keyword one and keyword two. Then, then you, you don't. It is what it is. Uh, so, so that has been also the perk for the experience hire despite it being a bit harder for them to accommodate with us. Uh, so one of the hardest part is that you're not as in control as you are as an um, FD pm. You don't have all this time for the relationship building and getting everyone on board. So sometimes you need to move without other people or, or you need to just make judgment calls if you're. Even if you're very uncomfortable with those calls. While of course being nice and being transparent and uh, openly communicating what you'. Um, and also adapting to things you don't like. Right. So maybe you don't like how this, uh, client does OKR. Tough luck. And you think their OKRs suck and you think it's just like everything. Well, unless they brought us in to change their, the way they do okrs, maybe stay out of it or unless you've solved, um, Marin, like the idea of quests. But this is like we have a main quest there, especially if it's a short, ah, mission of three to six months. And then we can take side quests if we solved for the main quest. So you can take that as a side quest if the champion is just usually the budget owner who brings us in says that that's a good idea and you can make that propos, but you can't really die on every heel that you find over there just because you, you disagree with their approach.

Speaker A: Um, but I would argue, I would argue, I would challenge you that a lot of product managers probably don't think they have time to build relationships, that they're not given time to build relationships and that they have to do that anyway. So I don't know. Marilyn, do you. What do you think?

Speaker C: Yeah, I'm actually, I'm uh, I'm actually. I mean most product managers think they have no time, no time for analytics, no time for relationships, no time for discovery. And I think that's actually part of the role is Figuring out how to balance all of the things that you need to know and do in order to make a good call and be able to influence the people that you work with to help them understand why you think that's the right way to go.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was thinking the same thing. So yeah, so I mean I get what you're saying. I understand like if they have them, if that is the quest, they have a mission. They may not, they may not um, use that time to do the relationship building because there's not, they're not necessarily going to be there. Long lived. But I'm, you know, I think most of us when we're first starting are like there's so much work. I, you know, I got to learn all these things. I don't have time to build relationships and it's like. But it's essential right? So it's, it's. That's a tricky, that feels like it would be a tricky um, spot for the key people.

Speaker B: So I mean in general, you know, when you're a new hire you go in very broad and you meet a lot of other departments. Uh, so at least also speaking for myself in my missions, I would just reach out to the people that I'm working on on let's say on initiative one I'm working more with user research and uh, other area in this other part is more delivery focus. So my stakeholders are program manager and so on. Another area would be go to market in let's say a country like Belgium, France and so on. So then my, my people there would be uh, marketing, sales, customer uh, success for so, so those I would cater to rather if even if they like seem a random bunch of people just based on the focus areas but not like go and socialize with all the heads of product at a certain client unless there, there's like a broader roadmap alignment thing coming ahead and then it would be great to meet them. Great to see unless the company has like a very centralized way of doing that. Great to see what, what's coming in there or if you already see some overlap. And I think that's also the um, the luxury and the nice part of the long term hires and also for ourselves when we were doing interim leadership roles which are very few and far in between but we do them once in a while that sometimes the in house directors and heads of product have these like very lots of time to go very broad and kind of talk with different leadership folks and so on. Whereas we were more okay, like which fires are burning because Usually we're brought in because there's uh, some somethings that are not working out either with the direct reports or the structure or the department or just the usual. And then later on figure out who's who and, and do a bit more of the soft alignment without a very clear specific goal that um, but, but you know, seeing then, okay, could what they're doing here pan out for us later? Especially that, that's quite useful in bigger companies. And I know you've been at Klarna and Google and I know at least from product leaders there that this was a lot of their work to kind of catch what are the trends that different areas were chasing. And then see, okay, do we want to piggyback on that or do, do we think this will um, be a disadvantage for us? But, but that also takes a lot of time investment and it doesn't pan out in the six months that we would be there. So that's more of a, that's why it's, it's more of a second topic that we would cater to rather than the immediate one.

Speaker C: Marilla, how did you get into this

Speaker B: role?

Speaker C: What, what? Uh, because if I think about classic product management, um, there's a problem, you want to solve it, um, you lean in, you know, you, you create a solution and you get to see the problem change and you get to build something. What led you to serving the niche that you're serving? How'd you, how'd you land here?

Speaker B: Overall? I wanted to always build a company because I, I have my family as entrepreneurs. Uh, later on my uh, my life partner has, has built a few companies so the ideas was, was always there and that was also one of the reasons why I moved to, to Berlin back in 2015. But I wasn't actively chasing it. And at some point in time I started getting requests uh, to, to support with ad hoc product. Initially of course like everyone, I wanted to take a break, do a sabbatical, did the vipassana, uh, and after I kept getting this inbound request and uh, when I got to do a few of them they were more on uh, dev shop, trying to sell more developers or wanted to have product there so that the product manager or product owner, how they call them, uh, writes these tickets for devs, uh, which is like not exactly why you get up in the morning, right? This is like one artifact of our work at all. Um, and at the same time the type of clients that these uh, dev shops had were um, very traditional companies who got excited about words like agile and um, Also build things that they didn't need too soon without figuring that out. So I thought, hey, this kind of sounds cool, right? Because it's basically what I saw. There were types of companies I wouldn't want to work for, but you sometimes figure that out after you work with them. So it's kind of nice to do this in and out and figure out what, what's not for me and try to help them. Uh, but, but maybe there's also a better format to do this that is not catering to the needs of development agencies selling more developers because there's a lot of them in the world and then they can do that for themselves. Um, and while I was in these clients, I also saw a lot of pretty decks from the management consultancies and there was a very big disconnect in between because the management consultancies come with this like two four year strategy. You should do this and you should do that and so on. And then what these clients understood from it is that they just like go and build all these line items that were shown as examples in the strategy deck. Because there was like no one figuring out, okay, you need to, this is an idea, you need to test it like this. And then if that works then you need to go like that and just um, and then ended up with these like laundry lists of a lot of things to do that didn't make a coherent sense because like no one had understood like what was the product or what was they trying to do behind it. So I thought there would be maybe other people like me who would kind of like to jump in and out of things and not necessarily spend two, three years in this companies. Uh, because after a while you've all seen this in your roles, right? The learning curve dials down and, and things start to get a little bit repetitive. Um, and that was the idea behind the company. But of course for um, for the work to be good, you need to also uh, be able to select the people and, and see them for a while. And that doesn't work very well if you get freelance staff because you can't, you don't have this experience of working together. You don't have the same incentives and um, career trajectory and other things that company could offer to people to, to motivate them and bonuses. Uh, so, so that's how it all came together. From one side figuring out uh, what the market needs. On the other side, what could we do for the people so that it's interesting. And then also how do we position ourselves for the clients and how do we set ourselves up so that we uh, deliver value? Makes sense.

Speaker A: Makes sense. Um, I'm curious like when you like given sort of the way the market is right now, the market. There's a lot of market trends in terms of what happened during COVID and then everything that followed after. I'm curious how that has impacted what you do. Um, has it changed anything in terms of who seeks your, you know, your input and from your teams? Um, or has or is that stayed sort of the same? I'm curious what the, how the market has impacted that.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, it definitely changed. So I really follow financial trends because we just see them in our demand so fast. Uh, sometimes it depends on the market and that was also a way we sought to balance it out. Um, to not be perceived and not be just a company in Germany. So we gather to, to Western Europe, Nordics and UK because sometimes UK is ahead of the curve which means that we, if, if things go a bit down then, then it will be there but other times it's more based on the industry. So you mentioned Covid and A Covet. You had all the travel die down directly and that's when we were starting to build up and our initial clients were travel and mobility who went to zero very fast. Were we. But just. But then uh, some of these people that we worked with in the um, in the travel companies uh, ended up uh, going to E Commerce and E Commerce was doing very well and then they, they brought in these companies as, as clients and also gave us the idea to diversify uh, across company sizes and industries. Although a lot of consultancies just go towards oh we're automotive and we're the best at automotive. I think. I don't believe so much in this domain specificity and it felt it, it wasn't advantageous for us in product management uh, and with the type of work that we do. Um, and then we went okay, we're going to be industry agnostic, we're going to accumulate some knowledge somewhere right. Just to the nature of our work. And a lot of this knowledge is also uh, applicable. You know, if, if you've done marketplaces is going to have similar dynamics regardless of these um, being pre owned or real estate or something else. So, so things are going to repeat themselves and still we're going to benefit from this knowledge. Then uh, the, the war in Ukraine, Russia uh started and you had the zero interest rate policies died down.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And after that it's been a lot of merger and acquisition and private equity backed companies and again it's fully changed our uh, customer base from the um, high growth startups who then started like laying off people like like crazy. Um so it's like how in the past um, companies like Tier that, that were growing super strongly for a while have been our clients and, and then they were not because they were also suffering from the market dynamics and the capital crunch.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And that posed its own set of challenge because when P comes in uh, they want to make a return. They, they don't do this over investment like VCS and then like hoping that one of these uh 10xs they're more looking on 2 to 4% return and they're looking for efficiencies between the product portfolio. If they buy multiple companies in multiple markets they want to merge all of this in one platform and then operate it with a bit less staff. Uh so these were the type of gigs uh that we were also getting like harmonizing the product portfolio, figuring out how this area could be more profitable, um, switching out some, some things because uh, one of the parts is that the people that were uh, part of these companies that were acquired or merged together weren't the ones who had a say in it and, and were just doing their business as usual. So so that's where also the extra capacity was needed. Um, another part that changed in the staffing. So on one hand since we're hiring junior people and helping them get into product, um that part went super well. So we started getting extremely well qualified juniors because no one hired juniors, uh when, when the markets uh, uh dried up a bit and this then we ended up already since last year or so we had a few batches of juniors who already became mid levels very fast just because there weren't other jobs on the market. And I, I still see right now I'm approached quite often by Even mid level PMs who cannot find a role because at most people are hiring seniors or principals. Um and even that area is a bit over subscribed with the uh, first line managers who cannot find another head of product or product leader role and are also applying towards the senior in principal. So so the, the job market also changed a lot and on the clients expectations as well. There was more um, tightness of budget but at the same time the expectations increased towards expecting senior level of work from a mid level or a more junior person. Um, having a bit less forgiveness if anything like was unclear or not in the perfect shape. Uh whereas in the past they would be like oh yeah we have this discovery part or we want to do, like, innovation, something m. And it was more of, like, the motion of spinning up more things or trying out more things because capital was so cheap and they just wanted to show that they're trying various things. Um, and so it's, it's kind of interesting. Like, whatever happens in the market affects us extremely fast. Uh, and we needed to, to adapt also our internal, um, leveling and, and a lot of other things to survive in this market.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, that makes total sense. That makes total sense. So the last question we always ask everyone is, what are you excited about right now in terms of what you see out there in front of you, of you?

Speaker B: I'm excited that the space is maturing. Uh, I know it's been tough for a lot of people, including ourselves, and I think in the long run this is going to be better because products should be a, uh, business function, uh, and, and having this, uh, force that you need to fight with. And sometimes in some companies you lose. Right. And in some companies, product just ends up being delegated under tech or just taking notes from sales. But, but overall it will still be for the. You see things. I remember your LinkedIn comment that you didn't like the founder mode part. Uh, I see where that is coming from, and I also see the downsides. Like, basically you're not creating a very strong second line of leadership, uh, or even like, second and third line of leadership, and then like, more things will fall through. Um, but as a founder, I also understand the fear and urgency coming when you see a lot of stuff is falling apart and that the market is less forgiving and you, you want to do something and maybe that something is like, not the best thing that they could do. Uh, but I definitely understand the sentiment from both sides, so I'm excited. There are still some indications that things are starting to lighten up despite, uh, and, you know, despite bad news here and there. And so in, in the long term, this will be better for product in general and also for the tech, uh, world, because we've all been a bit spoiled in the last 10 years, and this cooldown was expected at some point.

Speaker A: Sure, sure. Well, thanks for coming to talk to us. This was really interesting to hear. Kind of a different perspective on how product is done. Um, so I think we appreciate it. Marilyn, did you want to say anything?

Speaker C: No. It's really lovely to meet you, uh, and learn a little bit more about your business model and what some of your challenges are. So, so thanks, thanks for, thanks for coming and talking to us and everybody that happens to listen so.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Thanks a lot.

Speaker B: Happy to be here.