#GirlsWhoProduct: Kristina Walcker-Mayer

Productized
Sep 7, 2018 · 22 min read

By Katsiaryna Drozhzha on September 7, 2018

Kristina Walcker-M. brings 8 years of mobile experience to her role as Senior Product Manager Mobile Apps at Zalando Technology , where she leads the Browse & Shop & Find team and focuses on innovation and strategy in the mobile app space. Besides working on the product site, her passion for driving the mobile mindset within Zalando’s various departments makes her a true Mobile First evangelist.

Outside of work, Kristina’s biggest passion is traveling. After visiting more than 40 countries, the list is getting longer with every trip. The biggest achievement in terms of traveling was her year goal 2016, where she managed to “see the sea every month”. In Berlin, she loves spending her free time at the tennis court, good food and on mindfulness practices.

Listen to this interview and develop the confidence in your product self!


Kristina, before starting career of a Product Manager at Zalando, you have been into the world of business consulting for more than 3 years. What were the positives and the negatives of working with so many different clients, projects and stakeholders?

Before starting my career in Product Management on the corporate side of the things, I was working as a mobile consultant, mainly in 360° agencies and mobile agencies. It was a very interesting time because we still needed to explain to the big clients, like automotive companies, why mobile was going to be important. The positive part was that you learned so much about different industries. Every time when you needed to consult someone, you had to understand what their needs were. The requirements of each industry can be really different. For example, the automotive sector would have different needs from television business or supermarket chains. Mobile itself has a different potential and opportunity in how to meet those needs. I would say that I learned a lot by digging deep. It never got boring, because I usually worked on one or two clients at the same time. It helped me to learn how to work with different people. I think nowadays, Product Management is all about people management, because you’re constantly talking to developers, to designers, to stakeholders, to upper management, so you need to understand how you should work with different kind of people. Having different clients is the best practice to do so.

When I started my career, it was really helpful, that my manager took me everywhere and I could learn from her. I learned how to implement a lot of different projects. I think, the agency world is much faster than the product management world. You deliver the project and your work is done for this project. I think that’s the biggest difference to product management. In my eyes, product management starts when the work of an agency is over. The agency time is more setting up a project together with the client and delivering it. Usually, where the product management companies start, is when they bring the MVP out to the world, they check the numbers, they iterate on it, and then they get the feedback from their customers and evolve their product based on their customers’ needs.

Most companies don’t go through this process and that’s why they will never find out if their product is really successful or not.


You hold two university degrees in Science. Back then, how did you imagine your prospective career? Do you know if someone from your university peers works in Product Management?

When I moved to Berlin, I started studying Science of Music and Culture, since I had a strong background in music. I always wanted to become a Product Manager at Universal Records. But after studying it for two semesters, I somehow had the feeling that I was interested in doing it in my private life, but I could not imagine how this study program could be ever related to anything practical I could do afterwards. Since I was really good at mathematics, this was the only reason I decided to continue my studies in Business. First I did my Bachelor of Science in Business in Berlin. Then, I did my Masters in Potsdam. In between, I worked in management consulting for one year, which helped me to get experience that nowadays is of a great help for me in Product Management. I would not say that studying Business in a public university in Germany was really competitive. On the contrary, I think it is really outdated and you don’t learn anything that you would need in the practical world. At least for me that was the case and I would highly recommend to someone who wants to study business to go to Business School. I remember we had a class for E-finance and it was far away both from reality and from the internet. E-commerce was not even taught in schools. So, jobs like product management would not even have come to my mind during my studies. Only after I’ve started worked in management consulting, I understood that it could be really interesting, mainly because I could dive deep into certain industries and help the clients to detect structures of setting up strategies. However, I didn’t like the environment of management consulting. So, I started to look for something else out there. I found an internship in the company that was focusing on mobile design and development, also on setting up mobile strategies. Afterwards, I worked part time for them during my Master studies. Being on the agency side, working from project to project, from client to client, I gained a lot of experience that I later on used for Product Management. Having experience working in different industries helped me a lot to make my products better. In general, I try not only to learn from the competition in my industry. It is boring and that is what everyone else does and usually not really innovative. In my case, I prefer to learn from the other industries. For example, when I think about engagement, training habits and personalization, I would rather learn from great products like Spotify, Pinterest or Instagram. First, I try to understand how those guys engage with their customers. Then, I want to break it down for my product and try to understand how we can use those mechanisms to drive our own product.

So that was my road to Product Management. It was never something promoted during my studies and, to be frank, I don’t think any of my peers from the university even work in such a modern environment as I do. As an example, I contacted one of my teachers at the university and offered to run a weekend seminary around product management, but the answer was, “Yes, we can talk about it, but usually it takes up to one or two years, until the traditional university can set something like that up.”

Bureaucracy in Germany takes a little bit too long for introducing courses like that.

Attending TEDx event on how to shape “OUR COMMON FUTURE” at Chiang Mai, Thailand

It’s not a rumor that European public universities are still a bit “out-of-fashion”, especially in its administration. How do you think we can bring innovation into our public education?

I think it’s the companies’ job to be present and send their employees to bigger universities and run projects, because it’s a great recruitment channel to present innovative jobs. We can see it happening in the technical universities departments like Engineering, because everyone wants to grab the talented engineers first. It’s a shame that this doesn’t happen in other departments, like business or art departments. In the end, to be a Product Manager, it doesn’t matter what you have studied. You just need to follow up with the product, to be excited and to be curious.


You mentioned that there were some things that you did not like at your first job of a business consultant. Can you recall some of them?

I can just remember that I was in the beginning of my 20s and I was sitting in a 20 m2 meeting room among six men in their 40’s. I was spending my days there, 12 hrs a day without having a more private conversation with those people. It was all about business and no private talk around it. At some point it made me unhappy. The job itself was great, but I had the feeling that the environment was not for me.

“In my eyes, product management starts when the work of an agency is over.”

Do you feel that you are being challenged as a woman in a tech world? Do you feel that our society still expects from you to go out there every day and prove that you can do it, that you are a Superwoman?

To be frank, for a long time I didn’t have that kind of feeling, because I have two older brothers and my parents were quite traditional. Even though, I could observe that women were being perceived and treated “differently”, I was respected and treated the same “as a man” in my family or in school. I always had the feeling that this problem of gender discrimination didn’t affect me. However, I could see other women treated differently and see the guys to be more respected, unconsciously. After I read a book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg that was really eye-opening to me, I understood how unconsciously you are perceived being different as a woman.

You’re in a meeting room or you’re just speaking about your successes and you see that no one is proud of you, no one is saying, “Yeah, that’s awesome! ” People would leave the room and think, “Oh, what kind of arrogance.” On the contrary, if my male colleagues would use the exact same words, everyone would say, “Oh, awesome dude! High-five!” People perceive women look for their own successes and follow their own paths,as those who they don’t want to go out with or don’t want to have them as their colleagues. I’ve experienced this and it is also something that I shared with a lot of women here in the company. We have a lot of amazing women and it’s really interesting that now we are exchanging more. It’s both surprising and frightening that a lot of women had bad experiences, but at least now we can talk openly about it.

Ain‘t no half-steppin‘ in San Gimignano, Italy

Do you remember your first job interview for a position of a Product Manager? What surprised you the most at that interview?

My very first product management job interview was a little bit too casual, because it was just a lunch. What surprised me is the answer to the question that I asked, “How would a typical day look like?” The VP replied back and asked me, “How do you want your day to look like?” He said that, in the end, you’re the creator of your day, so you can play the day how you want to. Other interviews I had with especially bigger companies made me understand that bigger companies are shifting more and more to competency based interviews. Some companies will tell you at the very beginning, that they only focus on the competency questions. This can be both frightening and irritating, especially at the very beginning. When you talk to the midsize companies, people usually ask you questions about you as a person. While in the interview process in bigger companies, they don’t want you to talk about anything personal. They’re doing this because they don’t want to be biased. Whether they like you as a person or not, they don’t want you to win them over by being sympathetic. From one side, it can be a good thing, because it’s really based on the competencies and not anything else. But on the other side, it gives the feeling that you’re hiring a robot, not a person.

In my case, it’s mostly about the people when I decide which company I want to work with. I don’t want to work or spend 40–50 hours per week with people I have no idea if I can have a personal connection with. When it comes to building products, you need to have people around you that you’re clicking with, otherwise you will never build a successful product.

“When it comes to building products, you need to have people around you that you’re clicking with, otherwise you will never build a successful product.”

If you get to interview someone for a Product Manager position nowadays, what would be the three essential questions that you would ask the candidate?

The first question that I would ask is “Who are you?” meaning “What do you do? Which are your dreams? What passions do you have? What do you do in your free time?” Because this principle creates a warm atmosphere and I want the people that I interview to feel comfortable around me to speak about themselves. Also, I want to understand which person I’m buying into basically.

At the second question I usually try to give them a situation that I had in the past and try to understand how they would solve it. I describe a little bit the situation and I let the candidates tell what they would have a look into, what they would do and let them do a lot of assumptions. I think this is really important. As the third step, I would ask a question around:

“Let’s say you’re dependent on a different team and they don’t put it in their goals of the year. You need it pretty urgently and they say they don’t have the resources, because they have different priorities. What would you do?”

In these kind of questions, you can learn how a candidate would react in terms of pressure and will demonstrate if they have the calmness, the fullness and all the skills to find the right solution.

So, if I have to pick three questions, it would be one around the person itself, the second about how do you approach a problem and the third one would focus on how do you deal with people you’re dependent on.

Mobile is not a channel, it’s a customer behaviour.

What makes leading mobile so different from leading any other products?

As I mentioned before, when I started in Mobile in 2010, it was a complete different world. Some people had an iPhone and no one knew what Android was. It was more or less the platform of a phone for geeks, for real techies. I’ve seen the rise of mobile from the very beginning. We could see how mobile internet was increasing, the usage of desktop was decreasing, and we said that in a few years the mobile line will cross the desktop usage line. Right now, for example, at Zalando, we’re at 80% mobile traffic. Back in the time, we were 20–30% mobile from of all the traffic. Then the app craziness started. Every client thought they needed an app. A lot of agencies took advantage and made a lot of money by creating a lot of useless apps for any kind of company. What I really like is to put the question back to my plan and ask, “Why do you think you need an app?” And a lot of times it turns out it doesn’t make sense to create an app, because they had a different need. I think, until today, the full potential of mobile has not been leveraged. There is a lot of opportunities especially in e-commerce or in mobile commerce. No one has really cracked an cracked the nut of mobile commerce so far. And I’m proud that we’re definitely leading the way of mobile commerce with Zalando. There’s not a lot of good examples, at the moment, where I would look up. A lot of traditional retailers are now bankrupt, because they have not understood that e-commerce is more than putting products on a website. E-commerce is about campaigning, about social media and SEO. E-commerce is more important than the product online. I think the same shift is happening from e-commerce to m-commerce. The last one is MORE than just looking at a screen and having the products on a mobile phone, making them available for touch interactions. I think mobile commerce is actually much more, because if you observe how customers consume other industries content on mobile phones, it’s really different.

Mobile is not a channel, it’s a customer behaviour.

If you look into journalism through mobile, you have this snackable content. No one wants to read long articles anymore. No one wants to read Facebook posts either, we just want to see images. So, on all kind of different services, people want to reduce their cognitive effort. I think whatever mobile service you build, you need to build it for a consumer behavior which reduces any kind of cognitive, mental effort. I think no one is doing that right in mobile commerce, because on a mobile device you still need to click on categories, you need to think, “Oh, what do I need?” and maybe having something in mind that you cannot describe. But you still have to search for it or click through categories you do not understand. It’s just a matter of time until someone really understands the mobile e-commerce differently. I really hope that with our product, at Zalando, we can crack that nut.

“It’s both surprising and frightening that a lot of women had bad experience, but at least now we can talk openly about it.”

Zalando is Europe’s top best online fashion retailer. As a Senior Product Manager at the company, do you have to have some deep expertise in fashion industry?

I would not consider myself to be super interested in fashion. I usually like to wear nice dresses, but I don’t know a lot of brands, to be frank, I was never a girl buying fashion magazines and I do not consume a lot of fashion content. If I’m really honest, I would say that I hate online shopping, especially fashion. But, I think maybe this makes me a very good manager in my industry, because I just want to make it easy for customers and find the right things and make our services and products really relevant. I think the biggest challenge in online shopping is that people cannot find things they need and they don’t want to search 1.5 million products in a catalog. How can we create more relevancy and make it easier for the customers to find the products they like? To answer that question, I’ve learnt a lot about the fashion industry. Whenever I want to understand how I can for example improve the filter experience for my customers, I would set up meetings, expert interviews and I would call my colleagues from the fashion department to get their expertise on how to improve our product. They know so much about different challenges in sport, different challenges for men, for kids’ clothes or for premium clothes.


Can you please tell about the product that challenged you the most? What did you learn from that experience?

At the moment, I’m leading the Browse & Shop & Find team within the app. These are actually two feature teams, which we combined into one. It covers the whole customer journey, from search over catalogue and the filters to the product detail page and the wishlist. It’s quite a long journey, usually split into two parts. Since the team needs to look into the whole journey, it’s quite challenging to keep an overview on the whole, because it’s a very long road and I think it covers our most visited pages. To be able to iterate and to innovate at the same time is quite challenging, because it’s a very broad journey and we need to deliver on so many ends. For each single feature of this in web, we have a single product team and product manager. That’s the biggest challenge that we do have at the moment: Resources. The most challenging project I worked for, happened when I was pretty new into product management and the feature was not driven by our team, but by the stakeholders. Somehow it made its way into Company OKRs without being properly aligned to that. We had not planned it at all, because it seemed to be a little tiny feature. Then, while digging deep into it, it came out that there were many dependencies and hacks on front and backend. My worst nightmare for this feature was to perform good, because it was based on different hacks on every side and there was no way that we could roll that out. Eventually, this little feature was probably one of the most financially successful A/B tests we ever ran (at least according to the A/B test). So, our management said,“Ok, you need to roll this out to more sizes, because we need to see if this really scales in that way.” And of course, we could not do that easily There were a lot of discussions, back and forth, it was painful to make everyone understand that it was not that easy to just roll it out on a higher scale properly. Some things end up on your table unplanned, because everyone thinks that it’s really easy to run a test. Then, this little test turns out to be the most complex project of the quarter, which involves a lot of external teams with a lot of dependencies, even within the team. Imagine, we have front-end and back-end developers within our team. Everyone was plugged by this project. And then you build something for the trash can, because you can’t scale it, but it was so much effort. That’s what we do in product management, we’re testing concepts. But then, of course, your business stakeholders don’t understand sometimes that you cannot roll out things easily and that product delivery means a lot of people management. It can take up to half a year or even a year to do that properly.


You mentioned that you’re planning a series of your own podcast interviews. Can you please tell us more about that? And when should be expect the first episode?

I was on a longer vacation, earlier this year, for three and a half months and I was wondering, what I will do when I came back. I was a little bit challenging myself, “Maybe there is something else I wanted to try out instead of product management?” We’re still young and I think, it’s now the right time to try out a lot of cool things and bring to the table a lot of experiences from different jobs. I don’t believe that nowadays job descriptions are helping us to bring out the full potential. Mainly because they’re really limited. I was more looking for coaching on how can I find a job based on my skills, my experiences, my competencies and maybe add more softer factors, like working from home or from different locations. How can job search look like beyond job titles and a search? Why do we measure ourselves by sitting eight hours in the office, rather than defining an impact per day or impact per week? It doesn’t matter how long it takes for it. I talked to people and a lot of them have this problem. The answer you get on the internet to this problem is usually,

Quit your job, be happy and then go to Bali. Become self-employed and eventually you’ll be a life coach.” So, I thought, “OK, self-employment is nothing for me, I’m not that risk affine.

However, I believe the generation, which is 10 years younger than me they are jumping more and more between jobs. In the nearest future people will have very diverse job profiles, not only like “I’ve worked for Product Management for the past 10 years.” I was wondering how would the companies react to those diverse profiles which may not fit into the standardized job profile? This is a conversation I want to have with the companies. On the same side, I want to present people with interesting profiles, their interesting jobs or people who have created something really meaningful out of their current, standardized job. My project is called EmploYAY, and it’s about rethinking employment situations.

Listen to the first episode of EmploYAY with Dev Aujla, author of the book “50 Ways to Get a Job: An unconventional guide to finding work on your terms


Product Management — is it a profession or a vocation?

I would define it out of the product management theory. I would say it is a vocation, but honestly, I don’t believe all companies have this philosophy in mind. There are a lot of companies that use product management as an excuse for better project management. For them, I would call it rather a profession. If you want to be a good Product Manager, you need to bring a certain kind of personality. For example, you always need to be curious, you should ask questions without a fear, you should never be afraid of challenging the status quo. You should also bring a lot of creativity, because in the end, you are coming up together with your team with a lot of solutions. You should bring a certain amount of people management skills. For example, you should not be afraid of speaking in public, because you need to motivate your team, also in tougher times. You have to always stay positive and communicate the positive impact that the team is creating, even if, sometimes, you need to deliver something the team is not super motivated about.

You need to be the communicator, that’s why a positive mindset is really crucial in product management.

I can see that some companies started to hire people, who are purely data driven. That’s one side of the coin. Of course, people definitely need to bring technical and data skills, but the other skills that I just mentioned is as important as being data driven. There should be a good equilibrium of skills, as you need to bring a lot to the table. You don’t need to be really skilled or experienced when you start the job. Just be open, ask a lot of questions and be excited about what you’re doing.

If you think about product management purely as a profession, you will not be successful with your product.


And the last word. What advice would you give to women who want to become product managers?

Before you start a job, it really makes sense to read a good book. I highly recommend the Bible of Product Management Inspired” by Marty Cagan.

Attend Marty Cagan’s talk at Productized Conference 2018 in Lisbon, November 1–2. Secure your seat at http://productized.co/

It’s quite high level, but it gives you a good overview on how product management should work. You should also get the theory right and watch videos on YouTube, which can inspire you to know how product management should work and what you can learn from more experienced people. If you don’t have anyone around you expert in the field, you can choose a product or a company that you’re interested in- because it’s really hard to create a product people love, if you don’t love it yourself — and try to find a job there. For me, the challenge was how can I make online shopping comfortable for myself. If you manage to enter a product position within the company, the biggest advice I can give young women is don’t be afraid to ask questions, to raise your voice, to become uncomfortable, to come out with your own ideas, to be challenged. I had a leader, here in the company, and I learned from her that whenever you have a feeling like “Oh, we’re doing this thing, but I don’t believe in it,” you should stand up and find out why you don’t believe in it, why you have to do and challenge it. Maybe there’s something wrong with it and no one has the guts to speak it out loud. If you do that from the very beginning, even if you’re on a junior position, you will be a person who’s really changing things for the better. I think it helps that people see you’re not afraid. I see especially within younger women, that they are afraid of speaking up their opinions. I could see it in a lot of meetings, that no one would raise their voice, but once you go out of the meeting room, everyone is like, “OMG, this was so awful, have you seen that?” My answer would be, ”Why didn’t you say that in front of everyone?” You should not care about your position or your level. If you have the feeling this is not right or it’s not what the customer wants,

You should always speak up your mind.

Be transparent with the concerns you have, especially with the stakeholders who want you to do something. But whenever a decision is taken within your team, commit to it. It’s what we do, we are following the strategy of the company and that’s why it’s important to speak out loud, to be transparent and commit to the decisions you have to make. So: Disagree and Commit. What’s important to understand, within a company, especially from a commercial business driven company, is that in product we are the lawyers of the customer. In the end, we are the ones fighting for the right of our customers. Business side is not always thinking customer centric. This is our job, as of product managers, within the company to understand the business and the customers and fulfill needs of the both.

Get connected with Kristina by email at kristina.walcker.mayer@zalando.de, drop her a message on LinkedIn.

Krisitna recommends must 📚 on product and leadership:

Books 📖

Marty Cagan INSPIRED: How to Create tech Product Customers Love

Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, Nate WalkingshawProduct Leadership: How Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

Stephen Covey The 7 habits of Highly Effective People

Kenneth Blanchard, Spenser JohnsonThe One Minute Manager

Newsletter 📰

Blog 💻

About #GirlsWhoProduct

This project was made possible thanks to our partnership with Zalando Tech. #GirlsWhoProduct is a series of interviews with women that have been able to beat the ‘product’ ceiling and get into the profession. Our mission is to inspire, connect and empower more women to get into product roles and help them consider ‘product’ as a venue of personal and professional growth.

#FindyourPlay in Product Management. Apply now!

The diversity of people, lifestyle, opinions and attitudes are crucial drivers of innovations and success. We want to support local product communities to create an inclusive and diverse network. We believe that an inclusive culture is the most effective way for us to increase diversity within Zalando.

Find out how you can make the next play as part of our team.

About Productized Conference

Productized Conference 2018 is a multi-day conference in Lisbon gathering thought-leaders on Product Thinking, Product Management and User Experience to make ideas VISIBLE. Join 500 product people for 2 days of learning the latest insights from the best product experts! Register now at

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Productized Conference in Lisbon, 20–22 November 2019. Three days of conversations and training around Product Management, Design Thinking, and Product Design.

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