Hey, happy Monday!
Following the roads already available on everyone’s maps does not take you straight to your destination, but on a road that is undoubtedly busier!
To grow and find new solutions that benefit users and business, you have to explore off the map. No one is ever lost, as long as you left properly equipped.
Those who deal with innovation know this, but those who deal with product – with their product – do!
When I interviewed Matteo Carini of ProntoPro, I knew right away that I could write a Note dense with useful insights for you and your entire organization-no matter how big or small, it matters how ambitious it is. Share this Note with anyone you think should read it.
Matthew did a deep reflection on the product that led him, experiment after experiment, not only to change his organization but to create a new department capable of better aligning between the growing needs of the business and the needs of the users.
Before I leave you to read let me give you three pieces of background information.
➀ Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. I will announce the next STRTGY Meeting with a guest speaker who has been able to bring the NO-CODE approach to crazy brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Ray Ban, Acqua di Parma, Furla and many others. Put in a reminder to check your email!
We often think that these brands have teams of developers at their service and do not use these new tools that are constantly snubbed by the devs around us. Instead, they are fast, performant and adopted even (and especially) by industry leaders. This new product category will be pervasive in a few years!
Little trivia I never revealed: STRTGY is entirely built with NO-CODE tools! This does not mean that we will never need in-house developers, it simply means that the role of software engineering (and product design) is changing and that there are now great opportunities to be had in designing products that create other products (either by themselves or with human help).
The famous Product Trio (Product Manager, Designer and Software Engineer) may soon change!
➁ The STRTGY Meeting with Andrea Scotti Calderini is available for REPLAY. If you missed it the link is this ▶ or if you want to send it to someone directly via WhatsApp click here ✓✓.
➂ We are very close to Product Management Day on June 25 in Rome (or live streaming). If you haven’t done so yet, take advantage of the 15% discount on all tickets offered by STRTGY. Use and share this link ⁋.
If you are attending live, stop by our booth to talk about OKR for product teams (and more). You’ll find us with the Get Connected Atlassian and Gtmhub teams.
That’s it. As always:
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS
-Antonio
● PRODUCTS / Product Strategy
Creating a new department: Category Strategy
A: Hi Matteo introduce yourself to the community.
Matteo: Hi I’m Matteo, I do product management for ProntoPro.
Before joining this company, I worked in South Africa for a BIO fuel company in the innovation and technology sector.
I joined ProntoPro seven years ago. After being SEO manager for about two years, I followed an internal transition to product by holding the position of Senior Product Manager.
For about four months now, I have been creating from scratch and growing an internal Category Strategy department. It is an eclectic branch, mixing business development, customer development, product and marketing.
I also work on other projects as an investor and product and marketing advisor with two goals: to develop networking activities and to improve personal skills.
A: What are your superpowers?
Matthew: Among the hard skills no doubt marketing and SEO skills.
I took ProntoPro’s site from a zero traffic condition to a million views in one year.
I am fascinated by Design Thinking, particularly Double Diamond and the approaches to problem solving that the framework proposes.
Among the soft skills, I am told-it is always difficult to judge oneself-the growth mindset and the ability to receive feedback, but also to proactively ask for it and give it.
A: You have talked about the transformation of your role at ProntoPro and the transition to product. Who is the product manager for you and why strategically has it given rise to new functions in your company?
Matthew: The product manager is a person who-in collaboration with all the teams-finds the intersection of Desirability, Feasibility, Viability to satisfy the end user.
For the past two years I have been focusing on this aspect: when you work in product management it is easy to say that you have to prioritize the user. On the practical side, however, finding the intersection between the three factors is not so obvious, especially if you are not CEO of the company or if the narratives behind a choice are not clear.
At ProntoPro we have not always followed a user-centred perspective, only recently have we been able to reason by putting the user first, sometimes even making painful choices for the business, but consciously.
You can think of ProntoPro as a horizontal marketplace in which each “category” represents a different business model.
With this model, we can adopt two strategies for approaching the market:
- the first involves working horizontally and segmenting users by need;
- the second prefers to choose one market niche and occupy it completely, then move on to the next.
We chose the first solution, valuing the user and investing in the research team.
Through my experience in ProntoPro, I have realized that sometimes the role given to the product manager is reductive. I propose a concrete example: new needs often emerge within the product that can be intercepted as by-products.
People accessing our site were not interested in browsing by category-we had a discoverability problem related to how users were using the portal as it was growing.
I wondered if the different categories could become stand-alone products, and I created strategic departments to better intercept micro opportunities within the individual categories.
We have noted that specific behavior is attached to each and that, even, they could enable equally specific business models within them.
The product manager must serve as a connector between departments.
Outsourced Product Solution Exploration
A: Your talk is dedicated to Product Solution Exploration with an external team. Who is your talk dedicated to and what will those listening to you learn at PMDay?
Matthew: One of the most complex aspects is balancing the trade-off between innovation and fine-tuning or clean-up of products and business.
Let’s start with an assumption: the growth of a company can be compared to that of a person. When a new start-up is born, it experiences an initial infant stage of learning. Then it becomes a scale-up-as happened to ProntoPro-and experiences a period of adolescence in which it begins to have incredible strength but also several points of weakness.
One of the main problems facing the product management team is feature creep: continuous features are added to the product without triaging what is really useful. ProntoPro was in this condition: on the one hand it wanted to innovate, and on the other hand because of its horizontal nature it had not yet found the product-market fit.
Platform problems and low technological capacity did not allow us to innovate without giving up a series of strategic fine-tuning that would bring gradual improvements to the product.
We therefore chose to innovate externally by creating a kind of mini-start-up with which to validate new hypotheses and set benchmarks.
This solution allowed us to experiment more quickly and perform branded actions related-but not equal-to ProntoPro.
There are negative and positive aspects.
The cons are related to the fact that by outsourcing, tech teams or designers cannot benefit from a range of learning.
The pros are several. Building isolated products allows the company to benefit from an external tech team whose effort does not directly burden internal capacity, eliminate legacy issues, and increase the speed of flows. Product managers know that every new feature developed must coexist in the enterprise ecosystem because it has a cost before, during, and after its implementation. Isolating assumptions can lower these costs.
The talk topics will be useful for all people facing a trade-off between innovation and incremental product improvement.
Product managers who are undecided between the two options may benefit from exploring with an external team.
A: What resources do you recommend for those who will follow your talk to learn more about this topic?
Matthew: I have three. The first one is a useful text for creating an external spin-off, starting a new department and questioning assumptions made in the past.
To solve the specific problem I mentioned, I suggest “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany.”
The second, interesting but more substantial book is “Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy: Build Products Your Customers Need”.Finally, a method: Opportunity solution tree, to map opportunities, desires and feasibility.
