7 (+1) lessons I learned as a Product Manager at BlaBlaCar

They made me a much better PM.

Some experiences make you grow faster than others.

I’ve been a product manager for more than 6 years now, and BlaBlaCar remains an important stepping stone in my career. It was a hell of a ride, both personally and professionally, and I often say it was the best product school I could have done.

Some of those takeaways might seem obvious to you, but experimenting them at scale brought them to a whole new level in my professional life. Don’t underestimate them.

So, here are they!

1. Repetition is the mother of retention

Never assume everybody will hear — or remember — the information you just shared.

Repeat, repeat, repeat… and answer every question as if it was the first time.

2. Simplification is a thing

While I was at BlaBlaCar, I had the chance to work with people addicted to simplicity. You can check out some of their articles here and here (FR).

3. We are not our users

This one should be intuitive for all PMs but we tend to forget it too easily.

You don’t have the answers, your opinion is just one among millions of others. Talk to your users and watch them use your product as often as possible. This will help you understand their problems and frustrations, and identify some opportunities. This article I read recently presents it as “increasing our exposure hours”, I highly recommend you to read it.

4. If a decision is easy to make, you made it too late

This is what our CEO said to us when we tried to convince him that it was too early for us to launch a very important feature for the company.

This is probably my biggest learning, and it can be applied to many aspects of life. I might write a whole article on this one later.

5. Split. This. Project.

Long projects are bad for everybody: for your users (you don’t bring any value in the meantime) and for your team (you will all be exhausted and frustrated).

I already wrote a complete article on this one here if you want to know more.

6. Manage expectations and under-promise

Never commit on anything you’re not 100% sure to do or reach.

By doing so, at worst you prevent frustrating the stakeholders and avoid uncomfortable conversations about why you did not meet their expectations, and at best you happily surprise them.

7. Stop starting, start finishing

Having a long backlog of unfinished projects is the most frustrating thing I know in a squad’s daily life.

No release = no celebration + accumulated mental load.

Take a break, list the unfinished initiatives, check if they are still relevant and knock them out one by one, either by officially giving them up or finishing them.

You’ll see how much lighter you will feel.

Bonus: Everybody has imposter syndrome.

When I arrived at BlaBlaCar, I was surrounded by brilliant people and couldn’t help feeling like a huge fraud.

But instead of getting discouraged, I started to talk about it and realized that EVERYBODY was silently feeling the same, at least when they first started. Even the ones that were now impressing me.

That was definitely one of my most encouraging life lessons.

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I’ll keep sharing my Product Management experience in the coming weeks, stay tuned and sign up to be notified :)