This article comes from a conversation with Mirela Mus, the Founder of Product People.
Product People is the leading product management consultancy in Europe, headquartered in Berlin. Product People provides interim product management support for digital-first companies, empowering product managers to deliver business outcomes, rather than do feature laundry lists. Their consultancy approach mirrors that of the Big 4 management consultancy firms.
Product People has serviced clients such as Saastrify, Freeletics, Ecosia, FreeNow & Blinkist. Founded in 2019, they now have over 50 employees and manage 100+ client missions every year.
Mirela herself has a background in Computer Science, having transitioned to product management 12 years ago. She has worked for organizations such as the World Health Organization, the ecommerce giant Zalando, and mobility start ups like Tier.
Insights Mirela Mus shared
- The mix of intentional choice and luck in bringing her to where she is now: growing industry, getting into the right room, and studying computer science
- How Product People came into being: serving clients impartially, and allowing them to scale up and down teams based on need
- Managing product teams at scale across different contexts: hiring techniques, leveling, onboarding tips and tricks, day to day management, support and appraisal
This is one for those interested in hiring and management and managing different product contexts through process. It’s also a great read for anyone interested in interim and fractional work or becoming a founder.
Introduction to Mirela
Can I ask you to introduce yourself?
Sure, I’m Mirela, the founder and CPO of Product People. We’re the premier destination for product management services in Europe.
I have a background in computer science and an MBA and I have been doing product management for over 12 years. Half of those have been in a leadership role.
Some of the companies I’ve worked at are Zalando, World Health Organization, Omio and a few others.
On a personal note I’ve been based in Berlin since 2015, enjoy hiking, sci-fi, playing board games and sometimes painting.
Mirela Mus, Founder of Product People
Pivotal moments in Mirela’s career
Starting out
Initially I was based in Eastern Europe. I had lived in a few places, but only briefly.
One of my reasons for deciding to move out of Romania was career trajectory, as well as having more support for founding a company.
My parents are entrepreneurs in Romania. I knew that both the economic environment as well as the state support for entrepreneurship was lacking or was lacking when I left.
In that choice my uncle was also very influential. He had almost fled the country during communism; got into a career in tech.
That was one of the reasons why I selected Germany as there were quite a lot of startups back then. There are even more now.
Back in 2015, we didn’t have Brexit, but there were hints of an anti-immigration wave heating up in Europe. I didn’t want to leave Romania to be discriminated against even more, I was already a woman, so that was hard enough. I was looking for a place that at least pretended to be friendly.
That’s why I looked at Germany: start-up ecosystem, environment, as well as wanting to do product management right.
Initially I just gave it a year to see if I could make it my home and then stayed ever since.
Picking tech as her industry
What were the pivotal moments in your career?
There are lots and lots of them.
Best market is a growing market
One of the good choices was going into tech as ever since I did it has been a growing market.
Even if you’re a mediocre person in a segment that is growing a lot, even in a mediocre company, you just grow by being there. Whereas you need to be extremely good in a shrinking sector, and you may still lose.
I know a lot of people attribute it to luck, but it’s also the macro trend. It’s like a wave, it just pushes everything.
Choice of degree
In Eastern Europe, education was free. Communism had a lot of bad things, but one of the good parts is that everything was vastly free, including education. So it was almost expected that you went to university.
Then the choice was which degree would be the most impactful for me if I ever wanted to move out of the country.
I was very interested in medicine, but unfortunately as a doctor, you need to re-qualify all over again if you change jurisdictions. I was also interested in finance, same problem.
So in the end I went for computer science.
After getting in, I realized I could do programming, but I wasn’t that great at it or passionate, so I ended up doing more QA automation, finding problems.
Role of luck
While in this role, I was exposed to business analysts and product owners, because that was back in the days of product owners.
I tried to transition. It wasn’t possible in the company that I was at back then.
Then I got headhunted elsewhere for my first product management role, ended up working for a company based out of Silicon Valley that later sold to Pandora. They were B2B and they sold ads.
Again, I later realized it was also a bit of luck that I got that first role in product management.
I got it because the role was not high demand since it was B2B adtech – PMs don’t want to do ads generally and are not that excited about B2B. .
The adtech PM role being a bit unsexy, and me being one of the only candidates, plus the fact that I had a computer science background, allowed the hiring managers to say, “okay, let’s take a chance on this person, because it’s a technical product”. There wasn’t much competition for PM roles back then.
These days we have lots of people coming out of these two-week courses, lots of people on the market who had gained the title somehow, but that was 2012, there was almost no one around.
Moving to Berlin
The other pivotal move was getting out of Eastern Europe and coming to Berlin. You read this a lot about Silicon Valley. People say, yeah, you should be in SF or New York or one of the cities where things are happening.
I would say London is also one of the cities because even just by accident, you’re bumping into people. You can go to events, you can network informally.
Whereas if you’re distant physically, a lot of the serendipitous things don’t happen. I’m not for in-person working, but I am for in-person networking.
In our B2B business [Product People], we find out a lot more things at our offline events.
This is also why we organize them. We may find out that a company, even if they have 40, 50 job ads open, they’re actually not hiring or there’s a current shift where they intend to cut 10% of the PM workforce.
So then that’s probably not the client we should be pursuing right now,
You could also analyze data and so on, but there’s a lot of things that you can find out in person and sense trends.
Starting Product People
Moving onto Product People: what made you start it? What did you see as core needs that you could solve?
I will start with a joke that I once heard about the big three consulting firms where someone complained Whenever I send them a question, they answer with a deck.
I’m one of those people now: I repeated the backstory of Product People so many times that I ended up making a small deck which we also use for new employees.
Founding a Product Management Consultancy – Mirela Mus
Where I saw an enduring reason for us to exist was on the strategy side.
Impartiality in client services
Strategy consulting companies want to be impartial to some degree about the advice they give and not have a conflict of interest.
If you take strategic advice from an implementation shop, the implementation shop would look into their pool of developers and say, well, we have too many backend people sitting around. Let’s propose an API product strategy so that we can utilize these backend developers. We also have too many mobile app developers: Hey, how about you build a few mobile apps?
In the beginning I took some work from these types of development agencies.
Everything they tried to make me do there was to optimize towards the developers. The developers needed tickets. The developers needed this, that, instead of trying to convince the client to have a better business model or to build less.
Why would you build less when you want to sell more teams?
I didn’t agree with what they did, but I also couldn’t go against them because they were paying my invoice. I rolled off the assignment at the first chance when the contract ended.
I’m not saying that people start out with malicious intent. I’m saying that it’s hard to get people to behave in a way that conflicts with their interests. It’s the tragedy of the commons problem. People will optimize for their short-term interest because that’s just how we do things as humans.
So that was the idea behind Product People. It would be unlikely for a PM from these dev shops to say, Hey, how about we try a no-code approach here? How about we leverage a third party? Do we really need to build everything in-house?
We really try to live that. For example, one of our PMs went to a client and decommissioned the mobile app, replacing it with a white-label solution.
Another client had been stagnating, trying to build their own ERP system for a year. We placed someone as an interim head of product who decommissioned that initiative,and just said, Let’s look on the market because we’re special, but we don’t need to solve something that has been solved before.
When we set up Product People we looked at companies that were category defining or the best in the consulting space. Another fundamental decision and also big financial investment for us is having our people on the payroll. That’s again due to ensuring there is the right incentive alignment.
Need for flexible hiring in the market
The other part of our business model where we employ people and rent our product management services to companies was What is their philosophy on contractors?
We see right now there are lots of good people who don’t have jobs just because funding dried out, interest rates are high, and they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Maybe they job-hopped too much and ended up being the last person in a company that then decided they didn’t have the money to pay the people they hired.
All these people being laid off wouldn’t have needed to go through that trauma if VC funded companies had the foresight to understand they need a contingent workforce/contractors. You may change your plans or you may decommission some initiatives, and therefore it’s not right to overhire.
That is a problem VC funded companies created for themselves, which I’m very particular about because I feel people shouldn’t be put in this position.
I think it was also hubris in the venture funded space where it’s like: We will only go up, nothing goes down.
You always have fluctuations that you need to account for and not all problems are solved with headcount. We’re trying to offer an alternative.
Making choices about what to do or not do
We defined what we don’t do because the hardest part is to say where you draw the line.
For example, we decided we don’t do recruiting.
I am very happy to invest in a company that does recruiting as a service, but that would be a conflict of interest with our interim work.
If we also recruit and we do interim for the same role, we may be incentivized to prolong our interim role by being slow at recruiting. But if someone else does the recruiting, that’s not a problem for us.
Another part was that we decided to not do development for the obvious reason.
In general, we would like to work on products that impact humanity positively. We had someone leave the company because they wanted to work on sustainability related topics. That was a good prompt for us to go and try to acquire some companies that are in that space, even if they’re not the best paying clients.
Then we thought about which products would be inherently harmful. One that came up was gambling companies. It’s pretty well documented that it creates addiction and it preys on vulnerable individuals, usually people who already have financial trouble.
We decided that we won’t pursue this type of client and we will pass them on to another agency should they come around.
Needs Product People serves
The reasons you get an external in are capacity building and a fresh perspective.
The first assessment we do is to understand what we’re there for. Is it capacity building or is it a thing that got stuck?
Capacity
It can often be a simple lack of capacity. People in Europe go on parental leaves, sick leaves, they want to transition from one product team to another for various reasons.
A lack of capacity costs a company enormously if there’s no PM to drive cost reduction or revenue gain.
Execution issues
There’s also the part where something happened, those things have happened for a very long time and they’re simply not working out.
We often see that scenario post M&A because there’s lots of pressure from the buyers to harmonize the monetization strategy, maybe transition to a white label, maybe do this, maybe do that. But at the same time, Can you please continue making the money you made before?
The existing team can already keep the lights on, but then who does the portfolio harmonization, who looks at white label, and who will also not be needed after the merger is done. That’s a place we come in.
When it comes to strategy there are very few engagements where the clients don’t know their strategy. Most of the companies know what they want to do.
The problem is that it’s mostly that. Everything else falters or it’s understood by C-level and extended leadership team, but not understood or executed by anyone else. A lot of things fall through the cracks. The connective tissue is missing. That’s also where we come in.
Hiring product managers
Given that your people are your product, how do you make your hiring process robust?
A key decision that we took back in the day was to make the team remote. It helped that we grew during COVID and during all the lockdowns.
Recruiting has been a process we’ve been continuously fine tuning. One of the key things is just having more people in the pipeline. We post-mortem every mishire.
Hiring for ambition
If you just get people, and they’re not necessarily even the wrong people, just people who are not interested enough to push to make it work, things fall down. That’s why you see sometimes mid-level or junior people are more successful than seniors, because they just want to prove themselves.
We need to have people that are okay to be parachuted in. There are lots of things falling to pieces around you and you need to first start picking up the pieces. You don’t have all the context that the employees have, you don’t have all the history, but at the same time, you’re expected to perform a miracle.
Especially for the associate level position, we have given people more chances based on potential.
I think it’s also led to more women in the team, because there often is hiring bias where women are not given these chances. Representation also increases when people see that they’re represented.
We didn’t try to gear towards hiring a certain gender or certain nationalities. We tried to anonymize the process more so that we’re not charmed by the CV.
We look closely at how someone fills in the questionnaire when they apply, and how they do their case study, which is now harder and harder since generative AI.
It’s made it harder for us to assess skills, but it also made it harder for the candidates.
Before we would be more lenient. You know, someone tried, someone made the presentation, and maybe, we just offer them this level and then we see in the first three months how things are going….
But now it’s like This presentation is generative AI drivel. The person didn’t make an effort.
Within the span of a year the judgment criteria changed dramatically for candidates.
Accelerate your career with our 5 week course: Effective Job Hunting
Not being a fit for everyone
How do you measure whether candidates are succeeding once they join?
From a process perspective, we appraise people in the first month.
We decided that if we’re not 100% sure, we would rather have a false positive than a false negative. Meaning we would rather give someone a chance than not give them a chance.
That could also go the other way.
We did have cases where even after we post-mortem the hire, we didn’t see something we could improve. The references were glowing. The person did everything well and so on. And then they turned out to drop a lot of balls which you can’t really see in an interview process.
You see a lot of things when you actually work with people. You see how reliable and committed they are, how they pace themselves, if they understand how to go deeply into a topic, how to do things superficially, how they communicate, how they take feedback and so on. Because in interviews, everyone is awesome. They bring their best self.
We realized we’re not a fit for everyone and everyone is not a fit for us. We’ve had some people that weren’t successful employees, but ended up being very successful elsewhere.
It’s fine. It doesn’t have to work out everywhere. We’re very happy to move on from both sides, as soon as we discover it’s not a fit because not doing that just robs people of time.
In the most fortunate cases, people see themselves that they’re not a fit and resign.
I know a lot of people think that firing decisions are taken lightly, but it takes a toll on the hiring managers, it takes a toll on us.
People may wonder, Oh, is it me, am I going to be next?
It always creates a bit of stress internally.
Ideally we would try to understand how to not have hired that person to begin with. But it’s a bit of an art. It’s not a precise science because people themselves don’t know what they like and don’t like. ‘We lie to ourselves before we lie to other people’ is a great quote. If they fool themselves, they can also fool us.
It’s better to have this process in place and catch it early on before the blast radius is too big.
People management
Leveling
The other part is now that there are so many people, how do we provide a constant quality of service?
First component there is our leveling system, which we apply strictly.
How our system is set up
I wouldn’t say copy the Product People leveling system as it’s not relevant to every context, but I can explain how it works.
We’ve included our principles as a leveling input, in order to not make achieving levels a Lord of the Flies setup.
For example there are some consultancies where, even if the consultants are good, if they are in violation of one of their principles, they terminate them.
So regardless of what level you are on, which department you are in and so on, everyone must adhere to our principles.
Then we looked at the PM roles from associate, mid-level PM, senior lead, and so on. What do we need on this pillar?
If you’re a B2B company, then commercial leadership is one of the pillars you should have in order to achieve a high level in the hierarchy. You could also have execution.
You can find leveling templates online easily. We also got inspired by the clients we considered our ideal customer. We do a lot of work with these clients, so it made a lot of sense to take their leveling as an input into our model.
Being strict on salary by level
When we were growing our staff, we were competing with well-funded startups that were increasing salaries arbitrarily. And that hurt us for a very long time.
For example, last year you would have these mid-level people on the market who would be expected to be paid over six figures, but for us the people were mid-level.
I’ve seen at larger corporates that they can have a 50% pay premium over us for the same role, because they did some gradings, and they reward haggling.
Usually the people who haggle are the most confident, but not always the best.
That’s why we went for a very strict approach, which lost us some candidates.
We try to preempt losses from the beginning. We have public salaries.
Since people expect salary progression, at Product People your salary will increase after the first 6 months and after the first 12 months, but there won’t be any haggling.
So if you get leveled as an L4, which is a mid-level, then you either take the offer or come back in 6 months or another year, when you can reapply and see how you’re leveled back then.
But there won’t be a discussion right now because otherwise it’s just chaotic.
Tracking leveling effectiveness
One of our ambitions was that if someone leaves Product People, they will leave for a higher title at a smaller company or the same title at a much larger company in order to show the strength of our leveling.
We track it whenever there’s a departure to understand how well we’re doing. If that doesn’t happen, it means that we don’t have a very robust system internally.
When hiring you get situations where you scan CVs and you discover discrepancies, like a very junior person leveled as mid level. Now whenever I have CVs from that company, I know that I can’t trust their system.
If you have such a high discrepancy in levels, it’s not clear what a PM does there – and I feel that’s also not fair for the PMs.
Progression
Our preferred method is to grow people from within because that way they shadow others and have proven themselves. The client would be more sensitive to a failure if the person leading the engagement just flops.
360 feedback cycles
We run 360 feedbacks every 4 months and we run these on a shift schedule.
We noticed most companies out there just get blocked during performance review cycle, but we don’t have that luxury. So every month there’s performance review happening for some people.
This means you don’t have a large volume of people to review all at once every six months or every year. You just get a few feedback requests every month or so.
For the 360 feedback since people now work in teams, rather than individuals at clients it’s easier to benchmark what good is based on Product People‘s standards.
Otherwise we can get very easy to work with clients that are super happy about everything, or like the personality of the person. Or you can work with other clients that no matter how well you do something, they will say it’s ok.
Operational excellence
We’ve introduced an operational excellence function that looks at all the feedback we get from clients.
We don’t run 360s only internally, but also with the hiring manager, the person approving the budget at our clients, with the engineering manager, product designer, and with key stakeholders, depending on how missions are configured.
The reason why we do feedback internally is also to see problems before the clients do. It helps to harmonize for different communication styles and different expectations.
Sometimes it’s just a very unfortunate time at a specific company or they could have toxic elements within the team and so on.
We don’t want to punish our people or reward them based on false signals.
The operational excellence review has helped us quite a lot because most of the time, our internal feedback has accurately indicated areas of improvement.
Culture & principles
There’s a lot of cultural parts. We have five principles. One of these is Low Maintenance, High Results.
The principles reflect our business model. The client facing principles are: Spread knowledge generously, Be excellent and candid with each other, and Optimize for long-term profitability and growth.
In the beginning, we’d sell an engagement to the client and we had people who would track fewer billable days than they did.
They did this because they thought that the principle was to solve for the client.
It shows sometimes how hard it is to convey what you need people to do, because for you as a founder, this is obvious. We need to charge for this service.
The way you charge in agencies is usually time and material. You can’t charge if you don’t put it in a timesheet.
So we’ve added a principle called Solve for the Client and our company, because you can’t do things for the client at the detriment of our company.
The principle counter balances Optimizing for long-term profitability and growth so that we don’t do short-term things that have a high negative impact longer term.
Solving with systems
I’m a big proponent of solving things with systems, even if at some point someone falls through the cracks.
We get complaints about work-life balance at Product People because clients expect chop chop, do things from the minute you’re there. If you check out McKinsey, BCG, Bain, that’s the main problem. It also drives higher attrition, even for these companies who at some point reached the level of pay of the FAANG companies.
What we try to do are things that help work life balance within our business model like encouraging people to take sbbaticals.
That is something we could bring in to counterbalance the downsides of our business model.
Another problem we had was that people weren’t taking their holidays.
Now we have a hard cut off at the end of the year. Previously we would let them roll it over for the first half of the next year. This year we changed it to first 3 months of 2023. But from now on there won’t be any carryover, to force people to take their holidays.
We had cases where people would come up and say they want to resign, that they’re super tired and so on. These were the people with 27 vacation days left, which is almost a month and a half. Then line managers had to fight with them to go on a vacation because then they got suspicious. Oh, you’re trying to manage me out…
We know from psychological studies that fear of loss and aversion to loss is a very powerful function. Our hypothesis is that due to loss aversion people will take these holidays.
Delivery
How do you set up your organization to consistently deliver?
That part we grew over time. We hired our first managerial position only about two years ago and we were close to 25 people.
That’s a mistake I wouldn’t make the second time because I was stretched super thin.
One piece of advice is to understand yourself. For example, I’m the type of person who doesn’t like to manage a lot of people. The people that I manage self-manage themselves 70% or so of the time.
I have other people in the company that cover up for my lack of being able to work very closely and very granularly with a junior. They like doing that. They like giving very detailed feedback and seeing progression.
Understand your business model
Another major piece of advice I have is to understand the business model of your company very well.
I like this quote from Rhiannon White, the CPO of Clue, which is a period tracking app, that the business model influences a lot of what you do in the company, and it also restricts you to some degree.
Why do Google have the culture they do: because they have a monopoly on ad tech. Everything else doesn’t bring that much revenue, they’ve had a ridiculously flopped series of products, but they need these people doing this super boring, slow work because any percentage gain there, is worth millions more in ad revenue.
How do you motivate people to do this boring work and figuring out how to serve more ads to humanity? You create this kindergarten stuff around it and pay over market and so on and so forth.
But it all comes down to you serving ads.
There are lots of companies copying that culture, but without the same monopoly or business model.
You then end up with this language that doesn’t match what’s happening inside your company.
So probably the best advice is to think from first principles, think what your company is and what it isn’t.
Onboarding at clients
Our current process is assisted by our operational excellence function. They lead a lot of it.
When we saw that clients were reporting that we hadn’t delivered on our promise of blazing fast onboarding, it was of course the client. We wouldn’t get access to things, people who were supposed to give us some information weren’t available and so on.
We realized that this was something we could improve with process. The moment we are at contract signature stage, we start with questions like, okay, are you ICO certified? Which laptops should we use? Which accounts do we need? Which agile ceremonies should we be added to? Who are the people we should talk to?
A lot of these questions are about discovering how things work at our clients, who are the people that need to give us accounts, do we need to do an IT security assessment, all that.
Part of the onboarding is getting through these hurdles.
The other part can even be getting the newly signed client to fill in a specific mission brief.
Sometimes in sales calls they say things like: We want to turn our mobile app into a super app. Okay, what is success in the first three months? What are the current things in progress? Who are the people that we should talk to? What things should we get off your plate?
We’ve found it helpful to dig in and get them also to document it.
There’s sometimes some pushback where people are like, I don’t want to have a call with this operational excellence person. I want to just work with the PM. Yes, but you’re going to work better with the PM if you give us more to work with.
We start pre-onboarding the moment we have a clear signal that we’ll be working with that client. We also keep notes on each client, so we have a playbook for their situation.
Whenever the client was adding more people from us, we’re like, oh, okay, here are some notes on how things work at this specific client. Let’s request accounts. This is the person you escalate to if you don’t get the reply in two days and so on. So that has been tremendously helpful.
Check out Mirela’s full guide to Blazingly Fast Onboarding here
Get the Hustle Badger Ultimate 30 60 90 Day Plan and Template For Product VPs
Meeting clients where you find them
In most cases I think it’s a bit arrogant for externals to come in and say, Oh, no, this, everything is stupid because some of the things that they may do that sound counterproductive from the outside are also part of what makes them successful.
There’s this quote that a person’s worst flaws are also some of their qualities. If you’re attentive to details, you also end up being a bit nitpicky and annoying to people if they make typos but you can’t be attentive to details if you don’t highlight typos.
That’s what happens to companies. Some are more profit-oriented, some have a strong B2B sales-led approach, because that’s what the industry commands or how they were successful to some point, and so on.
Not understanding that would make us fail.
Team of 1
We have a dual setup that we evolved over time.
The client pays for one role because it’s hard to change established norms. But the role gets a sidekick, normally an associate product manager and a third person that’s a supervisor / people manager. That’s normally a product lead, director of product or VP of product depending on complexity or industry knowledge.
We saw that just having one person didn’t work because you get sick, you want to take vacations and so on.
In order to account for that, we set up this 3 person structure. It also covers us in cases when we underestimate or overestimate an engagement, we have all the needed seniority to deliver and protect our reputation.
We also adjust this because sometimes the client likes the associate in the team and also wants a discount. Hey, can you make the associate client-facing and give me a discount? , which is then good for the career progression of the person doing that because they will have proven that they led a client in a less complex environment.
Managing tough situations
How do you help your teams manage stress at clients?
Part of it is prioritization. Part is that most of our team have grown into the role through working up and being helped by someone else. We also have line managers who try to help people be more effective.
How can you be very responsive and very helpful but at the same time not get overwhelmed? How do you navigate moments where you push back if you figure out if it’s not something you should accept?
We had a case recently where someone was yelled at in a meeting. Luckily the person was senior enough and they said This is not how I want to be treated. Then the person calmed down and backed off. But that takes a lot of courage and not everyone is confident enough.
Alternatively they may think, hey, I’m here at the client. Maybe I need to accept things like this.
So we did some internal training with this cool slide that showed a firefighter figuring out when to manage the fire and when to exit the building.
Since we’re a cheerful culture and a lot of our staff also came from companies that were quite functional, we discovered that sometimes we’re these children of summer.
Unless someone has been in an environment that’s really antagonistic, they get blindsided in the beginning. So that’s something we’ve introduced recently for people to understand if it’s one of these environments.
For example, we have this culture that discusses a lot of things on Slack channels. It’s relatively public and you can dip in and out of channels.
But some companies don’t like that. The more old school way of doing things is if you have a problem with someone, you go and complain to your manager and your manager complains to that person’s manager and that person’s manager tells them.
We would consider this behavior back-channel-y, but some cultures that’s the norm. So that’s also part of training.
We had a specific case where our person reported a lot of backchannel gossiping and opinion mobilization, including racism, in a very spoken culture where little was written down.
It was a tough one because it was all based on whispers, but even though we had no evidence, we chose to believe our employee and ended the engagement sooner.
I can’t say too much more but we weren’t perceived as being that impactful at that client, probably partially due to this sort of unproductive discriminatory behavior.
In the end it hurt our employee, it hurt us as a company, and it also hurt the client. What we learned from it is teach our people to recognize when it’s Hey, this is crazy, but it’s manageable and when it’s detrimental, and you should tell us about it.
In general no one goes out to start a company that discriminates against people or has toxic behavior. It’s probably that they grew very fast, there were lots of things happening and they hired some people and ignored some signs or were not even aware of these signs.
I’ve found that in most places, most dysfunctions are either misunderstanding or oversight. It’s rarely something that’s clearly malicious.
Thank you for all of this, it’s been extremely insightful.
To some degree, just doing Product People, I had no idea what I’m getting myself into. Also when we grew through all our stages, it also impacted me as I had to grow into a new person and change a lot of things. So it’s always a work in progress.
Hustle Badger Resources
[Articles]
[Interviews]
[Courses]
Other Resources
FAQs
Who is Mirela Mus?
Mirela Mus is the founder of Product People, a product management consultancy firm, headquartered in Berlin. Mirela Mus has a background in Computer Science, transitioning to product management in 2011. Since then she’s held a variety of product leadership roles before becoming an entrepreneur and the CEO of Product People.
What is Product People?
Product People is the premier product management consultancy in Europe. They approach product management in the same way as the big 4 strategy consultancy firms. They offer interim services to clients looking to solve capacity problems or looking for a new perspective.
