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
Fri, 04 Oct 2024
Maria Angelidou is a seasoned product leader, having spent close to a decade at Meta where she was VP of Product and General Manager for some of the largest products such as Facebook Groups (2B+ users), Events, Profile, and Search. Before that, Maria led the Facebook App Monetization team, driving billions of dollars in revenue. Today, Maria is the Chief Product & Technology Officer at Personio, an HR tech company with an ambitious mission to unlock the power of people for SMEs. In Today's Episode with Maria Angelidou 1. How to Hire the Best Product Teams: What are the three different archetypes for PMs today? What non-obvious traits does Maria look for in new product hires? How does Maria structure the hiring process? What works? What does not? Does Maria do take home assignments? How has her approach changed here? What is Maria's biggest advice to candidates on both compensation and title? 2. How the Best Product Teams Do Product Reviews: What does every team get wrong in how they do product reviews? What are the four different type of product reviews? How often does Maria do a product review? Who is invited? Who sets the agenda? How is it structured? What makes good vs great product reviews? 3. Europe vs US: How Product Teams Differ: What is the single biggest difference when comparing product teams in the US vs EU? Does Maria agree that the work ethic is less in the EU? Which class of employee would Maria say is more entitled? What could Europe do to be more competitive with the US? What was the biggest surprise to Maria on returning to Europe from the US?
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.
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.
You are listening to 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 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 Angelou, 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 2 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. Pendo helps you get your users to do what you want them to do. With Pendo, you get everything from analytics, in-app
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Visit glean.com slash 20 to request a demo today. You have now arrived at your... 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Incredibly impressive.
How big was the company at this point?
Maybe 3,000 people. Yeah, 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 me, which is like IC, manager, leader, you can correct me. But that transition from IC to manager is a big one. How did you think about making that transition?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
For that exact reason is that you could go all the way up to VP on this IC truck.
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 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.
Well, that's not me, so that's crossing that box, right? Okay, captain 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.
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.
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, IC to manager, and then the third being leader. 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. 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?
Speaking of P&Ls, one of the biggest needle movers on Facebook's P&L was in particular the ads monetization engine around video, something that you were so central to. Can you take me to that story? How did that come to be, just so I have some context 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 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.
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, someone would tell you. And then another person would say for the same meeting, hey, you were too vocal.
With respect, is that not a badly run company?
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.
How do you prevent feature creep? Because it's really hard, year after year, like, you know, add nothing.
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.
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?
What 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 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.
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?
In product and decision making. When you think about speed versus quality and product, a lot of people, especially in the early stages, like speed's all that matters. Speed, speed, speed.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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
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?
In teams that you've worked with before, which one has been the one to break down?
Probably the middle one, like how people get stuff done.
How do you build process in product teams?
I'm actually allergic to process.
Okay. Why?
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.
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
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.
So when we think about helping them ship better products, the way to measure that is most often in product reviews. Very 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. 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.
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.
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 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.
What are the biggest reasons product reviews are not done well?
We have kind of like four different types in my current organization.
What are those 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. 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. 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.
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.
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.
What is in the pre-read?
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.
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. 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?
That's their fault, it's on them.
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 we should do more of it when it comes to like strategic direction where to go and kind of orienting that direction I think I think talk's really expensive and we should do less of it says the podcast brilliant irony there how do you think about
talk is cheap, we 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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I got told 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.
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.
How do you encourage or inspire big ideas in companies?
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.
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?
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.
And so as a leader, you have to reward both and you have to overcompensate for the fact that the latter is harder.
One thing that I love to is like to actually personalize it's different people. So I'll say, what would Mr. Beast do if he was running our product today? And then what would Johnny Ive do if he was running our product today? 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 design aesthetically pleasing. One will be shock and awe pleasing. And it helps frame different big idea generation in people's minds. Can I ask launch strategy meetings? I think people do product launches terribly today.
Yeah.
What have been your biggest lessons on how to do launch as well?
Yeah.
Do you know when a launch is good? Like when you have a product that works, is it always just like off into the races?
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.
When 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 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, okay, when 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. And 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 tech debt, 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 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.
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,
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.
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.
All of this is driven by people.
Yeah.
And hiring is so important to any leader's role, probably the most important. What have been your biggest lessons on how to hire the best product people?
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?
100%.
If they're better than me and I would want to report to them, fuck it. I'll pay them more than me and I will report to them. But they're not. Of course they're not. That's why I'm where I am and that's where they are. I'm sorry. And actually it takes out the whole segment of young people who are incredibly tenacious, ambitious, hungry hustlers, who of course they're not as good as me.
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.
I'm so sorry. If they're better than you, why do they report to you?
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.
So in a future world, we can see ourselves reporting to them. What's the hiring process?
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.
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.
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 execution interview, each of them are about 45 minutes. The execution interview looks at their ability to set the right goals for the team,
Do we do a take home assignment for that? Do we do a test in the room?
We have a take assignment, but it's a phase three.
Oh, that's the next one.
Yeah. So you go through that.
Fuck, I've never had a job. This is exhausting.
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.
And so is that a problem that the company faces or a product problem that the company faces?
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.
Does that feel right when you say that? Like that feels like an awfully long process. If I was top talent, which I'm not, I am like, oh my God. Like we could have a chat. You meet me at an event and I'm clearly a brilliant product person. I don't want to go through that.
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.
Why were you not a fan of that? And then how did you change your mind?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you did a very good job.
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.
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.
How do you think about the comp stage when you offer comp and responses to comp and title?
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.
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.
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.
So I think title is not something that you typically can negotiate.
How quickly do you know they're not the right person?
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.
Can you let someone go in a few weeks? It feels a bit harsh. I'm with you, totally. You can't let them go.
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.
You don't have that in the US?
No, it's at-will employment.
Wow, so you can make a mistake and it's like... No, you make a mistake and you part ways. No, we have probation.
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.
But then when you... Why is it harder in Europe?
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.
And so I think that's actually a competitive disadvantage for EU-based companies.
So it's just the depth of talent is so much less.
Yeah.
That's inspiring.
But that doesn't mean you can build an incredible company here. It just takes much more energy.
Do you find differences in terms of work ethic, respectfully, or approaches to work in intensity?
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.
Which group are more entitled?
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.
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.
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
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.
I ask that my teams at the team level get together at least once a quarter.
How much worse are team meetings remote?
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.
And you can really minimize and then you have...
you know the things that you do together in person they become much higher signal you know we're a media company we have creativity at the core I hope of what we do you lose all creativity for me as a media company if we're remote and so much is that I've got an idea Maria let's run with this what do you think oh and then someone else hears it across the room I don't think that's gonna work but did you see this this could work
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?
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.
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.
Having worked in the center of the valley and now in Europe, are you more of a bear or a bull on European innovation?
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
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.
Can we do a quick fire round? Sure, let's do it. Okay, so tell me about a time when you most vociferously disagreed with your manager.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Because if they get promoted and they get a bad rating right away, that's a really tough position to recover from.
People often won't do the role until they're given it, hence be a plate remover. You're not going to take your boss's job when your boss is still there and he's doing it. Well, she's doing it.
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.
What's the biggest mistake founders make when hiring product teams?
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.
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
A friend of yours has just become a CPO at a new company or at a company and they start the role tomorrow and we're having a coffee beforehand today. What do you advise them starting the role?
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.
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.
Final one, which recent company product strategy have you been most impressed by?
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.
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.
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.
I so appreciate your putting up with me pushing back on many different aspects. I've loved doing this. So thank you so much for making this your first podcast.
Yeah, thank you for having me. It was fun.
The thing I love so much about these vertical shows is very specific, granular advice that you can implement in your business today. That was fantastic from Maria. I so enjoyed having her on the show. And you can watch the full episode on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC.
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