Practice and reflect. There is no secret rule: doing and learning from my actions helped me a lot.

Discover our Qonto Insider of the month: Rémi Cougnaud, Product Manager at Qonto.

1. What did you do before joining Qonto (your education, professional experience etc.)?

Like lots of young people in France who enjoy maths, I started my education as an engineer. But, knowing early on that I wanted to create my own company someday, I felt that an engineering background wasn’t enough. I wanted to learn the “rules of the business world” (that was how I looked at it back then, don’t judge me!), so I pursued a dual degree at a business school.

During my studies, I had the chance to go abroad (to Singapore and London), as well as try different jobs with 6-month internships. My first internship was at Ingenico Group, allowing me to discover the payment industry. My second internship was at Yoobic. This is where I discovered the Product Manager role.

Right at the end of my studies, I engaged in an ultimately-unsuccessful-yet-learning-filled (sounds a bit clichéd, but it’s true) year of entrepreneurship. My main focus was creating insect-based meat. Knowing I wouldn’t be able to create a salary from this business, it was then time for me to move on.

2. Why did you join Qonto?

The first thing for me was to define which job would help me grow.

One thing that I learned during my entrepreneurship journey was that, if I wanted to succeed in my next venture, I would need to learn how to get things done efficiently. I wanted to be the owner of my decisions (i.e. taking on the their consequences), as well as being in contact with clients (which was one thing I did less well in my previous experience). So, for me, seeking a Product Manager role was the right path.

Next up, I needed to identify a company I’d like to work for.

Based on my internships in both big companies and startups, I knew that the best ecosystem for me to learn in would be a scale-up. So, I graded all scale-up in Paris (based on my personal criteria) and applied to the ones I’d rated above 4 out of 5. I gave a 5 to Qonto, for two main reasons. First: I used the product during my entrepreneurship journey, and was happy to pay for it. Second: I called someone working there and got the feedback that Qonto was the one of the best places to learn and grow as a Product Manager.

After going through the interview process with Qonto, my third step was accepting the offer.

During my interview process, I felt that — even if I had no prior working experience (except for internships) — the leadership team was willing to trust me and help me grow as a Product Manager.

With all elements combined, I started working at Qonto in June 2022.

3. How would you summarize the recruitment process?

The process was smooth, thanks to the feedback provided by the Talent Acquisition Manager after each interview. It really helps a candidate to understand how the process is going, and gives motivation when it’s going well.

It also felt open, meaning that questions were asked from both directions, and the the debrief of the case study was a collaborative discussion. It helped me to envisage how the day-to-day work would look in practice.

Finally, the process was quick. In my case it was only two weeks between the first interview and final offer.

4. What stood out for you about the onboarding process?

I was impressed by the number and quality of the sessions we had. After one week of ‘general’ onboarding, you have a strong foundation to understand how we work at Qonto.

What really stood out for me then was the second week of onboarding: the job-specific part. We had around eight hours of Product OS training from our then-Product Principal, which was key for me, as I was new to the Product Manager role. There were just four new joiners in those training sessions, so I felt I had a tailor-made onboarding session. I also met at least one Product Manager from each cross-functional team, helping me to better understand our product.

5. Tell us about what you do as a Product Manager at Qonto.

My mission as a Product Manager at Qonto is to build features that bring value to our clients and revenue for Qonto. As achieving this mission is not the result of a single task, I’ll break down what I do as a PM at Qonto into four elements:

1. Support my lead to define the roadmap. Here I’m tasked with building my understanding of the opportunity space and prioritizing work that will deliver on Qonto’s strategy. This includes: talking to customers, looking at and answering CS tickets, reviewing competing products, etc.
2. Design features that deliver value for our users by solving their problems. Together with designers, UX writers and engineers, we conduct user research to identify our customers’ needs. In addition to the skills mentioned above, I also carry out user interviews, usability tests, surveys, prototyping, etc.
3. Plan the solution implementation. In collaboration with engineers, we undergo a short, sharp scoping phase, in which we thoroughly plan how the feature will be built. Here I create the right conditions for the team to deliver quality, fast. The skills in practice here are: leadership, methodology, attention to detail, etc.
4. Measure the impact: when a feature is live, my role is to monitor if we reached our objectives, gather learnings on the hypothesis we made, and identify potential improvements if we didn’t reach the objectives. Here, I would usually use SQL query, build funnels with our tracker tool, and call users.

Of course, the job of a Product Manager is very diverse, but I believe these four steps are a good overview of what I do at Qonto on a daily basis.

6. What are the qualities required to be a successful Product Manager?

The first thing that I observed at Qonto is that a lots of different backgrounds can lead to good Product Manager. I’ve only been working on product for a year and a half, so it’d be hard to offer a comprehensive answer to this question. However, I can share the traits that help me personally in my role as a Product Manager:

1. Being relentless. Going into the details to gain a deep understanding of a problem that you’ve just discovered was crucial for me. Nobody will do it for you, but you need this information to build great features.
2. Practice and reflect. There is no secret rule: doing and learning from my actions helped me a lot. This is all the more true at Qonto, where we work in a lean way. One thing that I did to speed up the process was to read what my peers were doing, to learn from them as well.
3. Be empathic. Being obsessed with understanding customers and solving their problems is core to building a feature that actually helps customers. Empathy is also key with internal stakeholders, as you’re building a feature for customers as part of a team.

7. What has been your biggest challenge as a Product Manager?

My biggest challenge so far was querying a new feature we were working on. After investigating, I proposed that the revenue potential was not high enough for the effort we wanted to invest. However, in this instance, I didn’t have a better option to put to the team.

From this experience, I learned how to feed back in a more constructive way, making sure I’m ready to offer solutions to challenges where I can see them.

8. Which of Qonto’s 5 values (Customer focus, Ownership, Teamwork, Mastery, Integrity) resonates with you the most and why?

Ownership: for me, ownership is central to learning (and learning was a huge objective for me when joining Qonto).

9. If you could speak to potential future Qonto candidates, what would you tell them?

I often talk to people about Qonto, so I’ll share here what I usually tell others. 🙂

1. Qonto has a specific way of working (called The Qonto Way), and I believe that, once you embrace it, you will grow a lot and adopt skills that will stay with you for life.
2. Teamwork is easy and enjoyable at Qonto, mainly because everyone is good at their job.
3. We work in English with people from all over Europe, making it a good place to interact with other cultures.
4. Even if Qonto is already sizable, we still have big ambitions, so you will be able to grow in the company.

10. Do you have a fun anecdote you would like to share about your time at Qonto?

I wanted to motivate people at the office to take the stairs rather than the elevator, so I created a Slack channel called “#team-stairs”. One of the members of this channel is what you might affectionately call a troll, and under their influence the Slack channel has grown into a group mainly made up of people that love stairs. The channel is currently full of pictures of stairs (mainly fed by the same person, I won’t lie…!).

About Qonto

Qonto makes it easy for SMEs and freelancers to manage day-to-day banking, thanks to an online business account that’s stacked with invoicing, bookkeeping and spend management tools.

Created in 2016 by Alexandre Prot and Steve Anavi, Qonto now operates in 4 European markets (France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) serving 450,000 customers, and employs more than 1,400 people. Since its creation, Qonto has raised €622 million from well-established investors.

Qonto is one of France’s most highly valued scale-ups and has been listed in the Next40 index, bringing together future global tech leaders, since 2021.

Interested in joining a challenging and game-changing company? Consult our job offers!