How and why we become product people

Federico Iglesias
Globant
Published in
4 min readJul 8, 2021

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Photo by Jexo on Unsplash

The first thing I have to say is that my first days as a Product Manager passed without knowing that I was one.

I worked in a project-oriented organization, convinced of success basing the organized technology area on delivery teams, vertical structure, a little data-driven, and a lot of HiPPO (aka highest-paid person in the room’s opinion). I occupied a position similar to what we know today as a Product Owner or Associate Product Manager as a business unit member that was not the company’s core but was a generator of profitability and EBITDA. Nothing negligible to start my career as a Product Manager.

We had dealt with all kinds of structural problems, hard-coded queries, minutes of waiting for a landing page, not very usable, affiliate registration was 100% manual and a volume of calls to our Help Desk that grew in headcount the business grew. Additionally, the solutions offered by the competition were superior in terms of performance, functionality, and scalability.

After 3 or 4 months of working with one technical leader, a couple of developers, one product designer, and one QA, we put our MVP into production at four o’clock in the morning. I was tired but happy. The next day the CTO told me, clearly exaggerating, “I congratulate you; never in my life, I saw such a team.”

Time passed, and we continued to evolve that product; we built satisfaction surveys, had interviews with internal and external users, measured the traffic in an analytics tool, the most viewed pages, the bounce rate of the registration page. We worked with Jira, we had our sprints, we did retrospectives, and every day, in meetings of no more than 10 minutes, we shared what our goal was for the day. We did not know that we were doing product management, we did not even know what it was, nor did we know that companies like Netflix or Amazon had adopted this discipline years ago. Marty Cagan was a stranger to all of us, as much as Mind the Product or Insead.

Two years later, the company decided to hire a consulting firm specialized in our industry and e-commerce. The first two words they said were: “Product Management.” So a year and a half with them was my MBA in Product.

They taught me about strategy, product vision, agile and autonomous teams, to base decisions on data, to know the competition and the industry, to understand the own product very well, to put together a scalable team structure, to put the customer at the center, in separating problems from solutions, in iterating, investigating and measuring, developing, learning, improving, and measuring again. I also learned about coaching, leadership, and collaborative work. They advised me with a primary bibliography of the discipline. When they finished their work, they were also very generous to me. I had started my stage as Head of Product, also without knowing it.

Part of their job was hiring someone to lead that transformation, someone with experience and a great promoter of the product and its culture. So I think they chose the best person they could have chosen.

If those consultants had been my MBA, working these years with Nacho Bassino was my doctorate. We all help build an incredible transformation in 3 years. The idea of this post is not to talk about this or about the results obtained at this time; I will surely leave it for another time.

We impact every day on the lives of millions of users; we enjoy that, searching for data that helps us solve complex problems, learn, test, measure, and improve every day working collaboratively with teams and stakeholders and linking with the community composed by: product managers, product designers, agile coaches, developers and evangelists, friends, and best sellers. We live in a complex world, even more so since March 2020, but the variety and quality of products that come out every day to make a better world around the globe are incredible.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

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