The Pursuit of Scrappiness #41 Product management principles & work-life lessons from building a Unicorn with Martin Henk 🇪🇪 (Pipedrive, Eventornado)
Martin Henk is the CTO and Co-Founder of Eventornado, a software solution for organising online hackathons and challenges. Martin is also a partner and angel investor at Honey Badger Capital, however most people will recognise him as one of the Co-Founders of an Estonian Unicorn, Pipedrive.
In this episode we do a deep-dive into product management, covering everything from best practices and building efficient product teams to common mistakes. We also talk about life after a unicorn exit, the current projects Martin is engaged in as well as overall work-life balance throughout different stages of one's career.
The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps
[01:45] - ON PRODUCT AND WHY PIPEDRIVE WAS SO SUCCESSFUL
- Creating a new user persona
- Focusing obsessively with the main end-user
- Super narrow product focus
- Saying no to immediate distractionary opportunities
- Unfair advantage from founders with industry experience
[09:30] - ON BUILDING YOUR FIRST PRODUCT TEAM
- Keep it simple, keep it small
- Avoiding premature scaling
- Focusing on customer feedback for PM
- Turning chaos into discipline
- Optimal product team size
- Enabling complete focus on the mission
- Cutting meetings
[13:50] - ON PRODUCT MISTAKES AND MEASURING PROGRESS
- Introducing too advanced procedures
- Scaling up technology prematurely
- Avoiding vanity metrics
- Focus on result-based metrics
- A/B testing
[17:05] - ON PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES
- Tailoring the process to specific company
- Keeping product focus
- Regularly communicate vision
- Best product examples
[24:00] - ON LIFE AFTER UNICORN EXIT
- Resting & investing
- Motivation to jump back in startups
[27:00] - ON GREEN INVESTING
- Investing in Estonian forests
- Looking for ways to monetize without cutting down
[30:20] - ON EVENTORNADO MARKET OPPORTUNITY
- Managing and organising hackathons as a challenge
- 100s of hackathons daily around the world
- Future of hackathons
[33:55] – ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP LESSONS FROM PIPEDRIVE
- Maintaining focus
- Knowing the right company size for yourself
- Evaluating if you need outside funding or not
[39:00] - ADVICE TO YOUR 20 YEAR OLD SELF
- How to approach work-life balance (hint - it’s overrated)
- Taking care of your health
To reach out to Martin use:
Website: https://badger.ee
Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/
Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/
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