Dimitra Poulianou — The 5 What
Dimitra Poulianou
Product Manager at SumUp, Living in Berlin, Germany
About
With quality and tech background, Dimi started her journey as a Business Analyst for a SaaS solution and then moved to “official” Product Management working with Data teams.
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The 5 What
What is the most valuable thing you carry with you from the beginning of your journey as a product person?
At the time, I didn’t know how important it was but the first thing I remember was focusing on is the why. As a tutor, as a student, as a tester and then in product.
I had come across Simon Sinek and that captivated me. It clicked so well with my lack of self confidence and helped me see that there is no obvious answer. Nobody has all the answers and I’m not the only one who’s in the dark :)
What do you identify as a common thing among people working on product development?
Self motivation!
It can get lonely since we rarely work on the same product with our product colleagues, so the ability to be able to pick up yourself and keep going is very important. It’s not often that another colleague can pick up your research, your next quarter planning, your discovery workshop, your ideation session or your meeting with the stakeholders. You just have to remind yourself why this matters and go on and be your awesome self.
What do you think will be the next big trend in product development?
Product Management was mainstreamed (sic) due to the international Agile blow up, and that also shaped a lot of the aspects of the job. This intertwined connection to agile brought a lot of needed clarity but also took the focus away from where the value lies; and that is not in tickets and backlogs.
So, not sure if that qualifies as a trend, but this shift to the real value of the PM role is something that I’m glad to be seeing around;
customer-centric product strategy that follows the market, and vision that leads companies, is the true meaning of product management.
What have you learned recently?
These days, more than ever, we are all facing hard and abrupt changes on our plans. And it was now more than ever when all of us had to actually test ourselves and see how agile we really are.
I was lucky enough to be in a working environment and in a team that managed to handle change really well, managed to not only adjust working rituals but actually drop roadmaps and built new ones from scratch, in a matter of days.
Any part of me that was left fearing changes, is now gone and that is really liberating!
What would you like to say to the product people who are reading this text?
Don’t let yourself be comfortable with how things are. There is always a better, cleaner and prettier way, just around the corner. And that’s where creativity lies.
(Controlled) Experimentation (complete with fact-checking validation) leads to innovation.
