Product Land Talks :: The background of a Product Manager, Metrics and Adapting in Tech Turbulence

with Rafael Figueiredo

Feb 28, 2024

For some time now, we have been living in a turbulent period in tech where product managers have to adapt increasingly quickly and efficiently to innovations but also to obstacles and events that affect the entire industry.

In this week's publication we have the opportunity to bring you Rafael Figueiredo’s testimony and perspective, a Product Manager with more than 6 years of experience, a background in economics and an interesting journey in the most varied industries and areas - SaaS, AI, B2B2C and e-Commerce.

For more from Rafael, you can reach out to him here.

It is very common to talk about the academic background of a Product Manager. The truth is that there is no university course called "Product Management" entirely dedicated to the area. What did coming from an economics background give you in terms of advantages and disadvantages in our area? Lots of financial and business perspective and perhaps less technical and engineering-related context?

Without a doubt, the academic background of PM’s is at the center of many discussions of the community.
Economics has given me some comparative advantages in the sense that it allowed me to be comfortable with many aspects related to business, so if you look at the triangle Business, Technology, Design that is commonly used to describe the skills needed for a PM (current evolutions also include Data), economics was good to have a decent checklist crossed when it came to business, so when you think about product positioning, strategy and customer affinity, I would say that it did help.
That being said, I think it’s worth mentioning that more than the actual academic background, it’s about what you choose to do with it. For example, most of my colleagues were going to the financial sector and/or the Big fours, which could have potentially sent me in a totally different direction (even though some people do transition from those roles to Product). I knew that I wanted to work with innovative companies that were challenging the status quo, and so I kind of started to aim my career towards the area that allowed me to work with them. I went and did my Master’s on Services Engineering and Management, that aggregated to my Bachelor’s skills in the area of logistics, process mapping and service design. With it, I was able to start working within continuous improvement, which for me was life changing as it exposed me to a lot of cross-functional work, deep diving into rules and concepts of different businesses and a lot of stakeholder management.
Of course all of this comes with its downsides. None of my academia had anything technical within the programs. This means that my Imposter Syndrome rings a bell every now and then and I’m constantly trying to understand the perfect balance between what I should know has a Product Manager from a technical perspective VS what is overkill and not worth investing on, but i guess that’s part of the journey, I ask a lot of whys and do tend to space out while understanding technical solutions, maybe a little but too much sometimes.
One thing that I can’t help mentioning here is the importance of a sponsor, if you are able to find one and/or one is able to find you. My first Lead, João Carmo, who is currently Director of Product Management at Talkdesk, believed in my profile for an Associate role back when I first broke into product and served not only as my sponsor into the Product world, but also as a mentor and someone I could look up to while launching my product career. I believe this has more value than any academic background you may have, but it’s also hard to find, so you can’t really rely 100% on it.

Of all the industries/areas you've been through - SaaS, AI, B2B2C and e-Commerce - which was the most challenging and which one did you like the most? Positively and negatively.

I can’t really choose one, so I’m just going to speak a little about them and my personal opinion.
When it comes to AI Product Manager, it was a great school for someone who needed to learn how to navigate technical teams and concepts and had no tech background whatsoever. In that sense it was super interesting because it allowed me to understand where I should position myself as a PM within a team that was 90% backend focused and composed almost entirely by data scientists. You can see how this might be challenging for an Associate PM without a technical background. It is also very different from most product roles because it takes you a lot longer to see results, and the trial and error cycle is even more present and harder to get right. So you can think about AI Product Manager as traditional Product Management on steroids in many ways. The fact that I was doing this work on a SaaS B2B product helped a little bit, because we could leverage the strong bond we had with some customers/accounts and validate our ideas in a way that if we were doing B2C wouldn’t have been that easy, at least for the use cases we were targeting (NLP, Speech to Text and Text to Speech).
When it came to Ecommerce, I really enjoyed working on it because I actually was a frequent user of those types of products, so I was more familiarized with the challenges and it was easier for me to put myself on the shoes of the customer, because I did wear those shoes very often (not as a luxury buyer, but you get what I’m saying). That being said, I think sometimes that might have given me overconfidence, which, when you’re trying to innovate, it’s not an ideal thing to be feeling. You want to challenge your own assumptions and step out of what you thought was the right solution.

In industries like B2B2C, balancing the needs of multiple stakeholders can be challenging. How do you navigate conflicting interests to ensure a successful product outcome?

The most important thing while doing B2B2C, in my opinion, is to build a VERY strong bond with your customer. I say this because many times you are going to have to disagree with him about his own users, and if you don’t have the right relationship with them, this will not only be poorly perceived by them, but you also might not have the buy-in needed from them to move forward with your vision and you will then enter a vicious cycle of poor customer satisfaction (the customer here being the business your building products for). On the other hand, if they trust you, they will give you the buy-in you need to do what you and your team thinks it’s the right thing to do and they will also be more prone to start properly co-working with you. By this I mean be fully transparent. For example, many times businesses have a lot of information they might not feel 100% comfortable sharing with others, even with people that are building solutions for them. If they trust you, the likelihood of that happening is exponentially higher.
Finally, specifically for Farfetch Platform Solutions, one of the hardest things (due to the nature of the business) was to align the interests of the platform with the interests of the businesses built on top of the platform, which were not necessarily the same all the time. Sometimes there were big conflicting interests, and here you will also need the trust and bond I was speaking about before, but you also need to have very good storytelling skills so that you can paint a bigger picture where all three parties involved (the 2 B’s and the C’s) are winners. Only with such storytelling skills can you actually resolve the conflict. you obviously need the right data, the right strategy and the right overall market knowledge, everytime. The way you mingle it together and make sense of it all, that’s good storytelling and that’s where you want to be.

How do you define and measure success for the products you manage? Are there specific metrics that you consider most critical?

I don’t believe in any specific metrics as it really depends on the product, on the business and on the company. In early stages of an AI Product, you can be measuring the success rate of a specific ML model, and that’s a core metric without which you simply don’t survive, as for E-Commerce, generally speaking, if you get to raise the conversion rate, all the rest becomes slightly shadowed.
I believe that as a PM, you should be able to choose metrics that are feasible to measure (that’s a no brainer) but that are also possible and practical to track overtime, so that you don’t aim to track something that you will eventually drop and discard and the investment done on tracking events and whatnot go down the drain. Another important metric characteristic (at least for some of them) is that they should be understandable for a broader audience other than yourself and your team/cluster. I say this because as a product manager you want to be able to show the success of the work you and your team are doing to other stakeholders, either to build overall team/company morale, for performance/evaluation purposes or more importantly, to be able to build the right confidence levels to have buy-in for the stuff you want to build next. To achieve this, having metrics that speak to the minds of different stakeholders is really helpful, if your metrics are behaving as you want them to behave eh eh.

The last few months for Farfetch and other large tech companies have not been easy. Among many testimonies and public opinions, we are curious to know what it is like to be a Product Manager in a company that is going through this moment of great tribulation and expectation? How do you manage a product without knowing exactly what the next steps are or what resources will be at your disposal? One of the core skills of the role is the ability to adapt, still..

It’s all about the dichotomy” PM’s as innovation drivers VS PM’s as Efficiency drivers”. I think that the center “problem”, which I purposely put between quotation marks because whether it’s a problem or not I believe it's up for discussion, is that money is more expensive, a lot more expensive in fact. The product BOOM (at least in Portugal) happened during a period in which money was very cheap, and so we were all used to a reality of resource abundance and where the central focus of PM’s was a lot around innovation, because it was cheap to innovate and companies primarily captured investment based on their ability to innovate and/or pitch about their innovative future. I believe that because of it, Product orbited a lot around these principles.
With the price of money going up, the new normal in my opinion, is that PM’s need to pivot and center their work much more on the word Efficiency rather than Innovation. Innovation is obviously still important, but as product managers, more than ever, we need to generate money for the company, and with money being expensive, the logical way to earn money without capturing it via innovation, is to be (more) efficient, either by cutting costs or generating revenue. This means doing more with less, focusing more on ROI and having shorter feedback loops with greater likelihood of success. For struggling companies, you are probably also looking at shorter term roadmap planning’s with a greater focus on grabbing low hanging fruit and capitalizing them as much as possible.

What is the status of product management in Portugal? Do companies follow the best practices and the best markets? Is there anything in the area that you notice that is a clear cultural trait?

Portugal is a relatively small country, but It’s also flourishing with tech professionals and Product is no exception. We are lucky enough to have very successful companies being born here and also relocating and/or opening hubs in Portugal. I see this as an important driver to progressive company culture, which used to be very traditional and it consequently lacked appealing career prospects for tech professionals. Nowadays the paradigm has changed a lot and it’s a relief. I think that the fact that is a small country, it helps to create a very strong community, you see a lot of talks and meetups which, even though they are also common elsewhere, in Portugal they tend to have more familiar vibes because many people usually know each other and that creates a greater knowledge sharing. There’s also a big likelihood that you encounter old colleagues in new companies you join which is really good to create culture and strong bonding within that culture, but I think it’s also tricky if you want to have fresh visions and different ways of working, although remote work and geo-distributed teams have come to help with that.
That being said, I do believe that old-school Portuguese management style is still felt on many companies, and sometimes it pushes product managers to be solely focused on executing and delivering and forgetting about the strategic part of product management, because top management has a hard time delegating strategic decisions and letting go of the strict Top to Bottom decision making approach. But again, I believe that we are walking the good path and this tendency will slowly lose its strength.

Are there specific tools or methodologies you swear by in your product management journey that you believe have significantly improved your efficiency? Any favorite products?

From a company perspective I think that having good practices and guidelines that allow to properly document everything is fundamental for the success and efficiency of every department. Nothing compares to a consistent and organized Wiki solution, being Confluence or Notion or any other provider. This moves mountains, no matter what anyone says.
From a product perspective, I think that Product Led Growth can do wonders for the right companies. There are a lot of great success companies that have PLG on their DNA like Slack and ZOOM, but also companies that have pivoted for PLG and are now harvesting their results like Disney. Obviously this needs to be analyzed on a case by case basis in order to understand if it makes sense for a given company. For example, highly regulated industries or customized enterprise solutions might not benefit from it.
When it comes to personal working methods/tools, I would like to start by saying that we are living interesting times with lots of “product influencers” posting on Linkedin and claiming to have found the next best thing next to sliced bread. I think that this has a Net positive impact on the community, and I say Net because there are some downsides to it: everyone is selling their idea as the best one, everyone is focused on methodologies and tools and processes and it becomes hard to know what to aim for and what actually works for you. I mentioned this because I want readers to take my approaches with a pinch of salt because most of these approaches are what I’ve found to work better for me.
I always start my day by defining a list of 3 priorities for the day that I pick up from a personal backlog list that is (ideally) prioritized accordingly. I never pick up something before I finish those 3 items (common sense applies). If I finish them before the day ends, I pick up the next item in the backlog. If I’m unable to finish the 3 items, unfinished items carry over as priorities for the next day.
Another thing I like to do, specifically with remote work (I’m a home office advocate, at least for most of the week) is that I set myself a 15 minute buffer daily on my calendar to the end of the day. This buffer means that, wherever I’m doing (again, common sense applies) I need to stop and use that timebox to close the work for the day and prepare everything that I might need to pick it up the next day.
When it comes to products, my favorite one at the moment is Remarkable. I’m very easily distracted and so to have an E-reader and note taker that mimics paper and has absolutely no apps, no notifications, no nothing other than those 2 actions (reading and note taking) is absolutely amazing and a game changer. Nowadays I have slots on my calendar with the prefix RMK, meaning that for that slot I don't need anything else other than my Remarkable, and so I shut down everything else and focus solely on the tablet and the task I have to do.

From the balancing act of academic backgrounds to the diverse challenges posed by industries like AI, E-Commerce, and B2B2C, we glean insights into the multifaceted role of a Product Manager. The emphasis on building strong customer relationships in B2B2C settings and the evolving focus from innovation to efficiency in product management reflect the dynamic nature of the field. Exploring the state of product management in Portugal reveals a vibrant community amidst the challenges of traditional management styles. Lastly, a glimpse into personal productivity strategies, emphasizing the importance of intentional time management.

Rafael Figueiredo & The Product Land ⛰️