Product Hero #8 — Marcell Almeida

Hello Product Lovers!

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

The Product Hero from this week is…

Marcell Almeida!

"I think there is no PM with morning routine"

Is curious because I met Marcell in person just a few weeks ago, at the Product Meetup. But we already talk a lot about the product, product and… the product on our Product Group. He worked in a lot of digital companies, like Globo.com, EasyTaxi, Co-founded one fintech, grana.me and now he works as Product Manager at VivaReal. Marcell is super involved with the Product community and spoken in a lot of events, always with good points and analysis. Ok, let's start.

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

In short: I don’t manage anyone. Instead of that, I manage the success of the product by managing the vision and how we get there. I help software engineers to develop the right features to delivery business value.
Product management is defining the strategy and roadmap of a product or feature. It is a cross-functional discipline, and to do it well, I need to understand every aspect of the business. Everyday I need to be strategic and tactical, creative and technical, utopian and pragmatic.

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

I would be lying if I said I have a routine. I think there is no PM with morning routine. But the closest to a morning routine is when I get ready for the rest of the day by

i) checking and answering e-mails

ii) checking new bugs and deciding about prioritizing them or not

iii) check current sprint

iv) check KPIs

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

• Blogs
  Intercom’s Blog (https://blog.intercom.io/)
  Ellen’s Blog (https://blog.ellenchisa.com/)
  Ken Norton (https://www.kennorton.com/)
  The Information (https://www.theinformation.com/)

• Books
  Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics (Pretty basic but it’s a must read if you don’t have much experience being data-driven);
  Hard things about hard things (The best book i’ve read in my entire life); 
  Running Lean (Great book to open your mind about being lean. Much more specific and detailed when compared with Lean Startup).

4. What’s your type of Product Manager?

I like to build new products that can impact the company on mid-term and sometimes long-term. I don’t like doing things that move 1% or 2% of some “important” metric. There is a lot of PMs who focus on that and I think it’s fine. It isn’t my style.

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

While I was working on Easy Taxi Corporate we recreated our tax request screen but instead of doing it on small iterations I was dumb to prioritize something huge and it took us about 2 months.