Mario Di Nucci — The 5 What
Mario Di Nucci
Head Of Product Management Presso OLX Autos (formerly Frontier Car Group), lives in Berlin, Germany
About
I’m Italian, born in a region so-called Abruzzo which is famous for the same reasons New Zealand is famous (wild nature, a lot of ships and sadly many earthquakes). I moved to Padova where I study engineering. I worked in and for hospitals for 5 years until I moved to Germany. In Berlin, I’ve initially worked as a developer for a startup founded by Rocket, which didn’t last so long, but was a valuable experience to start thinking about my own business… and this was the beginning of my career as a product guy.
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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?
Being a good product manager is not only building something people need, it’s building something people will love. Understanding users needs is never easy, but the real challenge is convincing people to use your product, and you can succeed only if your product is making them happy(er).
What do you identify as a common thing among people working on product development?
Product managers are constantly starving for traction. They need to get approvals for everything. They need to validate ideas. They need to see numbers changing (either growing or decreasing). I’m pretty sure that whenever product managers are showing self-confidence, there should be always a part of diffidence.
What do you think will be the next big trend in product development?
There was a time when data was the answer to everything a product manager needs. Now we are surrounded by data, and it’s hard to get the right insights or behaviors. I strongly believe the future will be AI and Machine Learning, having models that can understand and learn from data in order to predict behaviors.
What have you learned recently?
That a technical background is “just” a nice to have. I have the pleasure to work with people coming from different backgrounds (cultural, educational, and working wise) and I’m learning every day from them.
What would you like to say to the product people who are reading this text?
Being a product manager is not about you. Maybe it sounds common sense, but too often product managers tend to do what they would like, or convincing people about their ideas, or getting things done according to their needs. Being a product manager is being part of a team, part of building something for others by others.
