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Product Thinking
Episode 202: Transforming Product Teams into Investment Partners with Fabrice des Mazery
00:45:23
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- [00:01]
A
Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
- [00:37]
B
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Joining us today is Fabrice De Masary, a distinguished product leader and entrepreneur with an impressive background in product management. Notably, he served as a Chief Product Officer of the Fork, which is part of TripAdvisor, aka the European OpenTable. There he achieved remarkable success including generating $1.4 billion in gross merchandise value, achieving 27% year over year revenue growth, and reaching profitability for the first in the history of the company. Fabrice's career has been defined by steadfast commitment to balancing user value with business impact, a philosophy shaped through his diverse experiences as an entrepreneur, product manager and advisor. From founding startups to leading growth initiatives at renowned companies like Deezer and IBM, Fabrice has cultivated a unique perspective on treating product management as a strategic investment rather than a cost center. Today he'll be sharing his insights on building product strategies with an investor's mindset, fostering partnerships with stakeholders, and the key lessons learned from both successes and setbacks. But before we talk to Fabrice, it's time for Dear Melissa. So this is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions. Go to dearMelissa.com and let me know what they are. This week's question is this. Dear Melissa, we are embarking on a big transformation program. However, the space I work in does not want to do discovery on changes to the current operating model, business processes or people changes. How do I create the awareness and influence our leadership and business partners to understand the value a service design team can bring to the transformation journey? So when we're starting a transformation like this, it is important to have a team actually manage the change management, especially in a large organization. So this can definitely be thought of as a service design team. When we're looking at trying to get people into more of a product operating model or an agile operating model. Whatever you're doing here, it's going to be a different end state than where we're at right now and it's going to affect how people do their work. It's going to affect how the business actually plans the work, thinks about budgeting, and it's going to affect people's roles. So we want to make sure that we're considering all of those factors when we actually start on this transformation journey. So if you want to influence your leadership team on this, you have to make them aware of what the changes are. A lot of times people think it's just introducing a process like Scrum or something else, and the rest will take care of itself. But how do you show them that other businesses that are operating this way are also thinking about all these different factors? There's a lot of case studies out there about businesses that have gone through transformations. I've done talks with large organizations and CPOs from them who talk through how they thought about the roles, how they thought about upskilling people, how they thought about their processes and their design. All of those things are really important. So when you're in a large organization too, in order to look at that change management, usually the head of product is the person who will be working with a team. Something like a product operations team can help you with this too, to really look at that end to end change management piece. And then they consider working with key partners to introduce role definitions, to understand different processes that have to work across organizations. They also look at how we might have to influence the way we do things like budgeting or governance or strategy reviews to actually get there. So maybe what you can do is introduce them to the way that other organizations work and show them how this is more of an undertaking here than we actually anticipated. Now, that might not be something that you can just walk in and do. A lot of organizational transformations take a long time, and where I see they start is usually by upskilling people, teaching them the new process or the role. Then what's going to happen is we are going to hit walls. So the best thing that you could do here is start by asking, what do we think this transformation is actually going to do? Right. What are the goals we're trying to hit here? And then over time measure those. And if it's things like we believe is going to increase profitability or it's going to help the business do X, Y and Z, track them, and then over time, if we're not meeting those things, we should start asking why or why not. So every transformation process should start off with really, really clear goals and metrics. We should be tracking about what we think is going to happen. And then we go back and we revisit them. That's usually when leadership starts to realize the scope of a transformation, but it could take many years to actually start to implement that. So you'll want to start there, try to define what success looks like. And then if we can't measure success or we don't see we're successful, that starts opening up the conversation to what else is needed. We go out, we look at the landscape of things. That's where a service design team can come in and help with that change management. So I hope that helps. It usually does take organizations quite a while and a lot of trial and error to get to that point. So I think there's a lot of patience aspect on here, but it's good to just bring awareness of how other people are doing it and what scope was needed and maybe introduce it from there to start. That's it for Dear Melissa this week. If you have questions for me, Remember, go to DearMelissa.com and let me know what they are. Now let's go talk to Fabrice. Are you eager to dive into the world of angel investing? I was too, but I wasn't sure how to get started. I knew I could evaluate the early stage companies from a product standpoint, but I didn't know much about the financial side. This is why I joined Hustle Fund's Angel Squad. They don't just bring you opportunities to invest in early stage companies, they provide an entire education on how professional investors think about which companies to fund. Product leaders make fantastic angel investors. And if you're interested in joining me at Angel Squad, you can learn more at Hustlefund VC mp. Find the link in our show notes. Welcome Fabrice. It's great to have you here.
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C
Well, thank you Mitchell for having me.
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B
So you have had a long, illustrious product career. You have worked at TripAdvisor, many of these other places. Can you tell us a little bit about what brought you into the field of product management and a little bit of history of how you've been leading teams?
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C
Yeah, so I really started by chance. I created a company 20 years ago now, 22 actually. Let's say that I'm kind of a boomer now and I really started, I am in legal tech in something that was just not existent. I didn't know anything about products, about engineering, about design. I was a low student, right. So I just saw an opportunity. I was getting bored at what I was doing at university, so creating the first company which I crashed and it pushed me to wonder why I had crashed. I wanted to know exactly. So this is where I Actually started to read books, crossing the chasm, reading books from Alan Cooper, from Don Norman. And it took me more than I think seven years before understanding that I had a job which called product manager, thanks to Marty, actually the first edition of his book. And that's how I really became a product guy.
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B
So since you got into the product community, you also led TripAdvisor. Can you tell me a little bit about what you were doing there?
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C
Yeah. So I was CPO of one of the three big brands of the group, TripAdvisor, which is the fork you could consider. It's kind of the European and open table, if you will. And I jump into a company which had been the leader in Europe for 15 years, but how could I say that in a state when everything was going okay and you're still the leader and you have competitors here and there, but you have to be ready to rethink how you do your business. And that's always hard. So I joined the company to rethink it to go from a business that was only fee based to a business that could be a sustainable marketplace. And that was quite exhilarating because the people that you're helping at the end are risk writers. And in Europe especially after one year you have 30 or 40% of these risk to others. We did actually stop the business. It's failure rate which is as high as the startups. So it's really, really great to bring more than people, but to bring help people build that success through technology in a field which is by definition building experiences which are not technological.
- [08:24]
B
I am actually starting a restaurant in South Carolina, so this is really interesting to me. My sister is the restaurant person though she's running it. We're just doing this together when you came in there and we're looking at the business model and the product, you know, at the fork. What were some of the problems that you noticed that you could be solving for restaurateurs and how to help them succeed better?
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C
To be honest, there are two things. The first thing is that you never know who you need to compare with. When you're a restaurateur. You could think that it's their neighbor, but it might not be the place where people go when they think about an alternative to yours. The second thing is that you could think that your competitor is on your street, but maybe it's not. So the first thing is how to give you comparison to know are you going in the right direction and who you should actually consider as your main competitor. So it really data, but the Second part is one of the things that we bring. Just like Google Reserve, Opensable, whatever is just people, it's just not even leads, it's real people because it's leads that's going to be by definition going to pay only if people come. So it's a pure success metric, right, as direction that a lot of SaaS companies are taking today. But the thing is that that could be you or me, you just pay exactly the same price. And maybe as a restaurateur, I want people that are more open to the kind of cuisine that I'm doing or the experience I want to deliver. So try to push a little bit. Which are the people that you need to actually find this fit, People that will love your experience, talk about it, come back instead of just having people just like a Martin, I don't know, Stein, you have an open, an empty chair, you want someone on your chair. It's more than this, right? So you want to push them to define what could be their own success. How do they look at their success and try to help them with data and with the right people to actually reach that success.
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B
You know, this reminds me a little bit about, I feel like helping leaders set strategy too, right? Like what are, what are we really trying to do here? Right. What does success really mean to you? And in a lot of your talks, you have been talking about shifting product managers mindsets from being that of just builders to that of investors. Can you tell me a little bit about what does that actually mean and how do you shift your mindset into being an investor?
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C
You have to start from the beginning. So you work in the U.S. so in the U.S. i'm going to draw a big caricature there. I'm sorry for that. But the business acumen is something which is inherently cultural. In the US it's not at all the fact that when it comes to Europe, I'd say at least France, Italy and Spain, for example, the product management came out of the IT department, not on the business department. So culturally there was always been some difficulties of people considering themselves as a business function and not as an IT function. And even the rest of the company still has this bias view of what you're doing. So you've been pushed to talk about discovery, talk about what you should do and the fact that it's complicated and you first see uncertainty, but people in front of you don't understand. All they want is to know when this specific feature would actually get out. So we've been, I'd say, battling against the profitability call with what I call product explaining. Okay, we talk about all these frameworks which people don't understand and we need to stop doing that. That's for me, the first thing, forget discovery, think about what it means for the people in front of you. So you talk about risk. Everybody understand the risk. We, when it comes to finance, of course, you consider different risk of an investment. So first thing is that which are the risks that are actually, in a way jeopardizing the my ability to build what I'm building and reach my targets. The second part for me is really beyond doing metric trees, which are great, but so many people tend to forget that you need to prove causation. It's not just growing it because it's satisfactory. And then you're going to say 1, 2% here, 3% here, you need to build a model and you think so that the third part is really thinking about whatever investment that you're doing with your team when it comes to time represents money. So if you take a typical team in Europe, it's going to be 1 million euros a year that you're going to invest, right? So it's the time plus, of course, things debit profit at 1 million. When will you have a payback for that? And usually people don't understand. They say, okay, I'm building the feature. First thing is that what was the cost of it, the real cost? Second part is, okay, when will I have net margin of, I don't know, 150k because I spent six weeks of that. No one thinks about that. That might be the most important thing to talk about with your teams and with your, with this as stakeholders. So you have different level of risk. Discoverability, discovery are here to mitigate that. That's okay. You have different level of risk depending on who you are on your teams, on the opportunities that are in front of you. And at the end of the year, as a cpo, all I'm interested in is how you're going to take that 1 million euro and invest it wisely so that at the end I have more engagement and more money in the bank. And that's for me, where we need to shift our mindset from frameworks, processes and fancy jargon that we have and talking about money, roi, payback and margin.
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B
I couldn't agree with you more on here. And I do see everybody get lost in this process trap where I see it the most too. And I would say this is not just a European thing. I think large corporations have exactly what you're. You're talking about here and a lot of the US ones I work with, the leaders understand the ROI piece and they talk about the money, but the, the teams are still talking about process, right? They're still deep into that. So really like I don't think that's a hard and fast rule. And when we were in France, I love product comp. Everybody was asking me about that too. They were like, why, why are we so stuck in like agile over here and in Europe there? And I was like, lots of, lots of companies in the US are in the same spot. It's not just Europe, but where I also hear a lot of pushback to. What you're saying when, when I say it to people too is from people who work on these back end teams. Right? Like you work in a bank and you are responsible for helping to do the APIs that execute trades, right? Or you're building the platform that settles them and does all that. And they ask how am I supposed to show roi? Like my leaders want to see the roi. They want to see that we're doing this. But I work on the technical aspects of it, right? I'm not selling this directly to the customers. How do you help people really trace those ROI all the way back to their product? And what do you tell people who ask you questions like that?
- [15:15]
C
Usually I have a twofold answer. The first thing is what would happen if what you actually building crashed? What would be the cost? And I had a discussion some time ago with a big bank called the bnp, which you might know, and they were talking about safe. And I know that's one of your favorite topics, right? And I have an open discussion about that. And they were so frustrated about it and say, yeah, but the IT director, he wants something which is predictable. So yeah, I can't understand that if you crash, it's not going to be millions going to billions that you're going to lose that. That's huge. So I understand why he is so stressed of making sure that things would just go on. It's not even about performance, it's about making things work. So the first thing is are you building something or are you actually building something which is called what are called an insurance, right? Just like when you're doing a factoring, the idea is that if I don't do it or if that crashes, what would be the cost? So the first thing for me ROI is I'm here to make sure that we're not losing money. That's kind of roi. The second part is trying to make a Link between what you do and the tasks that are doing. What is the value of the task? And as an introduction we're talking about you, you and I about protocols, the formula, the same thing. We know that time to task is damn important. And what is the value of earning? I don't know, 2 seconds, 10 seconds, 1 minute hard of a task. And that could be the same thing for the developers. I've been building a platform that developers going to use. If I have my answer right away instead of having to wait for two minutes, if it's easy for me to understand, easy for me to build or learn, it has a value. You need to make sure that when you scale it, you can actually measure it. And for me gets back to the internal ROI as your multiplier of whatever the other teams are going to scale. So yeah, it's 10x10x10x10x and at the end you might have a millionx. And that's thanks to you.
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B
One piece of this where I think people get confused too is like what do they own versus the teams around them, right? Like sometimes it's rare that a single scrum team in a really large organization, let's say, can impact the overall metric thing, right? They're like we have to. Metric thing is such a weird way of saying that. But impact, impact, let's say the overall cost in like a super dramatic way, right? It takes like coordination between many people to. To work towards these initiatives. How do you help explain that to people and show them, you know, the, the leading indicators to move that up or the parts that you're working on and how it contributes back to the, the whole. And then flip side of that too, right? Like how as a product manager should I explain to executives too that what I'm doing contributes to that whole. Right. Like I might not solely be responsible to it.
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C
It's always tricky. We all tend to use KPI trees because I say it's easy to link things. But as long as you don't really work with the finance team to have a model, it's going to be just hypothetics. And I know at Hard Liz to I'd say go beyond the frontiers of your own department and talk to people that you usually talk to when it comes to costs and not to roi. So the first thing is forget that usually finance people are really, really happy to go beyond costs. They are interested deeply by helping you and not talking only about the data, but really helping you modelize what is the real value of what to do. So that's that first thing, don't stay alone, don't talk only to data analyst, go and talk to the finance part. The second part for me is if it's really hard to do because yeah, you just one piece of it and you just have a small part and if the authors are not doing whatever, you're not going to have an impact. I tend to focus on the customer outcomes and that could be a bit cheesy. Right. But one of the things that I see in metric trees or that I don't see is the customer. We tend to be data driven but the data is a compass, not the bad. Right. So it's just consequence of what you do. Sorry for stating the obvious, but sometimes it's needed. So which kind of outcome was actually contributing to not only the metric, but if I do that, and I love people to do this, if they allow people to do this, I passed away or whatever. This has actually consequence on retention or brand or acquisition or conversion, whatever. And sometimes it just help you trying to say to an executive that if you don't do anything on it, what's going to be the consequences? Going back to that. Right. If people have a time the task risk is that long. We see the implication it has on our activation, ergo on our engagement. So without me, this is what would happen. Just going back to that. In fact, I'll give another example link to the restaurant. But everyone has a restaurant has a specific role. And you could say that I don't know if Melissa which is responsible of making sure that the desserts are done correctly, you could say that that's okay. I still can sell things. Yeah but the desserts might be 30% of the notes. That would be why people are staying long while they take coffee, et cetera. So if I'm not.
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B
Yeah.
- [20:43]
C
What's going to happen is really for me the first question that you think about and sometimes the answer is, okay, it's not going to make no change. And then you might think of changing the. Or going elsewhere.
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B
Yeah. Or moving to a different part of the product. And that that was an issue too that I saw when a lot of companies started transforming to agile. They had everybody over every little piece of the product. But that didn't necessarily mean you should be enhancing that piece of the product. It might work fine today. And that's always a concern too with this whole mindset that you're talking about as well, you know, treating yourself as an investor, thinking about it that way when you're trying to work with stakeholders, especially ones who are kind of like just get it done right. I just want to see products right. They don't understand quite the whole product management landscape. How do you get them to start thinking as what you call co investors instead of just people who are demand that you build X, Y and Z.
- [21:37]
C
Usually it starts with the loss aversion, right? Everybody is loss averse. Nobody wants to be responsible of investing in something which has zero return. Anyone would be. That's going to have consequences on me, my team, my position, my credibility, whatever. I'm sorry, it's a bit cruel but I like to play with those emotions. So I usually I'm in a situation, for example big companies or with some salespeople, not all sales people who gonna be just like what you depict. I want that done. And it might even be that you're internally considered as kind of a studio, right. So you cannot play as if it was your money because they will never consider you as an investor. So play with it. Play as if you were a financial advisor. So you say, okay, what I'm good at in product is building things. Right. But it's assessing the risk. If we give me that level of money at that time. So 3 months, 300k for example. And you want that result. Okay, considering what I know about what you're pushing as an investment, the risk of you missing the target is 90%. So are you ready to go on and being responsible of that? Because my only responsibility as a financial advisor, it tells you what is level of risk and what are the odds of missing the target. So usually make people think differently and say, you know, I can help you because I'm good at this. That's what we're good at. De risking situations. All the frameworks that we have and the tools are here for that delivery is the easy part. Even if people don't understand that it's kind of the easy part compared to the rest. So starting to make things like this is the first thing. The second part is what they're going to invest. So I take coinvestors. It's not co investor in terms of putting really money on the table. It is okay, you're talking about a feature, but just building a feature is not going to make it. I'd say pop everywhere and people will. There's no build it and they will come as we used to say. So let's add 50% of my cost on the go to market and go to customer. Are you ready to invest this kind of money? Which risk do you see on the go to market Parts. And at the end, how can you not give me any insurance but at least prove or help me prove that I was going to have a payback on my investments and you will too. And when exactly? Because I have plenty of other investments, right. I have 1 million euros a year to invest. So if I can this there is money that I don't invest elsewhere. Everybody understand that? But which are the figures that gonna help me and help you prove to one of the management that we should have our payback in six months, nine months, one year. And what you're gonna do to make sure that it happens and if you don't do it well, I'm not gonna be the one responsible. So that's, that's why I said having skin in the game, it's not only about asking for things that you know that I'm not going to do the go to market instead of you. I'm not the one that's going to push the sales to pitch that. I'm not the one that's going to call leads. It's going to be you, it's going to be your teams. If you don't put the money, the right resources on the table, we're going to fail. So that helps you to bring whatever you can bring on the table to make sure it's a success. Usually people start thinking differently when you answer in that way. And I'm not even talking about saying no here. I'm talking about are you okay with this level of risk? And usually people are not.
- [25:18]
B
After working with hundreds of companies to transform product management, I've discovered one thing that consistently holds both organizations and product managers back from reaching their full potential. The ability to craft great product strategy. That's why I created Product Institute's latest course Mastering Product Strategy. I've taken my hands on experience and turned it into interactive lessons that will teach you exactly how to create strategies that drive real business results. Lock in your spot now during the pre sale with code holiday and save $200 before December 31st. Visit productinstitute.com today. I worked with a VP of Product once who printed out a bunch of money on a piece of the paper and labeled them all and gave the stack of investment to the leaders that he was trying to get the prioritization requirements from. And he outlined everything that you were just kind of talking about like here's, here's our trade off decisions, here's where we are, here's where we could de risk things. Where would you put your money? And they talked through it all and he said like just handing them something that seemed like cash made them realize, oh, all of this actually does cost money and we need to be thinking about our different risk profiles and how we're investing in here. And it kind of changed the entire perspective of what they were working towards. So I thought that was a really cool exercise with it. What are the types of prioritization activities or things that you would do with stakeholders to get alignment around those things? Would you run a meeting? What kind of frameworks would you use to help build your case here?
- [26:46]
C
Actually I have two logics here. The first logic would be if I have, I would say modern product organization when I have teams responsible of whatever area impact teams, P3 teams, I don't really care as long as I have a clear AOI link to the strategy. Right. I usually are trying to build not really cases, but I want what I call pitches. I want them to bring things which is we think there might be something interesting here. I don't want you to over engineer business case because I've never seen a honest business case in my life ever. Even if you build it, you still have this optimism bias. So just bring a pictures and can build things together. Which is one way saying if it enters my prioritization principles, we can do it now if you have a more, I'd say less modern organization. What I built in the past was what I call investment forums. So the idea was really to take the risk, the discussions and the decisions together. So not here as for example defending your country if you're a country manager, but making sure that whatever investment that we are doing is what's going to help the company. I'll give you an example. When I was working at the fork, we had four country managers. And in the past if someone from Spain was interested by something, they will do this. We all know that this list of whatever they want, which is let's say refined enough for them to make sure that you cannot say it's not interesting because they can say I know on my market that blah blah blah and that was always a pain that what we built was a way for all the countries to take a look of whatever proposals were made by the others and they're going to judge if that's interesting for the oil markets. So is there something in Spain that pushed by Spain could be interesting in Germany if it's not, well, we might have a problem there because Germany would say I'd like something which is good for me too. So you start changing the relationship between okay, we are responsible of selecting the things that should have the best impact for all of us. And so you're really here to make the decision. We build the process so that we have I'd say pitches that are trusting, pitches that have been challenged before. But at the end we all responsible of the investment decisions. One of the things which is great is that if it fails, they are on stage with me. Right. So I'm not the only one responsible. And of course you've had succeeds. We. We are all together there. But I know that it started to. We started to see a kind of behavior of people doing roadmaps without even talking about roadmaps. I vividly remember one example of someone from Spain who had pushed an opportunity and we all agreed that it was interesting, but not right now. And the answer that she gave was I understand. I hope that maybe in the future we might be able to invest in that which would not was kind of saying let's see what happens and we'll see all together if that's going the right direction. Right. It's not trying to plan some things eight months ahead. One year before it might have been that unfair. We're going to call the CEO. We're going to do whatever first so that you put it in the roadmap. So they felt responsible of the success and responsible of the failure and responsible of the right usage of our resources. So we changed drastically the relationship that we had all together that began to be a good relationship and start to make friends with them before that would be completely impossible, to be honest.
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B
When you look at building those relationships too, what do you think is important for product managers to keep in mind?
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C
Well, I think first thing is trying to understand that everybody has a target in the company. And we should usually because we facing uncertainty and we integrated that in the way that we think about things. We. We think in bets. It's more poker than chess. Right. And we accepted that. A lot of people hate uncertainty. They absolutely hate it. So they have targets which are at the end of the month. And we tend to say yeah, but you know, we cannot really anticipate whatever. And that's unbearable because they. They think we are being responsible. And I, I heard that a lot. A lot of times get a product they cannot commit to anything even to when you're going to launch a feature for them. It should be easy. They understand maybe they misunderstand. They imagine engineers as people that are able to transport specs into whatever features. So you should be able to tell me that the end of June that Should be out, right? That's the only thing that I can answer. I don't understand what gibberish you're talking about, all the rest, but at least that could be solid, right? And no, we cannot do that. We always say it's complicated. So the first thing is, yeah, they have targets. And if you need to talk to them, you need to talk with their own language. You need to ask questions about business, how many leads you could get in three months after the feeder results, and what is your percentage that you have today between number of calls and the number of close deals. Ask them the kind of questions, use their own language, don't use yours. That's really the best thing that you could do to make people understand that you understand them. It's going back to empathy. Right? But internal empathy and using people's language and not yours.
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B
I think that's an important thing for product managers to remember. I feel like we empathize a lot with our customers, but sometimes people are not thinking about internally with the stakeholders or the leaders in their organization. Instead, we think these are these, you know, people would just scream at us to get things done. And we forget they're humans too. So one of the things I wanted to talk about too was kind of you talk about this talk, act like an owner, challenged, like a vc. And you discussed the importance of evaluating product decisions with a VC mindset too. Does that change the way that you think about product investments like we're talking about, or is it a similar type of framework here?
- [32:59]
C
Well, for me, there's a way of looking at the different opportunities that you have and looking at the team part. So usually this is going to say that, yeah, I'd like to make only deals that transform into unicorns, but, you know, it's never going to happen. So you're conscious that you need to diversify your portfolio. That's the first thing. And second thing is that, you know, you invest in teams and not really in products and you can reproduce that way of thinking when it comes to your product investments. So, udsa, there are three types of investments, and that's the same thing if you are a product manager or different kind of ET head or cpu, whatever. The first thing is what I call strategic investments, which are directly correlated with the okrs. If you have cards, the strategy that you have, which are things that's going to push the product into the right direction and that should represent 60, 70% of what you do really depends on. That's kind of a, I'd say, rule of thumb. Right. Let's say 60% and then you have low hanging fruits. Formally hanging fruits are a mix of. Sometimes enablers start to do for the other things, but they need to be able to operate. So if salespeople or ops or marketing wants to migrate to braze and they say that's important from them, of course you need a way to assess it compared to the other enablers, but it's not because it's not directly linked to a feature that is not important for the business of the company. So you need to accept to spend a little bit of time there. Refactoring is a bit like a tech enabler. Right. And you have micro optimizations which I think that not a lot of roi but not a lot of risk too. So sometimes you need those small improvements, small things because I don't know, you're spending more time at discovery and you have your team that is a bit in an idle state. So it's lower. Yeah, but low risk, the product is kind of the needs the mid, high or medium high risk, same thing for a while. And then you have bets, I like to talk about bets when it comes to things that are really, really undul and these kinds of projects that you're okay to, I don't know, spend three weeks every year on things that could build the future of the company, things that could be. You could lose the three weeks altogether and that's okay. But if you don't do it well, you might just be replaced by others, you might miss the next wave of technology, et cetera. So you just could get killed by the market. And the way that you consider your investments should be just like this in saying I might have one bed, it might be unicorn, it might disappear. Then I have a strategic ones and I know that bit by bit I should have money. And if it costs low hanging, that's lowest. But at least I have a return for one thing. Well, say that because some investments can be better than the others. You never know before. You should have a kind of a balance. And any investment know and investor knows that you need a balance to make sure that at the end of the year that you're going to reach your target. Now going to the teams part, the risk aversion of people is different. Usually people that work in platforms, for example, they're more risk averse. And as an investor you should consider that you cannot ask any teams or any team members to face the same level of risk. So if you're working on in the startup, everything is a bet, right? You pre pmf, everything is a beta. If you try to push people from big companies that are attached to their level of security, asking them to act like a pre PLs startup, it's never going to work. Okay. It's a fantasy. Never going to work. Same thing for platforms. You can make them think a little bit like investors, but maybe they are more, I'd say bankers, that's Wall street investors. So you need to accept that. The last part is if you push people into a direction when you're going to create anxiety because they're not okay with that, is how you actually push people to burnout. So that's not just a detail. That's really, really important. And that's really important for you as a product manager and especially for you as a leader.
- [37:24]
B
When you're trying to evaluate if you can push somebody in, taking a more risky bet or trying to cultivate like this is a safe space. Right. We talk about that a lot. How do we build safety so people don't be so risk adverse? What would you do as a leader to kind of assess if you're going to push your teams too hard and burn them out and try to make sure that they understand they're not getting fired for trying something.
- [37:45]
C
I would link two things. The first thing is really experience. I've been the founder three times, so as a cpo I'm perfectly okay with failure because I know that if you fail on one investment, you have all investment to get it back. And that's. Well, in a way at the end you have some kind of a acceptable average performance. I see not the. For me the problem is not really the safe place itself is how people feel internally, that matters to me. I know you are, but I know if everyone knows about the flow state in psychology, but we try to push ourselves beyond our level comfort to push performance. And if you want to go higher, you need to be in excited state but not in anxiety state. And I see naturally some teams that are more eager to take risks. They are more eager to invest time at improving their learning velocity, taking some shortcuts if they need to. And that's absolutely okay to push something in production. That's the easiest way to actually learn something. And I've seen all the teams that are really, really scholar in a way that they consider the process. It's just like what you were talking about before. And for me it's a symptom. Someone which is scared of getting out of the of the box in a way. Right. So I'm more attentive to okay, do I have someone? She's more of a project product manager than really a product manager. Do I feel like the team wants to go beyond their natural comfort zone naturally? Do they ask for challenge? Do they, are they okay with being challenged? These are all the symptoms that show me that I can push them to take those risks, assume the consequences and not get burned out through the process. Then it's my responsibility to as a leader, when I talk to other leaders and talk about the investment that we're making, make sure that the ambition is clearly stated right from the beginning, even if it's just 2 to 4% improvement. And no 3 dots 21 which I sometimes see right at the beginning of a product investment, which is completely crazy. It's too precise. If I need to make people understand that what we're looking for is kind of a yearly performance and not the performance of every investment compared to the others. So that really on my shoulders to pretend that way to be honest.
- [40:22]
B
So looking back on your career, if there's a product manager who's listening to this and says I want to be a more profitability focused product manager, what types of skills would you recommend that they cultivate?
- [40:33]
C
Well, the first thing is going to back to that but beyond data is trying to understand how the business works. It's more curiosity of spending time with salespeople, spending time with lead generation people really getting connected with how hard it is to sell not because the product is bad, but because well having the ICP in front of you and making sure the right moment, etc. Etc. It's hard, right? And we, a lot of people that I know are scared at selling things. It's not even that they're not interested. They're scared. They might say that okay, I'm. It's not noble enough but that's not really an excuse. They just don't know about it. So for me that that really the first thing. The second thing is it's going to be a bit weird to say that but the second skill that I consider is your ability to kill your own optimism bias. Right. So we are optimists in product people. We all think that whatever new feature that we're building is going to be better that what that what was before. Right. If you're not on Optimist, you're not a product people. It's absolutely impossible. But trying to consider scenarios, not just black and white, now it's working and it's not working different scenarios, what could happen? What is worst case scenario? What's the Best case scenarios, how people could react, what could happen, not only for mitigating risk, but only to consider that whenever you're doing some discovery, you're not discovering only about are people able to use it or people are saying that they want to build it, but what if I'm unable to have great, go to customer, no discoverability of the feature, et cetera, et cetera. So considering all the process of people buying something instead of only thinking about people using something, and for me it's a big help and maybe because I used to be a founder, so I have to sell things okay. And with my own money, so it changes things a little bit. The last part for me is if you want to be more profitable estate, you need to think of your process as a multiplier. So when it comes to taking decisions, you need to be okay with taking bad decisions. And that's okay as long as you never know what's going to be the result. The perfect process is not at all a guarantee of a good outcome. That's how life is based. And that's because we face uncertainty when it comes to human nature. Right. So I tend to push people to say, well, don't wait. If you're doing an A B test for the perfect statuses, look for a way to cap the investment that you're making. If it's five days, that's five days you have a trend that's okay. If just multiply the tests at the end, maybe, I don't know, 20% of the test would give you something wrong, but 80% is going to give you something right. So it's not the quality of the decision that really matters, it's the velocity of the decision that really matters. And that way of looking at things on the process or parallelizing things or being okay with imperfect information and saying, I'm not going to spend more than one week doing that discovery. And that's if it's more than that, we I'm not going to do that test and be okay with that. It's a special, I'd say, superpower that I've seen in usually in people that are very senior ICs in products, rarely seen that engineers really seen that in leaders. It's a special species of people that you definitely can give them whatever critical strategic problem and you know they're going to be that 10x for real and not just for the image because they are able to be so quick at making decisions and that's failing that in a way they're going to find the value where it is.
- [44:39]
B
I think that's really great advice for all of our product people out there listening. Fabrice, thank you so much for being on the podcast. If people want to learn more about you, where can they go?
- [44:48]
C
Well, LinkedIn, that's the easiest way. And well, if they're really interested, I have plenty of videos of talks here and there. I'm do it for the passion, not really for the business. So if you have any questions about it, feel free to ping me and I'm going to send you a bill because you sent me a question on LinkedIn.
- [45:07]
B
Well, thank you very much for that. Hopefully everybody sends you a lot of questions. We will put all of your links too at our show notes@productthinkingpodcast.com thank you all for listening to the Product Thinking podcast. We'll be back next week with another amazing guest and if you have any questions for me in the meantime, go to dear melissa.com and let me know what they are. Thank you.
- [45:25]
C
Thank you.