Product Management and the Discovery to GTM Cycle with Sohaib Thiab, CPO at Foodics

A big shoutout to all product leaders. Welcome to the Product Leaders Podcast by Fireart with your hosts, Dima Venglinski and Tolik Nguyen. Every episode is a deep dive into different aspects of product leadership to enhance the end-user experience.
In this episode, Dima is joined by Sohaib Thaib, Chief Product Officer at Foodics, a cloud-based POS and restaurant management platform. Dima and Sohaib have a free-flowing conversation around product management, including hiring and retaining, customer centricity, and the discovery to the GTM cycle in product management.

Topics we discuss: 

• Hiring and retaining talent
• Keeping the customer front and center
• Competition and product differentiation
• Product management and the discovery to GTM cycle

Hot Takes and Key Highlights:
Hiring and Retaining Talent
Sohaib starts with a value match of the company and the candidate, assessed over multiple interviews. Next, he looks for a curious mind that doesn’t accept things at face value but digs deeper for greater clarity. Equally important is the ability to give and receive feedback. With these checkpoints, Sohaib establishes the candidate's experience, scope, and impact. On the retention side, it’s important to make the employee feel like they are a part of building a solution for a real-world customer need instead of just being paid to do a job.
“You want to make people understand why they’re doing something instead of making them feel like they’re being paid to do a job”
Keeping the Customer Front and Center in Product Management
Customer centricity lies at the heart of product management. Good product managers and teams always represent the voice of the customer in an organization. Product teams leverage qualitative and quantitative data to determine the customer's wants. Good teams always discuss customer needs and use this to shape the product.
“The stronger the product team, the better grip they have on what the customer wants”
Competition and Product Differentiation
Your competition isn’t everyone providing the same service that you do. The competition is other players offering the same service to the same segment of customers that you serve. That is the starting point. Awareness of what the competition is doing is a must, but there is a big difference between having an onlooker's awareness and blindly copying what they’re doing.
“My philosophy is not to focus too much on what the competition is doing; instead, I focus on what the customer is saying and what they want”
Product Management and the Discovery Cycle
The discovery process marks the start of the product journey. Qualitative data from customer feedback and quantitive data are combined to derive high-level assumptions. The engineering and product teams collaborate to build the prototype, which is beta tested with the customer and feedback is sought, and modifications are made. There could be two to three iterations before the product is ready to be rolled out.
“A/B testing is a must when you’re building new products or improving existing ones”
Guest at a Glance:Sohaib is a seasoned product leader recognized for entrepreneurial thinking with a pragmatic and data-driven approach to delivering growth at scale. He is an expert in building high-performing teams across mobile gaming, e-commerce, and two-sided marketplaces.

• Sohaib on LinkedIn
• Foodics Website

Hosts at a Glance:
Dima Venglinski: Dima is th