Building High-Performing Product Teams
Six product leaders share lessons learned, HR fundamentals, journey of Viva Wallet, evaluating early-stage startups as a VC, jobs, events and more
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Building High-Performing Product Teams
Building a great product team is one of the top priorities for every tech company. So today we're going multiplayer to answer key questions when it comes to hiring, scaling, culture, working with peers, operating in Greece and more. Six product leaders from six Greek startups take the stage and share their thoughts. A huge thank you to Babis Makrynikolas (VP Product & Pricing, Blueground), Joseph Alvertis (Senior VP Product, Orfium), Konstantinos Giamalis (Chief Product Officer, efood), Mark Tsirekas (VP Product, ZOE), Nicole Gkerpini (Lead Product Manager, Seafair) and Nikos Fertakis (Head of Product, Skroutz). They were all willing to share their precious time, stories, and insights with me and I deeply appreciate it. Let’s get to it!
Hiring your first Product Manager
When is the right time to make your first product hire? What are the key aspects to consider regarding their background, traits and seniority?
The right time to make your first product hire is when you can’t do without one. There comes a point where the company is growing and the product-focused founder can’t take care of all the details, which slows growth. That is when you hire a Product Manager. You hire by necessity, not by choice. Ideally, you hire because you hit product-market fit and growing so fast that a second pair of hands is necessary! Overall, here is what I would be looking for:
Hire for potential first, experience second. In fact, hire for raw intelligence and “0 to billion” players. A startup is by definition an uncertain environment full of pitfalls where PMs will make mistakes and, in fact, do so often. It’s not about impeccable execution; rather it’s about the speed of learning. The question then becomes how fast can you learn, and do so in a compounding way that is reflected in how the whole organization operates.
Hire for T-shaped PMs. By definition, this has to do with the industry, the skills of the co-founders, etc. Overall, a PM should be able to a) communicate with perfect clarity, b) have an excellent product sense and c) be a master in creating a community within their team. Besides that, you hire for the right superpowers. Expect that some PMs will be great at execution and some others in product strategy. The key is to understand your industry and business model and how these reflect to the product management skillset needed. For instance, if you're working in information-heavy, high margin businesses e.g. Zillow, Glassdoor, etc you can afford more mistakes and weigh strategic thinking more compared to a company such as DoorDash, where operational excellence is a must. A visible example of this is the difference between Meta (Facebook) and Amazon. Meta tends to breed more hacky type PMs, whereas Amazon has focused more on business efficiency historically.
Be the glue. Your first PM is not here to set the vision; to be a “leader”. (S)he is there to reinforce the vision of the founder and rally the troops around it. To pass the ball around, to create leverage for the whole organization. Assuming product-market fit, to grow the organization and tactically deploy teams in the right problems, so that customers rave about the product. To do so, you need them to be able to influence and glue people and departments together. When people work harmoniously together, then magic happens. The PM is not the magician. (S)he is the enabler of magic.
Mark Tsirekas, VP Product, ZOE
The right time to hire your first PM depends on the product skills of the founding team, alongside other factors, such as the financial capacity of the company. But a key question a team has to answer in the early days is whether they have someone with product sense in the founding team. If not, then they need to hire one asap. A co-founder is an entrepreneur, a Product Manager should be the builder. Generally, the rule is that you need a product architect and a product visioner as early as possible, so you should look for a PM with these skills, if possible.
Orfium had a co-founder acting as CPO, so they hired me when he didn’t have the capacity to write requirements; practically when a third product team was created. When I joined, I also established the product management processes, talked about strategy, and did things that a co-founder without proper product management experience couldn’t know. Retrospectively, they delayed about 6 months, but they didn’t have the budget before (Orfium was bootstrapped), so we can say they did the best they could.
Joseph Alvertis, SVP Product, Orfium
Scaling up your team
You’ve made your first product hires and are now ready to scale your team further. What are the most important considerations when adding new members to the product team?
Before you scale the team, structure is essential. Product management lies between business and tech, and we need to make sure that a) there are available engineers (dedicated or shared resources) that will collaborate with the PM and b) there are business initiatives that require product/tech development. If one or more of the above is broken, then the work of any PM (regardless of seniority) will become very difficult.
Another important element is the PM skillset. Product management used to be a generic craft, but nowadays there’s specialization across the industry. A PM with consumer & e-commerce experience has a different skillset from a PM that works on financial systems, automations, etc. Of course, there are common skills in place (mostly the soft ones), yet when you hire a PM you have to make sure that (s)he has the right skills or at least the potential to acquire them.
Last but not least, the level of experience is crucial too. Imagine a junior PM among experienced developers, or an experienced PM in an area that has no business priority. In addition, this process is not binary. Hiring only seniors does not scale, while hiring juniors to handle complex problems should be avoided. Mix and match your product/tech team with junior and senior professionals, in order to create a healthy and productive environment and culture.
Konstantinos Giamalis, Chief Product Officer, efood
Adding a senior member to your product team early on makes a huge impact, but you have to find them, convince them to join you, and make sure they’re a good fit. If you cannot find experienced PMs, you have to “create” them. Hire less senior people, train, guide and help them grow. That’s your job.
Early on at Orfium, we were looking for certain traits on junior or mid PMs. Experience with startups or freelancing was a good indication that they could adapt in an uncertain, unstable environment. The second most important trait is a PM that wants to learn. You can figure this out by what they read and how they learn. Furthermore, they should be able to describe a product holistically. I have met people with scrum certificates that cannot describe the input and output of a system, the UI of an application and the need for reporting to clients.
What you’re looking for will change as your team scales. It’s a matter of budget, brand power, product lifecycle, definition of problem you’re solving, and whether you feel that someone coming from another company can add value by bringing in new processes and organizational knowledge. Here are some tips:
If you are a Product Manager, consider adding a good Product Designer. PMs cannot lead a product, design-wise, for long.
Use a flat structure as much as possible. Work to empower your teams and give them access to the clients. Join their meetings to help, if needed.
If your team is inexperienced, work with them and educate them. They need a role model, not just systems and processes.
Joseph Alvertis, SVP Product, Orfium
Finding product culture fit
Product culture ultimately informs how a Product Manager spends their time, how decisions are made, and the strengths and weaknesses of the team’s product development approach. In your view, what does it take to create a great product culture?
A great product culture is connected to a large extent to what Marty Cagan and Chris Jones call empowered product teams. Such teams are positioned to drive change and ship great products that customers love. They own product strategy, which is a major part of the company’s strategy. They own their domain and are held accountable for their performance and results. They directly talk to customers and try to identify and serve their needs. They are trying to solve a problem rather than implement a solution or a feature assigned by the “business”.
Of course, just adopting these principles will not lead to the desired effect. This is a yearlong journey that affects the whole company. The leadership team has to trust the product organization and give them the space and resources they need to deliver, product stakeholders must be educated on how to work with the product team so that they can maximize the company’s total output, while the company’s hiring strategy should screen for key skills needed by PMs to successfully meet these expectations.
While some aspects become more complicated as the team scales, the main principles and elements don’t change much. Hire skilled product managers, assign them challenging problems to solve, keep them accountable for the outcome, and everything else will follow.
Babis Makrynikolas, VP Product & Pricing, Blueground
In order to build a great product culture:
Hire PMs with complementary skills and a growth mindset. It’s hard for a single person to nail all aspects of product management i.e. discovery, planning, execution, strategy, leadership, data analysis, etc. Hiring a team of product managers who complement each other’s skills will help examine problems from different angles, identify blindspots, improve processes and propose diverse solutions.
Nurture empowered, collaborative and well-informed PMs. By empowering product managers to make their product decisions increases the accountability and ownership over the product outcomes. It is the responsibility of a PM to understand the company strategy and align the product strategy and decisions in a way that it helps the business. At the same time the product culture should be inclusive. The PM should promote cross functional collaboration, so that other teams can contribute insights, identify tradeoffs and provide feedback. For example, PMs can identify market needs and analyze competition together with user and market research teams, they can gain valuable customer insights from sales, or test the unique value of innovative technological solutions that engineers propose. A good PM helps the cross-functional teams understand the connection of their work to the overall impact on the company.
Have well defined product goals. Defining what product success looks like with clear and accurate key performance indicators, allows product managers to measure the impact of their decisions and communicate them to the rest of their cross functional teams. It also helps with focus and prioritization of initiatives, ideas and resources.
Nicole Gkerpini, Lead Product Manager, Seafair
Evolving as a product leader
How does the role of a product leader evolve as the company scales? How did you address the challenges faced? If you could go back in time what’s the one thing you wish you had done differently?
A small company is usually dead focused on achieving product-market fit and then exploiting that to grow as much as possible. At some point though, further growth requires expanding to other areas of the value chain and everything becomes more complicated. Skroutz has been through this in its evolution from a price comparison website to a marketplace with its own last mile provider.
As a product leader, a significant challenge is aligning your teams with the broader company strategy and needs, without sacrificing ownership, empowerment and speed. This is where good, high-level company key results are very useful, because we can translate these into product strategy by identifying and prioritizing opportunities. At Skroutz, having dedicated user research and product analytics teams has helped us massively towards that goal. Once we agree on the opportunities each team should work on and how success will be measured, then the team is expected to take ownership and capture these opportunities in the way it thinks best. Every team is also responsible for writing down an analysis of the opportunity and the proposed solution (once product discovery is complete). We hold meetings where we read those documents and discuss them afterwards, so we can be aligned and provide feedback.
If I could go back in time, I'd make sure my younger self understood the difference between lagging and leading indicators and which are appropriate when. The trouble is that the outcome we want to see is usually a lagging indicator (e.g. quarterly sales) and these are, by definition, terrible to monitor on a weekly basis after product releases. Each opportunity should have simple leading indicators for success metrics that inform us whether we captured it, and we can set these as goals for an empowered product team.
Nikos Fertakis, Head of Product, Skroutz
efood started as a food/coffee online ordering platform and within three years it transformed into an app where you can order a wide variety of goods, from pet supplies to flowers. As a result, discussions on conversion rate optimization and A/B testing were enriched with new flows development and new verticals launches; concepts that have different scopes and complexity.
Prioritization became a great challenge, as the food/coffee vertical was still the “king”, and every time a feature about a different vertical arose, the argument of opportunity cost emerged. Thankfully, bringing the product team closer to the business helped us a lot to tackle this problem. Data is great, but long-term strategy combined with data informed tactics is more important. Paradoxically, deciding with less data, helped us become more data-driven (this book helped a lot).
In order to cope with business scale, we had to scale the product team too. Although I had done this before with the marketing team, this time was different, as hiring PMs was way more difficult. A tactique that helped us (along with proper hiring) was the encouragement of professionals from other departments to join the product team. After all, I was a Marketeer myself, before transitioning to product management. Bringing professionals from other departments to product helped us accelerate business understanding and increase empathy levels across the organization.
One thing I would have done differently is to say more “No” to product requests. A “No” puts constraints and stretches both the business and the team to seek for alternatives or even abandon the request. As I say, during my years in efood I handled the scarcest resources of any modern business: marketing budget and product capacity.
Konstantinos Giamalis, Chief Product Officer, efood
Working with peers
Ultimately, product management is about getting results through other people. What do you think is the right relationship between product and engineering?
My personal experience has been helpful in this regard. I joined Skroutz as a software engineer and spent many years in engineering and engineering leadership roles before switching to a Head of Product role a year and a half ago. So, I think I can see both sides of the aisle.
First of all, I'm firmly in the Marty Cagan camp. I believe good ideas can come from everyone, and that engineers should have a say on what they're building. There is nothing worse than a product team where its engineers are "implementers", waiting for the Product Manager to assign them tasks. This leads to low morale and complete lack of ownership, which is not how great products are made. It's also a waste of the PM's time.
I think the Product Manager's role is critical here. The PM has to rally the team around their outcome and organize product discovery by providing the context and the analysis of the opportunity, structuring ideation, and promoting decision making. Once the product discovery phase is complete and the team goes into delivery mode, the tech lead takes charge with the PM consulting as needed.
Skroutz was built originally by, what we called ourselves, "product-minded engineers", who cared deeply about our users, their needs and the product we were building. We introduced the Product Manager role only a few years ago, when it became clear we needed it, but we have tried hard to retain the product mindset of our engineers. This can be especially challenging with new hires (for both product and engineering roles) coming from companies with different cultures. It is a never-ending battle!
Nikos Fertakis, Head of Product, Skroutz
In a way, the job of the PMs is to work within the constraints of the business to elevate the craft of their counterparts, so that they deliver the best solution to the customer's problem. Engineering and product must work in lockstep. And working in such a coordinated way requires an alliance, one based on trust. Getting there relies on three agreements:
Respect each other's craft. To achieve this, the PM needs to reinforce tennis courts. There should be clear boundaries of who does what. Everyone gets to have autonomy and be uniquely responsible for an area leading to them acquiring mastery.
Fall in love with the customer’s problem, not with our solution. Customer centricity is a non-negotiable principle that can’t be compromised. Without it, the job of the PM ceases to matter and friction arises as the (s)he inevitably loses their raison d’être and slides into other territories and behaviors.
Follow the data and have the best idea win. PMs are not the “ideas (wo)men.” They are there to foster an environment where the cross-polination of ideas happens ceaselessly, seamlessly and after a common understanding of reality has been established by data.
Mark Tsirekas, VP Product, ZOE
Operating in Greece
In your view, what are the key areas where product teams in Greece should improve?
Greek product teams have made good progress in the last few years. This is evident through the results that many startups have achieved, as well as through the creation of a vibrant product community. However, there is still a long way to go.
The area that product teams need to improve on the most is product strategy. In the past, the role of product in Greece was mainly associated with that of a Project Manager/Product Owner, who focuses on the implementation of a project or feature. However, this view is missing the very important strategic aspect of the role.
To improve, Product Managers need to train this muscle by working on their understanding of the business, reading books/blogs and attending meetups on product strategy and getting trained or mentored by more senior product leaders that have done this before in other companies in Greece or abroad. In parallel, CEOs and leadership teams need to be educated on what to expect from product teams and how their partnership can be more successful. If we do things right, we will create this training ground for PMs to thrive and give value back to the startup ecosystem.
Babis Makrynikolas, VP Product & Pricing, Blueground
As Greece's tech scene has been growing over the past few years, there is an increased demand and competition for product talent At the same time, there is a limited pool of PMs because, historically, there were only a few Greek pioneering companies that have been building and nurturing product teams. As a result, for a startup today, the biggest challenge is sourcing more senior PMs with enough years of experience in product strategy, scalability and leadership.
While from a first glance the pool in Greece seems scarce, there are opportunities to consider when building and scaling a product team. First, many Greeks who have studied and worked abroad are looking for the right career opportunity to return back to Greece or are interested in working at a Greek startup remotely. Then, there are multiple cases of people who do not officially have the PM role title, yet, they performed roles with transferable skills. Finally, for junior positions, the product org might want to invest time developing existing employees and shape them to fit their product culture. Lastly, nurturing the product communities in Greece will help attract and further develop the local talent as well as attract talent from abroad.
Nicole Gkerpini, Lead Product Manager, Seafair
Tools Product Managers use
Before we wrapped up our conversations, I asked our guests to share some of the tools they use. Here they are:
Collaboration: Miro, Slack, Geekbot, Confluence, Trello, Jira, Airtable, Clickup, Calendly, Roam Research, Notion, Threadit, Productboard, Google Workspace, Whiteboards, Post-it stickers
Design & Prototype: Figma, Figjam
Research: Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Amplitude, Hotjar, SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms, Kibana, Maya Insights, Adjust, Viable.fit, Tableau
Other: emacs, Visual Studio Code, Postman, Ahrefs, Timezok
All teams are hiring! You can take a look at their open roles here: Blueground, efood, Skroutz, Orfium, ZOE, Seafair
Startup Jobs
Looking for your next opportunity? Check out job postings from Greek startups in Greece, abroad, and remotely.
News
OrthoSon, a medtech startup spun out of the University of Oxford, raised a £8.9m Series A round by Big Pi Ventures and other investors to accelerate back pain treatment’s progress to clinic.
Feel Therapeutics raised a $4m funding round from Genesis Ventures and other investors to further develop its biomarkers & digital therapeutics solution for mental health.
Trouva, a platform to discover independent bricks-and-mortar boutiques across the UK and Europe, was acquired by MADE.
A VC fund with focus on Cypriot companies launched named Kinisis Ventures.
Startup accelerator, OK!Thess is accepting applications until the 29th of May.
Startup Profiles
Interesting Reads & Podcasts
Recording of Open Coffee Athens #108 with a fireside chat with Haris Karonis, founder & CEO of Viva Wallet and presentations from Georgios Pipelidis, co-founder & CEO of Ariadne Maps and Lisa Katsouraki, SVP Corporate Development & Strategic Partnerships of Etraveli Group.
A podcast with Sanne Goslinga, Director of Talent at Marathon VC, discussing the role of HR in a company, what a Director of Talent does at a venture capital firm and more.
How to win in hybrid work by Zaharenia Atzitzikaki, Design Leader & Executive Coach, here.
How to land your first Product Manager job in Greece by Joseph Alvertis, Senior VP Product at Orfium, here.
A talk by Yannis Smaragdakis, co-founder of Dedaub, on what you can do as a developer to make a smart contract audit process more efficient and effective.
A podcast with Costa Tsaousis, founder & CEO of Netdata, on his journey founding the company, lessons learned, and more.
Steven Kokinos, CEO of Algorand, on how he got into crypto and the current state of adoption in the space, here.
Java developers chase a memory leak in Python by Dimitris Nikolouzos, Engineering Manager at Οrfium, here.
Some thoughts by Dean Pappas, co-founder of Grape, on how crypto can help with digital governance innovation, using Solana as a case study.
Christina Melas-Kyriazi, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, on her journey from investment banking to VC, media models and distribution in VC and evaluating early-stage startups, here.
Marketing organisations should be changing faster than marketing by Giorgos Vareloglou, co-founder & Managing Partner at REBORRN, here.
A post on selecting product metrics & KPIs by Manos Kyriakakis, Head of Product & Growth at Simpler.
Events
“GCC Social Meet-up in Thessaloniki” by Greek Cryptocurrency Community on May 14
“Genesis Ventures > Goes Crete” by Foundation for Research & Technology - Hellas on May 18
“Women in Tech Summit” by Product-Led Growth Hub on May 31
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