20Product: How the Best Teams Do Product Reviews | What Everyone Gets Wrong in Hiring Product Teams | Product Lessons Leading Facebook App Monetisation Team to Billions in Revenue with Maria Angelidou, CPO @ Personio

0:00You only promote people to the next level when they actually consistently already demonstrated that they can operate successfully at that level for a long period of time. And if they haven't done that, don't promote them because actually promoting them when it's premature, it's worse for them. Because at that next level, they will be calibrated compared to the group of people, the Hoko Hort of people who are already operating really well on the next level. And if you promote them prematurely, it's actually going to be really bad for them. You are listening to 20 product with me Harry Stebbings.

0:33Now 20 product is the monthly show where we sit down with the best product leaders to unpack their tips, tactics and strategies to scaling incredible product teams. Today we sit down with Maria Angeladoo, one of the product OGs having spent close to a decade at Meta, working on some of the largest products, such as Facebook groups, which has two billion users, events, profile and search. Before that, Maria led the Facebook app monetization team driving billions of dollars in revenue. And today, Maria is the chief product and technology officer at the European Unicorn Personio. But before we dive in, this episode is brought to you by Pendo, the only all -in -one product experience platform for any type of application.

1:16Pendo helps you get your users to do what you want them to do. With Pendo, you get everything from analytics, in -app guidance, session replay, mobile features, feedback management and road mapping, or working together seamlessly. It's built specifically for creating exceptional product experiences, and it's trusted by more than 10 ,000 companies, including the world's largest community of product managers mind the product. Want to see how Pendo can work for you? Head to pendo .io slash 2 .0 product -podcast, and get started with Pendo's free product. Don't miss out on creating the ultimate user experience.

1:53And talking about AI, Glean is the leading work AI platform that transforms our teams operate. AI has the potential to help everyone at work with nearly everything they do, but only if it deeply understands the data, people, processes, and context specific to your work. Glean is the leading work AI platform that does exactly that. Glean's powerful AI AI assistant helps you find answers, generate content and automate work. You can also build no code and a low code custom generative AI apps and agents that scale the power of your company's knowledge anywhere it's needed. Hundreds of enterprises, including some of the world's leading technology, telecom, retail, manufacturing and banking businesses, put AI to work with GLEEN, empowering engineers to ship code faster, sales reps to better understand their customers, support agents to resolve cases more accurately and IT teams to deflect questions and solve issues automatically.

2:48Glean is work AI for all. Visit glean .com slash 2 -0 to request a demo today. You have now arrived, aren't you? Maria, I am so excited for this. I'm also so excited. This is your first time on a podcast. It is. So thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me, Harry. I'm really excited to be here. Now, I heard there was a sliding doors moment when it comes to your entrance into Facebook, So tell me, how did this sliding door story come to be on joining Facebook? Yes, it was indeed a sliding door type of moment. So I'm going to take you to 2013. I was invited to one of those alumni events, right?

3:27This is the Boston Consulting Group. I worked at the firm for many, many years ago and I typically don't go to these. But that time was different because one of my friends made partner and it was a big deal to her. And so I wanted to go and congratulate her and give her a hug and so I said I'm gonna go and you know I remember that day I almost didn't go you know I had a lot of work that day and my husband literally I remember was pushing me out of the door because I already committed and he said You should go okay? I went so I come to this event and I joined one of the groups who are standing and chatting and I I met this impressive woman.

4:10She was a director of product management. And she speaks of her job at Facebook so passionately that I was listening to her. And then I thought, it's either a bunch of BS or there's something that I really don't understand about this company from everything, just from outside in everything I know about it, right? So she invites me on site and it ends up being a loop of interviews and I go. And then on my way back, you know, my house is in Manlo Park, California, and so it's 15 minutes away from the headquarters And so it took me 15 minutes to get home and I'm not even at my house yet And I am pulling into my driveway and my phone rings and it's Facebook offering me a job And so I was so impressed it took them literally less than 15 minutes from the time I you know left to discuss you know, debrief, do whatever they needed to do to offer me a job, right?

5:07Incredibly impressive. How big was the company at this point? Maybe 3 ,000 people. Okay. Yeah, it's something like that. And the product team was very, very small, maybe less than 100. And what was your starting title? Product manager. How do you think about the transition from IC to manager? You went, as you said, that starting as a PM, and then you get into this kind of three tiers to which is like IC manager leader, you think that me. But that transition from I .C. to Managers is a big one. How do you think about making that transition? So my perspective is that a manager is responsible first and foremost for the outcomes of their team.

5:45That means that you as a manager need to do whatever you can, whatever everything that you have in your control to do risk and make sure that your team delivers on what they sign up for. When you transition from IC to a manager, there are two things that will change for you. Number one is, you know, longer responsible for just the product that you're working on directly. You're responsible for all the products that your team is working on, right? Like everyone of them, that's one. And two, you're responsible for the people on your team. So, you know, you need to understand their weaknesses and their development areas and their strengths, you need to manage, you know, deal with the other performance, you need to get them to the next level.

6:32The sooner you change your mindset about those two things as you transition, the better it is. Do you think we have a skewed view of progression? And what I mean by that is, you can be a brilliant IC, and you should stay as an IC. Actually, some people aren't destined to be managers and managing people, but that's the way that we're told it works. You do very well and then you get promoted. Is that broken? You know, this actually topic is nearing dear to my heart. So when I was at Meta, I, in addition to my core responsibilities, I was also a functional leader for product management. And one of the things that I did at Meta is I introduced PM archetypes exactly for that problem, right?

7:17Because you're gonna have people who are brilliant. and ICs. If there's no clear career progression for them, they feel pressure to transition into management. And oftentimes, that's not the right decision for them and for the company, because it's much harder to find very senior ICs who have superpowers on different topics than to find managers. And so I introduced these archetypes. There were certain characteristics that they were spiking on. And for that exact reason is that you could go all the way up to VP on this ICTRAC. What are the PM archetypes and how should we think about them? So the ones that I work with the team to introduce were in addition to Generalist Track, you had Captain.

8:04So Captain is someone who excels in managing insanely complex projects. You need to have a central strategy but then to bring them to life, you have to manage 10 -20 teams who are executing on this central strategy. Well that's not me, so that's one. That's one, I'm also in the mall, so I can't count in one. The second one is entrepreneur. So this is especially in big companies, you really need to protect that talent. And these are the people who are incredible for zero to one. Bringing ideas to life and then getting them to product market fit. And so they are just excellent. Just getting the team together, getting them inspired, motivated, and iterating on an idea to get it to work.

8:49So that's the second archetype. And then the next one, the third one, and the last one was specialist. So these are the people who have just some very, very deep expertise in the specific domain, like integrity, growth, ML, things like that. Do you often see ICs wanting to be managers when they shouldn't be? Yes, if you don't have the right incentives. So we have that in terms of, you know, I see to manager. And then the third being leader. Yeah. How do we think about what is required to go from manager to product leader? Good product leaders need to have general management skills. That means that they need to have not just strong product sense, but also strong business sense.

9:31Can they manage portfolio of products that is complex and can they distribute capacity and resources appropriately, can they manage the words a healthy P &L, can they drive business goals, not just protocols. It's being kind of P &Ls. One of the biggest needle movers on Facebook's P &L was in particular kind of the ads monetization engine around video. Something that you were so central to. Can you take me to that story? I just, how did that come to be? Just so I have some contacts there. Actually that was my first role at Facebook. and I can tell you that was my probably hardest role, not just at Facebook or MetaNow, but probably across my entire career.

10:13Facebook was nothing like I've ever experienced before, like a couple of things. One, it was that it was a really heavy feedback culture, really heavy feedback culture. So... Like direct. Oh, very direct and a lot. So no matter how small or big it was what you were doing, you got feedback from many directions. And a lot of times it was also conflicting feedback. So, you know, you were not vocal enough in this meeting, what someone would tell you. And then another person would say, for the same meeting, hey, you were too vocal. With respect to that, not a badly wrong company? No, I think it actually was a great school, because what it does is it really pushes you to calibrate and think about, okay, how do you, what type of feedback do you lean into and which one you don't?

11:02How do you prevent feature creep? Yeah, so... It's really hard that you're off to here. You're like, you know, I had nothing. I think there are a few things that you can do. How do you prevent from it happening in the first place? I'll give you a few examples. One is, you know, you can have really solid design guidelines and design system that the teams that develop in their corners of the product then can go to and lean on to have consistency. You can have front -end components that are ready to grab and so the teams don't reinvent them and again there's like of consistency right? Right now we're developing really clear tone of voice guidelines so this is like how the product talks to you across the different surfaces.

11:43If it's all consistent it feels simpler right? How do you think about product being science versus art? When you talk about kind of intuition there versus maybe more data -centric decision -making it kind of makes me think of product versus science versus art. How do you think about that? I think if product was all science, then you wouldn't see so much diversity and outcomes of all these companies that are trying to get to product market fit. And so I definitely think that there is art part of building a product, right? You have to nail the science part of this. But I think the most important part of the whole thing is, without which you're not going to have breakthrough success, is the art part of it, right?

12:23In product and decision making, when you think about speed versus quality and product, a lot of people, especially in the early stages, like speeds, all that matter, speeds, speeds, speeds. Yeah. How do you think about that speed versus quality when it comes to product? A lot of people talk about this nowadays and we are asked to do more with less and we want to do more with less. Every team is asking the same question. So my teams are actually not different than that. When I push for faster, better results, I often hear back, what do you want us to do? Do you want us to ship faster or do you want us to ship a better product?

13:00And my answer to that is I want both. And I say that not to be difficult. You know, there's definitely a relationship there and the more time you spend on polishing something, the more polished and crafted that's going to be. But a lot of people miss this point that they assume that everything is operating at an optimal way, you know, at the baseline level. And that's almost never the case. So I'll tell you this story. Recently I was talking to one of the senior product leaders on my team. And this was after I gave them feedback that they could go faster and there was some polish on their products could be better.

13:36And we drew this graph on the white board in my office. So it was sort of like the X -axis was the speed of execution and the Y -axis was the quality of the product. And the graph was something like this. right, like the faster the pace, the lower the quality, the, you know, lower the pace, the higher the quality. And he asked me, well, like, do you not think that there is an inverse relationship here? And I drew a line that was to the right of that line. And so I said, yes, there is an inverse relationship. And you can go faster and you can build better products at the same time. And so how can that be, right?

14:18And so if you think about all of the things that make a team, enable a team to go faster, and you think of all of the teams that enable them to shape better products, there's so many things you can improve. And they can be typically bucket it into like three major things. It's either the talent on the team or adjacent teams, right? So they have the right talent or it's, you know, how do they get stuff done, right? Or, you know, what is, you know, what are the tools and the systems and the tech that they use to get stuff done? And if you don't have, you know, the right team, the right talent, you don't, and not working optimal ways to get stuff done.

15:08And they also using tools that hold them back. Well, your team is not going to be at their maximum on both of those. What is the most common reason why companies fail today? Talent, process or systems? I think it depends on the company. Typically, there is opportunities across all three. And it depends on who build the company. Did you have kind of people who knew what they were doing when they were building the systems and? In teams that you've worked with before which one has been the one to break down? Probably the the middle one like how people get stuff done. Proc Yeah, how do you build process in product teams?

15:52I'm actually allergic to process. Okay So why? So I think that there is, you can get stuff done with either initiative or process. And both of those extremes are bad. If you have a company where it's all about initiative and there's no central process whatsoever, like you're going to have a lot of chaos and you're going to have a lot of things that are conflicting efforts. And so that's also going to slow you down and you know, it's going to be hard. And also if you have, you know, on the other side, if it's all about process, and you train your team to wait for process to do anything, right? You're going to feel like it's like a bureaucratic government over time.

16:41And nobody, nobody talented is going to want to work in the environment like that. So both extremes are bad. I think if you, like I told you, I think there's companies do better when there is just minimum process. And the process and means to an end. And that end is, you know, it's either for to help people go faster or to help them ship better products. any other process is waste of time and you have to be really, really diligent not to let it become over -processing in your organization because it's actually going to, it could destroy your culture. So when we think about like helping them ship better products, the way to measure that is, you know, most often in product reviews.

17:28Very different according to different leaders, different companies. What have been your biggest lessons on how to do product reviews, right? I set aside two to three hours a week for product reviews We don't have to fill them up right like the way that We decide what to review is both in pool and push ways so Pool is me and my report in our staff meeting. We discussed typically Okay, like what are the priorities? How they going and you know other other things that we want to discuss Because there's a lot of ambiguity whatever whatever and so that's that's the pool way and then push is when The teams themselves, they want to discuss a topic because they need help with making a decision, they need help on trade -offs that they're considering or strategic considers, whatever it is, right?

18:18So those are the two ways. Who's invited? I ask my teams to stick to the minimum number of people that they need to have a good discussion. So basically I ask only for people who need to directly contribute to the discussion to be in the review and that's typically like up to 10 people But what we do because I think transparency is very very important right we record every review and We have a slacksham and we post about every review the materials the recording the action items the ETA is like everything is documented and Then the team can pull whatever information they want What are the biggest reasons product reviews are not done while?

19:01We have kind of like four different types in my current organization. What are these four different types? So there could be a strategy review. So the strategy review is where we go deep on what is the problem that we're trying to solve. Why is it important? We talk about product opportunity, we talk about business case, whatever it is. But it's all about just like the what, if you will. The second one is roadmap review. So this is like an execution plan for whatever problem you're trying to solve. It talks about the sequencing, the milestones, the exact goals that the team is going to take. And it's basically the plan to get there.

19:38So it's the how. We have a launch review. So launch review is before the launch of any product. We look at all of the things that need to come together to have a successful launch. And the same review we look at experience and we pressurized it against the quality bar that we have. And then the last type is business review. So we look at the financial performance of the product and all of the business levers for that product to do well or not well, what need to change, what we need to pay attention to. So those are the four types. Now you asked about when product reviews don't go well. I think one of the reasons is when the team doesn't know what are the most important questions that we need to answer.

20:23and you can catch that in the pre -read. So we ask that the pre -readed cent is sent at least 24 hours in advance. What is in the pre -read? Well, the pre -read goes over the problem that we're trying to solve and the all the different components that you need to discuss as part of the review type. And so it's sent over as a Google Doc 24 hours beforehand? It's a Google Doc that everyone is expected to read before the review and add any comments or thoughts in that document so that we can have a productive discussion. Have you ever not read the pre -read? No, I really try to not be a bad example.

20:58If the pre -read is sent 24 hours in advance, I will. If the pre -read is sent, like, you know, one hour in advance, I'm not going to be able to do that, right? That's awful. That's on there. Strategy, number one, Gustav at Spotify, who I love, and he's right, and I'm wrong on this, just to be very clear. But he always says, talk is cheap, and so he should do more of it when it comes to light strategic direction where to go and kind of orienting that direction. I think I think talks really expensive and we should do less of it. So it's the podcast brilliant irony there. How do you think about talk is cheap?

21:32We should do more of it. Really encouraging debate versus my style which is more dictatorial direction. I think debate is incredibly important and so one of the things but I also don't know if talk is cheap. So I think those are two different concepts. One of the things that I really loved about the culture of Facebook when I was there can be captured by strong opinions loosely held. One of the reasons why we were successful for the products is that we were really leaving that value and that culture. It really means two things. One is that you have to have a point of view. And to get to a point of view that you feel conviction about, You're going to have to go deep into whatever topic you're having this point of view about, right?

22:16You're going to have to do your homework, you're going to have just spend enough time to develop expertise in that topic to have a strong point of view. And you have to share that point of view and people will debate a lot. I was going to say the crap out of it, but that's how you get to a better outcome. And the second part of that, you should not be stuck with your strong point of view, right? like you should be open to new information as it comes in and not just open to new information. You should go seek out new information because you know that it makes your decision better. And so that's what this culture about, you know, not the important of not being right, but it's the importance of, you know, making the right decisions.

22:57So that's one thing. You talked about the, you know, Toccus cheap and there I really agree with you. I disagree with the philosophy of this Toccus cheap just because Toc doesn't cost us any code, doesn't mean that we need to do more of it. I think like you said, talking costs us time and that is the time that you can be spending progressing towards your north star and you know your teams could be executing during that time, right? So any product leaders who love philosophizing for me is a big red flag, right? Like I love people who are action oriented, who know how important it is to make decisions fast.

23:32The faster you make a decision, the better it is because you unlock your team to go execute, but as they execute, they're going to learn new things and so you're going to integrate, right? And all of that has debates in them. I got to hold on. I had to ask this. What is possibility thinking? That sounded like pontification. The idea is that as a product leader and as a product organization more broadly. You don't want to be only going after small incremental gains. You also want to go after big ideas and you want to take big swings because they are more likely to bring step -change growth to your business.

24:14And so the possibility thinking what it does is it asks you to dream big and to think big and to not be afraid to go after much riskier and higher reward ideas. If you Your team is not, doesn't have the muscle to go after big ideas, right? Like, over the longer horizon, it's a recipe for relevance, I think. How do you encourage or inspire big ideas in companies? One is, I think, as part of your strategy and you articulate, you know, what do you expect teams to do? You're going to think about this in multi -time horizon way, right? And you are going to allocate your resources to big ideas and new products, existing products.

25:03And if you very clear with the strategy that you set and you communicated to the team, I think they're going to know what's expected. So that's one. As a leader, you have to be very clear, you know, what is the strategy you're driving? And as part of that, ideally, it's not just in conventional gains. you have allocator resources to go after bigger ideas. The second thing that you have to be really careful with is the incentives that you have in your organization, right? So how do you recognize impact? Who do you reward? What type of behaviors do you reward only in incremental gains or do you also reward people who go after bigger ideas?

25:44Even if they fail, because some of them will fail, there's no doubt about it. And it is much easier to deliver incremental gains because they can happen in shorter periods of time and they're much more reliable than to go after bigger ideas which take more time, they're more unpredictable. And so as a leader, you have to reward both and you have to overcome for the fact that the ladder is harder. One thing that I love to actually personalize is different people. So I'll say, what would Mr. Beast do if he was running our product today? And then what would Johnny I've dearf who's running our products day and from the same person you will get multiple different answers with that image of that person in mind and they'll both be big ideas but one will be inherently much more designed aesthetically pleasing, one will be shocking or pleasing and it helps frame different big idea generation in people's minds.

26:38Can I ask launch strategy meetings? I think people do product launches terribly today. What have been your biggest lessons on how to do launch as well? Yeah. Do you know when a launch is good? When you have a product that works, is it always just that often to the races? No, I think that's more of an exception. Typically, you learn and get signals throughout the development process. We talked about, as you discover, as you test different options, as you iterate, you're going to gradually come to a picture of whether the product is a hit or not. Invest majority of cases, it's over a period of time.

27:14When do you do a second product? Ideally you start thinking about and discovering your second product one to two years before you need to have results in the market because it takes time to go to build a successful product. And so if you are a company with just one product and you hit product market fit and you're growing, it's all going great. That's the time where you start thinking about what should I introduce the next product and if it's in another year or two, you start at that point. So I heard this brilliant statement the other day and it was like, yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift.

27:55And that's why it's called the present. Which I thought was really sweet. My question around that actually specifically is about resource allocation as CPTO and how you think about allocating resources between historical type that existing revenue streams that are working very well and need resources. And future blue sky thinking this could be a next great product. Like you said, there are actually really simple playbook. There are free categories like you said. There is new products that you can be spending your capacity on. And as part of that, I would include any big bets ideas. There's the existing products and improving their quality, either optimizations, or step change improvements.