I am not a Product Manager…but I talk to them. Episode 2: Amaia Calvo-Fernández (eDreams ODIGEO)
Amaia has been working 15 years in projects and products involving customer experience and creation of value in the digital economy. She gained her understanding about customer insights working in the first Usability Laboratory in Spain. Then she joined an Innovation area inside the public sector with the mission of building distinctive service models between the traveler and the tourism network. In eDreams Odigeo she led agile squads focused on conversion, revenue diversification and on the creation of the first travel subscription program of the industry, with half million users. Thanks to these layers of experience, she treasures a solid understanding about the technical, human and organisational aspects that come to play in creating great products.
1) If you were a product, what product would you be? Why?
I am totally a Tamagotchi. I am from the 90’s (ahem, give or take), I am fun, I need to be fed and played with! And I am digital but not 100%.
2) In your own words, what is a Product Owner? And a Product Manager? Which one do you prefer to define your job?
I think the PM/PO is responsible for delivering value to the customer in a way that meets the purpose of the business/organization she belongs to. This implies learning about this customer and what value “means” for him or her and, at the same time, understanding how to deliver it. The well known Double Diamond framework summarises these two activities in “Building the Right thing and Building things Right”.
The Product Manager/Product Owner roles, in my observation, depend on the internal organisation of the company. There are companies where the strategic part of the role, the one ensures to build the right thing, is played by the Product Manager; the role of prioritization of tasks and delivery are played by Product Owners.
From that perspective, a Product Manager would devote her time to manage a Roadmap that balances customer, market and stakeholders needs while Product Owners would work on keeping the team focused, facilitating the technical solutions and prioritizing the Backlog.
I know companies where the same people are just playing both roles, and there are companies that have split them. Even in the same company, there are positions that require a different mix of both responsibility areas, depending mostly on the strategic weight of the Product itself in the context of the whole business.
I currently define myself as a Product Manager, because it makes it easier for the market to understand my skill set. However, I always felt that “owning my products” defines better how I feel about this job.
3) Why do companies need Product Managers?
Actually companies only need Product people at a certain moment. Often the role is compared with being a CEO; not because PMs are special, only because they are connected with the reason why the company exists… What are we solving here? How are we solving it so we are sustainable? And at early stages, is the CEO that finds those answers.
As the companies find their market fit and their proprietary way of delivering value, the answers to those questions become more complex: companies deliver multiple customers and ways of reaching them, extend their primary value proposition, leverage different resources, face competitors and deal with a changing environment. Constant experimentation becomes important to find the right answers. So Product organizations come to help to keep up with the delivery of value, taking into account all those new moving parts.
4) What is the difference between a good Product Manager and a bad Product Manager?
Bad PMs never question why. Good PMs do ask themselves why.
5) What do you enjoy the most as a Product Manager?
The part I love the most is the product discovery part. When you get to a good problem or opportunity definition you feel like holding the Big Bang particle in your palm: all possibilities of solution are in front of you!
And the whiteboards. I can’t live without one.
6) What is the worst part of being a Product Manager? What frustrates you?
Product is a team effort and is cross functional, it goes beyond the squad that a PM leads. It frustrates me when the companies are not set up in a way that the different elements of the product experience for the customer collaborate in the best way.
7) If you could ask any question to any Product Manager on Earth, who would you choose and what would you ask him/her?
April Underwood, that is the Chief Product Officer at Slack. I am a big fan of the Slack experience and it surprises me the specificity of their features. They have completely covered scenarios that in any other company would be corner cases at the bottom of the backlog. I would ask her how do they encourage and prioritise such attention to detail in the Product team.
Note: this post is the second one of an ephemeral set of articles based on my conversations with eight Product Managers. I will publishing a new article in the next six days. You can read the first episode -an interview with Alexander Hipp (N26, pmlibrary.com)- through this link.