My word of the year for 2022 is learning. Learning to start a business, learning to execute, and learning to manage. All at the same time and for the first time. My biggest source of learning has been reading other entrepreneurs and investors.
I want to close the year by sharing learnings about product leaders in startups, by Bernardo Hernandez.
The Product Leader
Bernardo Hernandez has been a successful entrepreneur and investor in multiple startups such as Idealista, Tuenti, Fever, Verse, Glovo, or Paack. He was also the Senior Director of Product Management during his time at Google, reporting to Marissa Mayer, one of Google's product leaders.
Below is a summary of Bernardo Hernandez's talk at Escuela Escribano on the role of product leaders.
Q: Where does your motivation for product creation come from?
I once read something by Steve Jobs that changed my life. It was something like this: everything around us has been created by someone who one day decided to sit down, have an idea, design it, make it useful, usable, produce it, sell it, and make it financially sustainable for it to work. Absolutely everything you see around you, everything is made by people who have decided to do it and who have put effort into doing it the best way possible. Everything is made by a product creator.
When I heard this, I was amazed: you can build reality. And that's how it all started a little bit. At first you don't know how to do it very well and you don't have many skills, but that opened my mind for me. You don't have to have a special gene, you don't have to belong to a special group. Anyone who wants to create and change reality can do it. For me, that's the fundamental premise. You can do big things or small things; you can do them well or you can do them poorly. But when you think that it all starts with personal motivation, it changed my life for me. And suddenly that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to learn everything necessary to be able to create things.
What motivates me the most is not making money or my personal brand. When people ask me why I do this, what really motivates me is when someone takes out their phone and I see Google Maps, I see Idealista, I see Glovo, I see Wallapop, I see things that I have been involved in, things that I have made myself. I have created something that millions of people use. And this gives you an incredible sense of purpose in life.
It motivates me to do it the best I can —not to make the Renfe website 😉— but to do it well. Because when you do it better, you'll have more success (in principle). There are few jobs with such an incredible purpose as shaping reality.
Q: What is more valuable when creating a product: the technical or the artistic?
New technologies allow many of us here to create new realities. With few resources, you can do incredible things. The digital revolution allows you to do bigger and bigger things with increasingly efficient resources. This was previously very complicated because you had to invest a lot in machinery and capital. It was reserved for certain people who had exclusive access to these privileges. Now, access to the productive capacity of machines has been much more democratized, which is behind any industrial revolution. Anyone with a good idea can capture resources. Of course, you have to know how to get these resources (usually with venture capital) and build something very big in a relatively short time.
Product management is an art, and like any art, it has a technical and an artistic side. Almost all product disciplines focus a lot on the technical: PDR, Notions, OKR, Agile Methodologies, or Kanbans. This technical part, which is very important, requires a lot of discipline, study, and preparation. However, many product professionals think that product is just this. They think that working in product is being a project manager, which is what was done here in Spain 10 or 15 years ago. Product management requires speaking the language of engineers, financiers, marketers, and salespeople. I remember when we wrote about this topic at Google. I really liked this philosophical part and I defined it a bit as the backbone, the glue of a lot of functions. For me, it's no surprise that at companies like Apple, marketing product managers, who are very connected to the market as Steve Jobs' philosophy was, are really the most important positions.
This technical part is very important, but like all art, you have to put the brilliance of art defined as something that is creative, which doesn't have to be a certain way, to the technical part. This is the part, like in all the arts, that is most difficult to teach and learn. In addition, it is very multidisciplinary, since you can find that great product professionals come from backgrounds in philosophy, art, and often design.
The artistic part is fundamental because for a product manager to be successful, in addition to all the technical part that is teachable, learnable, workable, and practical, you have to have this artistic part that I call product judgment. Product judgment is very difficult to achieve. Product judgment is that part of understanding how to transform reality, what reality needs, and how I can do it for it to be successful.
Q: What is product judgment?
I will mention what I believe are the four main skills for having product judgment:
The first is to fall in love with the problem and not the solution. Generally, the way you think is the best way to solve a problem ends up not being so. You have to be very flexible and humble to fall in love with the problem and not the solution.
The second is to feel the pain of the customer you want to serve obsessively.
The third is that you don't know which crack will sink the Titanic. When managing a product, it is very important to establish priorities in terms of the development of your plan. But then when something breaks, you have to pay attention to practically everything to find the root problem. I especially like, when I'm building the MVP, for it to be very artisanal work. Until you have the market fit, you have to be very close to the user. You have to pay a lot of attention, you have to feel a lot of the pain of the problem you want to solve, and you have to do work with a brush and scissors.
The fourth is to let common sense rule, what I call passing the test of your mother: would you give this to your mother? This common sense is something that can't be done from a Notion or from a meeting room. You have to be with the customer, observing the user experience for hours, to see how the product implementation is.
In these four skills is where the art of product judgment lies. Innovation comes from these elements, from an obsession with the problem, from obsessive attention to what the user feels and to possible mistakes. From a perfectionism that cannot be extreme, because then nothing is ever executed.
Q: How to form good product teams?
The first thing is to understand very well what the product function is. In Spain it is something that has not been particularly well understood. Something that gave me a lot of product perspective was when I arrived in the United States in 2007 and started working at Google:
I see that in the company they are very clear that the engineer is the one who makes sure that the lines of code are as cheap, secure, tested, and scalable as possible.
The designer is responsible for making it pleasant to the senses. That it is beautiful, that it has its style guide, design, consistency, and precision.
And another figure appears, which is the product, which is the one who decides what the product does: decisions on flows, wireframes, mockups, measurements, dashboards, user testing, and roadmaps.
The product is the one who is in charge of being the conductor and the writer of the score. Then the engineer is the one who makes the best lines of code and the designer gives the most precise and consistent design. What is the fundamental error of almost all development teams in Europe, but especially in Spain? That all these roles are mixed up. It is the engineer who does the design and usability without product judgment. Or the opposite, when the designer does it and suddenly makes some super cool things but unusable. Out of the use standards, without notions of conversion and fundamental product issues such as usability.
The second is that it is the responsibility of the founders or the general management to create teams with talent where these responsibilities are very well separated. One of the fundamental issues for this functional division to be successful is that each person is very good at what they do. It is relatively easy to know if the engineer is good, because there is a lot of engineering tradition and you know if a code is good or not. The same goes for the designer, because it either appeals or not. However, in product, as it is a not very standard function, it is very easy to dress up as a good product manager, sell the bike, and camouflage yourself under a project manager or under a good PM. So leaders must be very good at building quality product.
Q: Who is the product leader in a startup?
There are many types of founders, but great founders are product leaders. That is why there is usually no CPO in an early startup: the founders themselves usually serve as the CPO. As a founder, you have to be a good product manager, identify a problem and become obsessed with the product to find the best solutions. I hardly know any important successful companies where the founder was not the CPO. Sometimes even the CTO. Generally in the United States it is the CPO and CTO. Great entrepreneurs are engineers. In Spain less. Almost all founders came from ADE but with a lot of product criteria.
That is why hiring CPOs in early stages does not work. Because you are going to hire a product person who will have good product judgement and then they will fight with you because you are the founder and you will want to do their job. This is one of the big mistakes that are usually made in team building. Founders who do not know about product and want to hire a CPO. If it is a good CPO they will start their own company. Why work for a salary and 0.5% of the company when you can have 40-50%?
Then, when you are creating a team and hiring people, you have to understand this very well. You do not want people with a lot of product judgement. The product function is very complicated. It has a very creative and commitment-based part. Do not involve too many people with a lot of judgement because it will be a nest of crickets. This has also happened to me many times where I have had to fire people and tell them to go start their own company. Of course, you have to listen to others, but you have to find that balance where people feel heard, but at the same time it is a ship with a very clear direction. Because misalignment in a startup is very costly.
Choose very well who you want to work with. At the beginning it has to be a team that respects your leadership and that has a strong commitment to align with your product judgement. Because product judgement comes from above. It cannot be designed by consensus or built by consensus. Good things do not come out. Human diversity is very wide.
In all these successful companies there is a very clear product direction and very aligned teams. Hiring these teams is very important because you want them to be good people but at the same time understand the operational principles with which they are managed.