1041. Insights: How to build a high-performing product team

23:43Melissa Stringer:I could literally talk to you about this for hours, but I will stop. No, no, it's okay, don't worry. The producers won't let us talk for hours. so we're all good we don't have stress I mean I suppose Nicole we're going to jump onto a break in a sec but I just wanted to give you the final word in this section I suppose from your perspective obviously we've talked about lots of the kind of key components to think about when you're starting to define how you move to this dream product team what would kind of be your key questions what are the key things that you're looking for the business to kind of decide before you can start to actually build that team

24:09Kate Moody:I think it really is understanding the stage of the business as Alex was saying before and what you need to be successful at that time and then being really honest with your candidates to the people that you're talking to about what you're looking for. I think if you look to fill a checklist of all of the key product skill sets that are the buzzwords and kind of the, you know, somebody who has worked at incredible product organizations, but as a business, you guys are in a scrappy scale up phase where that person isn't going to be doing that or using those skills. You're wasting your time. So being really honest about who do you need and what skill set do you need at that time?

24:49Kate Moody:And there'll probably be a time in the future where the person you're hiring needs to look different than the previous person you hired, or even that looks different from the superstar that you have in your team who everybody thinks is incredible, because you've realized as a leader, there's a gap that you need to fill in that product space. And so I think as a product leader, it's very, very important that you have that understanding of where's the business, what does my team look like, and what do we need at this time? And that can change and it's okay if it doesn't meet a mold of the perfect product manager.

25:21Kate Moody:It can be these other skills like Mel was referring to where you really know that you can trust their commercial acumen or you think that their background working on a specific product or area in a business was really impressive even if they don't necessarily have the full product skill set yet that hopefully you can teach and mold and adapt.

25:39Melissa Stringer:Yeah no I think that's super interesting. Okay, I'm going to take a quick pause for an ad break, but we'll be back really soon to kind of continue digging into this topic because there's so much more for us to explore. Okay, back in a sec. Hey, folks, David Breer here, CEO of 11FS. Here's something you might not know about me. I get a lot of people trying to impersonate me online, fake profiles, scam emails, the lot. And a big part of that comes from data brokers, hundreds of them quietly collecting and selling your personal information. Your phone number, email, home address, job title, all out there and all fueling identity theft, scam calls, and spam.

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27:36Melissa Stringer:Welcome back. In this half of the show, we're going to pick up where we left off, digging into exactly how you set up a high-performance product team, what tools do they need to set them up for success, and how do you maintain the success as the product and business evolves and scales. Nicole, obviously you kind of closed out the first half of the show. I'll come back to you to kind of kick off the second. We've talked a lot about, like, this might be a hard question, right? because we've talked about how multifaceted these teams are and the variety of skills. But I suppose if you were starting from scratch and you're building a project team from scratch, what kind of roles or capabilities do you think are essential to begin with?

28:08Melissa Stringer:Like obviously you might end up with this very diversified team, but if you kind of have to pick like a starting point, where do you think kind of the safest place is to start?

28:16Kate Moody:I guess going with the assumption that if you're starting from scratch, there's a lot of potential like top-down decision-making that's already been made around the direction of the roadmap or the direction of the strategy, at least in the kind of short to near term. I think it's really important to kind of have somebody who is incredibly good with the stakeholder management and communication side of the role. They really need to understand what is the vision, what is the direction, what is the position of the business to know what is like feasible and kind of what the budget needs to be or what do we need to achieve and then figure out a really creative way to come up with solutions to kind of move in that direction.

28:55Kate Moody:So I think those communication skills and that really ability to talk to multiple people in the business and understand their point of view and kind of help bring that to life with an actual roadmap that has milestones that you can build towards and you can show progression towards, that's really important in the beginning. And then once that trust is built and once that there is trust that what the product team is doing is beneficial for the business, is moving things in the right direction, is showing progress against the goals and objectives, then a lot of those skills of like deep customer research, really digging into kind of UX and UI decisions, experimentation, those things become very important in the future.

29:35Kate Moody:but that trust isn't given or I don't necessarily even think it should be given by default to a brand new product team. I think you have to go through that stage where you really kind of earn your stripes maybe I guess is the right way to refer to it when you're starting from scratch and I guess it also depends on what your leadership structure looks like and who you're reporting into. I've been in situations where products reported into the CEO, the CTO, the CPTO, all of those kinds of combinations so you just have to have a good view about what that looks like and what are the expectations going to be for the product team to make that decision yeah i mean

30:12Melissa Stringer:again across all the points everyone's made it sounds like there's been quite a lot of different experiences right about whether the ultimate product direction is coming upwards from the product team and is sort of being signed off or endorsed by the wider business or if you have a sort of very you know ceo-led or cto-led like they decide the product direction at the top and it's about implementing and executing that. Alex, is there kind of a norm or does it just completely vary depending on the organization, I suppose? And as you're coming, if you're a product person coming into a business, how easy is that to kind of discern from the outside like where the true orientation is?

30:48Melissa Stringer:Yeah, I think it really depends on the organization. And I think it really depends on how it's been set up, what kind of the overall strategy or idea, kind of what's been adopted. So I think, you know, I've been through multiple iterations of CEO, CPTO, CPO, etc. And I think there's no right answer, in my opinion, of what that looks like. Every organization is going to have its own identity for that. But I think that the key thing that I think has been most successful in a setup is, irrespective of who you're reporting into, keeping that first side for a moment, If the company has a very clear strategic goal at the top, so whatever that is, maybe it's being, you know, the best savings platform or best, you know, card provider or whatever that is, right?

31:37Melissa Stringer:That, you know, that strategic goal, very clear, and it linking to outcomes. And the outcomes shouldn't be kind of your features on your roadmap, but your actual outcomes. Is it increasing the number of customers per month or by day or whatever that looks like? because the moment you then have that really clear, very simple, very understood objective, product then are empowered to think about the initiatives, think about experiments, and think about strategic bets that they will place in order to execute that strategy. And it's very simple. I see strategic bets actually changing often. I think being able to come in and kind of break stuff and product managers being able to think about like, okay, okay, let's build this little prototype.

32:18Melissa Stringer:Let's test it out. It might fail. Move on. Throw it to the side. We've tried it. We've done it. We're moving. That, for me, is the special sauce. And I think now with the tools that were being given and all of kind of the things that are really coming into the market over the last almost six months, really, it's been like this massive change, products also getting closer to the engineering workflow. And so being able to then embed product into that engineering workflow a lot faster, this is then really where you're going to see that momentum. But I think in order to have the momentum, it is that clear goal that is being set.

32:50Melissa Stringer:Now, that could be set by your CPO because the company was founded with a CEO-CPO. That's often. Or you might have a CEO-founded, very clear vision. It's not a one-size-fits-all. But I think the most success I've seen is where that is incredibly understood. The moment that this goal at the top is not understood or there's too many goals and people don't know where to prioritize their time and they're kind of like, oh, I'm hopping back and forth between multiple, things slow down naturally, right? And so I think it's being very, very ruthless about what you're prioritizing, what's the goal, what are those outcomes, are the outcomes actually measurable and achievable?

33:32Melissa Stringer:Because if they're not and you kind of make very vague and very kind of maybe overly simplified pieces, then people get confused as well. So there's, It really comes down to, in my opinion, the way in which it's set. I think product minds are the most adaptive, and I think they're very creative. I think product people are very, very creative people, which I think is the successes. Creativity equals really interesting new products. Okay. Yeah, no, absolutely. I can completely see that. Mel, Alex alluded to kind of tools as in part of her kind of overview. You mentioned earlier on that when you look back on your experience in financial services, some things haven't changed, but I suppose what is constantly changing is the tools that product managers have available to them to support their work.

34:19Melissa Stringer:We haven't really mentioned the word AI so far, which I think is quite impressive. Normally, I try and play a semi, normally not without alcohol, drinking game version of AI buzzword, bingo, whatever, Danny drinks every time someone says AI. Anyhow, that aside, how are the tools that are now available to product managers changing how product works or how do you think it's changing how products should work? Yeah, so I think to Nicole's point about earning your stripes, if you had a brand new product team, and actually in my experience, a lot of well-funded or teams with a lot of backing now often don't have product as their first hire or their first, you know, their founding team.

35:06Melissa Stringer:It could have been like a, you know, technical person that partnered with a commercial person. And so then once they've got the ball moving, they then think, oh, actually, wow, we need product. And so you're actually coming into a moving landscape and things are already going and you may even have customers because especially in financial services, there are so many ways that you can connect partners together to create something that is fairly unique and especially in the B2B space, there's a lot of subtle partnerships and revenue models and things that you can pursue as even a non-technical team, particularly in the crypto space and stablecoin space and FX and all of that.

35:54Melissa Stringer:I won't go down a rabbit hole, but anyway, so I think that that is the most likely scenario that the product team is joining a moving ship and they already have goals and targets and they probably have some partners and it's already quite complicated. And they've hired you at the last possible moment that their budget can possibly contain as well. So they're like, right, Mel, we've got three months runway and you need to fix this, this, this and this and we need to achieve our next proof point of this many customers or we need to do the X, Y and Z to get our next round of investment. That's like a totally well-trodden scenario.

36:34Melissa Stringer:And in terms of tooling, to Nicole's point or to provability, I think you don't need to nowadays waste any engineering time. You as a product person can stand up something that is demonstrable, testable, looks beautiful, and you can just use AI tools to pull this together. As long as you can ask intelligent questions, you can use your product chops to sequence things properly. I mean, you're basically halfway there and you've not even touched engineering. And then you can get on the phone or you can get in the meetings and test it with real customers. And so you don't need to spend any organizational resource to do this.

37:18Melissa Stringer:You can literally just do it on your own. And I think that that also is like shaking out who the good product people are because you need to be able to get something from nothing to demonstrable, yes, customers want this before you even bother wasting any, well, you're not wasting resource at that point, but you know what I mean? Like you've proven that this is the correct direction and then you can just get going. I mean, obviously there are, back to like my point about, you know, stable atoms and so on, there are things that need to be built in the background to enable a capability and technically so you know if you're designing workflows or if you're if you're saying okay well actually we need our resource internally to be doing this this and this you can get people working on stuff that's super valuable um but i'm just saying you don't need to waste resource on the experiments now which is amazing and um yeah i i think that that is incredibly powerful for product managers and it's incredibly powerful for gaining the trust of the founding team or the CEO or whomever you report to.

38:25Kate Moody:Mel, I couldn't agree more and I think what's been really interesting is seeing product managers who want to work this way because they know it'll make them more effective at their job rather than necessarily the pressure of trying to hire people who love showing off everything that they can do with AI. So I think some of the best product people know that in order to influence someone, having a prototype that is in your design system and looks like what you want it to look instead of something sketched on a piece of paper like I used to do, you know, that is going to convince people that they understand the idea that you're trying to get across.

39:02Kate Moody:They can see the vision and the future you want to work towards. Or if you don't have the resource of your engineering team who's knee-deep in delivery to focus on discovery on something else, you're then building that prototype to then experiment with because you know it'll help you do your job better. And I think the big difference is not necessarily somebody who wants to spend all of their time doing those things because that's the buzzy, cool thing to do that's going to get you loads of money these days. It's somebody who wants to be a product manager and know that there's all these tools available to them to help them do their job better, more efficiently, more effectively, and get a yes the first time, if that makes sense.

39:42Kate Moody:And I think that's been the biggest shift and change for me, especially when hiring for new roles and having these conversations in interviews and bringing people on. You know, there's a lot of pressure sometimes inside organizations to work that into the process and have people kind of show off how they use these tools. But if you focus too much on that and if the spotlight is too much on that and you don't remind yourself that these people are still product managers and they still need to kind of embody what being a good product manager means for your business and for your customers. And I think that balance has been really interesting to see that shift over the past six months to a year.

40:17Yeah, no, I can completely appreciate it.

40:20Melissa Stringer:It must be such a dynamic environment and there's so much change. I suppose one thing that seems interesting just from this conversation alone, I hadn't had this before, but we've spent so much time talking about how critical it is for product managers to kind of be at the core of an organization, to be that connecting tissue, the leading duck, the leader of the orchestra, whichever analogy you use, but it's all about kind of being connected to the organization. And I just, I do wonder if maybe one potential thing to work out with new tooling is how you then mitigate the risk. Obviously, it's great that you don't create additional burdens on engineering, but is there maybe a risk that it goes too far?

40:58Melissa Stringer:And maybe product teams become insular in a way because they start to do all these things kind of with their own tools in isolation. I mean, Alex, am I being overly pessimistic here or is that something that you're trying to work out? I think it's something that's going to have to strike a balance. It's, I think, some individuals in product are particularly good at showcasing what they've done, and they're extraordinarily excited to show across the organization, right? And go show their engineering counterparts or go show other people across the business. And then I think naturally you're going to have others who are a little bit more, I'm going to just try this thing out, kind of do a side of desk, it goes somewhere, and it kind of gets lost.

41:30Melissa Stringer:And so I think there's maybe two parts of this. I think one is, I think you have to kind of, as a product leader, ensure that you are championing, one, that product doesn't become its own kind of silo in a corner. Two, you know, how are you showcasing, doing demos, providing kind of overviews to all of the kind of business lines across the company that you're at to show all of the success and the interesting things that you've done. Equally, one thing that I love to see is when something, we do a prototype, we test it out, and we end up not going ahead with it, that still gets showcased. which I think is great because people can see something that we've tested, experimented with, and decided we're not going to go ahead with that.

42:10Melissa Stringer:And we're going to put it back on the bookshelf for now. Maybe we'll pull it out later. But for now, we're going to park it to the side, which keeps the teams really curious, really interested. So, I mean, I think there's probably no right answer. I think it's probably very dynamic at the moment given how fast change is happening. But I think it just comes back to kind of the personalities that you have in your product team, how you're leading as product, how you are showcasing the skill sets that you're doing across the business. And ultimately, I think product for me, a big part of it is curiosity.

42:43Melissa Stringer:And I think a lot of people that I hire for or people that I work with are people that I love to have that curious spirit. And so I think that's also where when you have curiosity, people who are curious like to show other people what they're up to. And so I think that kind of mindset is really, really important to continue to kind of drive because I think there's a lot of change um i do think product will look different in a year's time and i'm we could that will be a rabbit hole maybe for another day um but but yeah i think it's probably quite dynamic in in terms of how do you keep it interconnected and not so siloed across the business yeah no absolutely i'm guessing probably as you seasoned professionals in this space you guys probably get this question all the time but i do also think it's really interesting given how much we've talked about how like being multi-skilled is is critical to being successful in the product space like having maybe like a background in one space and then coming into product might make you actually a better product leader in in the end um what how how can someone like if someone isn't in product at the moment and is listening to this podcast and thinking like oh like I like the sounds of these like problems these challenges but I'm sat in engineering or in a sales team or like how do you how do you think someone can make that pivot from another discipline into product like how does that work nicole what would you advise to somebody this is something i

44:02Kate Moody:mean i'm quite passionate about this we've had a lot of people we've hired either in kind of associate roles just starting out or where we move them in the organization and i think there's a few different ways to kind of go about it i think first of all being in a small organization does help because you get to know people a lot better so you have more of an opportunity to get to know the product team and kind of make yourself known to the product team in advance. But I do think, first of all, that it shouldn't be a surprise if you have a job ad out and someone applies from your organization that they're interested in product.

44:33Kate Moody:I would want to know in advance and I would want that person to have told me that they're interested, asked me to shadow, gotten involved as they could from their department. So if there's somebody in engineering or CS or operations, just showing a certain level of interest and making sure to kind of have high levels of engagement really helps catch someone's eye and makes it known that they kind of potentially either have that skill set or show an interest in that product skill set. So that when a job ad does come up or an opportunity does come up, it's not a surprise that that person kind of is applying.

45:07Kate Moody:And also, if you're applying internally for a role, you should have deep, deep knowledge of the organization and you should be able to kind of come to that interview with ideas on how to make the product better or pain points or opportunities and you know really convinced that you can learn the product skill set but what you can bring to the table is your knowledge of the organization your knowledge of kind of how you can fit in really quickly so I do think there's a lot of opportunity to do that as an internal move which obviously isn't always easy for everyone especially if you're in an organization where those opportunities aren't coming, etc.

45:44Kate Moody:I do think it's getting a little bit scary seeing a lot less associate and kind of junior level roles becoming available, especially with things like AI and the ability for people to kind of do a lot of those roles maybe more efficiently. So I'm interested to see how that changes over time. But I do think just really making it known that you want to make that move and seeing what you can do to kind of infiltrate and influence the product team from whatever role that you're in already is a great first start.

46:13Melissa Stringer:Yeah, no, absolutely. Okay, annoyingly, we're getting towards the end of our time because I feel like we probably all could just talk about this all day. I certainly could. What key piece of advice, Alex, would you give to a company that's maybe got a product team and they want to change it up, they want to kind of improve the performance of that team, they want to move towards that dream product team in 2026? What would be kind of the single key piece of advice that you would give them to get started? But if you focus first. I would say the focus on is your goal of the company clear? And I think that for me is probably the most important because then you can hire or kind of have or mold your team around how do you actually achieve that goal?

46:51Melissa Stringer:I think where I've seen things get slow or challenged is when that goal is not clear. And so I think if that's set up, then, you know, to Mel's point, you can navigate the politics or the challenges or kind of the fluctuation of change. You can then be really outcome led of how do we just start to kind of get our head down and execute across that goal. Mel, what about you? What advice would you give? Yeah, I agree with Alex. I think having a really clear goal at the top is important. But I also just think that looking for unusual product hires is probably a good thing to do, especially if you're a super small team.

47:31Melissa Stringer:It could be somebody who already knows your business really well. or I mean my favorite hire at the moment if you know depending on your budget if you've got like a budget for a sort of junior to kind of mid product manager somebody who's done something end-to-end who's done an entrepreneurial project with real customers and can demonstrate that and they've you know as much as me we may laugh at this but they've managed to vibe code something that has resulted in real customers and they are able to go from zero to sort of proven methodology and output that's making money. I mean, I think that that's a safe bet in terms of hiring and those people may come from engineering or they may come from design or they may just be super creative.

48:18Melissa Stringer:But I think it's a good proxy for finding creative, passionate, driven people, which is essentially what you need in product. Yeah, no, I love that. And Nicole, final word for you. What piece of advice would you give to someone that's looking to mix up their product team in 2026?

48:31Kate Moody:I think be honest about what you need in your business to be successful. I think that what you're looking for is going to be very unique to your team, your business, your size, your industry, etc. And just start by writing that down or thinking about the gaps, the weaknesses, or even what has been working really well and do you need more of that. And just be really honest about that. Don't worry about hiring to tick boxes that would please the kind of product purists out there because everything's changing too much for that to, you know, stand the case of time over the next five to 10 years.

49:11Melissa Stringer:Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm so, so grateful for all of you taking the time out to join us today, sharing your perspective, sharing your loans from this industry. And I think a ton of really, really useful insights in that. So thank you so much. Where can people find out more about you, what you're working, what you're doing now? You can find me on LinkedIn and you can find me on my website, which is melissastringer.ai. Awesome. Alex, what about you? You can find me on LinkedIn. I go under Alexandra Rivas-Gale. Yeah, that's it. Awesome. And Nicole, what about you?

49:39Kate Moody:Yeah, feel free to connect on LinkedIn, Nicole Bianchi, or go to getchip.uk and download Chip and see what we're all about. Awesome.

49:46Melissa Stringer:And as for me, you can find me also on LinkedIn at Kate Moody or drop me an email at katellenfest.com. Thank you so much for listening. If you like what you've heard today, please follow our podcast on your favorite platform of choice. and if you really like what you've heard, why not share this episode with a colleague or a friend or someone looking to get into product. As always, if you want to join the conversation, find us on social media. Just search for 11FS or FinTechInsider or email podcasts at 11FS.com. Thanks very much. Goodbye.