Prioritizing your Products and Features w/ Lucas Cerdan, Product and UX at Algolia

Hey there, this is Mike Belzito, co-founder of Product Collective, and we're here for another product launch Q&A session. So thank you everybody for joining. Uh, I'm super pumped for today's session in particular because this is a topic, prioritization, that I frankly have always struggled with. So this is definitely one, like all of them, where I just feel like you know, this is pretty much just for me and everybody else is along for the ride. Um, you know, but in all seriousness, I'm glad that everybody's here. Um, a couple, couple sort of introductory notes about Product Launch and what the session is all about before I get into introductions. If this is your first time joining, thank you for being here. And, uh, just to let you know, this is a live Q&A chat, so I have some questions prepared But if you have questions coming up along the way, just know that there's a chat on the side and feel free to enter them there. I will every so often be looking through that and I'll try to pull in as many questions as I can. Um, usually our guests love to continue the chat afterwards, whether it be in our Slack channel, if you're a member of that, or, um, on Twitter, places like that. So, um, be sure to jot down questions and feel free to ask along the way. But before we get into the session today, just a first reminder about, well, two things. First, Industry, the conference that we plan every fall for product people, that actually prices were supposed to go up as of like midnight and I forgot to increase them. So every month on the 15th, they increase by $50 and $100 for the all-access pass. I probably won't have time to get to that until later today. So if you are purchasing a ticket to industry, feel free to do that at some point this afternoon and before I make that increase and you'll get to save a little bit of money there. But we actually just announced a couple speakers. Sam Gortler, who's a product manager at Asana. I'm pumped to have her join the lineup as well as Josh Anand. And Josh is a director of product management for Magic Leap. Magic Leap is a, pretty cool augmented reality company that is actually still in pre-launch mode, but I think they've raised, it's like close to or over a billion dollars, which that is definitely more than I've ever raised in any of my past startups. So I'm pumped to have Josh join the lineup as well. And I'm really excited for Algolia to sponsor this episode of Product Launch. And the cool thing about it is we actually got— we actually asked the team at Algolia, hey, aside from sponsoring, like, you know, is there anybody from your team that it might be awesome to bring in and get involved and talk about this particular topic? And that's where Luca Cierdon sort of volunteered and said, hey, I'd love to talk through this topic. So by the way, Luca, thank you so much for joining. I really appreciate you joining us for Product Lunch.

Thanks, it's a pleasure. Yeah.

Now, I wanted, before we get into the chat, I want you to, if it's, if it's cool, maybe mention a couple things about Algolia, which for those who are unfamiliar, it's, it's a company that's really focused on building unique, unique search experiences. And I remember actually not that long ago, I was searching for something on the Hacker News website, and all of a sudden I look up at the top and I'm like, oh wait, Algolia is powering this. And so actually, it's probably a product that a lot of you have used because they power search functions on places like Product Hunt, Medium, Crunchbase. So it's actually probably a product that most of us have used, but maybe Luca, if you could talk a little bit about that just so folks can become familiar with it.

Yeah, sure. You actually said pretty well, Algolia is a search as a service. We are hosted search API, so a lot of websites that you know of are actually using Algolia to deliver the best search experience that they can to their customer. And this is what I'm working on at Algolia, is to make sure we power this search and make search great, basically.

Awesome, very cool. Well, before we get into our chat, I see there looks like maybe one or two people that are having some audio issues. You probably can't hear me, but if you're having an audio issue, I know some of you it's working just fine, but, but know that these sessions are recorded. In fact, immediately after The session will be available to stream. So hopefully you'll be able to hear it then, even though you probably can't hear me telling you this now. But anyway, I want to, I want to jump right in and talk prioritization with you, Luca, because this is something that, again, for me, I've always struggled with it. I've always found it to be pretty difficult. And I feel like product people, they're never short on ideas. I mean, they're usually the number one challenge a product person has isn't, gosh, my team, we just can't think of cool creative ideas. People usually have a million ideas, but they need to focus their time, they need to focus their effort. For people that have that challenge too, where do you even start? You know, what's a good starting point for a product person that's trying to address that challenge?

Actually, for us, it's more a company challenge. Having ideas, as you said, we have billions of them. It's easy to have a backlog with a ton of ideas. We see that more as a company-focused kind of thing. So the way it works at Algolia is that every quarter we have the company and the exec team to define the themes that are really important for the next quarter. So we have like 3 to 5 general ideas. It's not even what we're supposed to do, just things we want to achieve, the vision of where we want to be. And then every quarter we divide different teams, try to find out the most impactful way to define the idea of how they can contribute to these ideas, and this is where we start the prioritization. So for me, my job is made a lot easier at Algolia since I know every quarter where we want to be. And everything, if I have to take an idea, I can already score it depending on these objectives and make sure that everything we're doing is part of the focus for the company. So this is where we start. Another thing that I find really interesting at Algolia is that we try to always have 3 big ideas in the pipe, whether it's being in development or it's being in the research phase. We try to always have 3 features that we make sure the competition don't have and 3 features we make sure are going to be the next best thing. We always try to have something that makes sense, that we are not always working on small things, but more, okay, where do we want to go? Do we achieve our vision? And how do we make sure that things that are on the pipe are relevant? So I would say, to answer the question, that it has to be a company effort, because if your salespeople, if your marketing people are not aligned with what you have in mind, I don't think what you're gonna do is gonna matter anyway. You're gonna have a lot of conflict between the teams. So First you have to make sure that the exec, your exec team, you know where you're going and then you can prioritize the idea that makes sense and be focused on specific things.

Got it. I love the idea of having those themes in place. At least it gives you something that you could constantly, you know, check against yourself. You could constantly ask, hey, is this product or is this feature, is this in line with those overarching themes? So I really love that. And you mentioned having, some of those big ideas that you're always making sure that you're focused on. I know I've been in a place in the past where there's, you know, we will launch a product and, you know, it's never the case that a product's perfect when you launch it. So you always want to make it better. But you also want to have those big ideas that you're working on as well. How do you balance improving current products versus, you know, coming up with those new big ideas, not just coming up with the new big ideas, but actually implementing those, those new big ideas without overlooking you know, one of those two? How have you approached that in the past?

So first, it's, uh, we always try to have these three big ideas in the pipe. If we don't do any of these three ideas, we know we are lagging behind. We don't want to play catch-up, so we always make sure we have these three ideas in the pipe, and the rest we can choose what we want to do. But we always try to have something, which is really important to make sure we have something new and something redundant that comes up. Then The challenge I find for that is that you always want to improve the product or fix the bugs and this kind of thing. One thing that I think is working really great at Algolia is that we don't have a support team. It's actually the engineers that do the support. So they have like 1 or 2 days per month now where they have to do the support. And when you're responsible for a product and you have a bug and you have to actually do the support, you can make sure that they don't want to fix the thing twice or three times. They want to just solve it and make sure the customer is happy because they are customer-facing. So Algolia is a developer-centric company. Our clients are developers. So it's pretty simple for them to relate to who they are talking to. But a good way of doing that is to make sure that the people who actually create the product and want to improve the product are responsible for actually dealing with the bugs and dealing with the customer when something is not working. So that's one thing that is working pretty great with us. Our developers are pretty— they care about the product, they care about improving things. So personally, I don't have to fight to make sure that people fix bugs or want to focus on, I would say, more the nasty stuff, which is not shiny and working on write new things. It has been working pretty well so far.

That's great. That's great. Now, you know, one, one question I did want to ask you was when it comes to actually, you know, let's just say you had a few ideas the team is working on and they fit within your themes. Maybe, maybe they are big ideas too.

Yeah.

You know, how do you compare? You know, I've seen some companies have formulas and they'll have, you know, assigning points whether it be you know, impact and time it takes. Of course, it's like impact, that's pretty qualitative, right? So that could be tricky. Have you seen formulas that work quite well, or do you have a formula that you and your team work with? How do you approach that?

So we don't necessarily work with a special formula where impact is twice the score of something else. That being said, we try to— we use some different kind of software like You maybe heard of product plan or this kind of stuff. What we like to do is that for each idea we have, we try to correlate it with the customer feedback. And the customer feedback is at the center of everything we do. If we have an idea that we think is important, but we don't have the insight from the customer, we don't really perceive the value for customer, this try to be— we try to either gather more feedback or prioritize something that has more value for the customer. So yes, I think having some kind of formula can work. That being said, it really depends because it can be really tricky because if you have like a set formula, it can be really a pain if you have someone coming and say, oh, but I think my idea is worth more on this different topic and every— and then you start discussing things that don't really make sense, to be honest. So one thing that I thought worked pretty well is if you have like a lot of internal stakeholders and they have a lot of things that they want to do, I try to ask them to come up with their own formula and to prioritize their own idea that they think matters for them. So they are just ranking their own idea between each other. And then I can choose between the different things that I can do. And they have a limited scope. So they are already the one restricting the idea that they have to do, that we can actually work on. Different way of applying formula and making it work depending on what you're trying to solve. But I'm not in favor of having like a one kind of way formula that is really public in the company and everyone can discuss it. And every, uh, you, you start losing time if you start discussing every how you score everything, every item in the campaign.

Yeah, well, and I'm glad you brought up the internal stakeholder point because sometimes you know, you might get a great product idea that's coming from whether it's marketing or operations, but sometimes those requests that come in from those groups, it's something that they need done, right? It's not necessarily for the product, but it's product team has to get involved with what they're doing. Is your process— because I know when I've had that happen in the past, then the challenge is, okay, well, we can either focus on internal requests or, you know, build product. So, you know, it's like, how do you, how do you really weigh that? Do you use the same— is it essentially the same process? You know, it's like when you get that internal request, you ask them, hey, you know, weigh the importance of this and you're comparing across departments, or how does that work?

Yeah, so that's coming back to the company focus I was mentioning, because if we have already the different themes that are really important for a quarter and then an internal stakeholder comes with something that is not exactly relevant or more relevant than what you're doing for one of these points, is already sure, the stakeholder is already sure you're not gonna do it. So it's a good way of making sure that all the ideas that come up, you're sure that you have to listen to them and they are going to be relevant to what you're trying to achieve. Then we have to discuss. Sometimes the big idea is really more important than doing your product. It happens and you have to deal with it and you have to do it. And you try to rank it between what you had in mind in terms of impact on your company goals. And sometimes it's really hard, you have to make hard choices and Either you can agree and can find a solution, or sometimes we do that at the exact level. Sometimes we have like two big ideas, okay, that both are important equally for the company goals. Then depending on how much resource it requires, how do we approach it? Sometimes you just have to take hard choices and make sure that everyone at the company exact level agrees with the decision. Kind of how we're approaching it right now.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Let me ask you this. When, when a product person is, you know, let's just say whatever method they use to prioritize, they're on the path, they're moving forward. But I know sometimes it could feel like you're— it's like, hey, am I doing this the right way? Am I going in the right direction? And even if you're getting, you know, support from the top, A product person might be asking themselves even still, like, hey, is this the right direction? Are there any sort of like gut checks that somebody could do along the way to make sure that they are staying on the right track?

Very good question. First, I personally don't work on any idea that I'm not sure we have worked with the customer on. So every time that we're working on something, I'm pretty sure on who I'm working for for this idea, who is gonna benefit from this idea, why does it matter. And actually, I think that if you try to convince people in the company to work on something, you already have to make a communication or an internal communication around it. So you already have to explain why it matters to do something. That being said, what I like to do, what I personally do, is that at the end of every week, I keep a personal journal and I write everything that I've been working on. And I try to make every quarter, at the end of every quarter, I just look at what I've done during this quarter, what we actually achieved, a kind of personal retrospective on things that I actually worked on and things that we actually delivered. And I try to see, okay, did my work have any impact? Did I think that the work I was going to do had this kind of impact? And I try to see what works and what didn't work. To make sure that for the next quarter when someone comes with me and says, do you think we should work on this? I can already have a good idea of does it make sense or not. But I try to keep a list of things that I've actually done, what things I've been working every month, people I've seen, this kind of stuff, to make sure that at the end what I did personally as a product people had an impact on the company and the company goals.

I like that. I like that. No, I appreciate you sharing that. I'm going to go to a couple of questions from the audience because we have several actually. And one of the questions that actually, you know, it seems like it's resonating with a lot of people is, you know, you mentioned before about prioritizing versus, you know, something that's brand new versus, you know, maybe it's a feature that already exists or a product that already exists. But how can you best, whether it's research or discover, that you could validate or invalidate a certain product feature to then bring it back on the prioritization list? Like maybe there's something that you've launched, but how do you really know whether or not it's working? And if it's not working, you know, it has to get back on your priorities. Like what tells you that exactly?

So we're a bit of a hacker company mindset, is that we love to hack around the engine for a new feature. Most of the time it's like big customer who comes up with a problem and they're like, I wish I could do something with Algolia, I wish I could do something more. And we have solution engineers for our biggest accounts, for instance, that are here to make Algolia successful with your company. And they hack around the engine, they try to build things, and if it makes sense, if we think that feature could benefit other users, we try to hack around it and build something nasty just for one customer that only makes sense for one customer. But then we try to extend that to the other accounts. We're like, hey, what do you think about this idea? Does that make sense? Do you think this is something that could benefit you? And if we have more and more feedback and people that are even ready to commit to pay for a feature, then it's a good way to bring that back on the, on the pipe. But we always It can be very research because you have an idea and you want to see if it works with the market, but we like to hack around just a proof of concept or something just for a particular customer and see how we can extend that and if it makes sense to extend that. So that's kind of the way we approach how we should build new things.

Got it. Yeah, so it's almost like rather than overthink things too much, build something small or that you could put in front of a customer and start to get feedback on that is what it sounds like. Yeah, I like that.

Yeah, it happens, it happens a lot. But then for, yeah, for more complicated features, it's traditional user research that you can do, asking customers, customer interview, this kind of stuff.

Yeah, that's great. One more question from the audience for now, and this one, again, seems to be a popular question. But before you had mentioned the quarterly themes, Yeah. Now, how far in advance do you start vetting ideas within a particular theme to ensure that you're actually ready to build in the next quarter? So once those themes are set, how far in advance do you just start working on that?

I would say that the last month before the end of a quarter, the execs are already thinking about the different themes. We already have a kind of idea of where we want to go. We already have like a vision for a year, for instance. We have a vision for 6 months. To a year. So it's really a global vision. So you already know what kind of things we're gonna work on, what kind of things that can be approached. But defining exactly what we want to do is done quarterly. It's done quarterly, and before the last month at the end of the quarter, we already have the things coming in, and we try to gather all the team together and say, okay, here are the 5 things that we have to really focus on the next quarter? Do you already have some idea? Because we already discussed about a lot of things before that can make sense for these themes. Or do we have to find another idea because we need to find something that is more impactful? And generally, it's from this kind of discussion that we dive in more on what, what we're gonna work on exactly. But then, that being said, ownership is one of our company cultures. So a lot of people, sometimes if they have an idea and they think it's really important, they can start working on it, showing something, a proof of concept, an MVP from the developers. If they think it's important and if they think there's something, go ahead, hack around it, show it, prove your points, uh, let's talk to customer with it. So it really depends. We, we, we allow for a bit of freestyle in our process. We're still a young company, we are 100 people right now. So we allow this kind of free flow from our developers because sometimes it's a product for developers, so developers sometimes have the best idea for a product for developers.

Yeah, that's great. So Algolia is at 100 people. I know some of the companies that you serve, some of your customers, they're similar size, some of them are much bigger. Is any of the advice that you have given on prioritization, does it change whether you're, you know, small company versus big company or startup versus more established? Or do you feel like all of these things we're talking about, sort of no matter what state you're at, it still applies?

I think you still have a huge difference between small and big companies. For Algolia, being focused on a few themes every quarter is really critical. We cannot do a lot of things. Like, I don't think a Microsoft kind of company can focus on only 5 big things. It wouldn't make sense for, for them. But I guess you can divide that by business operation and everything, but you have to find the things that make sense. I think small companies have to be really laser-focused on something, on a few things. You cannot be working on too many stuff. I actually think it's the most difficult part, and this is why prioritization is really important, is that you have to cut through the flow and you have to keep the most essential thing to deliver actually something that is important. Whereas if you work at a bigger company, I guess you can take a bigger team and try things that maybe doesn't make really sense. You can take more risk in exploring things that are less, less prone to success, I would say. But you can have a larger set of experiments, so it's pretty cool. So you can still take more risk as a company because you can— small company because you can change a lot of things. You have— you can try things that are a bit more radical, but I think the number of experiments you can do at a large company is also pretty different.

Yeah. Well, we've talked about a few things, few suggestions of what product people can do. We've talked about what you've done at Algolia. What about things that product people shouldn't do? You know, I'm sure you've seen a ton of, you know, common traps that people have fallen into, mistakes that people have made when it comes to prioritization, maybe mistakes you've made. I don't know, I make a lot of mistakes all the time. Are there any that come to mind? You know, maybe some of these common traps that you could share?

I think not knowing where you're going. If you don't know that, it's really easy to completely fuck up your prioritization because if someone comes with an idea that you think is absolutely absolutely brilliant. It's really cool. People want to work on it. It can be really, really cool, but you have to know where you're going, and it's easy to have a roadmap that is changing too fast. And you have to make sure that when you commit to something, you actually commit on it. And you have, as product people, you have to be sometimes the guy that's a bit not fun, and you're like, okay, I know why you think your idea is great. I know why you— I personally like your idea a lot. But honestly, we shouldn't work on it. And I think one thing that is also a mistake for product people is to keep a backlog that is too big. I think at some point, just putting an idea in a backlog— I think for me, a backlog is where an idea goes to die. So try to clear your backlogs as often as you can. If I look at what we put in a backlog one year ago, I know that's— 80% of the idea, we're not gonna work on that ever. So let's try to keep a backlog that is at a human size and that you can manage. I think it's really important not to just use the backlog as an excuse for, hey, your idea is great, let's put it in the backlog and see after. Yeah, but sometimes you have to say no upfront because you know you're never gonna do that, which is the big mistake I've made in previous experience. I know I'm Way more careful now.

I've fallen into that trap too, for sure. I know, you know, I remember telling people, oh, we're going to put that in the backlog, and literally that was the term that they used. Mike, the backlog's where ideas go to die. Yeah, I guess they're not wrong, unfortunately. But then I tried to work at it and get better at it. So I, you know, and I might— let me, let me look and see if there's one more question from the audience because I know Time went really fast. It's already, you know, pretty much our time. I get, you know, one question actually. Yeah, let me pull this one. Let me pull this one here. We talked a little bit about this before. We talked about, you know, new ideas versus improving product. What about when it comes to infrastructure? You know, that's sort of the unsexy thing that a lot of product teams, you know, it's like nobody necessarily gets excited about focusing on infrastructure and improving the internal systems. But how have you worked with your team to prioritize when that's necessary versus actually, you know, building the fun and exciting product features, whether they're new or improving, you know, current customer-facing product?

Yeah, so first, infrastructure at Tygria is really key. Infrastructure is actually part of a huge service that we provide to our customers, is that we are hosted search API. So we actually provide The infrastructure we have there, we are not running on the cloud. We have our own servers in our own data centers. We have our different providers. So infrastructure is something really key at Algolia because one of our core focus is the speed. If you actually experience a search at Algolia, you can notice that it's really, really fast. It's in a 50 milliseconds kind of way. So you don't achieve that just with the product. You don't achieve that just with the, the algorithm, you have to have a crazy infrastructure. So it's really part of the product for me. It's part of the experience that we managed to deliver. So we need that infrastructure to be on top level, basically. So we have great people for that at Algolia and make sure that when a customer has a requirement— and I don't know if this feature has already been announced, but basically we have some people who need the infrastructure to be more scalable in a way, to have more tools to scale. This is something we're going to prioritize because it's part of the experience. It's part of the product in a way. It's going to experience— it's part of developer experience provided at Algolia. So working on the infrastructure, for us, it's part of the product. We don't make a difference between having a new feature or having a new tool for DevOps to scale the infra. For us, it's the same, and we prioritize the same way.

That's a, that's a great way to look at it, and that's probably the case for a lot of companies that might be similar to yours where you're essentially providing a product to development teams that will then in turn provide it to their customers. It's like the infrastructure, that is one of the core products, that's the feature, so it's important to keep that up.

If you actually go to our product page at Algolia, it is something we put on our product page. I think one of the value of using Algolia regarding an open-source solution is that you don't have to handle infrastructure, so it's something we provide for customer. So for us, it's a key feature of our product. I think speed, search or not search, but having a product that is easy to use, fast, all these kind of things is the experience you actually deliver. You can have the best UI possible with the best onboarding, if it's slow, you're gonna lose people. So you have to make sure that what's behind your product, what is actually powering your product, the actual machine also makes sense.

No, that's great. Well, we're pretty much at the end of our time, and I'm sorry for those that had questions that I didn't get a chance to ask. Luca, I know you're on Twitter, right? Maybe you could just share how folks can connect with you there.

So Luca said I'm maybe gonna type it in the chat.

Yeah, I'll actually do that. Is it just all one word, no underscore or anything? Oh, yep, there you go. Thank you.

That's great.

I know it's, I know it's the evening in Paris, so, you know, maybe we could let Luca eat some dinner first, but then, then he'll get to the questions that we'll hound him with. But I appreciate you joining us. And by the way, if anybody wants to join Luca and I in person, it sounds like you'll probably be coming to Industry in Cleveland this fall. So it'll be fun. We can, we can all hang out. We can all talk about prioritization there for sure. Luca, thank you again for joining us for product launch. Any parting words or any sort of like final advice we didn't get a chance to cover?

No, thank you for organizing this product launch, and I'm looking forward to coming to Cleveland in fall. It's gonna be a great conference.

Well, I can't wait to hang out in person. Thank you everybody for joining us, and we will see you all next time with another Product Lunch, actually, if you just go to the productlaunch.com page, and it is lunch, not launch. I know we had a question about that, but we, for most people, this is like a lunch hour. So it's like, hey, listen to awesome product interview and eat some lunch. But if you go to productlaunch.com, you'll see we actually have the next several Product Launch sessions organized. Anna Marie Clifton and Cindy Alvarez are two separate sessions, but they're both with Yammer coincidentally. We have another one with Wade Shearer coming up. We have, we have a few that are planned, so those should all be great. And if you have any ideas for us on who we should interview, I'm always open to those as well. So with that, again, I'm Mike Balsito with Product Collective. Thank you, Luca, once again from Algolia, and we'll see you all next time for another product launch. Thanks everybody.

Thank you so much. Bye.