121 / A Gigantic Vision: Infusing Joy into Workplace Culture, with Michael Sacca & Chloe Oddleifson

Working in a startup brings the concept “CEO of the product” to a whole new level. Suddenly, as Gigantic CEO Michael Sacca and COO Chloe Oddleifson know well, you’re responsible for every aspect of your product’s development, launch, promotion, sales – and everything in between. Fun fact: there’s plenty to take away from the startup mindset for all us product managers.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Michael Sacca & Chloe Oddleifson share their journey, from 6 years of working together at Dribbble to now building Gigantic from the ground up. Gigantic is a product- and marketing-focused training institute that aims to fill knowledge gaps through perpetual learning.

“Michael and I were coming from a place where we knew our jobs inside and out,” Chloe says. “We knew exactly how to be useful, exactly how to bring value. And then we started Gigantic and moved into a world where it’s just us. There are no processes, there are no rules, nothing is set in stone, and there are no clear answers. We just have to pick up and figure it out.”

“It doesn’t take long to see the power of a brand,” Michael adds. “I don’t think I ever respected it before as much as I do today. We can have a better product than the competition out there, but it’s so much harder to get people’s attention” when you’re just starting out. “We can build whatever we want,” he adds, but getting the attention and going to market are much different and much harder.

“If someone wants to be the CEO of the product internally…,if you really want your head of product to be the CEO of the product, then they really need to understand those other disciplines and they need to be able to do them,” Michael says.

In many ways, that mindset becomes easier to execute when the culture that nurtures it is founded in joy.

“As we started thinking about the type of company we wanted to build, the type of culture we wanted to infuse, and the type of experience we wanted for our customers, joy was the term that best described it,” Chloe explains. “We should be able to find joy at and in the work we do because life is just too short for it to be any other way.”

Catch the entire conversation with Michael Sacca & Chloe Oddleifson to learn even more about that journey and their plans to deepen Gigantic’s impact.

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