Product Hero #7 — Victor Lima

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

Ok, let’s start. The Product Hero from this week is…

Victor Lima!

I met Victor a few years ago when I worked at Dafiti, and he was consulting for the company. Since then, we went a lot of events together, like F8 (Facebook Conference) and few editions of Product Tank, in Sao Paulo and San Francisco.

"I help users and companies achieve their goals.

Victor is former software developer turned into product manager, Partner and Head of Mobile Product Development Concrete Solutions, PSPO, SPS and CSPO, Drummer and amateur musician. 
He worked in products like Itaú, Dafiti, Cartola FC, Kanui, Tricae, Netshoes, Carrefour, also a lot of other apps and was the runner-up of Prêmio E-commerce Brasil 2014.

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

I help people (and companies) in Brazil create and develop amazing digital products. Then I quickly ask: “hey grandma, do you own an smartphone? Good. I help people developing the apps that are inside them =)”. Jokes aside, I like to explain my job as someone who build products, the same way you think of it in the physical world, but in the digital world.

Another, and more subtle, a way to explain my job go along this lines: I help users and companies achieve their goals.

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

It depends on the day I’m starting. If its a review/retrospective/planning day, then I’ll probably be attending those meetings and having discussions about the product with the team. If its on any other day, then the first thing I normally check is the analytics dashboards: metrics such as DAU’s from yesterday, conversions, engagements and other important KPI’s.

After that I normally check up on the team, attend a daily meeting, and try figure out the next discovery cycle that I should be executing. Wheather it is customer/user interviews, help defining high-fidelity prototypes, chatting with stakeholders, managing dependencies between my product/feature and other teams, things like that.

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

I try to workout everyday. If I’m not able to, then I’ll probly just try to run on the treadmill for 20 minutes or so. There is something about doing physical activities that helps me clarify my mind and be more effective on my day to day job.

I also follow lots of product people on Twitter and other medias (mailing list). Currently myself and friends are organizing the Product Tank Meetup in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, so reading on the Mind The Product mailing content is always good.

As for books, I have this reading track that I always recomend to other product managers/owners. It starts with:

• Lean Startup (Eric Ries);

• Inspired (Marty Cagan);

• Running Lean (Ash Maurya);

• 4 steps to Epiphany (Steve Blank);

• Lean Analytics (Alister Croll) and

• User Story Mapping (Jeff Patton).

On the engineering side I always recommend:

• Continuous Delivery (Jez Humble);

• Mythical Man Month (Fred Brooks) and

• The Art of Unix Programming (Eric S. Raymond).

On the UX and design side:

• Lean UX (Jeff Gothelf);

• UX for Lean Startup (Laura Klein) and

• The Elements of User Experience (Jesse James Garrett).

Finally, there is always the agile classics like the Scrum Guide, The New New Product Development Game, Kanban by David Anderson and others.

Besides, I get inspiration on people that work with me. Recently, I participated of the book “Silicon Valley is Here!”, with Fernando de la Riva, that explain most of knowledge that we have adquired last years.

4. What’s your type of Product Manager?

In my company we tend to look at Product Owners coming from four distinct strong areas: engineering, UX, Marketing/Metrics and domain knowledge (i.e. banking, e-commerce, marketplace, etc.). Besides those areas we also try to assess his or her knowledge on Agile and Lean methodologies.

Having said this, I definetely fall on the engineering type of Product Owner category, because of my background in software development. However, during my years working as a Product Owner I started developing more my background on other areas like metrics and marketing, and specific knowledge in certain domains in which I had the opportunity to work on.

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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?

I could go on about many mistakes that I gladly did, but I’ll focus on more recent one:

I recently started working on a product which seemed to have the need to scale to many teams (and consequentially many, many people) in a pace faster than it actually needed. Scaling too early has lots of bad effects, the first one is the complexity in coordination and communication efforts, simply getting everyone on the same page on the same time is way harder than when you work on a pizza team. Scaling too fast also means that those little details that you left unanswered or unaccounted for in the product have way bigger impact on the whole picture.