MENA PMs #2: How Almosafer's Product Director Manages Product Teams | Christian Kemsies

Our second guest of the Product@MENA series is Christian Kemsies. Chris is a Product Director at Seera Group who has worked in product management for over seven years. Chris has built and scaled tens of products and product teams. With that being said, let me give the floor to Chris to introduce himself.

Part 1: All About The Super Chris

Shehab: Who is Christian?

Christian: Great, let's start with an existential crisis — Who am I?! I'm Chris, and I currently hold two positions. I'm the Product Director for Flights (interim), and first and foremost, I'm the Director of Product Operations and Strategic Projects at Almosafer; I'm helping to build, enable, optimize, and scale the product divisions whilst improving the interconnectedness and interdependence of the larger ecosystem.

In my previous roles as Product Manager and Product Lead across platforms and for specific verticals at Seera, I have built up a repertoire of invaluable knowledge, which he now applies to enable the product team to operate with resilience to constant change internal & external forces and to scale effectively.

My career prior to Seera Group spans areas of IT, technology consultancy, and project management at startups, as well as a 13-year tenure at Beiersdorf — one of the largest FMCGs in Europe.

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Shehab: What is your superpower? And How did you gain it?

Christian: I like to think that I'm a good translator. Not only can I speak the "language" of marketing, sales, engineering, etc. I can translate problems or requirements from one language into another.

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Shehab: Let's go back to the start. Tell us a bit about what you studied and where your career journey began.

Christian: I never went to University; instead, I did an apprenticeship to become an IT Specialist for System Integration and worked in a data center with bare metal servers because the cloud was not a thing back then. So my day-to-day was mounting servers and installing the operating system till they could be handover to the Project Teams.

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Shehab: Which part of being a product director is the most challenging for you?

Christian: Finding the balance between flexibility and stability. Flexibility is to react to new business or market requirements, and stability for the team is to focus on an opportunity and have certainty about what is up next.

Part 2: Chris's Way of Managing Product Teams

Shehab: I know Seera is one of the hottest companies in the region right now. Tell us more about it. What problems do you solve? And what products are you building?

Christian: Almosafer (part of Seera group) recently became its own company. Elevating the journey for travelers from Saudi Arabia, the MENA region & beyond while harnessing Seera Group's 40+ years of expertise, Almosafer supports Saudi Arabia's vision as a national champion for tourism. Almosafer creates opportunities for outbound, leisure, and religious travel whilst serving B2C and B2B customers, partners, and suppliers with state-of-the-art travel solutions, a digital-first mindset, and travel advisory.

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Shehab: How many product teams do you have? Do you structure your product teams around products, user types, user journeys, outcomes, or something in between?

Christian: We structure our teams around customer-facing products and customer-enabling products, where each product team can have multiple squads. E.g., the flight team has two squads: Funnel and Supplier integration.

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Shehab: How do you think departmental silos affect your product teams? In what ways do you build and maintain relationships with stakeholders from different teams?

Christian: I think it all boils down, in the end, to frustration and anxiety. Departments or teams working in silos will eventually lead to misalignments, wrong expectations, and, worst case, wasted money. This puts pressure on the Product Manager because we are the pines responsible for managing expectations and ensuring we are aligned with our stakeholders.

Whenever possible, I'm trying to make my stakeholder part of the process, call it co-creation, if you will. Use them to bounce off ideas and to get regular feedback. Also, never underestimate the power of a casual conversation over a cup of coffee.

Part 3: Let's Talk Strategy

Shehab: How do you align your user needs with the company's vision and your product strategy?

Christian: If the needs of my users do not align with my vision and strategy, then I either have the wrong vision/strategy, or I'm focusing on the wrong customer segment.

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Shehab: How do you align your team on the strategy and the vision? How do you make sure that everyone feels heard?

Christian: Ideally, I had the chance to create both with the team or at least had them participate in the creation process. And within the exercises, there are plenty of opportunities for each individual to be heard. But this will require a safe environment and trust among the team members. If your team members feel unsafe voicing their opinion, they will stay silent.

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Shehab: How do you set the strategic priorities for your product teams?

Christian: With a vision in place, I have an idea of where we need to go, and the strategy is my map (plan) of how to get there. The priorities depend a lot on the bigger picture because context matters. Breaking the strategy down can help identify obstacles or opportunities on the way and therefore inform the priorities we want to set as a team.

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Shehab: It is crucial for product managers to focus on strategic thinking. Is there anything you are doing to improve it, and if so, how?

Christian: As mentioned before, context matters. So, I believe Product Managers need to spend time understanding the ecosystem they're operating in. Broadening their horizon, so to speak. Being a subject matter expert when it comes to your product is only the first step. To become strategic, one needs to have an understanding of the bigger picture, which includes the company, domain, industry, technology, and many more areas based on your field.

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Shehab: How do you perform product discovery? What tools/techniques/methods do you use? Do the results affect your product strategy?

Christian: For me, the core of discovery is how to learn faster. That means I should have a learning goal before I set out to do something. Based on the learning goal, I will choose the tool which is best suited for the job, e.g., Customer Interview, AB test, data analytics, survey, prototyping, etc.

And yes, your learnings should inform your strategy; it is a fundamental building block of your strategy. And whenever you learn something new which disproves one of your assumptions, you may want to course correct it.

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Shehab: How do you engage with the product teams to break the strategy into initiatives and features?

Christian: I like the working-backward approach for that. At least to get to the initiatives level. Keep in mind that we are running continuous discovery, so we constantly keep on learning, and a feature is nothing but the solution to a (customer) problem. To engage the team, I will explain to them the problem and why it is worth solving. I will also regularly come back to them once we build a feature and show them the impact of their work.

Part 4: Getting The Execution Right

Shehab: How do you ensure efficient execution? What methods do you use with your teams?

Christian: I try to give the team as much freedom as possible because I believe they know best how to do the job. The degree of freedom depends on the team's maturity; the lower the maturity, the more coaching and guidance are needed. But in the end, most teams use either Kanban or SCRUM.

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Shehab: How do your product/design review meetings work?

Christian: I rarely need such a formal meeting because of our collaborative approach and the clear agreement that results (data) beat opinions. So by the time we launch a feature, everyone involved has already seen the designs multiple times and is aware of the problem we are trying to solve and how we measure success.

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Shehab: In a word, what makes a PRD or a user story effective?

Christian: It explains what the problem is, why it is a problem, and why it is worth solving in a way that is understandable for everyone.

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Shehab: How do you usually guide your product team to avoid falling into the trap of product edge cases?

Christian: An edge case is a theoretical scenario until data proves otherwise. That said, it is good to be aware of them, but we should not design for all of them. I'm a fan of the Pareto principle, build something that works in 80% of the cases and then ship it. The data will show us what we must do for our next iteration, which is also part of continuous discovery.

Part 5: Final Advice

Shehab: What's a lesson (or more than one) that you think would help aspiring product managers?

Christian: "Common sense is not that common." Being aware of assumptions and how to address them is a surprisingly powerful skill.

Shehab: Thank you, Chris, for taking the time to have this interview and to share with us your product journey.

Christian: Thank you, Shehab!