176. Maja Lindström, CPO, Talentech - Lessons learned from 8 acquisitions - The CPO perspective!

In this episode, we speak with Maja Lindström, CPO, Talentech, a leading developer of HR providing a seamless talent journey through a centralized platform. With main hubs in Oslo, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Copenhagen, Talentech's scalable solutions support every stage of the talent pipeline, offering personalization and flexibility to meet tomorrow's challenges.

We talked with Maja about their M&A journey, 8 acquisitions to date and counting, and how you make the unifying process work from a product and technical staff perspective. Some of the questions we discuss in this episode are: 

• First, what are the different underlying strategies that can fuel an M&A strategy of this nature?
• What is the process of "onboarding" separate product teams into a new unified and larger team working on a platform strategy?
• What are the most common pitfalls to avoid here, and why?
• What is the process of integrating different products, at times on different tech stacks and different maturity levels?
• To be successful with this amount of frequent and large acquisitions, it requires a lot from the organization. Which are the key players, processes and characteristics needed from an organization to be successful in a process like this?
• How do you find a balance between product autonomy vs central platform thinking to avoid losing speed in deployment and releases?

This is for all the product leaders out there and people considering an M&A strategy. Tune in to learn mode from Maja's journey of acquiring and integrating 8 product organizations into one platform unit.