Maria Angelidou
speaker
134 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Maria Angelidou’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yes, if you don't have the right incentives.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Yeah.
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?
Probably the middle one, like how people get stuff done.
I'm actually allergic to process.
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