Continuing with the series of entries on “Product Management from the Trenches”, today I focus on my initial steps as CPO, from landing at the company to my first decisions.
Let’s recall the starting situation: a new CPO at a company where product management had never been practiced, recently acquired by a PE fund, where my role as CPO was imposed by this fund, and as the first new person on the executive committee where members had known and worked together for 20 years. Sometimes I say, though it may be politically incorrect, that I was the adopted child that nobody wanted.
Here, I recall the disclaimer from the first post in this series, noting this is my experience and learning. These writings might not include all contexts or thoughts that crossed my mind, and others with different experiences might have made other decisions. We will never know and it doesn’t really matter. What is important is that you draw your own conclusions and, hopefully, a couple of ideas for your future ventures in product management or any other field, as I believe there is significant transferability from this experience to other roles and industries.
Having made the disclaimer, let’s get to the core. After the lengthy selection process that included several business cases and free strategic consulting about the organization, I joined the company’s discipline.
Before fully entering, a brief note on free strategic consulting: I am aware that in these roles, your technical abilities are demonstrated through such scenarios and artifacts, but I believe they should be limited and equivalently rewarded—not necessarily paid, but with good feedback on points of agreement or disagreement. Any solution can be valid due to the usual lack of context, and what matters is how you reach those conclusions. However, I’ve found myself in situations where I made a relatively large effort for such roles, only to be told later that I only had 2 years of equivalent experience. This is what I call crappy feedback, feedback that adds nothing and shows a total lack of professionalism. First, because that lack of experience should have been apparent from reading the CV, and second, although experience can’t be replaced, there are people who learn much more from their roles than others in the same positions. I always say that one year in a startup is equivalent to four years in a corporate environment.
With this context established, let’s now explore how I faced the initial challenges. On my first day, I experienced non-existent onboarding, a brief chat with the CEO, a tour of the office, a temporary laptop, and office keys handed over with a “let there be product”. At that moment, I felt somewhat helpless and in shock as I felt abandoned—meaning no path had been prepared for the success of this position. There is extensive literature and studies on the correlation between good employee onboarding and their tenure and success at a company. I won’t detail here but will leave you a couple of links [1] AND [2].
Thus, I had to create my own onboarding. What I did was initiate a set of conversations that allowed me to understand the environment I was going to operate in at various levels: people, processes, and industry dynamics. Conversations that I believe should be approached from a curiosity standpoint, especially when you detect seemingly incoherent situations. Don’t judge; try to understand the context in which decisions were made and check how that context has changed if it has.
In this line, I began to 1) research relationships between departments, understanding not only the official and functional org chart of the company but also the unofficial and personal one. In the end, companies are made up of people, and there is a history of relationships that determine the relationship between departments (e.g., issues of nepotism, internal conflicts, etc.) 2) establish relationships with key people, taking a good number of coffees to understand the different challenges and points of view of relevant people within the organization. Especially relevant to me as CPO was the relationship with the CTO, since product and technology are interlinked, and it’s crucial to work on this relationship from the beginning. 3) understand what documentation was available, where the knowledge bases were. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much documentation, a lot of tacit knowledge in the organization, and no culture of documentation—only some individuals, perhaps for their own survival, had developed certain artifacts that would prove quite useful in the long term. And last but not least, 4) understand the competitive dynamics of the industry: positioning of different players, products (including ours), differentiation variables, long-term vision of the portfolio, etc. In this last part, conversations with the CMO helped me a lot to understand this, as well as the documentation the fund had prepared during the due diligence process of the purchase. And 5) also importantly, understand the product lifecycle, which activities and people were involved from the ideation of initiatives to be developed until they were delivered to customers, what the decision and implementation process was like, and going further, what the process of retiring them was like.
Regarding this last point, the reality was somewhat discouraging. Although the software life cycle was reasonably controlled with a slightly modified but functional Scrum, what originally concerned me the most was how decisions about initiatives to pursue were made, which basically had a backlog created from ideas by the C-level who had a meeting with the product owners to maintain an Excel sheet with three columns, 1) priority: from 1 to 2 (🤯), 2) brief description of what needed to be done (in barely a tweet 🙈) and 3) team responsible for doing it. Spectacular, right? It did not make sense to me that a company of certain size continued making those decisions in such a way: 1) using the most expensive resources of the organization 2) that did not empower teams to develop their own initiatives based on objectives, which meant with every doubt or difficulty encountered along the way during implementation, teams required the intervention of a C-level person, with the associated and limited availability and scalability of the model.
On the other hand, this approach made me think two things 1) darn, they’ve been doing this for 20 years and they sold the company, it can’t be that bad, as I reflected with some people from the C-level, it wasn’t that they had achieved that success thanks to that way of working, but in spite of it. Obviously, there are other variables, initiatives, and derivatives that had led them to that success, and 2) that although I might be shocked, I knew it was very easy to improve the situation with four quick actions (quick wins) to start releasing the executives from microdecisions and start empowering the teams.
By the way, there’s a very good book on how to approach the first days at a company that helped me a lot called The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins.
Not content with the complexity of the situation, in terms of information availability and uncertainty, I hoped to take at least a couple of months to understand all these dynamics, slowly but surely. However, I had to get moving quickly because my first mission as CPO, the first task I was entrusted with on the second day after my arrival, was to create a strategic roadmap for the next two years of the company. At that moment, I again thought, how on earth am I going to do this if I just landed? So there I was, without onboarding and wildly, without having stepped on a construction site in my life (NOTE: the company was mainly positioned in the construction industry) and without much idea of the products, the processes, the industry and its competitive dynamics I had to present that roadmap for the next two years, mission impossible or not? I was going to have to get moving very quickly if I wanted to deliver work up to my standards of quality.
When I find myself in these types of situations, I have learned not to panic and always remember a phrase from Javier G. Recuenco that he mentioned in the seminar on complex problem solving at UNIR, which is the following, you have to learn that despite feeling totally incompetent, you have to be functional, and that’s what I’ve learned to identify that feeling of incompetence, in reality from the impostor syndrome, and in the end be functional. I think this has defined a bit my way of understanding product management. There will be situations where you have no clue how to continue, but still try to put something together that makes sense that allows you to understand what the next step is with some criterion. I knew given the onboarding I had experienced, no cavalry was going to come to help me solve this problem so I tried to find solutions outside, and talking with my friend Timour, he helped me put things into perspective, he said you are an “executive” now so you have to figure it out and do things that may not be so obvious and that they are not going to explicitly ask you to do, so do what you think needs to be done. Faced with these challenges, I decided to wear the hat of CSO, Chief Strategy Officer, and with the help of my colleague, I resorted to proven strategic tools: one of these was the balance score card, which would allow me to have a framework of thought to tackle this problem of creating a roadmap in record time. Let’s see how this tool facilitated better planning and execution of the task in question.
Basically, this tool allows you through the definition of a main goal, in my case, increasing EBITDA, to define several subgoals, usually between three and five that lead you to that main goal, in my case I won’t discuss them for obvious reasons, but they have to do with improving processes, organic and inorganic growth.
From these three subgoals, what you define are a series of activities, initiatives, or strategic objectives in four dimensions: 1) Economic and Financial, 2) Customer, 3) Internal business or operational, and 4) Innovation and learning. All of these, you relate in the different dimensions so that in the end you create a series of programs that touch one or several of these strategic objectives in each of the dimensions, and finally to each program you assign a set of several actions over time as well as their champions (who will carry them out and their support teams, something like a RACI matrix) and you have a proto-roadmap ready.
The idea behind this exercise obviously was not to establish the company’s strategy two years out by a newbie who had just arrived, but to have an artifact in the form of a roadmap that would serve to trigger a conversation that would allow me to adjust my focus based on a series of strategically prioritized objectives and agreed upon both with the C-Level and with the company’s shareholders.
And you know what happened? That mission accomplished 🚀, I managed to have in record time, a roadmap with some sense that was discussed and modified, creating a good first impression in the company, because although it’s true that saying you only have one chance to make a good impression and although I did not have that impression during my onboarding I was able to give that good impression during my first executive committee about my capabilities.
In conclusion, my first days as CPO were full of unexpected challenges and significant learnings. The key to navigating this uncertainty was adopting a proactive and strategic attitude. I would like to highlight three essential lessons that I think will be useful to anyone facing similar situations:
Preparation: Although formal onboarding was nonexistent, creating one’s own based on dialogue and exploration was crucial. Don’t wait to be given all the answers; actively seek to understand the environment and dynamics of your new organization.
Collaboration: Establishing early connections with key people, especially in areas such as technology and marketing, can provide crucial insights and facilitate important synergies.
Strategy: Using strategic planning tools, like the ‘balanced score card’, helps structure your thoughts and align your actions with broader business objectives.
These strategies not only helped me survive but thrive in a challenging environment. For those who find themselves in similar situations, I recommend adopting a similar approach: face chaos with curiosity, preparation, and a clear plan. What about you? Have you faced similar challenges? What strategies have worked for you? I look forward to your comments and experiences.