 Hey everyone, this is Carlos, founder and CEO at Product School. Today I'm here with the CEO and CPO at AirFocus, Malte Schultz. Excuse my non-German accent, Malte. Hope that I didn't butcher your name too much. How are we doing? Pretty good, pretty good. Thanks for having me. It's really good to be here. I'm glad to have you. I remember I was just talking off the camera. You guys bootstrapped your business, you've been around for a while, and now you raised money, and now you're growing. I love those stories and I want to get that back story from you. Let's start from the very beginning. What's your background and what's inspired you to start AirFocus? I started as a product manager right out of university around seven years ago. I was dropped into this super strategic role. I don't know what happened, but they expected me to turn around the business. I very quickly learned that, at least in this company, product strategy and product management is very broken. It has to do with the nature of product management being such a multifaceted, complicated thing. I also saw a lot of things that could have been improved. Very early on, I thought, well, there need to be better ways than, I don't know, using complicated Excel spreadsheets and always looking for a single point of truth when it comes to product data and mission statements and so on and so on. I was interested in the problem and I started AirFocus really as a side project with my co-founder Christian. The prototype launched on BetaList and we got feedback, we iterated. In the beginning, it was really just a little tiny prioritization tool that has evolved quite a bit since then. That's really cool because it means that you are solving your own problem. That's something that I've seen happening in not only CEOs, but also product managers. When you really care about the problem that you are solving because you have that problem, you will always have product market feedback. Yeah, exactly. I had to solve it. We can't stand these spreadsheets anymore. And we do. There are so many companies that are trying to replace Excel because, obviously, Excel is great for many different use cases, but at the same time, it's not the best for anything. So when it comes to building products, we're just talking about it. So many people out there still use spreadsheets, PowerPoints, whatever, to represent a roadmap for their company and now we're seeing different technology that is specific for those cases. What would you say our focus does different than not yet as a spreadsheet, but all the road mapping tools out there? Yeah, yeah. So essentially, we're building a home for products and the people who built them. So that's actually our new slogan, but we are providing PMs with everything they need to do their job and we're trying to make sure that there's a single point of truth for the product team and the company even. So you always have the right data at hand when you need to make all these product decisions all the time. So we always say you're always prioritizing, so not just which features to put into which release and so on, but on multiple levels, you're prioritizing your outcomes, your problems, your opportunities, your features and so on. Yeah, and we help product teams with all these topics from kind of breaking down the bigger mission into objectives and then prioritizing what problems to solve and then to, as you said, like creating and sharing roadmaps that actually align people around the things that you should work on as a team and as a company. So let's talk about road map because it's true when you go deep, you realize that a road map is not just a list of to-dos, it can get very messy very quickly and now we're seeing how as a product manager, we're thinking more about the user and identifying certain insights that come not just from the company, but sometimes it's from our actual users and other data points and then transforming those into action and making them more strategic for the entire organization. It's really a challenge. So just give me some best practices on how a product team can leverage road mapping to really make it a strategic tool. Yeah, that's a great question. As you said, the big challenge is to be strategic, right? And it's very difficult and all the teams struggle with it and probably everyone will always struggle with it because it's so complicated, but there are tricks that you can and should do in order to get better at it. And what you should not do is start with features and requests that have been thrown over the fence by sales and marketing and competitors and future lists and so on. So what you should really do is like do the right level of discovery and trying to understand the problems that you're using that you're solving and the problems that different customer segments have. And in order to kind of put this into the road map, there are obviously multiple ways how you could do this. There are outcome-based road maps where you really focus on the outcomes and the initiatives that you should tackle on the highest level in order to achieve your mission. But we are not big fans of telling people that they're doing it wrong or that there's just one approach of solving these problems. We've just learned that yes, everyone shares these problems because it's so difficult, but at the end of the day there are often good reasons why companies do what they do. So sometimes it makes sense to have a feature road map or even the timeline road map and some people hate it, but sometimes it makes sense. But very often the thing that we try to communicate to product teams is to really look at the outcomes that you want to achieve and try to cluster opportunities that you have in your product backlog or idea backlog and kind of put them all together in a now-next-later fashion. That is a process that works for everyone, at least as a starting point. Yeah, because you're building a product for product managers. That's very meta. Obviously, product team may have their own playbook and that's okay. There's no silver bullet that works for everybody. However, now, is there anything that you can do with regards to onboarding by creating templates or by somehow helping those first-time users to make sure that they can understand your value proposition and get off the ground quickly? Yeah, I mean, you already mentioned templates. We had templates from really from day one and templates are great because it brings you a very fast aha moment. So we have been a product-led growth company from day one. We only hired our first-time person like a month ago. So we had to kind of provide our users with these very first aha moments within the software. So they sign up for our vocals. They tell us very quickly what problem they have. For example, I need to build a roadmap because my team needs it or my boss tells me to do so. And then we try to get you a result super fast, right? And that could be a template for an out-time-based, non-executive roadmap. You mentioned the company's product-led, which I think is awesome and we're seeing more and more companies. So giving an example of how, let's say a user kind of finds out about you and then eventually bubbles this up to a decision-maker for them to integrate their tool with the rest of their stock. Yeah. So there's one thing that doesn't work and it's showing people Facebook ads and then expecting them to sign up and immediately become paying customers. This has proven to not work. What a surprise because for sure not how I would have bought a software. So our time group is super interesting because they're super clever people, right? They're working in product because it's probably one of the most intellectually interesting things to work on because it's so complicated. And these people are clever and they are trying all the players in the market or at least the top players for sure anyways when they're looking for a solution. So that's kind of really good for us because we're not as overfunded or funded as some of the other players in the market and we're still a scrappy 30-person startup. So that's for sure the good part. So people always try us out and then they go with the product that they like the best. And yeah, like this is a big decision for a product team, right? Like usually these teams use JIRA to manage developers and tasks and then they maybe use, I don't know, Slack and Intercom for customer feedback. And what they today do is they manage all the product strategy and product management in excellent spreadsheets, right? And PowerPoint as we mentioned. And the decision to now move to a more professional solution is, in my opinion, more and more a no-brainer. But then they quickly discover that this is a very important decision. So that's why they are looking on places like Capterra or they're reading about what's the right way to do product strategy and to prioritize my backlog. And we're just trying to be helpful and not pushing our product and trying to hard-tail to sell to you because it's never working. I agree. You cannot trick the user. Especially you're talking about product managers, people who are in the trenches, seeing every single product out there, right? So, obviously, social validation is good, but at the end of the day, you want to get your hands dirty. You want to play around with cool and then make your own decision. Yes. So one of the indicators of a product-led organization is when the CEO comes from a product background. That's not the only way to do it, but obviously in this case, it is true. In your title, you said that you are the CEO and the CPO. So how do you wear those two hats? Well, there are only two ways how effortless is going to stay a success story. It's when we get our product right and then when we also get all the surrounding stuff like communication and customer support, right? But the product is the most important part of our puzzle and of our value proposition. And it's just that I was the first product manager on the team when we were just three people and I kind of remained in that position where we didn't have a few product managers on the team. But on the one hand, to be super honest, it's very difficult for me to let go because I'm still so deeply involved on the product side which I sometimes should not be and you can ask my colleagues. Yeah, but it's just like super crucial that me as the leading person in the company is still involved in all the sprint plannings and road map sessions and so on. There's just no other way that we build this platform. Even if you don't have the official CPO title as a CEO, I'm sure you're still going to be involved and I've seen that across the world. I'm still involved in that. I think one of the challenges is probably to kind of create a space for other product leaders to shape that vision and really feel empowered to grow. Otherwise, we're going to become bottleneck. Yes, that's already happening. You're very right. Yeah, you have to make room for others to develop their own thinking and problem solving. I'm sorry. I love this question because it's CEO is different but I want to learn more about your calendar. What does your day-to-day look like? Yeah, so I for sure don't want to bore you with like no days like the other, but in my case, it's very true. So I start in the morning. Actually, I'm not a super early morning person not because I am not getting up early but because I drive my daughter to kindergarten every morning. So that makes me only start at around 9 o'clock. And then I prepare a little list of things that I must get done by the end of the day because I'm still very involved in getting stuff done and I try to pick the most important projects and usually I get only 50% of those done. So I'm prioritizing my day essentially. And then we have a product daily. I'm involved in that. And then I mean, it's really difficult to look at my calendar because it's so all over the place all the time with hiring, fundraising lately. Like we went through major product upgrades and migrations in the last two months. We worked on stuff for 10 months in the basement without releasing anything new and then shifted all at once. So that was like insane. And we at the same time rebranded AirFocus and launched a new website. So this kind of stuff you cannot plan. It's just like the survival mode all day. But now it's getting better. I mean, in reality, it's always a roller coaster, right? Like, and one of the funny things I think in general as a CEO is you kind of reinvent yourself. And I'm sure at the very beginning when you were in the basement just building it was all about just shipping the product. Now you mentioned fundraising, hiding and many other things around. And it's exciting and stressful at the same time. Yes, 100% very stressful, but super exciting. I love my job. I don't want to do anything else. It's awesome. So what is the status of the company today? How many people are working there? Yeah, we are a bit more than 30 people right now operating out of Europe. Mainly we have our first hires in the U.S. also. And yeah, we're a remote first company. Although we have an office here in Hamburg, Germany, but we make sure that this is a remote company. So when someone remote is styling in on a meeting and everyone goes to remote to really make sure that we have this culture where everyone feels to be on the same level. We are noticing this trend, obviously, especially because of the pandemic when a lot of organizations are building their virtual HQ, but you've been working remotely and I haven't worked before it was cool. So I want to hear from your perspective also being based in Europe. Have you noticed any differences trying to build a global product with a strong customer base in the U.S.? I think the answer would have probably been different two years ago and probably biased by, let's say, stuff that you read on the internet where it says you have to be in San Francisco and stuff like this. But I have more and more of the feeling that it doesn't really matter where you're located, especially when you're product-led growth and you can hire people in two minutes via Upwork or other platforms and they can join you remotely to provide customer success or customer support in the U.S. The stuff has gotten a lot easier and it just allows you to hire the best talent because if I would just hire based out of this little limited pool here in Hamburg, I would not be able to onboard the people that we have today. That question is becoming less and less relevant. I think it's going to get to a point that it's not even going to exist because you're going to be read by the quality of your product and what your customers say about you, not by where someone is living. Yeah. It now already feels like a no-brainer, right? Like two years ago we would have said maybe, but now it's super obvious where this is going. Yeah. I remember when I started my previous company, like I was planning that, oh, we had a team I'm from Spain, so I was always based in San Francisco, but we always hired remotely and it was like almost like an excuse like, well, but you know, but you have a good network. I had to justify why someone wasn't working in the same office. Now it's a company. It went from that to a competitive advantage. Oh, you're so smart. You're hiding across the world. You were like, okay, I get it. Everyone is doing it. Yeah. So let's talk about the future. The future of Air Focus. You mentioned that obviously you guys are much more than just a road mapping tool. You are home for products and I think that also requires strong integrations with other products because if you tried to be the best for everyone at the end of the day, it would be the best for nobody. So how do you go about integrating with different tools to make sure that you are the hub, but at the same time you give flexibility to the product teams to create their own stack? Yeah. So I left what you said earlier where you said that you essentially solved your own problem. So I built Air Focus to solve my own problem and I knew we had JIRA as the tool that was irreplaceable in the company. So from day one, we built on top of JIRA and then very quickly we learned, okay, other tools, other companies are using Trello or Sana, Azure Default, all these tools. And so really from day one, we had integrations into these systems and we then also quickly learned that these integrations need to be super advanced with two-way sync and mapping and all these things because tools like JIRA, Trello, ClickUp, Lately, Asana, they're great tools, right? Like they're just not made for product strategy or product management as a kind of product hub, but for collaboration and project management, they're awesome, right? They're not going to go away and that's why we have to and we're happy to sit on top of this landscape and help you make better product decisions on a daily, but mostly on a strategic level. So that's a trend we've seen tools that products that really want to be category leaders and you want to define and go very deep into something by definition, they need to put all their energy into that. And I think that having the ability for products to integrate with others in an easy way, it's really powerful. I remember those days where like you had to build everything. First of all, you had to build in-house, but not only that, you had to build every single type of thing and it was just a nightmare. Now it's really amazing to see product leaders and other creators in general to be able to plug and play certain blocks that work so they can focus on really adding value to the customer instead of reinventing the wheel. Yes. Yeah, the beauty is that we are really able to focus on the things that we are good at and that we want to solve, which is product strategy and certain parts of product management. And the definition of these two terms is very difficult, but like we're not here to replace how you prioritize your JIRA, the bug backlog. Like this is not what AirFocus is here for. Yeah, that's true. And how do you guys dream your own champagne? I guess you obviously use AirFocus in-house, but what other tools are part of your stack? Yeah, so obviously we use AirFocus as a strategic product tool to do all the things that I mentioned earlier. And then on top of this, we are of course using Slack also since day one. And then a tool that we introduced around two years ago it was Notion and we love Notion, Notion, Notion is awesome. And we actually learned a lot from Notion also in terms of our own approach to building AirFocus because Notion is all about modularity, right? Like you essentially start with nothing and you can then build on top and really build fancy applications even and websites and whatever you want to do and we're kind of going into a similar direction. So we're not believers of there's one way to fit all product teams into a certain way of doing product strategy. We're instead adapt to your stack and your situation by being super modular. And we're just trying to be helpful and listening to the problems that you have and then giving you solutions that fit to these problems and that is kind of similar to how Notion approaches their problem. We use Notion in-house as well. And it's really amazing to see really so many pools that are very visual. Now that these are part of this, what some people would say no code, which means basically you don't need to throw a single line of code in order to build. And this sounds obvious today, but back in the day, that was impossible. I remember a lot of our students would say, hey, do I need to be a software engineer in order to become a product manager? Do I need to code? Do I need to annihilate? Like no to any of that. I mean, obviously there are many things that you need to learn, but it's more about just really understanding the customer and leveraging technology to fit those needs rather than going so deep into technology to build something very complicated and then see the customer likes it. Yeah, it's really interesting. And I'm also following IndieHackers still a lot also since the very beginnings and the kind of applications and companies that these IndieHackers build based on low code or no code is just a stomach. So what do you think is like the future of product? Where are we going? That's a complicated question, but I think with kind of connecting to what we just had like a minute ago with no code tools and the ability for everyone to create applications and solve problems. Obviously this is a positive thing, but this also means that there's a much more competition, right? And so kind of building tools and building stuff has sort of become a commodity. And if you're not building the stuff yourself with low code, you can, I don't know, get 20K and set up a DevShop in Ukraine and build stuff yourself. So I think in the long run, the things that will win and retain other things that have like outstanding quality. And in my opinion, you only get that when you're really strategic and you're kind of going beyond just understanding product. You also have to understand business and you have to kind of bring these two things together. Of course, like the customer is also a big part of this kind of trial. But yeah, like you have to be strategic and you have to understand business in order to build products that really create outcomes that help you win. So I agree with you. I think now product is becoming more strategic in general. Like I see a lot of CEOs that call themselves product people and a lot of companies that are product-led. And this is not just for the companies that sell products to product managers. This is just across the board and it's a big responsibility for people who work in this industry to really build something that people care about. It's just for the sake of it. Yes. Yeah, and it's about so many small things like gamification and understanding network effects and bringing all of that together. And this all goes beyond just, I don't know, writing user stories and user mapping and all that stuff. It's bringing it to kind of a higher level and solving business problems at the end of the day. And I think sometimes we tend to forget this as product people, myself and people. It's normal. You mentioned product strategy multiple times. I think it's the right word here. We come from a world where a product was very misunderstood. And still in a lot of organizations, they say project management. They treat it almost as like, okay, here's a list of tasks, a laundry list and you have to go through them instead of like, really, let's elevate the function to decide strategically where are we going as a company? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's very different than product management for sure. Well, it's been awesome to chat with you. Is there anything else you would like to add? No, I just wanted to congratulate on what you've got with product school. It's an amazing platform and you're doing outstanding work. And we're very happy to reach your staff and then partner up on projects. Very good. Well, thank you for giving back to the community. Bye. Thanks, bye.