Product Hero #5 — Liza Mello

Hello guys!

E ai! Esse é mais um post da Brilliant Basics, a sua newsletter sobre tópicos de produto sem filtros. Toda semana tem conteúdo novo para fomentar as mentes pensantes a criarem produtos melhores

I'm really exciting because today is special. The First #ProductHero Woman:

Liza Mello!

Although we're Brazilians and a lot of common friends, I met Liza just in my sabbatical time in San Francisco. We had done the Stanford Course together, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and drunk some milkshakes with friends at Ghirardelli (she did a post sharing 10 places to eat in SF that I recommend you to see: https://goo.gl/mXOzo6 ).

Liza graduated in Journalism but figured out that it was not her passion. So, she worked with UX during few years before Product. Born in Porto Alegre-RS, lived in Argentina, Silicon Valley, married and cat lover, now she’s based in São Paulo, working as Product Manager at one of the most important apps from Movile: PlayKids, a children’s entertainment app that has more than SIX MILLION monthly active users around the world!

Before Movile, she worked in companies like Terra, UOL, Clickbus (Rocket Internet's Venture) and Lema21 (glasses e-commerce).

"The only 'natural talents' you need to be a product manager is to understand human behavior"

How do you explain your job to ‘normal’ people (like grandparents…)

Haha that’s a good one; When I switched from journalism to UX Design, I had a hard time explaining to all of my family what I was doing. When they finally got it… I changed to Product Management! But now they can even explain it to their friends. So basically what I say is:

“Think about Facebook. There are people there thinking of ways to make FB even more fun and to make you spend even more time there. That’s what I do in PlayKids. I talk to users, I look at data, I check our competitors and test new ways of improving our retention and our conversion.” They seem to get it.

2. What’s your morning routine at work as a Product Manager?

Movile, we’re crazy about numbers. So, when I arrive at the office, I grab some cookies and a cup of tea from Movile’s cafeteria and check all our analytic tools. Since PlayKids has a freemium subscription model, the key is to find a right balance between monetization and user retention, so these two are my main concerns.

Besides that, I’m always on Slack/Skype, so people can reach out whenever. I’m usually already discussing work when I’m still commuting to the office.

3. Where do you get your inspiration? (links, books, activities…)

I’m totally ADDICTED to podcasts right now! And you know that haha. That’s all I could talk about in the Valley when we met. I love the fact that I can learn in “dead” periods of my day, like when I’m commuting. Below 10 awesome ones:

5 podcasts about product: Startup, Seeking Wisdom, ProdCast (only in Portuguese), This is Product Management and Getting2Alpha.

5 podcasts about other matters: Serial, This American Life, Planet Money, The Heart, Reply All.

4. What’s your type of Product Manager?

Because of my UX design background, I’ll always lean more to user research. But eventually I learned that there are things only users can tell you, but there are many others that data can tell you even more. So every day I’m more into data.

I’m not (anymore) a JIRA lover, a “my backlog has all tasks perfectly detailed” kind of PM. I used to be like that, but PlayKids taught me to spend less time describing tasks in online tools and more explaining them to my team. I also don’t have a sheet with a roadmap and I don’t even have due dates to our releases! I have a team that I trust and a backlog that is constantly (and by that I mean weekly) being reviewed, because of the results of the last deploy. If we are learning every week, why should I bother detailing a backlog for the next six months? I have bullet points in a email draft that I keep minimized in my Gmail.

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Já ouviu nosso podcast? 🎧

Semanalmente eu e o Aíquis Rodrigues (Product Manager na Z1 e criador da newsletter O que eu ví por ai) discutimos sobre as notícias da semana que chamaram nossa atenção, sempre trazendo um olhar de produto para a discussão.

Dê o play na sua plataforma predileta:

Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Outros

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5. What was your biggest mistake/fail? And what you learned?

In 2014, I was working in a house with 20 people, my CEO was the most energetic person I have ever met in my life and, even though we had investments from Monashees, Lema21 had a small budget, like startups usually do. So I was very used to this small and excited team and to a “cut the BS” high speed rhythm… and then I decided to leave and go work to a big company.

Oh, man… I couldn’t have failed more hahaha. I remember my first week. I started on Monday, and Wednesday I was already sure I had made the wrong decision. Every (EVERY!) decision had to be approved by an enormous number of managers, in meetings with 15 people, that had to be arranged for 2 weeks in advance because there were no rooms available for such a large group. So nothing could be done, I felt like I was ripping money away every day.