Episode 216: Getting OKRs Right: Planning with Impact at OLX with Hugo Froes
Join Melissa Perri in an insightful episode of the Product Thinking Podcast featuring Hugo Froes, Head of Operations at OLX. In this episode, Hugo shares his remarkable journey from UX and service design to leading product operations, a transition that highlights the importance of bridging design with business needs.
This conversation dives into how Hugo has effectively shaped product operations at OLX, focusing on process optimization, reducing friction, and empowering teams to deliver true value. Hugo’s approach showcases how strategic product operations can drive innovation and efficiency within organizations.
Ready to explore how product operations can transform your organization? Listen to the full episode and gain practical insights from Hugo's experiences!
You’ll hear us talk about:
25:08 - Making OKRs Work Across the Organization
Hugo discusses the challenges and solutions for standardizing OKR frameworks to ensure consistent and measurable outcomes while allowing flexibility for team-specific practices.
30:41 - The Product Ops Mix
Hugo explains the multi-faceted approach of OLX's product operations team, focusing on improving efficiency, streamlining processes, and supporting organizational growth through strategic tooling.
39:03 - Measuring Value in Product Management
Hugo and Melissa explore the importance of continuously validating product value against business outcomes, emphasizing learning over feature delivery.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hugo: Having joined the company in the beginning there was two or three priorities that they put in front of me, but they said, look, you're gonna have to define the role 'cause we're not exactly sure what this is.
[00:00:07] It's about building the relationships. And then I try and look at, in terms of the long term goal, where do we wanna go as an organization? Where do we wanna mature? You try identify those big problem areas, but I automatically look at the quick wins I can get. And it's the type of things like in the first month, second month, I can already be pushing something. People start seeing these things, these cadences, and they start saying, oh, this is interesting.
[00:00:28] I think a lot of people have used OKRs as an excuse to, aspire to a lot. Then you say, but what are you actually delivering?
[00:00:35] Right? Is it worthwhile? And it's oh, but we're hitting these numbers that we set out either sometimes they're too cautious or you realize that they're building something, but it become, it becomes a Frankenstein's monster. It has to be connected to, you know what, we have to keep producing, we have to keep bringing that value. And, you might hit those numbers, but if the long-term value is broken. It isn't worth anything. And so it's an education piece and everybody has their opinion. It's, you bring up OKRs and we've got 500 opinions about everything.
Intro
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[00:01:01] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
[00:01:30] Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
[00:01:39] Melissa Perri: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Joining us today is Hugo Froes, the head of operations at OLX. Hugo's journey from a UX and service design to leading product operations is a fascinating one. The product operations transformation he led at OLX is featured in my book Product Operations with Denise Tilles.
[00:01:57] As someone who continually bridges design and business needs, Hugo offers valuable insights for any product-focused audience. We'll be diving into his unique experiences and learn how OLX has successfully embraced product operations under his leadership.
[00:02:10] But before we talk to Hugo, it's time for Dear Melissa. So this is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions. Go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. I answer them every single episode.
[00:02:22] Melissa: Today's episode is brought to you by Liveblocks, the platform that turns your product into a place that users want to be. With ready made collaborative features, you can supercharge your product with experiences that only top tier companies have been able to perfect. Until now. Think AI co pilots like Notion, multiplayer like Figma, comments and notifications like Linear, and even collaborative editing like Google Docs. And all of that with minimal configuration or maintenance required. Companies from all kinds of industries and stages count on Liveblocks to drive engagement and growth in their products. Join them today and give your users an experience that turns them into daily active users.
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[00:03:03] Melissa Perri: Here's this week's. Dear Melissa, I lead a large organization's new ops function serving product engineering and design.
[00:03:11] We are hiring a director of UX research who's going to own quant and qual data and have a large data insights team who has one to two team members embedded within each product portfolio. We also have a great market research team within marketing and more research within strategy and operations.
[00:03:26] There's plenty of process governance and project management work to do, but struggling to think about how we can provide value outside of those areas when the other areas I typically see within product ops, data insights, and research are being owned by other teams. Alright, so this is a great question and actually one that we get into on this episode of the podcast with Hugo Froes who leads operations at OLX, but one of the things that you should be looking at here is about building the bridges between these teams and product development. So just because research is being streamlined under a head of user research does not necessarily mean that the research is being made accessible for everybody who actually needs it.
[00:04:04] So what could you do to work with that team to figure out, hey, is this actually meeting the needs of the product managers? Are they using tools where we can actually pull research out and put it into product management tools that will help product managers a little bit better? All of those things could be bridged through product operations.
[00:04:21] It's the same with data. Just because we have data teams and they're embedded in different areas doesn't necessarily mean that we might have the right dashboards for the right people. You might have like 7,000 dashboards going on, and none of them actually solve one of the problems, let's say, for the leaders.
[00:04:36] You wanna work with the data team and figure out, again, how do you bridge that gap. So while you're not responsible for those domains, you are still responsible for figuring out, how do I take these things that product development needs to streamline their workflow and to build better products? And how do I bridge the gap between these teams?
[00:04:53] Go and be the liaison and be the person working with them and pull it into the relevant stuff. So you might be integrating tools to make sure that data flows more seamlessly. You might be advocating for the product development teams to these other teams to make sure that they're solving their problems as well.
[00:05:07] But it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to own that discipline all the way through. So instead, figure out what they're doing, what the scope of it is, what the intent is, and then figure out how do you bridge that silo and bring it back to product management and to the product development teams to solve their problems.
[00:05:24] That's how I would approach it. Thank you for your question on Dear Melissa, and again, if you have any questions for me, go to dearmelissa.com, let me know what they are. Now let's talk to Hugo.
[00:05:35] Melissa Perri: Welcome Hugo. It's great to have you on the show.
From UX to Product Ops: Hugo’s Journey
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[00:05:37] Hugo: Thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here.
[00:05:40] Melissa Perri: So you are running product operations at OLX now, can you tell us a little bit about what led you to get into product operations?
[00:05:48] Hugo: It's a pretty long story and it's I don't know how other people tell the story, but their stories. But in my case, I started off as a graphic designer, which has nothing to do, and then, but I never felt fully fulfilled. I. Then I discovered the world of digital design and I moved into the digital realm.
[00:06:02] And there it was interesting 'cause I was working with Google Analytics, that kind of stuff right at the beginning of Google Analytics. And I was like, it's great. I can see the impact of the work I'm doing. And then a few years later I discovered the world of user experience. Really conceptualizing, thinking about the whole experience from end to end and. I fell in love. I started, investing a lot in that. I worked in that career, moved into doing service design, doing design thinking workshops, co-design, these kinds of things, working with public entities. And then I got, I reached this point where I just didn't wanna work on the
[00:06:32] projects anymore. I was, I'd done it, I'd been working at it for 20 years or so, and I suddenly got an invite from Chris Compton, funny enough, who was working at Farfetch and he was in the practice team and design, and he said. Hugo, we need someone for Portugal. And I thought you would be the right person for this role. I was like, what is practice? What do you mean by practice? And basically what he described was design operations. And so we joined, I joined Farfetch. And it was interesting 'cause we did work for about three months in design operations. And then the product side said, you know what? Design, it's fixed. We need a lot more in product. And so our whole team transitioned into product operations. And at the time I had no idea what product operations was, and I was pulled into it and I started deep diving and I said, okay, look, I have expertise in this. I know how to do half of this stuff. I love working in terms of development of people and development of organizations and development of teams. And so we became the product operations team. And then I was invited to Oex to become the product operations lead in one of the customer units.
[00:07:28] Melissa Perri: So that, that's a big transition from ux into product operations. What were some of the challenges or things that you needed to get up to speed on to, to start moving into more of an operational role?
[00:07:40] Hugo: It's interesting because to an extent, and I think service design gave me a lot of the tools that I needed because I was already looking at how I machine and the system worked. And so for me, the transition to product operations was comfortable and I had helped working as a consultant and user experience, I'd actually helped a few companies starting products from the ground up, right?
[00:07:59] So I've been part in that, of that initial phase where we're defining processes, ways of working with figuring out dynamics and rituals. And so it felt really natural for me. The interesting part was we, in the beginning we used to get a lot of pushback because product folks would say, you've never been a product manager, you don't know what you're talking about.
[00:08:15] We would turn around and said, okay, then convince me that I don't know what I'm talking about. And the truth of the matter is we could argue because we were looking at it holistically, right? We didn't think about, this is design, this is product. We were thinking as a product organization, how's it functioning? And that's how we slowly started getting, getting that at least buy-in from people and getting their attention.
[00:08:33] Melissa Perri: I love that because a lot of the best product ops people I've worked with started from UX too, right? They were trying to solve those problems from a UX perspective. 'cause they were trying to figure out how to bridge those gaps, right? So that UX and product could work better together, we could get better customer research in.
[00:08:48] And they started from that design ops perspective that you were talking about and abridged and bridged from there. But I find that. Sometimes like uXers in the UX community have so much more passion to, to solve some of these problems than some of the product managers I meet. And that's not to say that some of the product managers aren't passionate about this by any means, but I have seen this pattern before, so I find that really exciting.
[00:09:10] And I think it also excites the UX community out there who sometimes feels like they're second class citizens.
Shift to Product Thinking
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[00:09:17] Hugo: And I like that and to an extent, right? I feel that also product managers right now, it's happening more often where they like to think about it on their time off. They get together to discuss product, right? As a whole. But I remember five, six years ago, designers were already doing this, right?
[00:09:31] They would have retreats, they would be talking to each other, this type of stuff, and product folks. Each one was in their silos and they all had opinions and everything, right? But you wouldn't see it as much and now you start seeing this more. So I think that's also changing because and that what happened was because of that, designers were able to think about these things and develop and evolve. And so very often you would get to any organization. Even right now I see the same thing where design, they just almost naturally start having these discussions. They start fixing them and working towards them, and whereas with product, it's like, no, I'm swamped with so many other things. I don't have the time to look at half of this stuff as I, I would like to write.
[00:10:05] Melissa Perri: It is true, and it's a really good point, like you do in design, we have a lot of the terminology like you were talking about, like service design and design thinking and all of these different concepts that are a lot more about how we do the work or what we're bringing into that work. And it operationalizes quite a bit of those types of cadences and things, and I feel like product management is just starting to get in there as as a discipline as a whole. But for ux I can go back 15 years and think about these things.
[00:10:32] Hugo: To an extent, with design, they had the luck that we've got forefathers who've been thinking about this for or so years. And tons of work was being done and oh, this, there's, here's 500 frameworks. Oh no, sorry, only 200 of them were actually work. And so they've been going and working and maturing them.
[00:10:46] But even recently, right? I don't know if you saw it, but IDEO admitted, they sent out a communication at the time saying we've reached the conclusion that design thinking will not solve every problem. And you're like, that's your investment of the lost, I don't know how many years, and you've just admitted that it won't solve every problem.
[00:11:02] And it's that's scary. It, it is interesting because, everything seems available. It's like when I talk to any product manager, it's oh, I've read the book in the real workbook, or I know this process or this framework, and. This is definitely gonna change the things that I say.
[00:11:15] How do you know? Let's test it out, right? Because we don't. And the context changes. And again, it's maturing. It's slowly maturing to that. And it's also because and, I bring this up very often, I think. There's also been this bloated thing around how organizations need to function, the size of them, the team structures.
[00:11:30] Like you have to have a fixed structure where you have, the trio, let's say for example, right? And I know Theresa Talk talks about the trio, right? But at the same time, it's okay, can we maybe look at it and say, do we need the trio? In some cases we don't. Right? Or maybe the trio is a different structure than the just the trio, right? And so it's fluid. It should be a fluid thing. There is no single formula for every organization. And I think people have been stuck in these formulas and thinking they're still figuring them out.
[00:11:56] Melissa Perri: Totally agree. Yeah. And it's about adapting and taking things that work for you and making them better and putting them into your context. And what I was thinking, it was funny that you mentioned about ideo. Like I feel like, for so many organizations, the concept of product management in general is just very new for software organizations.
[00:12:13] Obviously they've been doing this for a very long time outta Silicon Valley, but so many companies are coming to it for the first time. I. Just in the last five, six years, some of them last year, which sometimes shocks me, but, it is what it is and it's a learning journey for a lot of a lot of places who've been extremely successful doing what they've been doing.
[00:12:29] And now it's time to, start looking at our software and back 10 years ago. When I was trying to work with some of these banks to introduce 'em to the concept of product management, they'd invite me in to teach something specific. Minimum viable products was all the reach 12 years ago. So I'd come in and I teach about minimum viable products and I was like but this is a part of product management. You need product managers to help define what a minimum viable product is, and you have to work with the designers to do that and get into this. And I remember one company telling me like, oh no, we don't need product management.
[00:13:04] Hugo: We have design thinking. So like we, product management's not a thing. Like we, we just, we have design thinking. And I, I was like, okay, that's a tool that a product manager, a UX designer or a team can use, to approach these problems, but that's not a role. And it's not like a, it's kind of a process, but it's more of a way of working and thinking to bring these concepts together. It's not a formalized thing. And they were like, oh no, like product management doesn't matter. I'm like, you can use design thinking and product management. Why? What is going on? So I'm very happy to see that we're like past that mark. But I do remember when everything was so like, oh no, you have to do it this way. And some companies are still operating that way too.
[00:13:43] I think it's a great step forward in that we are hearing so many traditional companies talking about productizing, if it and becoming product organizations. And talked to a few, I've been talking to a few people who are working on in traditional companies and their big challenge is obviously. educating people, and then people have got this product management title next to them, but they have, they don't do anything that we associate with product management, right? It's just because they're managing a part of the product to an extent. But the fact that they're already doing that, they at least see the value of the product space and what it can do. And I think it's exactly that. We just have to figure out what brings value at what stage of the organization. Looking at that context, breaking it down, right? And it, again it's, it goes back to the same reason why we build products, right? We build product products thinking about what is the value I can bring to a customer that he will pay for? And that, right? And that's the simple thing. And then you look at it and you say, it's the same thing here, right? It's what do I have to build in terms of a team build that value for the customers? And people focus too much on, oh, Marty said something, or Melissa even said something or to, and it's I get it.
[00:14:44] Hugo: I'm not saying it's not a great baseline, but question why right before you do anything, right? Yeah, deep dive on these things and it's like I say I try to be agnostic and my approach is generally let's look at what's working on each of them. Let's test them out and then see what fits in our context and our reality. And also realizing it's all a process, right? In the initial process you don't get to ideal in six months. It just doesn't happen.
[00:15:08] Melissa Perri: Yeah, I always get so upset when people are using my words to justify something that is like out of context or to follow something like to a t. My friend was the chief product officer of a company and he texted me and he said, Hey, Melissa, like my team keeps telling me we can't do something that I would like them to do because you said in the book. In your book something else. And he wrote my words back to me. He's like, this is not how I interpret it. And I was like, no. And I also know you're a really good chief product officer. Like I hired him into the company. I was like. And so he's like, can you come tell my team that I know you and I know what I'm doing. And I was like, this is awful. Don't do that. Don't use people's words and weaponize it against people who actually know what they're doing and figure out like what context it actually applies to. So I think we like to latch onto things and try to be very specific about this is what this says, and we must follow it, but we're missing the whole contextual picture. And even when I go into organizations and help them, I'm like, okay, your context is a little bit different. Like maybe we won't get to this point. That's all right. As long as we get from here to here, that's progress, that's what we're making. And that's why I think like product operations is such a great role and really interesting because you basically have to contextualize all those things for the company. So can you tell us a little bit about your work at OLX? What does the company look like? What made you wanna start product operations? Like what was the push to get product operations going in it?
Starting Product Ops at OLX
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[00:16:33] Hugo: It's an interesting story 'cause they actually reached out to me when I was at Farfetched and they said, okay, in the customer unit for motors, we don't have product operations and we'd like to 'cause the director of product was I. Had read a few articles and thought, oh, we need this.
[00:16:46] And it did exist to an extent in another customer unit, and I thought, okay, maybe, I don't know. I'm not sure. I was really okay and farfetched really happy, but they made me an offer I couldn't refuse. And they basically told me your level of influence will be at the top level leadership, so you'll be part of that customer unit leadership. And I thought, okay. Having that influence, that'll be fun. I wanna try it out. But having joined the company in the beginning there was two or three priorities that they put in front of me, but they said, look, you're gonna have to define the role 'cause we're not exactly sure what this is. and interesting thing was that suddenly there was a change in leadership literally a month after because the director I was working with went on a sabbatical and he joined.
[00:17:26] So we had a new director coming in and new heads of product and. I spoke to each one of them and none of them had ever worked with product operations and they were on the fence of the value of product operations. So I went into panic mode at the beginning, but what I did there was I started building the relationships and that's one of the things I tell people in the beginning.
[00:17:43] It's about building the relationships. I. And then I try and look at, in terms of the long term goal, where do we wanna go as an organization? Where do we wanna mature? You try identify those big problem areas, but I automatically look at the quick wins I can get. And it's the type of things like in the first month, second month, I can already be pushing something.
[00:18:01] And it's the little things, right? Sometimes oh, we put a new calendar invite, or we set up a ritual or something like that. People start seeing these things, these cadences, and they start saying, oh, this is interesting. Then when we start pushing around the quality and we're sitting there and we're saying, okay, look, great work, however, let's look at it in a different way. And we start, we start influencing bit by bit and I was very lucky with the director that I was partnered with because he really took a gamble and he really dove in with me, right? And he would pull me into conversations and he would sit with me and he say, Hugo, I'm thinking about an LT workshop we're gonna be having.
[00:18:32] Let's sit down together and figure out how this should be structured, what we wanna get out of that, and everything like that. So the two of us worked together on a ton of stuff, right? And it was. I don't know if I would've had as much success if it wasn't for that. But another interesting thing was I was a single person, right?
[00:18:46] And the team was supposed to grow and then we had some, hiring freezes at the time. And so the team was never growing and I was a single person. But, and it's one of the things I learned, and it's one of the great ways I like to approach product operations. It's about how do I make myself seem like I have bigger impact? Without having to be in every single interaction. And here it's important and a lot of people, debate whether, we're not substituting what product leaders should be doing. I actually say with the right product leaders they are partners and they're accountable and they take ownership of ton of the stuff where I can just literally help and, help shape it with them.
[00:19:21] And I partner with them, but they take it and they take it to their teams. And the success comes from that. If I do admire myself and I have to be a police. It never works actually. I just get pushback. Whereas if they take the ownership, they go in there and they implement it, they make it their own, right. It's incredible, and that's the results I've seen. And then last year what happened was I got, so we did this internal process and luckily I got moved up to the head of product operations across all the customer units. So now we are structured, we've basically got three main customer areas.
[00:19:50] One is the general classifieds, which is similar to eBay, right? It's about buying and selling of used goods from everything, right? Anything you wanna sell on there. Then we've got one, which is, it's a sort of vertical around motors, right? And that's motor vehicles bikes, parts, that kind of stuff, and another one around real estate. And here we're talking about literally create a platform for real estate agencies to be able to post people to find homes and things like that. But they're also looking at renting. They're looking at all these other things. And What happens is each of these has a central product team. And then what I've done is I've put a lead in each of these teams because. Rather than taking product operations central I was scared that by doing that we would actually lose a pulse of what's going on in the customer units. So what we've done is I've put a lead in each of these main customer units.
[00:20:36] The rest of the team is a bit more fluid dependent on the priorities quarter by quarter. And then I'm overlooking all of this and we, what we try and do here is. We try and basically scale out what's working well in one, for example if need be if we see something that's needed across the organization, we try and solve that for all. What we try and do is we try and work together with them and we try and make it as painless as possible, right? Because we don't want this negative impact. And, it's been an interesting year. It's been an interesting year because we're showing the impact, which is great, right?
[00:21:06] And people do see that impact, but it also means we have to be very careful in prioritization, 'cause we get pulled into 500 things and our scope can be enormous. Enormous.
[00:21:15] Melissa Perri: What have been the core tenets or the core areas that you are concentrating on in product ops that you found have given the teams the most value?
Rethinking OKRs for Real Teams
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[00:21:23] Hugo: It's for me, one thing I always find in every organization I arrive at is one of the key problems is always planning. And in bigger enterprise organizations, people argue against this and oh, how can you do yearly planning? But we do yearly planning. We have a stage at one stage of the year where we have to figure out what is the budget we wanna basically allocate for our, you know, every gamble experience, everything we wanna do next year, how do we, allocate that budget? So this planning has to happen. But in terms of the organizations trying to turn this as fluid as possible, adaptable and flexible as possible, that's where we see the most value, right?
[00:22:01] Because teams think, oh, you have these set timelines and this is how it has to work. sometimes it's that simple thing of someone who comes in, who's neutral, who's outside and saying, okay, we know we have to deliver this by this date. Let's actually work backwards rather than saying, we have to deliver by this date.
[00:22:16] So let's sit a week before and discuss, no, if you wanna be comfortable here, maybe we need to discuss a month or two months before where it's a relaxed conversation, right? You don't feel the pressure. You have to make a decision now. And so by this we start creating the space for people to be flexible, start connecting the dots earlier. But another thing we did for example, was with OKRs, simple thing was defining. Two or three types of OKRs. And it's like everybody talks about the outcome, OKRs, and I get it. The problem is what we noticed was with teams, they were working on an OKR and then they don't see those results for two or three quarters, right? And it's always on their roadmap. It's always there sitting there and it's bugging them. And you turn around and said, okay, let's break this down. You've got discovery OKRs, so now you can actually map out discovery you're gonna be doing. And next you're gonna be doing build OKRs, right?
[00:23:03] Because you have to build something that's built around milestones, and then you have outcome OKRs. And so what happened was, strangely enough, this created a bit of a space for that habit of the I won't even call it dual track. It's almost a triple track, right? Which is at any given time, you've got some things that are doing discovery, some that are being built, and some that are doing launching, right?
[00:23:22] And actually in outcomes by this. Because what I've seen in organizations is usually it's oh. You've assigned an OKR that's a hundred percent of your time, and you're like, no, there's a hundred other things that have to happen or else next quarter we are only gonna be, we're gonna go back to zero.
[00:23:36] And so it was creating this and it created a huge impact. So one of the big ones is always planning, right? Another one we found that could bring potential impact usually for the teams is just organizing insights. And we know what happens, right? Any organization we're talking about, whether it's data, whether it's research, whether it's, all these different teams, they're creating tons of content around insights, information, and they create dashboards.
[00:24:01] They create reports, they create, and you look and you think. Okay. The amount of time any product team has to figure out where this stuff lives, it's over. It's too much of an overload, right? And so it's okay, take a step back and say, how do we bring this so that a product person can go in there and in five minutes I can find what I need and where it is, and then next, how do I use that quickly, right?
[00:24:22] And so it's about making them more efficient and effective in this. It's reducing, the friction around these things to give them the space to do the work they need to do.
[00:24:29] Melissa Perri: When I've worked with companies who had that challenge of how do you break down this into, first of all, like a good OKR one that we can actually understand
[00:24:38] and then how do we put it into a system where now that we look at it, we know what actually makes sense? Usually there's all different levels.
[00:24:44] Like people think those like those levels of OKRs could be like in a story level. They could be really high, they could be really low. What did you do to standardize that OKR framework that you just talked about between like discovery building? Did you have to socialize it? Did you have to teach people on it?
[00:25:01] And then how did you get it into a system where it started to make sense to you and the rest of the company and the leaders?
Making OKRs Work Across the Org
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[00:25:08] Hugo: This was an interesting one, right? So what we did initially was we gave very low direction around OKRs for the first year actually. and it was about, okay, figure out what makes sense for you. And we let each of the leaders in each of the tribes and things like that go away, test out various ways of working and all that kind of stuff.
[00:25:24] What we did was then myself and the director I was talking about, we sat down and we looked and we said, okay, it's great, but there's a lack of consistency. The levels of maturity are all over the place and everything. So we sat down and we figured out, and this is one of the things I love to do, is rather than going and saying, here's an entire process end to end, and this is how you have to figure it out. What we did was we looked at the key points where things had to be connected and one of the things we said to people was, okay, from this point now, and it's a literal little thing you can put at the beginning, right? A little precursor. You can put inside the description of your OKR and say, is it a delivery? Is it discovery, or is it an outcome? They're like, really? And it's, yes, you can do that, right? I'm like, oh, okay. Okay, great. And then, but then we say we, we gave a set of principles, right? Everything has to be measurable. And they say, oh, but how do you measure something that isn't connected to metric?
[00:26:10] And I say, you have to deliver pieces of it, don't you? So you need to measure if you're able to deliver that. Is it gonna improve efficiency of effectiveness? Yes. How do you measure that? So it was, but what we tried, what I tried doing is, rather than overloading, I tried focusing on four or five key points that were gonna, that they needed to change their ways of working.
[00:26:28] And then a lot of the rest of the work is about just being with the teams and working with them. But the great thing here, and like I was mentioning earlier was with the product leaders, they then came in. engineering and everything, right? Even all the leaders would come in and they would keep the work going to the point where it actually became cultural without having tons of documentation. And so it's something that's just become part of the DNA of the organization where people come in and they say, oh, okay, I are so well organized. And then I have people from other parts of the company saying. Can you share the documentation around OKR And I'm like, I don't really have much. And it's a very strange thing because it was about finding that balance between giving some flexibility to the teams, but also I. You know, building some consistency around here now it didn't, it wasn't perfect. We also had to turn around and in some cases, put limits on the amount of they were, right?
[00:27:15] Because they would come up with five or six objectives, I don't know how many OKRs, and you're like, that's too much. You've obviously overloaded yourself. That's not gonna work. And it also depends on, because one of the product leaders did an incredible job. Of connecting them around themes, for example.
[00:27:28] And so those themes give you a direction, and then underneath the OKRs are the tactics to try and deliver towards that theme. We're still trying to figure those things out. We're still, fine tuning the things, but what we start seeing is, like you were saying, it shouldn't be tactical.
[00:27:41] It shouldn't be too tactical if it's too tactical. It's in your roadmap, right? It's something you're just gonna build. With my team, for example, I try to flipping the things around, which is I turned around to the team and we knew what our main goals were for the year, right? And I turned around and said, okay, let's look at the next quarter and say, what do we believe we will be in delivering, right? What are the tangibles that we will be delivering? And then you look and you say, but why are those important? And then from there, we built the OKRs. And people are like, oh how did you do that?
[00:28:09] You shouldn't be doing that way. And it's ok. You know it, it's tangible. You look at OKRs.
[00:28:14] and they seem like they're too far out with deliverables. I can look and I say, this is What I expect will be delivered now. Then I can just set my targets a bit higher in some cases, right? And an extent I'm doing okay off.
[00:28:24] So it becomes more clear for the team. And they had a very clear notion of what they were gonna do, didn't just seem like something conceptual sitting on a board somewhere or anything like that. On top of that, we're using a tool, which is stability to basically connect the things. The great thing there is that we can. We can map dependency between OKRs, we can also map out a strategy map so we can visualize how it looks in a tree structure. And, you can do a mix between yearly versus quarterly versus, so it gives us a lot of flexibility in that state. And now we can connect it to Jira. One of the new things they've launched is they can, they're starting to connect also metrics.
[00:28:58] So you can have metrics directly associated to some OKRs there. So this is great. It's slowly bit by bit. We're building it up.
[00:29:05] Melissa Perri: What I like about your approach too is I feel like it's very pragmatic. When you are introducing OKRs or this concept of how we measure things to companies for the first time there's a lot of people who are very dogmatic about it and say Hey, we should have started, with the outcome and the key results.
[00:29:21] And it's yeah, in a perfect world you should have, but we live in a world where we've got a lot of stuff in progress. And if we're gonna do this for the first time, why don't we actually look at what's in progress? Label that. And then next time when we go to do the research let's, then let's look at our OKRs then we can get into it.
[00:29:35] And I think that's such a realistic place for companies to start. And I'm so glad that you talked about it. 'cause I feel like sometimes people have that disconnect where they're like, oh, I wanna do this the right way, so let's just throw out everything we're working on and start all over again. And you're like, no, you still have to deliver things. Like the stuff you're working on may be good. We just haven't expressed it that way. And that lets us know if it's good.
[00:29:56] Hugo: No, and I think a lot of people have used OKRs as an excuse to, as aspire to a lot. Then you say, but what are you actually delivering?
[00:30:04] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:30:05] Hugo: right? Is it worthwhile? And it's oh, but we're hitting these numbers that we set out either sometimes they're too cautious or you realize that they're building something, but it become, it becomes a Frankenstein's monster. It has to be connected to, you know what, we have to keep producing, we have to keep bringing that value. And, you might hit those numbers, but if the long-term value is broken. It isn't worth anything. And so it's an education piece and everybody has their opinion. It's, you bring up OKRs and we've got 500 opinions about everything.
[00:30:31] Melissa Perri: Yeah. So you took on this role of really standardizing this, bringing in this governance, bringing in this way of how do we measure the success on it? What else does your product operations team look at?
The Product Ops Mix
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[00:30:41] Hugo: Our product operations team looks at various aspects, right? We in general. And look, I try and focus, I've mainly made it about three or four main areas, which is around the people developing, growing, the people on the teams, maturing the organization, even looking at the hiring process.
[00:30:57] And again, to be honest, we don't own these things, all of them. What we do is sometimes we partner with HR or with our learning partners in terms of building these things up, but we look at exactly how do we mature the product organization. Another one is around the processes, and here we. We try not to over-engineer any of the processes, right?
[00:31:15] But what we do try and look at is where are the processes broken and how do we fix that? And this is, we're talking about anything from. Ideally we wouldn't be owning it, but bug management for example, right? We've implemented a bug management process because we realized it wasn't working the way it was done, and so something was implemented. But we're also looking at things like how we support an organization through reorganization or restructuring of teams or, we look at their tooling, so the systems underneath that, that support them. And what we try and do is we try and find tools that will improve their day to day.
[00:31:44] Any tool that is gonna be adopted, we ask for people to justify why it needs to be adopted. And secondly, it, we make sure that it's not duplicating what another tool already does. So ideally it will either bring something new to the table or it will substitute one or more other products and do it better. And so that's how we approach it and we try and help reduce the amount of, tooling and then we look at how we can automate these things as much as well po possible, right? How do you connect the different tools so that people don't have to spend hours saying, oh, now I copy pasted from here to here. can we connect the two And automatically one is feeding the other perfect. Let's do that. Let's test that out. Even right now, someone from my team who was interesting 'cause we have this little report, it's a deck that's sent out, it's a Google deck, and he found a nice little script that basically what it does is. He just puts the script running every at beginning of the month, and what it does is grabs a template, creates a new document, and shares it out with the people for them to start filling in the information they need to. And you're like, saved us time, you saved the team time. And they don't have to. Product ops is not a blocker there. People don't have to wait for us to create, it's automatically done. These little things is what we try and do, right? Constantly optimize and improve things.
[00:32:50] Melissa Perri: So since Denise and I wrote the book, AI obviously has become something that we never stopped talking about and I've seen it really contribute to automating things and scaling product operations. Are you using any AI to help you with product operations or to help your product managers?
[00:33:07] Hugo: It's an interesting thing. Initially, and I think with every company that has adopted AI, they're all looking at how do we improve our product, right? For our customers? And that was the first focus for everything. But our team automatically started looking and saying, how can we improve the way we work internally? So one of the things, for example, was we started putting researchers using it, right? And I know when I, the first time I mentioned AI to researchers, and it wasn't actually at olx, it was previous to that, they freaked out and they said, oh, but the human factor, it has to be validated and it's still validated by researchers.
[00:33:36] So let me just put that in the beginning. Everything is validated by the researchers, but they don't have to now transcribe an entire interview. They don't have to summarize it, right? When they want to bring in the content, they don't, they have help identifying big patterns across the things.
[00:33:51] So what they do is they introduce these things into the AI system, and then it helps 'em identify these things. It makes them more efficient in the stuff that, to them is actually boring, right? They can spend time on. The work they do in, researcher with a customer, when they're talking to a customer, the value they bring is huge. Let's let them focus on that, right? The insights that they bring out of the conversations, that's what brings value. Another thing we've done is we started looking at exactly how we can plug in AI to different systems in the right. So one is, can we use it to analyze our confluence documentation?
[00:34:22] Everything that's in there so that people can easily find it with a prompt can they find the information that they need, right? Another thing we're looking at is, can it help us pattern match between connecting all the different insights that exist across the organization, like I was saying, right?
[00:34:35] We've got data, we've got contra search and NPS csat, we've got surveys, we've got. I think I've got. about 10 or 10 or so different resources. But can we start? And I think that's the power of it, right? No human would be able to see that connection between the, things. With the help of ai, we can start seeing these connections between the things much more easily because it can process these large amounts of data. And then, other than that, we're looking at can we automate how we're doing. In terms of the other processes, right? Like, how are we doing planning? How are we doing? Where can we give? And what I love is what Open AI is doing where you can almost create your own ai. Your own AI system or AI model. That's something cool to look at, right? Which is okay, actually I want something that'll help me through my planning process, for example, right? Or in this case, one of our teams shared something which was a simple system to help you through your OKR process, right?
[00:35:25] It helps you write the OKRs, you put them in there, it gives you some feedback and input, and you're like, that's basically expanding the product operations team without us having to do tons more work, right? So we have been testing out various things.
[00:35:37] Melissa Perri: That's awesome. And when you look at the AI tools too, what what kind of challenges do you think are out there? What are you like excited about how's like the gamut of what you've seen?
The Real Limits of AI
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[00:35:48] Hugo: For me, the basic simple thing is, there's two challenges here, right? One is that AI is not exactly at the place that, everybody thinks it is right? There's this perception that it's, oh, it's gonna do everything right now. I don't have to think anymore, right? It's not there yet, right? It isn't. and people need, I think people need to look at it as an amplifier, Rather than something as its substitutes. Because right now what happens is, you can't take it at face value. And I've seen that with more junior folks, right? Where they'll put in a prompt, it answers and it's oh, this is the answer and I'll go away. And you're like, wait, no, you have to question it. You have to deep, 'cause if you deep dive, you'll find out there's biases here or there's, there's, so we have to be careful in that extent. And that's why I think that the human factor is super important. We have to keep it in there. But let's actually pass on the crappy jobs over to AI if possible.
[00:36:38] And make us better. I think that's the thing. I think we have to think of it as the same thing of, those bionic arms or whatever that amplify whatever we have. It's the same logic here, right? And we need to work together with it. It shouldn't be substituting anyone or anything in that sense.
[00:36:52] Melissa Perri: One of the things that, yeah that, that's where I see a lot of people saying, Hey, AI is just gonna replace product managers. They're gonna replace these things. I was curious, what do you see? Do you see that trend actually going to happen or what have you know, what's more likely.
[00:37:06] Hugo: I can, I can't guarantee it a hundred percent, but I can almost guarantee that there will be tons of companies that will try to do that.
[00:37:12] Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's true.
[00:37:14] Hugo: And I think we'll have a few years there where it'll be these companies proving that, oh, we don't need product managers, we don't need engineers, we don't need we've got a no code AI that will build our entire product. And I can guarantee that a year or two afterwards they're look and they say we can't work this way because it's a crap product we've put outside there, and things aren't working properly, because AI, number one, isn't there. Number two it's always that type of thing where AI is limited in terms of bias. So I think we will see that. Unfortunately I do, I would love to say, oh no, rose tinted glasses and say everything's gonna be hunky dory, but they like everything else, right? Companies run off the trends and, they're always looking at ways of, not all companies, but a lot of companies are looking at how do they reduce that bottom line?
[00:37:57] How do they reduce their spend and, the operational costs. And it's yeah, there's hundreds of ways you can do that, right? I, could also turn around and say, you know what, I. one product manager can handle the whole product organization of, 40 to 50 packs. They can, they'll blow out completely or they'll be doing a terrible job of it, but they can.
[00:38:14] And you'll be saving money. 'cause you won't have to hire those, 20 or 30 product managers. So it's the same thing with all these things, right? The companies will test it out. They will try it out. And we've, we're seeing this across every industry, right? Where people will try and cut on costs. And the truth of the matter is, the question you always have to ask is, does the product still bring value to customers? And at the end of the day, is that a quality product? And I think we've lost sight of that in some areas, right? Where people are just pushing out new products every single week and you look and they say it's very similar to something that already exists and it doesn't bring anything really new.
[00:38:44] Oh, but it's got ai. It's that doesn't bring anything.
[00:38:47] Melissa Perri: It's funny 'cause the whole concept of, build, measure, learn. Like we think about in Lean Now, it's so easy to build that you can put out like junk all day, every day. But so many people still don't do the learn piece, which has always been like the most important. And I, I.
[00:39:03] Hugo: a funny thing, right? It everybody, I remember when we were talking about user experience initially, and I was trying to sell that and it sounded like I was selling a religion, right? It was ridiculous. People, I would go in there, and I they would look at me with a very strange face.
[00:39:14] But and you saw this evolution where everybody's talking about user experience, right? Oh, that's great. Now everybody's talking about everybody's defending the user, if you wanna call it that. But then that part around actually, getting insights and building on those insights, people do a terrible job, right?
[00:39:29] Even people get the insights. It validated, it worked. Let's keep that. You are like, no, wait, this is the first evolution. There's still more to do, right? You'll discover more stuff and. Yeah. So people just keep building and layers and layers 'cause they want that, the money coming in, they want the thing to grow and to be honest, right?
[00:39:45] All this investment and stuff like that, it complicates things. 'cause companies are looking at how do I increase my valuation? It's not about how do I increase value? It's how do I increase my valuation? Unfortunately that also incentivizes, just pushing stuff out and, yeah.
[00:40:00] Melissa Perri: Yep. And it's interesting 'cause that fails after time, right? You could be pushing all this stuff out And if it doesn't increase the value of the product the valuation starts to go down because nobody, you get your churn. People aren't adopting what you just put out there, and it, all comes back at the end of the day.
[00:40:15] Hugo: No. And I've looked at, and like anybody I get excited and I say, oh, maybe I should think about building a product and, putting together a company or something like that. I look and I say, but I can't think of a single thing that would make sense that would actually bring value right now. That is differentiates a differentiator for what exists in the market. Potentially maybe some of them need to plug into each other a bit better, right? And that's a simple thing. That's what you need. You are looking and say, anything I'm gonna build is just gonna add a little bit extra.
[00:40:39] What's the word? What's the effort there? And it's like I tell people really think about whether it makes sense. And like you said, tons of products coming out all the time and. Yeah, most of 'em, I, when I do vendor management or when I do, looking at the benchmark across different products, I get a list of 20 and then the ones that actually get even close to what I want, maybe three. And of those three, none of them solves a problem I want to solve. And it's ah, this is so frustrating. They
[00:41:05] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:41:05] Hugo: Laundry list of features, but they don't solve what I need to solve. That's depressing.
[00:41:08] Melissa Perri: It is depressing. And then that's a big part of product management too, right? Being able to actually measure the value on it, so that, that's a key part of product operations too. What do you do to help the measurement side of things, right? Like we're running these OKRs, we're looking at it like, how do you see product ops and data working together there?
[00:41:26] Hugo: Yeah it's interesting 'cause I've always touched or at least paid attention to data, but until I read your book with Denise, I'd never actually deep dived on the concept of product, of, of actual data. And then I realized something that. For me, it also depends on how the structure of the organization is working, right?
[00:41:42] So for example the owners of data are the data teams, right? And what happens is in some cases, they're doing an incredible job of doing the curation of that data for the teams. And
[00:41:52] in that case, I probably don't even have to jump in there or do anything around that. However, there are many cases where they have tons of data.
[00:41:58] They know what to do with that data. There's 500 dashboards. There's tons of people. So there, what we do is it's a thing I always tell my team, just remember one thing. Our job is to help curate the stuff. So that people can make quicker decisions with more confidence. So we have to find the mechanics to do that.
[00:42:14] And sometimes we'll work with a data team to do that. Sometimes. We'll just basically, a simple thing is, oh, we'll create a list of where all this data lives, right? So you can more easily find it. There's simple things we can do, but. It is about trying to connect the people to Right information. And that's what we try and do. So we won't always create a dashboard or anything like that, but sometimes you need to create a aggregated dashboard because it doesn't exist. Or something that gives you that top level view or that gives you the correlation between things. So we, we try and incentivize that.
[00:42:42] Melissa Perri: I, everything that you're talking about is so great from a product operations standpoint too, because it's about meeting the company where it's at. And It's not reinventing the wheel, you're like filling the gaps in to figure out what do we need and how do we strategically get this done to help our product managers.
[00:42:58] When you look at the evolution of where you wanna take product ops and what's next for it at OLX, what are you excited about and what are the things that you'd really love to tackle?
What’s Next for Product Ops
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[00:43:07] Hugo: I can't talk about our next year roadmap because it would be so cool. Um, but we we're, we're, we're looking at this right. So we've established a ton of, baseline stuff working and it's going right? And we're pretty happy with that. But in the coming years one, one of the things we've established exactly how do we take this, insights, curation to the next level.
[00:43:24] So that's definitely one of the ones we're looking at. another thing we might potentially be looking at is how to upskill the organization. And here we're talking about training, but it's not just about training it's. And an interesting thing for you. So it is about training, but it's also about helping people build those skills and that culture. But another one that is super interesting is the training leaders. And this is something that does not exist enough of, there's tons of product management training, but teaching a leader, to how to go from that tactical to the strategic level and then at that strategic level. You are not switched off from the tactical, right?
[00:43:59] And you still have to coach people, you have to mentor, you have to help shape direction and everything like that. You have accountability for these things as well, right? And I think there's this automatically, these jumps between these areas. So trying to figure out the best way to figure, to help them evolve and grow to be able to support the organization.
[00:44:15] That's what I'm looking for there. And in general what I wanna feel is that the teams feel less overloaded with any changes that have to happen, right? So they feel comfortable with, and they become adaptable. Ambiguity doesn't scare them as much, right? Because they've got a good support structure.
[00:44:31] And I think that's my main goal as a, as an ops team our actual final goal is to become obsolete, right? That's what I tell our, my team. I tell them our objective is to become obsolete. And they're like, should you be saying that? And I was like, that's our goal. There's so much to be done that I doubt that will ever happen, but it is our main objective, right?
[00:44:51] It's to become as obsolete as possible. Because it's like I tell them, product operations is here to bring value and you know it's increase. And the truth of the matter is the minute we're a blocker or something is totally dependent on us, we failed. And that's the truth of matter is right if you can't do something because of product operations, dot dot, if I hear this phrase, we failed.
[00:45:12] Melissa Perri: It also sounds like you're keeping the team small and lean when it comes down to that too.
[00:45:17] Yes I do that on purpose, right? 'cause one of the things, and it's something I've learned with restructuring and, organizations go through various changes. And this is a support area, right? This is an area that's enabling other people. and so we're supporting, I realize that growing too big let's say for example, we're really good at our job and we solve most of our problems. I don't wanna look in five years and say, I have to. Let go half of the team. 'cause now we don't have work for them. What I wanna make sure is we always have the right amount of people to be able to continuously find that balance between bringing value and, justifying having those people on the team. So I purposely turn around and I've told people this is the size of the team and I say, but I'm not gonna grow up much more than this. You're like, but Hugo, we could use this. And I understand. We will figure it out. We'll figure it out. But yeah it's about making sure that exactly the team always feels like, they're always in that small bit of quality.
[00:46:07] So this sounds like a really great future for OLX and for product operations. Hugo, my last question for you on the podcast. If you had to look back on your career and give advice to your younger self, what would it be?
[00:46:19] Hugo: That's a very good question. I don't know that I have a clear answer. It's interesting, but. For me, the simple thing is the universe has a plan, if that makes sense. Because at every time throughout my career, I would very often, question, am I in the right direction? Does this make sense for me? I've always been a creative person. I sketch left, right, and center all the time and I've always, I've been drawing since I was, three years old, but I never felt fulfilled. And
[00:46:44] then I discovered user experience, and I was like, oh, I suddenly, and this was at the age of 32, so you know I took a long time before I discovered something I was passionate about working. And then, I've always been a person who loves to experiment and learn about everything. And I read tons of books and I'll try this, I'll try that, and, so I it almost seems like I'm always shifting ideas and, interests. And I always thought this is not worthwhile for my career. But that expansive experience and knowledge now is worth gold in what I'm doing right now. So it has built up towards that. And so I think it's the type of thing where, look, be patient, be resilient. And, what's, it's a type of thing where just keep moving forward. It's one of the big pieces of advice I tell people.
[00:47:26] Sometimes forward might have a bend in the road or might go in a different direction than you were expecting, but just keep moving forward, and opening up yourself to opportunities, I think that's the main thing.
[00:47:36] Melissa Perri: Great advice for people out there. Hugo, Thank you so much for being on the Podcast. if people wanna learn more about you where can they go?
[00:47:42] Hugo: Hi. Thanks again for having me on the podcast. I guess if you wanna look for it, actually this is a new one for here, exclusive for the podcast. So I have the Thoughts Unraveled newsletter that I've been, but I haven't been sending it out for a while due to too much stuff going on.
[00:47:56] But myself and Chris Compston are gonna be partnering together. And we will be doing a sort of just just the word? We'll be doing a kind of podcast as well, but a relaxed conversation between two people and I'll be sending updates on that soon.
[00:48:10] Melissa Perri: I love that. Great, and we will put the link to that show if you wanna tune in and subscribe to their podcast as well on our show notes@productthinkingpodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next week with another amazing guest. And in the meantime, if you have any questions for me, go to dear melissa.com and let me know what they are, make sure you like and subscribe so that you never miss another episode of the podcast.
[00:48:32] We'll see you next time.