Product Management

Innovation Platform

My Role
Product Manager
Timeline
Apr 2021 - Jun 2023

I applied product management best practices to lead the project team to success in record time.

Overview of my process to lead the project:

The Story

1. Design Thinking: Understanding Users

I led the team to regularly engage with users from different countries, focusing on understanding their pain points and working methods.

I set a goal for the team to have one conversation with a user per week, which evolved into daily user interactions during some weeks.

By listening to users discuss their challenges, we clustered these into main discovery areas and identified the riskiest assumptions.

I guided the team in creating a learning plan as the central element of our product roadmap.

We tested ideas through 1-week prototypes and no-code websites, gaining invaluable insights from user reactions.

This approach allowed us to prioritize features intelligently and focus efforts on what provided the most value to users.

Focus: My Process for Creating Personas

I champion innovation by starting with the customer and working backwards.

Personas help us summarize and share our understanding of users, avoiding self-referential design.

2. Lean Startup: Launching a Minimum Viable Product

I coached the team to launch the product very early, just after three months of development, even though it was incomplete and had bugs.

If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
Reid Hoffman

Despite initial embarrassment, this early launch allowed us to have more insightful conversations with users, leading to a more reliable and effective roadmap.

Focus: My Process for Running Lean Experiments

I use lean experiments to quickly gather insights and prioritize building the most relevant features, saving time and resources.

Tools we used:

  • Umso: Quick value proposition testing.
  • Bubble: Advanced responsive web applications.
  • Webflow: Animated responsive landing pages.
  • Glide: Rapid mobile app concepts.
  • Figma: High-fidelity prototype design.
  • Miro: Real-time low-fidelity prototypes.
  • UserTesting: Remote unmoderated user testing.
  • Feedback Loop: Customer feedback collection.

3. Agile & Scale: From Early Adopters to Global Employees

After identifying product-market fit, I transitioned the team from startup mode to an industrial approach to scale the product within the organization.

I defined and set north star metrics to measure engagement, adoption, retention, and user satisfaction.

I coached the agile team to be fully autonomous in completing delivery and discovery tasks, adhering to product management best practices.

We implemented global transformation and acculturation actions with the change management team, including creating and animating a community of power users to share feedback and participate in co-design workshops.

Focus: My Process and Tools for Creating a Product Roadmap

A product roadmap is crucial for aligning vision, communicating team progress, gaining leadership buy-in, and collecting feedback.

  • A high-level roadmap gives the execs a 12-month inspiring overview of the product vision, goals, and capabilities.
  • A dev roadmap breaks down the product goals into 2-week sprint goals with feature prioritization for the next three months.
  • A user-facing roadmap shared on an online tool provides visibility on work in progress and invites user feedback.

Tools I use to build a roadmap: Notion, Trello, Jira, Asana, monday.com, ProductBoard.

Top 3 Takeaways

  1. Insights from user interactions with prototypes are valuable, but those from a ready-to-use product are even better.
  2. Rapid product delivery, even if incomplete, ensures quality by enabling quick roadmap adjustments.
  3. Users love co-building products, fostering a sense of competence and pride, and leveraging the community-led product co-design advantage.