Audrey Pedro is currently the Chief Product Officer at Scaleway, a complete cloud solution trusted by more than 25k businesses. Audrey’s experience spans over 10 years in product management, overseeing the company’s product roadmap, from strategy and design to general distribution, as well as quality of execution.

Prior to Scaleway, Audrey held product management positions at DocuSign, as well as serving as lead product manager for P&C fraud detection at Shift Technology.

Today we are going to talk about:

• Joys and learnings from working with startup founders
• Building product mindset in early stage ventures
• And hiring and creating a great product team

Episode highlights

[6.33] Evolution of product management in French product startup ecosystem

[13.20] Series B raise as a pivoting time in a product journey and the skill of letting go of product team as a Founder

[22.00] Scaling up journey and managing expectations from product leader

[29.46] Building product culture - identifying the impact points and centring the view on the value to user

[40.00] Building high functioning product teams that are diverse and equitable

Importance of trust between the incoming CPO and Founder

Audrey outlines the need for the alignment between the expectations of founder from the incoming CPO and the CPO him/herself already at the role definition process and interview stages. Audrey advises to have the tough discussions early on, preferably in the interview process to gauge the understanding of expectations. When growing, creating space and doing gap analysis will help identify the widening gaps in the company and product offer or product service, which will allow to focus on the user and centralise the efforts of all teams. As you grow and doubling in numbers, Audrey brings the example of how product management can be the saviour in helping one to focus on right features, therefore not wasting the time and effort of engineering team, aligning everyone to the same goal - this journey, Audrey says, starts with observation and communication.

M&M’s dilemma - coating vs peanut; Big picture, then details

Audrey shares that focusing on the end user and challenges you are solving for the user, rather than processes first is the approach she takes with her teams. This allows to focus on user experience and core value creation, ensuring the loyal user base and supporting all facets of the organization from product teams to engineering to customer success. This is a key for businesses relying on community and retention, and in situations where you need to have a strong value based differentiator to grow in the market.

Connect with Audrey in Linkedin and Twitter

View Scaleway's offering