Concretely, what’s a typical workday for a product person at Pennylane?
Pennylane is a product-led company, which puts users at the center of everything. While this statement is rather common in startups, it comes with special challenges as we grow: our product team is over 30 persons now and will be over 60 by December. Our success will depend on the team’s ability to nurture direct access to users. This access is crucial to ensuring we keep solving the needs of SMEs and accounting firms.
🕵️ The discovery phase
The main focus of the product management team is on the discovery phase, with engineers being the true owners of the delivery phase. For discovery, Product Managers and Designers work hand-in-hand by conducting in-depth user research, including interviewing users and collecting insights from sales and customer support teams. Their goal is to get the most comprehensive understanding of the users’ needs and pain points. We use Harvestr and Notion to make the most of the feedback we gathered.
For quantitative research, we are happy to leverage our Data infrastructure which makes looking for insights very easy via Metabase.
Once these needs are identified, product managers and product designers sketch ideal solutions and get in touch with engineers to stay aware of potential risks and dependencies.
💡 The delivery phase
The conception phase starts with sketching wireframes (we are heavy users of Miro!) in close collaboration with engineering managers and software engineers. Remember that at Pennylane we have a remote-first team so we love tools that enable us to have asynchronous discussions.
The conception phase also includes user tests: it is crucial to have their views on wireframes or prototypes before we move further. Once we get a workable prototype, it’s the responsibility of the engineering team to own the delivery phase, with the product team acting as a support and engaging in discovery for another problem.
Lastly, as the feature is about to be live, product managers collaborate with product marketing and operational teams to ensure a successful release. It’s now time to have a look at the Metabase dashboard to monitor the adoption of the feature and get insights on what the next iterations should be.
👋 Interlude — Meet the team!
👩💼 15 “small CEOs”
We have around 15 feature and impact teams: each team consists of a product manager, a product designer, an engineering manager, and 4 or 5 software engineers.
One specificity of Pennylane is the great autonomy of each team: we often refer to product managers as “small CEOs”, who are expected not only to orchestrate the vision, the strategy, and the success of features, but also to empower every team member in this direction. Not every team follows the same rituals: they are free to organize their work as they see fit as long as they respect the key principles of the agile manifesto and some homemade product principles.
The relationship with myself as the CPO or with other product leaders respects the team’s full autonomy (no top-down roadmap at Pennylane!) while assuring a common understanding of the company’s strategy and vision. Overall, the product leaders aim to guarantee efficient work conditions, help define the north star metric of each team, mentor people to develop their skills, and accompany every team member toward success.
If this journey looks attractive to you and our product principles resonate with the way you work, we would be delighted to hear from you!
A last note: we’re proud the team is gender-balanced and we care about inclusivity in terms of gender, race, and sexual orientation.
