After Product Issue #1

Welcome to After Product Issue #1.

We’ve seen an incredible response with hundreds of people signed up in just over a week and amazing people willing to share their experiences.

We’re going to share those stories in this newsletter, with the aim of shedding light on paths Product people can move on to (if they wish!).

Today, we’re sharing our conversation with Alex Jundi, Strategy & Operations Lead @ Farmlend. My key takeaways:

• ‘Recommendation’ vs ‘Doer’-based roles - moving out of Product, you’ve got to get comfortable with having less say in what is built.

• In Product, you’re constantly making decisions with limited info - this transfers well to other roles.

• Product teaches you to say ‘no’ well - but it’s a transition to do this for yourself instead of on behalf of your team.

• There’s a sense of community with your engineering team that you may miss.

• Don’t discount passive learning in Product - imposter syndrome is real, but Alex found he’s learned a lot of skills he picked up in Product.

Full interview below 👇

Can you tell us about Farmlend and your role a bit?

Sure. Farmlend is seed-stage marketplace (raised £5m from Entrepeneur First and Local Globe last year) that connects small-scale farmers around the world with distributors. We facilitate the transaction and the payment, and take care of the shipment and the tracking. We’re basically cutting out all the middle men in the supply chain. We also provide some working capital financing for farmers as well.

My role is basically the vaguest thing ever - it basically means that I help the founders with anything across Finance, Business Intelligence & Analysis, and Operations & Processes. I also support with Product as we don’t have a PM yet.

Before your current role, you worked in Product at Deliveroo - why and when did you get into Product?

I started out in Strategy Consulting (which is what you do if you don’t really know what you want to do!), before moving into Finance & Strategy at Deliveroo. Both those roles were quite analytical, Excel-heavy, and what I would describe as ‘recommendation-based’ roles - you do a lot of analysis, spot opportunities, and make recommendations based on data.

I enjoyed that but I wanted to gain an understanding of what happens after delivering the recommendation. I didn’t have any concept of how that product actually gets built or what the tech team is actually up to!

I knew I lacked those skills, and because I knew I might want to found something in the future, I thought this might make me more well-rounded. Once I had identified Product, it was a matter of speaking to Product leaders around the business and seeing who was hiring - thankfully, they didn’t have to worry about the cultural fit, so it was just the Product interview and quite a quick process. Deliveroo is pretty good for internal movement.

So you worked in the CRM Product team for a time at Deliveroo - why did you then decide to move on from Product?

There were two main reasons:

1. I didn’t love the environment in which I was doing Product. I really enjoyed working at Deliveroo, but if you’re a PM at a big tech company, you’re focused on one small part of the Product. Whilst your impact can be pretty big (CRM for all Riders and Customers across the Deliveroo platform), your scope is still relatively narrow. Perhaps because of my background in strategy, I wanted a broader scope.

2. I knew that I wanted to join an earlier stage company. I was actually looking for both Product and non-Product roles, but found this one at Farmlend that looked like it would be a good opportunity.

How was it moving back into a recommendation-based role from Product?

Yeah, it’s definitely a shift. What’s great about Product is that you’re making decisions all the time even though you may not be an expert in everything you’re working on. But you’re the person in the room that people look to to drive things forward. And as a PM, you quickly get comfortable making decisions with, say, 80% of the information and then perhaps changing direction when more information comes to light.

That’s served me really well in my role right now - at Deliveroo, you have loads of data you can rely on to make statistically-significant decision-making. That’s a luxury at a smaller start-up where things change week-to-week - in that environment, you need to be able to make decisions with incomplete information. Getting comfortable with that in PM has definitely benefitted me.

Can you give some examples of what your day-to-day can entail?

The founders describe my role as an extension of them (CEO, COO, CTO). Examples of projects include building a financial model for how we want to get to our Series A. Or working with our COO to optimise our processes when orders come in. Forecasting for our business is another. Working with our CTO to ensure engineering ceremonies are appropriate for the size of our tech team is something I’ve also worked on.

It’s a super generalist role. It’s like a Founder’s Associate on steroids basically.

How is it interacting with Product and Engineering now?

They weren’t looking for a Product person, but I’ve been able to fill some of the gaps as we don’t yet have a full-time PM. I’ve been helping the Engineering team in more of a coaching capacity, but as soon as our PM joins, I’ll be working closely with her as more of a typical stakeholder.

One of the great things about working in Product is understanding Engineering better and the challenges they face. I feel more capable of having difficult conversations with them about trade-offs between speed of execution and perfect engineering solutions now.

Sounds like you’re going to be a better stakeholder than you might have been?

I think so. Even the way in which I might build a spreadsheet, if I know it’s going to be ‘productised’, will be different now.

There’ll always be some tension with stakeholders but I hope that I won’t become that annoying person who’s always pushing for things to be quicker unreasonably.

So would you recommend what you’re doing now to someone in Product?

People come to Product from all types of backgrounds, but if you’re the type who likes analysis, prioritisation, and working to tight deadlines, it’s a great role. It’s particularly important to be able to confidently converse with both Business and Engineering teams - that lends itself particularly well to Product.

It’s worth mentioning that when you’re working with a founding team, everything is urgent, and you need to be comfortable with that. But if you are, I would definitely recommend this type of generalist role in an earlier-stage company (eg. Founder’s Associate, Chief of Staff etc).

Can you say more about how it is it working so closely with founders?

One of the ways Product helped me here is finding ways to say ‘No’. We do this all the time in Product, but it’s definitely served me well in my new role, where I can explain the trade-offs to my founding team and help them prioritise my workload.

The key difference is that in Product, we’re more often saying ‘No’ on behalf of our team’s capacity, rather than our own. That’s a bit of a shift, but the principle is the same.

Anything you miss about Product?

I really enjoyed the sense of community that I had with my engineering team - small things like having stand-ups every day, you get to know people quite well. If you move into a role like mine, you need to be comfortable with the idea that you may not have a well-structured team.

What’s next for you? Would you go back to Product?

I’m still pretty early at Farmlend and I’m really enjoying it. I want to stay and see where that can take me. Either way, I definitely want to stay in early-stage companies, perhaps found my own one day, but for now I’m happy.

I would go back to Product, for sure. As I mentioned, I was considering more PM before Farmlend, so who knows in the future.

Anything else you want to share?

One of the things that I worried about when I worked in Product was how much I was learning and how much impact I was having. But now that I’ve left, I’ve realised that the role was much more valuable than I thought and I’m applying a lot of skills I learned in PM every day.

So I’d just say that to anyone working in Product who potentially feels like they have imposter syndrome, you’d probably discover in another role that you’ve actually been learning a bunch every day, you just don’t realise it.

That’s all this week! Catch you next.

Feedback - got an idea for how we can improve After Product? Just hit reply and share your thoughts!