Building products with confidence at the intersection of clarity, purpose and impact

Main Takeaways

• Use clear product principles to guide rapid, consistent decision-making
• Look beyond surface-level feedback to understand true customer needs
• Create alignment through early stakeholder involvement and transparent communication
• Focus on metrics that matter to customers, not just internal assumptions

What's your setup? What tools, frameworks, products do you use?

Circuit is fully remote-native, which I think for me, if I'm gonna work remotely, I want it to be with a company that does that very intentionally. It creates a better experience for everyone when it's not like you're forgotten about at home.

At least 2-3 days a week, I work from my home office. The other 2-3 days, I go to Juno House in Barcelona, which is a private social club for women with a co-working area. I usually go for half a day and then come back home, or vice versa. I like having a bit of structure and getting out of the house to be somewhere social where I can have a coffee. I do this on days where I don't have any meetings.

In my home office, I use a standing desk and dual monitors. Something unique to my setup is that every Sunday, I make a bouquet of fresh flowers for my desk. I also keep an aromatherapy diffuser on with different essential oils throughout the day, depending on my energy and what I need.

What's the biggest challenge for you at the moment and how do you plan to overcome it?

The biggest challenge for me right now is also the thing I'm most excited about. I joined Circuit 9 months ago, put together our product strategy when I was 3-4 months in, and now, in partnership with my CEO, I'm working on a category strategy. This means zooming out of the product itself and defining what space we're playing in.

For example, I work on the B2B product, and it's a lot earlier on an adoption curve. It's earlier in its lifecycle as a product. I look at other players in the market offering something similar as us creating this category together. This is probably the most exciting but biggest challenge because it's not just about what should the product do - it's about positioning, brand promise, and our most efficient acquisition channels. It's a lot broader of a remit than the product itself.

In your opinion, what defines a top 1% product management professional?

I think product people who are just inherently curious and who really recognize that it's not all about the product. It's a huge part - hopefully, you take pride in what you're building and that's shared across the team who builds it. But at the end of the day, there's a bunch of other things that come together to make something go from "oh, that product is cool" to "oh, this is a resilient part of my needs."

I've been that person in the past who thought it was all about the product, and now I'm much humbler after my own startup experience and lots of things along the way. Top product managers know that it's not all about them or their roadmap. It's about working in concert with other disciplines.

How do you go beyond surface-level customer feedback to dig deeper into user needs?

Taking anything at face value is a short path. For example, with our product, we do route optimization. If you put in a bunch of delivery stops, we'll show you the best sequence to do those stops. We have customers who ask us all the time, "I want to manually reorder the stops." Historically, our product hasn't supported that.

If you took it at face value, you'd just hear people say, "Oh, I don't know. That's just how I'm used to it. That's just what I like." So you have to dig and ask, and then you learn things like "package 6 needs to be picked up here and then dropped off there, so I need to make sure the pickup comes before the drop-off in the route." That helps us understand that maybe we need to have it like an object, which is a package, not just a stop, which is a destination.

What non-traditional metrics do you use to measure product success?

Honestly, we follow pretty standard SaaS basics. The free-to-paid conversion is obviously make-or-break. But what's interesting is that before I joined, our founder had an assumption that for our line of business, the cost per delivery for a courier was the most important metric. That sounds reasonable - I would assume couriers want to know that.

But we're not seeing that messaging in itself be the hook that gets people. Instead, we're seeing that the first delivery attempt being successful is one of the most important metrics to our customers. So now when I'm trying to decide what to build, that's a question on my mind: Will this solution improve successful first attempted deliveries?

Can you describe a time when new information made you pivot your product strategy?

My own startup experience is probably the most relevant example here. We were aiming to basically make organizational design easy and modern, making it something that's not a painful reorg every time a company realizes they're not organized in a way that supports their direction.

I started this when the market was booming, or at least in the last days of the boom. When the market came crashing down, people didn't really want to do that anymore. I pivoted the product to try to frame it as something that could help during a reorg, but what I failed to see was that in a time of crisis, nobody says, "let me go use this new product."

The market wanted to drag us toward being an integration tool between HR systems and Notion, but I woke up one day and realized - I don't want to be some integration tool. That's not the problem I care about. I think there are founders who know in their heart they're meant to be a founder, and they'll solve a thousand problems until one works. Then there are founders who care a lot about a very specific problem and don't want to go through the founder experience for anything other than that problem. That was me.