Eighteen months ago I closed a very significant chapter in my career after serving as Chief Product Officer (CPO) for 13 intense months in a company with more than 20 years of history, whose management team had never incorporated product management into its daily operations. Recently, the sale of this company has been confirmed, an event that I believe marks a good time to share the valuable lessons learned during my stay and how these experiences have transformed and strengthened me professionally.
Now, in my current role at DoiT, where I can be myself and develop my full potential, I can apply everything I have learned. I look back and reflect on those 13 months, which were professionally very difficult due to various circumstances that occurred in the specific context of the company that I am not going to comment on, but I do want to stay and share the learnings of this trip because I think they have been very useful, on how to understand the dynamics of a company from the C-level point of view as a CPO, especially one owned by a private equity. This understanding of the shareholders context was crucial, and continues to be in my current role at DoiT. Here, the learning continues, and every day I apply the lessons that emerged from those challenging 13 months.
In a way, I see this experience as a kind of hormesis cycle that has allowed me to become more antifragile in very energy-demanding and stressful situations.
All these learnings and some more are what I try to put into practice in my daily life in my new adventure, and that I usually share in my product classes with the great team at The Hero Camp, in a way it is my way for this experience to serve future generations of product managers and help them better navigate uncertainty and, despite feeling totally overloaded or even incapable, be functional and useful for their teams to tackle relatively complex situations.
Although 13 months fly by, the objective is to break down the situations and key aspects that defined my experience, there is a lot of fabric to cut that I could not condense into a single article, so my intention is to make a series of posts in which I put the focus on certain situations or aspects, but always in a format that allows us to understand the challenges from the starting situation and subsequently the next best actions that I took at a high level. From the initial moments, where it was essential to understand the context, the design and creation of the product team that eventually had more than 20 people, to the design of what I called the product operating system with all its processes and ceremonies. If everything goes well and I see that the series of articles has traction, I would still encourage myself to write another series of posts with the learning diary of the most specific decisions, the reason and the impact.
I would have liked to call this series something like “The year I trafficked with a private equity fund” in tribute to that book by Antonio Salas, but then I thought that perhaps it was a bit exaggerated and not so illegal, although there could be many very bizarre stories, the idea was to keep the good and the useful, and I decided to call it “Product management from the trenches” also paying tribute to another book and for several reasons:
The first is that I felt like I was going into a daily struggle, in an environment full of enemies, where no one understands what a product manager does and that I was in a daily battle to move the needle of the company, in my head I came that scene from the movie “Apocalypsis Now” in which one of the characters exclaimed “I love the smell of napalm in the mornings,… it smells like victory”, but on the other hand it represents a bit of the role of the product manager who is involved in many aspects of the company and in a way you have to like that dynamism (rock and roll 🤘)
And the second because I think it represents a bit my philosophy or way of thinking about product management, I will talk a little more about this in another article, but basically, I see it more as a mindset, in which based on a set of tools that you have acquired during your experience, training and so on, you act and apply these tools in the most orthodox way possible, without being very purist, I always say that working in a product company is an unicorn because reality does not resemble what we see in product reference books or posts by product management gurus, I’m not saying they are bad books or bad references, quite the opposite, I think they help us a lot but I think we have to understand them from their basic principles. and apply them as possible based on the context, in my product classes I usually talk about the concept of shuhari but well I will talk about that another day.
Before starting to unravel the details of this story, I would like to make a small disclaimer, in the end, this series of articles represents my perceptions and my experiences, with all the biases and particularities that this entails, I do not intend to give a lecture or similar, simply take what is useful to you, because I understand that in my situations you would probably have acted differently or obtained other learnings.
That’s it for this week’s article, did you like it? Do you have any comments? Have you been in the same or a similar situation? What is your philosophy on product management? Do not hesitate to write to me, in the next article I will start by describing what a private equity fund is and my first steps as a CPO.