Product starts with People | Hello Stavanger 2024 Recap

Justyna Pindel

Working in technology is like creating music🪕. There is no one right way. In my career, I experimented with different positions from Finance, through Marketing, UX, HR, Sales, Agile, to Product Development and Management. In my career, I have taken different hats, from a freelance consultant to Scrum Master in a corporate environment, up to startup founder and Product Executor. And a few more 🙃.

All of these positions helped me to build empathy and gain a more systemic approach to work across different types of organizations and business domains. This unique combination of skills makes me who I am today - a Product Facilitator. Having a full business understanding makes me capable of transforming ideas into fully functional products. For me, the product starts with people.

I believe my role in the organization is to enable my team to work at their best to bring top solutions to the customers. Building digital products allow me to use my full potential.

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KPIs, cycle time, retention rate, conversion rate, SLAs, NPS, MRR CLTV, CLV, CPR and so on. We can have as many metrics as we want. We can be as data-driven as we wish. . . but if we don't understand that each Product starts with People, we won't get far.

How to become a Product Manager who cares as much about customer satisfaction as about the team's happiness?
How to use systems thinking and agile coaching in Product Management?
How to become a full-stack Product Manager?
How to build a product culture that will make your company profitable?

This talk will be an experience sharing story based on years spent working with startups. The main storyline will evolve around an automotive startup, where in 18 months, as just one Product Manager, I was able to:

built a strong product team(s)
launched product to two markets
built two complementary products
raised eight million euro