An interview-style reflection on lessons from growing the Mind the Product community. The speaker emphasizes the importance of having product managers skilled in discovery and launching products, and strongly advocates long-term investment in team well-being and a genuine people-first culture—which paid off during the pandemic when the team responded resiliently.
Chapters
What have been your learnings throughout all this process? If you were going to do it all over again? The first thing to call out is that by having product managers at the heart of our company, we were incredibly lucky in that respect. These are people who are designed to thrive in uncertainty and to do discovery and to launch new products. That was at the heart of what we needed. We had great people. Clearly, for anybody who's looking to do this for the first time, we have some amazing workshops on discovery that people can pick up on the site. I was going to say that of course, you guys are a product. You guys have absolutely those blueprints that people can use. That. Yeah, I think the, the other sort of. I think the other thing that really paid off for an awful long time. We have invested incredibly heavily in looking after our team, their emotional well being, giving them the tools they need, figuring out how we can collaborate effectively as a distributed team. And when it came to the pandemic landing and needing to furlough people and mess around with working hours and change things left, right and center, the team here have been absolutely spectacular in terms of how they've reacted to that. They've stepped back when needed, they've stepped up when needed. They've been phenomenal. But I think that's because of the way that we've looked after people for five, 10 years prior to having to make that call. I think it's one of those where if you try and invest in your team when you need it, it's too late. You invest in your team early, invest in them as much as you possibly can, make them real. There's so many companies who say we're a people first business. Everything's about our team and it's bollocks. It really is. Whereas we were. We've worked incredibly hard on that from day one. We've always looked after people in the best way that we possibly can. And when it came time for us to sort of essentially call that debt in and ask them to really front up and be there for us, they've been spectacular. So the lesson I would take away from that is that there were points in preceding years where I could have looked at the business and said we could be more profitable if we stop doing this for the team or stop looking after them in that way. Ryan. They would not have been smart cuts going through what we've gone through now. I would absolutely invest in the team again, like that again and again and again. It was absolutely the right call. And when the chips were down, they were absolutely there for us.
