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
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 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.
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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah.
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?
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.
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.
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