MENA PMs #5: How Bayzat’s VP of Product (HR&Payroll) is revolutionizing the HR industry by building All-star Product teams | Safwan Youseph

Our fifth guest of the Product@MENA series is Safwan Youseph. Safwan is a VP of Product at Bayzat who has worked in product management for over six years. Safwan has established his product career entirely with Bayzat and went from a Business Analyst to a VP of Product in less than seven years. With that being said, let me give the floor to Safwan to introduce himself.

Part 1: All About Safwan

Shehab: Who is Safwan?

Safwan: Someone who’s hungry for learning and growth. I joined Bayzat as a Business Analyst in 2016. I have always aspired for growth ever since the beginning and never stopped. I am thankful for the right environment I got into and the opportunities Bayzat offered that helped me to reach where I am today.

I was able to solve various problems at Bayzat for HR Managers, which historically used to take a lot of time and effort. To date, I am a product manager who helped Bayzat solve a problem, of which the solution is now the most transacted product on Bayzat. Moreover, I am honored to be a part of the team that broke the barriers of entry to revolutionize the HR and Payroll space in UAE.

I am a strong advocate of giving back, and today, I do that in the form of mentorship, primarily coaching when necessary for aspiring or early-stage Product Managers. I am also a part of various forums as a Product Expert and Mentor.

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

Safwan: Patience and ability to read the room and the people.

Fun fact, I was the most short-tempered person in high school. It was more a realization of the pain and mistakes I caused with the help of a dear friend that I realized the virtue of patience. With that came the ability to be silent, observe and read the room.

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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.

Safwan: I am a Dubai-born and bred lad. I did my undergrad at Amity University and my Masters from Curtin University. While I was doing my undergrad, I took the opportunity to explore the job market through internships and part-time roles. But it was right after university I joined Bayzat as a full-time employee. I was a Business Analyst then, where I was responsible for the sale of individual and family health insurance plans.

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Shehab: Which part of being a VP of Product is the most challenging for you?

Safwan: As you shift to a leadership role, the most complex problem is always people management because people are complex. And managing Product Managers, whose primary responsibility is management stakeholders’ expectations, is a challenging role in itself. The breadth and variety of the teams you interact with also lead to further complexity here.

Part 2: Safwan’s Way of Managing Product Teams

Shehab: I know Bayzat is a hot company in the region right now. Tell us more about it. What problems do you solve? And what products are you building?

Safwan: We are on a mission to make a world-class employee experience accessible to every company. And we do that by digitizing the HR, Finance, and Insurance experience. We work with stakeholders in the region — UAE and KSA, in the HR, Finance, and Insurance industry, and automate their administrative tasks, thereby allowing them to spend time on strategic initiatives that lead to building a better work culture, which then leads to the world-class employee experience — our mission!

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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?

Safwan: We structure our product teams by tribes. We follow the Spotify tribe approach in the company. Within a tribe, you can have more than one product squad. A squad consists of Product Manager, Product Designer, and Engineering, whereas the tribe also has members from Business Intelligence, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and other departments.

The squads are further divided by the product verticals, which are derived from the outcomes we are chasing as an organization. At present, we have 9 Squads at Bayzat.

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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?

Safwan: This was a major problem for us in 2019, and ever since we adopted the tribe model, it has started to fade away. Don’t get me wrong, we still have gaps to bridge, but it opened up opportunities to get closer than before. We aim to solve this through overcommunication.

Part 3: Let’s Talk Strategy

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

Safwan: While defining the product strategy, we analyze the riskiest assumptions, and at most times, the riskiest assumptions include product-market fit, commercialization, and cost. That’s how we align user needs with the vision and product strategy.

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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?

Safwan: We follow the cascading strategy framework suggested in “Playing to Win” by AG Lafley and Roger L. Martin. We include multiple stakeholders in this exercise, which allows us to align everyone. It also further helps with running experiments to validate the riskiest assumptions.

The strategy is then aligned with the respective tribe OKRs, which aligns respective tribes on what to achieve for a particular period of time. The OKRs are cascaded down further into projects, experiments, and other such initiatives.

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

Safwan: It is again governed by OKRs. As a team, we decide on what’s important for us for a particular point in time.

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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?

Safwan: By providing more visibility into company strategy and how it is defined and being accountable for driving product strategy. At the same time, the right support and guidance are given at each stage to ensure they are guided correctly.

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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?

Safwan: We start with a hypothesis. Our litmus test is if it aligns with OKRs, Product Strategy, and company mission. Furthermore, we do an extensive assessment of the problem space through various means. Being a B2B product primarily, we rely on Customer Interviews mostly. We follow the Continous Discovery framework of Teressa Torres. We also rely on other mediums for data gathering — Hotjar, our BI tool for product analytics, and Surveys.

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

Safwan: In the B2B space, aligning sales, customer success, and marketing with product initiatives is always a challenge. What unites us all is our strategy and mission. We engage with different stakeholders of the company, and we have a pre-defined way of collecting and analyzing feedback from all stakeholders — internal and customers.

This allows us to bypass a lot of struggles when it comes to misalignment on what we do to why we are doing them, and at the same time, saves Product teams time and effort to break strategy down into initiatives and features to build.

Part 4: Getting The Execution Right

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

Safwan: Some metrics we look into are the time to market and success metrics tied to the contribution to the OKRs. We also analyze costs and categorize them into Opex and Capex, whereby time spent on engineering is considered a Capex, whereas time spent on finalizing a solution is an Opex. This also helps analyze team efficiency and ROI

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

Safwan: We have multiple product and design review sessions. We have an initial meeting to debate on the Opportunity presented by Product Managers on why to solve a problem. We have several meetings in between to evaluate the user journey, user flows, and designs. We have Design System review meetings at the end of finalizing the intended user flow. In parallel, we also have an engineering evaluation on the compatibility of new components if introduced in the solution.

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

Safwan: Clear

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

Safwan: Extensive knowledge of the domain and your product is critical here. We have various internal refreshes sessions that allow Product teams to remind and remember how our product functions today.

When building a new solution, we also have checklist items, where when building, there are always a few scenarios to consider. This also, to a great extent, allows the product team to not fall into the trap of missing out on edge cases.

Part 5: Final Advice

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

Safwan: For Aspiring Product Managers, test your hypotheses on whether you love to be in Product. Reach out to current Product professionals and make sure you instill confidence in them and a promise that having you on the team will not result in them investing time to onboard you, as that always is why people shy away from having you do some work for them.

What it does for you is to get practical experience on how things actually work in Product. It allows you to build experience, and you also get to an Aha moment of how some of the skills you have developed over a period of time are going to be your strong suit for this role.

At worst, you will realize that this is not for you, and that also is a win!

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

Safwan: Thank you, Shehab!