Productwise Alexandra Marshakova

Francis Brero is the Founder and Product leader in MadKudu, a data heavy product allowing companies to manipulate and use first party data to customise the buying experience for b2b buyers.

Our question of the day: how do we improve customer centricity as your product scales?

Francis shares that 1 big change was to introduce Gong, a call recording tool, to bring the voice of customer into the front of the decision making. Francis uses snippets of the recordings through the process of adjustment and improvement of the product on ongoing basis. "You get an amazing pulse from the customer and the way they are reacting". Team also includes relevant snippets with feedback on product roadmap and product experience on board memos. This tool alone allowed MadKudu team to implement multiple improvements in the product, such as better match the customer journey and deepen partnership strategy, and significantly reduce bias in collecting feedback.



Connect with Francis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francisbrero/

Check out MadKudu: https://www.madkudu.com/

Love interviewing first time founders and CPOs on the podcast. Why? Because they both help us all go back to the essence of product management and recap on some of the bias we are all prone to. If you are a first time or repeat product lead, scale up product person or a founder working out the solution - these learnings are for you.



Few weeks ago I sat down for a chat with Matheus Beltrami, Co-Founder and CPO of deX Labs to talk about his journey to product from functional field of data and analytics. deX Labs⁠ is a vertically focused state of the art platform designed to seamlessly integrate every aspect of data handling.

Matheus talks about 3 main learning areas along building deX Labs⁠:

- developing a deep understanding of the problem you are tackling by keeping focus on your user group and problem you are solving for them. He outlines the need to separate yourself from your perception of the problem (and your opinion) and what customers are saying and experiencing. This is easier said than done!

- collecting and prompting information. Digging (really) deep into the problems. Being attentive and allowing ample time to truly understand the day to day of your user in order to gain a better insight into the problem. These days product leads are inundated with many meetings causing them to get lost in details sometimes and put the big picture questions on the back burner. Create "thinking" time pockets to counteract that. This point was also brought up by Millie Zah from DAZN on ProductCon few weeks back and is a talking pain point for product leaders I am talking to.

- accept that you'll have to compromise. Group and cluster ideas, put those into backlog and prioritise. Rigourously.



Best of luck to Matheus Beltrami⁠ and the deX Labs⁠ team on growing the product further!

Dig into the story of development of WeDu, a community of endurance athletes united around the belief that the true path forward is forged by breakthroughs of body and mind. WeDu naturally grew with its community and expanded horizontally to become a platform, brining together creators, brands, and fans, scaling operations with the help of AI, offering highly curated experience for their niche customer base. Dylan Casey also talks about the "flow of the dollar", tackling the cost implications of scaling the b2c business, and keeping the focus narrow and being one thing to a specific group of people.

Love when product people build the product for product people! Focused on assisting large and complex product teams to improve on collaboration, communication and results, airfocus recently successfully closed a $7.5M fundraising round, led by Newion with the participation of XAnge, Nauta, Riverside Acceleration Capital, and Picea Capital. In this session we break down the components of building successful products and double click on one of them - building empowered and self guided product teams.

Tune in to hear key learnings from the Co-Founder, CEO and CPO of airfocus, Malte Scholz!

As a talent professional and in my conversations with the founders and CEOs, stage appropriate hiring comes up 100% of the time. That is why I am so glad that we are covering this very topic as the first episode of the new 10 minute series. We had been running longer here, as the subject in question is so vast that myself and Natalie can hold a 2 day conference on this.

Natalie had been working as an early stage PeopleOps leader for over a decade and had been shaping the organisations of many startups across Boldstart VC portfolio and outside of it. Her straightforward approach, clear focus on her niche and experience make her one of the top people seed and Series A ventures need to have onboard. Join me as we summarise this massive theme into a 22 minute discussion on who to hire and, most importantly, when.



Connect with Natalie Ledbetter over Linkedin, follow her latest talks, and don't forget to check out her article for Fast Company.

Making the new "10 minute podcast" series available for everyone to enjoy. Each episode in these series is focused on 1 prominent question for the tech community today. I'll be interviewing Founders, CEOs and Product & Engineering leaders, sharing their latest learnings.