It's my pleasure to invite Lauren Treasure, a Co-Founder of Higa to speak today and give her perspective on leading the product in start-up or scale-up vs leading product in your own venture. Lauren has a wealth of experience in B2C space and shared some amazing learnings around:

1. The differences in founding a company vs. leading a product team,

2. Building a product zero to one at an existing company vs. building a company zero to one,

3. How it takes a smaller team than it ever has to start a company

Product people who are eyeing the path of the Co-Founder (which I am seeing an increase in!), this episode is a must listen for you!

Check out Higa and connect with Lauren on Linkedin!

Francis Brero is the Founder and Product leader in MadKudu, a data heavy product allowing companies to manipulate and use first party data to customise the buying experience for b2b buyers.

Our question of the day: how do we improve customer centricity as your product scales?

Francis shares that 1 big change was to introduce Gong, a call recording tool, to bring the voice of customer into the front of the decision making. Francis uses snippets of the recordings through the process of adjustment and improvement of the product on ongoing basis. "You get an amazing pulse from the customer and the way they are reacting". Team also includes relevant snippets with feedback on product roadmap and product experience on board memos. This tool alone allowed MadKudu team to implement multiple improvements in the product, such as better match the customer journey and deepen partnership strategy, and significantly reduce bias in collecting feedback.

Connect with Francis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francisbrero/

Check out MadKudu: https://www.madkudu.com/

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!