#24 What Product Managers Need to Succeed in 2021
Luca Criscuolo studied initially environmental science and holds a Ph.D. in climate science. Next to all his work and research, he decided at some point to be closer connected to the real world and people building products. From that point on he started working in Product Management and moved his way up to several product leadership roles.
With more than 14 years of Product Management experience, he's currently working at eBay as Head of Regional Product Europe.
In this episode, Luca and the Product Bakers discuss the different dimensions that are important to hiring a great Product Team vs. the skills a Product Team needs to succeed based on modern best practices and the current times of uncertainty.
Luca on the internet:
Linkedin: @lucacriscuolo
Twitter: @loloabe
Website: https://www.lucacriscuolo.com
Meeting Minutes
Table of content
0:28 - Intro Luca Criscuolo
5:10 - Product Managers with different Backgrounds
7:44 - Dimensions of Product Management
11:05 - Growth Hacking and Marketing
14:30 - Hiring for the right mindset
20:00 - Leadership and Product Understanding
23:42 - Leadership mindset
32:46 - Coaching for the right mindset
35:33 - Biggest mistakes Product Managers make
39:14 - Corporate vs. Startup
44:04 - Career development
55:17 - The future of Product Management
57:40 - Closing thoughts from Alex and Christian
What made you move from environmental science into the product?
Luca: That's not so straightforward, my background is that I have a PhD in climate research. Climate research is actually a lot of mathematical modeling and software and supercomputing. I enjoyed it very much, but after finishing my Ph.D., I still worked for one year as a researcher, but then I had to decide, what I wanted to do in the future. Science became a little bit like repetitive to me and I wanted to get very close to other people instead of just being closed in a room and doing my mathematical modeling.
This is where I found a position for our company located in Berlin, which was at that time producing software for researchers and they were looking for a product manager. And then since during my PhD studies, I used a lot of MATLAB, C+, Fortran, and basic software development I reused my skills to move into the software industry. I think it was a good choice at that time.
Was it clear to you what to expect from that role and what your role would look like?
Luca: No. In fact, if you look at my CV you see that I actually started a PhD in Italy and I had a standard and steady life. But I felt the need to see the world. So I left everything and I got a very good position for a PhD in the max Planck Institute so I jumped basically into the dark and moved to Hamburg.
Then after my experience in the research, I felt again, this pressure of changing direction and it was without knowing very well what the software industry and product management were about. So I jumped again in the dark. It's the way how I am. I need to learn new things and I get this pressure of moving around exploring and learning and growing, and you never know in the future, maybe I will jump into the dark again. I don't know.
What is product management?
In my career, I worked with product managers who were originally coming from completely different experiences. I had, for example, very good product managers coming from a design. They were former designers, and they had a very good experience in interacting with users, understanding how users think, what they want to do, how they look, and how they interact with objects. I had also very good product managers coming from customer support, another place, where you get a lot of insights about the problem that the user has. And now a new generation of PMs are basically analysts. Product analysts. People that get into the numbers and that they grow a knowledge that other people do not have.
And that means that it is not only about interaction. Design is not about the problem is about the numerical quantities that actually are behind, the business value of the users.
So here, there are two dimensions, right?
There is one dimension of how you build a functional efficient team independently from product management. And the other one is about the skills that you need to build a good product management team? So those are actually two different topics. The first topic is how you build a good, efficient and functional team and I think any leadership coach will tell you that the most important aspect of a team is having a diverse group of people working together in the right way. This means that having people that look like the same and act the same will decrease the success of that team because there would be vulnerabilities that are not covered by other people.
So having a diverse team means having people that actually think differently that have different experiences and that can cover each other and support each other.
The other dimension is the skills that they bring with them.
The more I work in product management and the more I work in large companies at the size and scale of E-bay or also companies on the scale of 200-300 people, maybe startups, the more I understand that we need people that focus the attention on the customer problem and they do not really compromise on the customer problem.
They see the difficulties that a customer has with a product and they try to find the right viable solution. To the customer problem and when they see such a viable solution, something that is actually feasible from a technical point of view that brings a business value. Something that is connected to the brand of the product and tries to pull all the pieces together to bring the best possible solution.
So if you talk to business people you see them also wanting to bring a solution for the users, but they want to optimize around the business. When you Talk to technology people, they also want to bring a solution, but the focus is on optimizing the tech of that solution. And I think we need that different type of profile that actually aligns between all these solutions to find the right one that satisfies the user, satisfies the business, and satisfies the technology.
So that's the core part of a product management profile.
… tune in to learn more 🎧
