Love interviewing first time founders and CPOs on the podcast. Why? Because they both help us all go back to the essence of product management and recap on some of the bias we are all prone to. If you are a first time or repeat product lead, scale up product person or a founder working out the solution - these learnings are for you.
Few weeks ago I sat down for a chat with Matheus Beltrami, Co-Founder and CPO of deX Labs to talk about his journey to product from functional field of data and analytics. deX Labs is a vertically focused state of the art platform designed to seamlessly integrate every aspect of data handling.
Matheus talks about 3 main learning areas along building deX Labs:
- developing a deep understanding of the problem you are tackling by keeping focus on your user group and problem you are solving for them. He outlines the need to separate yourself from your perception of the problem (and your opinion) and what customers are saying and experiencing. This is easier said than done!
- collecting and prompting information. Digging (really) deep into the problems. Being attentive and allowing ample time to truly understand the day to day of your user in order to gain a better insight into the problem. These days product leads are inundated with many meetings causing them to get lost in details sometimes and put the big picture questions on the back burner. Create "thinking" time pockets to counteract that. This point was also brought up by Millie Zah from DAZN on ProductCon few weeks back and is a talking pain point for product leaders I am talking to.
- accept that you'll have to compromise. Group and cluster ideas, put those into backlog and prioritise. Rigourously.
Best of luck to Matheus Beltrami and the deX Labs team on growing the product further!