 Hello everyone, my name is Remy. I'm a product manager at Hopin and today I would like to talk to you about how to keep focus during a period of hyper growth in your company. So I've been a product manager for five years now in different type of company in B2B startups, but also SaaS startups at different stages of maturity. So I've been in in small startup post-stere A and more like scale-up startups that have grown to more than 1,000 employees, both European and American companies. And this gave me the opportunity to see different stages of hyper growth and really have the ability to see like the different choices you could take at those different stages of growth and especially in the last two experiences I had. So the first one being Hopin the company where I'm at the moment. This company is basically what we do is a shared experience company. We have a different type of technology for virtual hybrid or onsite events. We are funded in 2019 and we grew to more than 1,000 employees in 47 countries and each month millions of people use our platform to join events. And here especially I would like to discuss the event of COVID and how it impacted our growth. It definitely accelerated the wide-scale adoption of virtual and hybrid events among the industry. And same with Mano Mano Pro. So Mano Mano Pro is a B2B construction material e-commerce. It's a marketplace with five union product catalog for construction professional. It was launched in 2019 and it went also in 24 months from zero to 100 million euros annual revenue. And same in the early COVID when I was still at part of Mano Mano Pro we saw that the first closure forced the traditional rest of us to close. So B2B construction companies had to rush online to be able to buy and so it really created a hyper-growth environment where it's harder to keep focus. So the agenda is in two stages. The first one is how can rapid growth create a defocus from a product perspective and what strategies, some tips to put in place to keep your focus during this period of growth. So first I would like to start with the product market feed. So usually when growth starts this is the phase that your company is at Mark Anderson, a famous venture capitalist, defined by the customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it. The usage is going super fast and the money for customers is piling up in your company checking account, you're hiring sales and customers report as fast as you can. Usually you're also raising money pretty fast and usually that's what happened to Hopin. So post-launch in 2020, the company raised several rounds, grew to more than 1,000 employees and grew to have more than a few millions of people attending all the events. So growth can make your market basically become huge and you have a lot of product opportunities. It can also like such as COVID because it can also accelerate the transformation of markets and suddenly your product doesn't have feed just with one market but you start to receive usage and product request from different market types, different types of customers and that's what is very exciting during growth is like you stretch this product market feed and you try to enter new markets and that's where it's become very interesting as a product manager because you have more and more product opportunities and usually what's a business team, so marketing, the funders, the sales, usually what they expect the product to do is to be able to tap into all those potentials, to be able to grab all the potential of those different markets and they will just ask for more and more and more and be able for the features of the product to match different opportunities. So for instance that matter my know it could have been like being able to match both the construction companies in painting but also in carpentry and be able to have a an e-commerce website that would match both those different categories for a company like Hopin it's more we would face different types of events, music concerts, conferences, internal events and obviously the the the temptation is to try to attend all those markets and to grab as much revenue as you can but basically if you give in as a as a product team as a as an engineering team you will most likely just look like something like this so clearly you can see I'm not a designer what I want to show here is just that the little dots are basically features and if you don't drive a strong focus strategy most probably you're going to try to enter different markets and project some features in some markets without really have anymore a strong product market fit and you're going to stretch your your product in so many directions that in the end you will not really make a make it in any of those markets so those little diagrams are nice to watch but basically how do you know if your team has lost focus as a PM so this has different you have different ways of noticing this the the one I noticed most is basically to ask yourself what is your team mission it's put in simply is like what are what am I here to do what is the team supposed to achieve in a year how does that serve the the company and and for instance in in Mano Mano Pro my team was a had a scope about around loyalty and trying to achieve people to repeat more on the platform and at some point when the growth was exponential suddenly the I could not relate to the objective of the company and my team was very the focus in the sense that we were doing a lot of work that was not really part of our roadmap and that's also another indicator is when you look at the past work you've done in the recent months you need to try to be able to be honest with yourself and understand how much of this was part of a of a plan for part of objectives and how much was just being opportunistic if I go back here a little bit like going to those low hanging fruits are they often called by leadership and trying to just stretch your product in different direction and so if you realize that in the past months more than 50% of your work was those kind of high-level requests or last-minute and prioritized work it might mean that your team has lost focus and that's something that you will see as well in your day-to-day with your engineering team because they are most likely constantly switching context which means that they are defocused by like in the middle of a sprint you would add new tickets in the middle of a big project you pose this project to start another one they would have a lot of bugs coming up from from different part of the company without you being able to really push back on the bugs because your order of priorities are not clear anymore and that's something that obviously end up in your product and the product and take depth are high so it means that your features that are existed that exist already do not meet the quality requirements so you have a lot of MVPs out there and they always remain barely viable you really don't work and iterate on your features and your features actually don't serve as a way to really drive a strategy and iterate and make them better to enter a market they are just checking boxes checking a feature delivery kind of boxes and that's often what can be seen as a build trap the feature factory I think that also the kind of concepts are very interesting for you to look at in these situations but I'm not going to just quarter this this book but also like just give you concrete tip about how to approach this as a senior PM how to work towards getting your team more focused and what can you do first of all I think it's important to understand what is your responsibility as a product manager often time as a nicely product manager you are dependent from prioritization and strategy which is drafted at a higher level than you in the company obviously you are often in a startup that as a CEO or founders that have a strong idea about where the company as a whole is heading and that is what you usually would call the company vision or company mission and that's really something that the the C levels and the CEO owns and driving from that you will usually have product leadership so either like either a CEO if it's a small startup or VP of product or head of product that is in charge of linking the state of the current product to this company vision to project what is usually called a product vision so it's saying like okay if we want to achieve this company vision that's what the product should head towards and then as a as a group or senior PM you're usually just in charge of understanding what your sub-product or the scope of your team is going to participate to this product vision right so how am I able to deliver on the on the few features or scope that I own and make sure that they're heading towards the product vision so that's something that is very important to understand is that if your company mission or the product vision are vague it doesn't help you to stay focused and to say no with confidence so it's very important as a nice CPM as a senior PM to always challenge those visions you're not here to write them you're not here to to imagine them but you definitely need them to be concrete and need them to be useful and love and be able to leverage them for you to drive your own strategy so if in your company during this phase of hypocrisy suddenly the narrative is not clear enough it's your responsibility to go and and get closer to leadership to ask for clarification to ask and express the fact that what is existing is not enough for you to do your your job in a in a clear and focused way something that's important as well and I'm going to touch based on this just afterwards is it's also your work at your job as an IC to connect with other teams such as marketing and research teams to make sense of the market opportunities so as a PM you're going to receive those future requests on a daily basis from different persons sales and sales engineers or marketing teams and it's very important to force or at least ask people to try to take a step back and keep tabs on those opportunities in a structured way so for instance if I go back to my Mano Mano example it was very important for for us to it was an e-commerce website so sometimes we didn't know what was the specialty of the of the customers but that's something that we quickly enabled because by being able to know how many carpenters or painters were able to use our platform and and crossing those company numbers with publicly available data we were able to understand the different markets we were facing like big companies small companies Paris base like city base or more countryside base which is very important in e-commerce all those different of grouping of market that gives you a better understanding on which one you want to prioritize and this is what gives you those two things so a high level mission that you can understand a more concrete market knowledge that gives you the ability for for you and your team to understand your mission statement and and this will definitely help you to see where to bring your team and and and what what needs and what request you you will need to to prioritize so going back to my little dots and bubble basically as a p.m. that's what you're facing you know you don't have a nice round market like I showed earlier you just here leading a product you have some insights some some feedback coming in some requests and and you need to prioritize you need to make sense of all those requests and to be able to work towards this and be able to categorize those research those requests is something that takes time a lot of time and that's where you should focus as a p.m. not in project management not in doing specifications but in trying to make sense of your product market fit and trying to make sense of the different characteristics of the market out there and and how to do this concretely it's really just making sure that every time a company is asking for something you're able to enrich this company data with more parameters that allows you to recognize what market they belong to and so for instance I'd hope in first it would be the event type the intent so do they want to run an event that is more internal or that is more like a carry fair to recruit people and and and do they intend to do this on a weekly basis on a on a monthly basis or is this a one of event that they run once in the year like a big one number of attendees like all these kind of parameters will help you and and and the research and marketing team to be able to identify those markets and that's that's pre-model because then obviously at some point you will be able to judge the interest of each of those markets compared to your product and to be able to understand that some request comes mostly from one market and and and others come from another type of market and what's very important is that this shouldn't have just happened at your level because otherwise you could prioritize market a and and another group in the company another group of of of squads will prioritize another market which is important is like for this to happen at a company level or at a product level and and for all those product teams to be aligned and and and with the leadership to prioritize a market for for you and this is this is really important is how do you force the company to go to this prioritization it's basically by saying no as a PM it's just by being clear and being able to say this is impossible to build this i'm not going to build a feature here a feature there a feature there you need to know and be able to recognize when your team is not focused and say no to the the features that defocus your team and and by asking your your leadership to take the hard decision and to be able to bring you a clear market focus and a clearer uh strategy business strategy to enter a certain market or not you will be able as a PM to say no much clearer and that's what i wrote in this slide is you'll be able to make your focus very explicit both to the the go-to market teams no we won't build this feature here because it doesn't serve the markets we're trying to break into and also to your dev team which will find a much higher alignment and focus by telling them this is why these bugs are are not treated right now we are not prioritizing them so they are they are like more like a p2 or p3 because they don't belong to the use cases that will fit the market we're trying to break into and and and little by little if you were able to focus and head towards this direction a strategic direction where you know that you chose not to address some market but chose to address other markets you will a little by little be able to extend your product market field towards those markets and be the leader in those two markets and that's something that's very interesting and and and that is happening right now with uh with hoping and and when you start to become the leader in a in a vertical in a in a type of market and that's where he progressed can be really sustainable and and long term um so that's a bit the wrap up of of this little experience sharing um it's basically how in in a few words how to go from an initial product market for it uh that might be disrupted by higher growth because you will either have a changing markets to confront to or your your your company will be exposed to new markets um that you might want to be um entering into but um the very important thing to be able for these goals to not just be one-off and kind of opportunistic is for at some point the product teams and and and culture to switch to um a more focused attention and be able to really choose your battles and be able to prioritize the markets internally and for this to be aligned from the product vision to the company mission down to your own team as a p.m. and that's why like most of the slides I've already always start with always the same company mission the same product vision might be very boring for people that see this every week but uh it's a way to really always make sure that we are heading towards the same direction um so that's it I hope that was useful and um I hope to see you soon in the product school