Maria Angelidou
Appearances
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
You 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Yeah, 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
I set aside two to three hours a week for product reviews. We don't have to fill them up. The way that we decide what to review is both in pull and push ways. Pull is me and my report. In our staff meeting, we discuss typically what are the priorities, how they're going, and other things that we want to discuss because there's a lot of ambiguity, whatever. And so that's the pull way.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And then the 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? So those are the two ways.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And we have a Slack chat and we post about every review, the materials, the recording, the action items, the ETAs, like everything is documented. And then the team can pull whatever information they want.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
We have kind of like four different types in my current organization.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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. This is like an execution plan for whatever problem you're trying to solve.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
It talks about the sequencing, the milestones, the exact goals that the team is going to take. It's basically the plan to get there, so it's the how. We have a launch review. So a 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And the same review, we look at experience and we pressure test 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 we need to change, what we need to pay attention to. So those are the four types.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Now, you asked about when product reviews don't go well. And I think one of the reasons is when the team doesn't know what are the most important questions that we need to answer. And you can catch that in the pre-read. So we ask that the pre-read is sent at least 24 hours in advance.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Well, the pre-read goes over the problem that we're trying to solve and all the different components that you need to discuss as part of the review type.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
No, I really try to not be a bad example. If the pre-read is sent 24 hours in advance, I will. If the pre-read is sent like, I don't know, one hour in advance, I'm not gonna be able to do that, right?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
One of the reasons why we were successful with the products is that we were really leaving that value, 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? You're going to have to do your homework.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
You're going to have to 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?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 the importance of not being right, but it's the importance of making the right decisions. That's one thing. You talked about talk is cheap, and there I really agree with you.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
I disagree with the philosophy that talk is cheap. Just because talk 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 your teams could be executing during that time. Any product leaders who love philosophizing, for me, it's a big red flag.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
I love people who are action-oriented, who know how important it is to make decisions fast. The faster you make a decision, the better it is because you unblock your team to go execute. But as they execute, they're going to learn new things, and so you're going to iterate. All of that has debates in them.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And so the possibility thinking, what it does, 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 your team is not, doesn't have the muscle to go after big ideas, right, like over the longer horizon, you're going to, it's a recipe for relevance, I think.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
One is, I think as part of your strategy, and you articulate what do you expect teams to do, you're going to think about this in multi-time horizon way. You are going to allocate your resources to big ideas and new products, existing products. If you're very clear with the strategy that you set and you communicated to the team, I think they're going to know what's expected. That's one.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
As a leader, you have to be very clear what is the strategy you're driving. As part of that, ideally, it's not just incremental gains. You have allocated 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. How do you recognize impact? Who do you reward? What type of behaviors?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Do you reward only incremental gains or do you also reward people who go after bigger ideas, even 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And so as a leader, you have to reward both and you have to overcompensate for the fact that the latter is harder.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Yeah.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Yeah.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
No, I think that's more of an exception. Typically, you learn and get signals throughout the development process. 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. In the vast majority of cases, it's over a period of time.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
That's the time where you start thinking about, okay, when should I introduce the next product? And if it's in another year or two, you start at that point.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Like you said, there are actually really simple playbook. There are three 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, right? There's the existing products and improving their quality, either optimizations or step change improvements.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And then there is, if you have existing products already, your company with multiple products already, There's obviously maintenance of those products, also known as KTLO, and internal productivity. Those are the three major categories of investment. If you are a company that has already multiple product lines and you have hundreds of millions in revenue,
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
That's where you start being very, very intentional because the percent of your allocation to your existing product starts to go up. And so ideally, that is not more than what you invest in your new products, right? So let's say you invest 30 to 40% in your existing products and 30 to 40% in new products.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And then the rest, whatever it is, 25, 30% goes to maintain like KTLO and internal productivity. As part of that new products bucket, my advice is to keep at least 5%, maybe 10% of capacity that goes into planting new seeds.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Yeah.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
that you hire people that are better than you, stronger than you, smarter than you. Actually, when I was at Facebook, Mark used to say, you should hire people that you would want to report to. And I completely agree with that. So that's one. The second thing is like when I hire- Do you though?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Because at that next level, they will be calibrated compared to the group of people, the whole cohort 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Thank you for having me, Harry. I'm really excited to be here.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
I've been doing this for 10 years. But they can be better than you. But they're not. Exactly. I mean, it depends on the level and like for people who report to me, absolutely. I want them to be better than me. That's why I'm hiring them. Obviously, if you are hiring someone who, I don't know, three levels down from you, it's not going to be at that point, but you're still hiring for potential.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Maybe they're not better than me on all dimensions, but you can see yourself reporting to that person. That's the essence of it. With some more experience or whatever it is, you would be happy reporting to that person because you know at some point they're going to be better than you on all dimensions.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
It's a four-phase process. So the first phase is the screening and exploration. So there's a couple of interviews there, the TA, talent acquisition partner that looks at relevant experience, any kind of like location, things like this, any fit with the current roles. And then if that is a check, then it goes into an exploration with a product leader. It depends on the level.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
For more senior people, it could be my reports that are doing those, and they look at digging a little bit into motivation, relevant experience, going deeper into, okay, do we have any open roles that fit that for what we're looking for, and any red flags. So if they go through the first phase, this exploratory phase, then they get into functional loop.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
So functional loop looks into vetting their product sense and their execution. So product sense is, can they take an ambiguous problem and can they understand customers well? Can they come up with, through all of that, with a good solution to the problem? And so it really tests their product intuition as well. Can they make decisions that are pulling data insights from all the sources?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Yes, it was indeed a sliding doors type of moment. I'm going to take you to 2013. I was invited to one of those alumni events. This is the Boston Consulting Group. I worked at the firm for many, many years ago. 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
The execution interview, each of them are about 45 minutes. The execution interview looks at their ability to set the right goals for the team,
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
We have a take assignment, but it's a phase three.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Yeah. So you go through that.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Then you go into home take assignment, which we call case study. Say that you passed your functional loop. A case study is typically a set of problems that you would have to solve and be working on if you joined the company.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Yeah. If you check on that, then you get into the last phase, which is looking at your leadership and drive. And there's a buy raiser interview there, which looks at your values and how if there's a fit with the values of the company. So and after that, we do a debrief and we make a decision. So I'll tell you, I'll tell you.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
I mean, you can get through all of that within a few days. It depends on how you design your, like, if you want to move fast. So I'll tell you on the case study, I wasn't actually a fan of that. Personio had that.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
I just never, I never used it in the past. And I thought, you know, as you just said, like, I mean, who's going to put all of this time? And, you know, so Personio actually had, this is the company I work at now, had case studies part of their process. When I was going through the process, I was talking with Lujano, the CEO, they also asked me to do a case study.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
So they gave me a case study, and when I looked at that, like you just said, I was like, are you kidding me? There's no way I can find time to do this. It was like pages and pages. I don't do that in my process. I'll come to that. It was like 30 pages or something. And so I almost withdrew from that process.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And it just so happened that as I was looking into that case study, it was describing all of the problems that I would have to tackle if I started the company. And it really piqued my interest. I'm a sucker for good challenge, learning new things, and that actually played in their favor. with me because I started to look into that and it drew me in.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Then I felt invested and I was looking forward to rolling up my sleeves and just getting into it and tackling all those challenges. When I started at the company, I had to redesign the entire hiring process to make it more rigorous.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
I mean, it's important to hire the right people, just a full stop. And I ended up keeping it because it was something like from the DNA of Personio and actually it made my experience pretty unique. So I kept it, but the way that I changed it is it's very concise and it shouldn't take more than like an hour of someone's time.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And they go away and do it or it's like a do it while they're... Yeah, so ideally you give it to people at least two days in advance because like you said, you can't, you know, people are busy. You can't expect them to find time last minute, right? So you just send them to them, send it to them and they come back with, you know, their thoughts of how they would tackle some problem.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
I think you should definitely negotiate. And I'll tell you that women typically don't negotiate and men do. So that's my experience. So I think you have to negotiate is just part of the deal. And if you feel uncomfortable negotiating with the company, negotiate with the talent acquisition person, right? Like whoever the recruiter is, don't negotiate with the manager.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Because they also sometimes don't know, you know, what... What do you think women don't negotiate and men do? I think there is a misconception that that could reflect badly on your relationship with the person that you're talking to. And I think it's at the end is it shouldn't be the case. Title. I think title is, is not as a company.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And so I wanted to go and congratulate her and give her a hug. And so I said, I'm going to 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.
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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
Like when I, when I came into Personio, I changed all the titles and, you know, simplified and all of that. So I don't think you can give, unless you are really, really early, but I don't think you just can give whatever titles, right? Like you have to have consistency in your organization. and clear mapping to all the levels from other companies you hire from.
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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
So I think title is not something that you typically can negotiate.
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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
I think if it's a really bad hire, you will know within a few weeks. If it's, most cases though, you just, they're kind of slower.
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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
Why not? It's brutal. In Europe, you have the probation thing, right? So this is a new thing I learned. Totally. But there's this thing that's called probation and that's where you decide.
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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
No, it's at-will employment.
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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
Yeah, I know that. But that's because when you pass probation... Long lead time to hire anyone is just so much harder in Europe.
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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
Okay, you know, this is actually one of the things that I had to adjust is that, you know, for every 20, maybe 10, 20, if it's specialized role candidates that you get in the US that are solid, maybe you get one in Europe. And that actually really slows down your hiring. Unless you lower your hiring bar, which you're not going to do.
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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
And so I think that's actually a competitive disadvantage for EU-based companies.
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Yeah.
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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
But that doesn't mean you can build an incredible company here. It just takes much more energy.
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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
I think, yeah, I would say that there is a difference. In the States, people feel like their job is a much bigger part of their identity. And I think in Europe it's just less of a phenomenon. And when you feel that your job is important to you personally, I think you put in more effort, more of an owner, let's say, than a renter, to use that terminology.
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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
I actually think it's more kind of like the younger generation across Europe and the US, especially people who maybe this is their first job and they had a job that is like pretty just cushy from the perspective of like, you know, all the benefits they get and they think that's normal and they don't realize that there's actually not normal.
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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
So when I started at Personio, we had, you know, we were just coming out of the pandemic and there wasn't really like an intentional strategy for, you know, location strategy. And so I actually did a lot of research and I talked to a bunch of my peers and public companies and private companies to see like what's working, what's not.
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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
I ended up deciding that we're going to continue to hire remotely. The benefit that you get from that is that you just have access to much better talent and you can hire much faster. The risk, but you can totally mitigate that, I think, is that when people are in person, there's many more opportunities
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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
So I come to this event and I join one of the groups who are standing and chatting and I meet this impressive woman. She was a director of product management and she speaks of her job at Facebook so passionately.
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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
to spend time together in unstructured way, like socialize and ideas come up, not in a structured way. You also form much stronger relationships on the team. I think as long as you have a way to bring people together regularly, which I do, you create that environment, I think you can mitigate most of the not being in person.
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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
I ask that my teams at the team level get together at least once a quarter.
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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
If you have, you know, we have about 30% remote in product and technology, which is the organization that I run. And when you have such a high percent of remote people, you're actually really, really intentional with meetings. And so we shift to async collaboration as much as we can. And there are all these tools now, right? Like we use Loom, for example, for that.
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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
And you can really minimize and then you have...
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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
Product reviews, I don't think are that much worse because we have a structured process. What you described is more like brainstorming and- Idea generation. Yeah, riffing on each other's ideas. And I think for that, for example, I right now live in Munich and I don't go to the office. It's like, I don't go to the office every day, right?
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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
What I do, regardless if I'm in the office or not, if I have an idea, I will just quickly ping, if it's my direct or someone who reports to them or someone who reports to them. I work with all sort of people on my team. You don't need to only go to your directs. That's really important. And we'll just quickly get on Zoom and we'll talk about that.
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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
As long as you don't make out of it like this whole meeting. So you need to leave a bunch of time on your calendar that is not packed with meetings so that as you go through your creative process, you can quickly grab people and talk to them as part of your day.
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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
uh this is hard well that says it all um i think it's hard because of like the access to thailand that i told you right that's the number one thing that's that's the number one thing the other thing is the process versus uh initiative like i think if you go back to that spectrum that i described like you can get stuff done with initiative or process
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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
that I was listening to her and then I thought, you know, it's either a bunch of BS or there's something that I really don't understand about this company, you know, 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 Menlo Park, California.
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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
and you come to the middle, I think my experience is that the companies in the US tend to be closer on this side towards initiative, and companies in Europe tends to go towards the process. Again, it doesn't mean that you can't have a company that thrives on initiative and has minimum process in Europe. You just have to be much more intentional because it's not the default.
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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
Maybe the one example I'll pick is from the time that actually changed my mind and I still use that insight from that debate. So it was earlier at Facebook when I was sure that I was going to promote this one person that I hired, I invested in him, I got them ready for the next level, all of this stuff. And I was really convinced that it was the right time to promote him.
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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
And my manager said, mm-mm, He's not ready." We went back and forth. It was a pretty strong debate back and forth. I was at the point where I was like, okay, I'll just disagree and commit. She grabbed time with me and explained her rationale, which is she explained to me this idea that promotions need to be lagging, trailing, and not leading.
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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
What she meant by that is you 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. If they haven't done that, don't promote them because actually promoting them when it's premature, it's worse for them.
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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
Because at that next level, they will be calibrated, you know, just like compared to the group of people, the whole cohort 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. They might actually churn from the company, right?
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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
Because if they get promoted and they get a bad rating right away, that's a really tough position to recover from.
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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
I think it's a mindset thing. I think like this goes back to when you asked me about, you know, what advice do you give to people to get promoted? I think you can absolutely start doing the work at the next level, taking the responsibility and showing that you can do the job.
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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
two mistakes. One is they don't hire the right person. And so it could be either because they don't know what the role needs to be successful, or they don't know how to vet the person. They haven't seen what great looks like, and then they compromise really quickly. So that's one. And the second part is they don't know how to build a good product team from structure perspective.
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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
What do I mean by that? If you look at every individual PM, they all make sense as individual hires. But if you put them all together as a product team, you're like, they're all junior and they're all high horsepower, high potential, but there's no one there to actually train them and get them to the next level and all of that stuff. So it's just like the structure sometimes doesn't get
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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
build context as fast as possible, do a listening tour, build expertise in the company that you're joining, right? Like in the space that you're now gonna be building products for. Spend time with customers, spend time with your finance team to understand like all of the business behind it. And then at the same time, you know, start putting your points on the board.
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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
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 left to discuss, debrief, do whatever they needed to do to offer me a job, right?
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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
Just make yourself valuable to your boss, to your team, to your peers. Like don't wait until you're an expert. I think you asked that question earlier and I think both of those are important.
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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
Maybe I'll give you a couple. Well, I cannot not mention with everything that's going on in our industry, Satya and Microsoft and what he did with OpenAI and Infection AI. And I think he really saw that AI was like an all-in moment for Microsoft and actually the rest of tech and took a bet. And I think it's proving to be a pretty good bet. The other example I would maybe highlight is Instacart.
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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
So Fiji is the CEO there and someone that I used to work with at Meta. And so I follow the company and I'm pretty impressed with what she's done with the company, right? Like she turned it around, made it profitable during difficult time. She brought in the high margin ads business. I think she is also taking this win-win mindset to all this approach.
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I was reading about the deal that they made between Uber and Instacart. I think that's brilliant, both of them. It positioned them much better in restaurant delivery against players like DoorDash. She also is investing in healthy eating for low-income communities. So I think if you put all of that together, I think she's an incredible operator and it's been impressive to watch her.
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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
Yeah, thank you for having me. It was fun.
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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
Incredibly impressive.
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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
Maybe 3,000 people. Yeah, something like that. And the product team was very, very small, maybe less than 100.
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Product manager.
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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
So my perspective is that a manager is responsible first and foremost for the outcomes of their team. That means that you as a manager need to do whatever you can, everything that you have in your control to de-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.
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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
Number one is you're no 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 every one 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.
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You need to manage, you know, deal with underperformance. You need to get them to the next level. The sooner you change your mindset about those two things as you transition, the better it is.
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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
You know, this actually topic is near and dear to my heart. So when I was at Meta, 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 because you're going to have people who are brilliant ICs.
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If there's no clear career progression for them, they feel pressure to transition into management. 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. So So I introduced this archetypes. There were certain characteristics that they were spiking on.
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For that exact reason is that you could go all the way up to VP on this IC truck.
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So the ones that I work with the team to introduce were, in addition kind of to generalist track, you had captain. So 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.
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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.
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So 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 a specific domain, like integrity, growth, ML, things like that.
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Yes, if you don't have the right incentives.
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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. Can they manage a portfolio of products that is complex and can they distribute capacity and resources appropriately? Can they manage towards a healthy P&L? Can they drive business goals, not just product goals?
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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
Actually, that was my first role at Facebook, and I can tell you that was my probably hardest role, not just at Facebook or Meta now, but probably across my entire career. Facebook was nothing like I've ever experienced before. A couple of things. One was that it was a really heavy feedback culture, really heavy feedback culture.
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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, someone would tell you. And then another person would say for the same meeting, hey, you were too vocal.
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No, I think it's 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.
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I think there's 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.
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You can have front end components that are ready to grab and so that teams don't reinvent them. And again, there's lack 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. If it's all consistent, it feels simpler, right?
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I think if product was all science, then you wouldn't see so much diversity in 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.
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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?
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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
Yeah.
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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?
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And my answer to that is, I want both. And I say that not to be difficult. 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, at the baseline level. And that's almost never the case.
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I'll tell you this story. Recently, I was talking to one of the senior product leaders on my team. This was after I gave them feedback that they could go faster and there was some polish on their products that could be better. We drew this graph on the whiteboard in my office. It was like the x-axis was the speed of execution and the y-axis was
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the quality of the product and the graph was something like this right like the faster the pace the lower the quality the uh you know lower the piece the the the higher the quality and he asked me 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.
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I said, yes, there is an inverse relationship, and you can go faster, and you can build better products at the same time. How can that be? If you think about all of the things that enable a team to go faster, And you think of all of the teams that enable them to ship better products. There's so many things you can improve and they can be typically bucketed into like three major things.
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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?
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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 or the right talent you don't and they're not working optimal ways to get stuff done and they also using tools that hold them back well your team is not going to be you know at their maximum on both of those what is the most common reason why companies fail today talent process or systems
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I think it depends on the company. Typically, you know, there is like opportunities across all three. And it depends on, you know, who built the company. Did you have kind of people who knew what they were doing when they were building the systems?
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Probably the middle one, like how people get stuff done.
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I'm actually allergic to process.
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So I think that 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, you're going to have a lot of chaos and you're going to have a lot of things that are conflicting efforts. That's also going to slow you down and it's going to be hard.
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Also, if you have, on the other side, if it's all about process and you train your team to wait for process to do anything, you're going to feel like it's a bureaucratic government over time and nobody talented is going to want to work in an environment like that. Both extremes are bad. I think if you, like I told you, I think companies do better when there is