Agility and Adaptability Strategies for Success in Product Development and Leadership

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My name is Leszek, and I will be talking to Andrew Martinez, Fons, about product innovation,

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leadership evolution, and agile transformation.

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I'd like to start off with, your professional journey.

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And could you take us briefly through your professional journey leading up to your current role

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as VP product at Honeysales?

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Sure. I came out of college, with an industrial design degree.

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It was called product design, but, really, it was about designing telephones and cars and things like that. Physical goods. Physical goods. Exactly.

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But I had an internship, the summer before my last year of university, building websites, with

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a small, it was actually a franchise of web web development firms called US Web. It's no longer around.

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But, it was with a small office of of folks who were building what I would consider to be sort of early web apps. This was 1997.

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So pretty early in the Internet's history.

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And, I loved the confluence of interaction and graphic design and sort of the technical requirements

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or the underlying system model that needed to be fulfilled with those apps.

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And I actually took a job there after after graduating.

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And so I spent the first five years of my career actually doing, design and prototyping for for web apps.

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I was my title was UI designer.

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I did a lot of UI design, but I also did a lot of prototyping.

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And I think this came from my from my school training that the best way to show people what

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you're trying to build is to build it.

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And it might not be real.

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It might not actually have any back end to it, for example, if it's a web app.

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But just showing them how you might click around and tick, you know, perform a task and complete

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it end to end is super super valuable.

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So I spent 5 years in in really just kind of these, web design and consulting firms.

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Ended up founding one with some friends, for a couple of years and, kind of building up, I would

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call my a UX chops, basically.

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After that, I moved into a product management role at eBay.

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That was my first, PM job.

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I spent only a couple of years there, but then moved to a small start up, and then later to

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a much bigger, clean tech firm, But all the while doing product management and eventually moving

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into a a product leadership role as a first a group product manager, now a VP product.

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All of this happened in the US, and I moved to Germany in 2016 while I was working at Yelp.

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Yelp had acquired a company that was based in Hamburg, and, an opportunity opened up to both

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move into a leadership role and move physically to Hamburg.

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And so we did that and my family.

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And, since then, I've been in different leadership roles at a couple of different, tech firms. Okay.

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Cool. Thanks for that. Now let's, I'd like to talk a little bit about Honeywells.

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Can you give us an overview of the product, of the business, and basically explain to us how

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or explain to me how it transforms the traditional sales process, with its AI, driven approach.

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Sure. Our our mission here is to make every sales conversation relevant.

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And so in the sense that a salesperson wants to always have contextual relevance with the conversations

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that they're having with their prospect, with their customers, with somebody walking in off

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the street looking for, to solve their problem.

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Our goal is to equip sellers with those with those tools.

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And we use machine learning and AI to do that in a way that, really just increases their efficiency.

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So we we've talked in the past about, potentially replacing, sellers or or something like that.

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I think it's really turned into helping sellers, giving them superpowers essentially. So Interesting.

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How do I take something that used to take me 10 hours a week, and how do I condense it down to 30 minutes?

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And specifically, the problem we're trying to solve right now is how do we help a seller find

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in their book of business the, we call them signals.

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What are the signals of activity in their network that make people that might make someone open

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to having a sales sales conversation?

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And then giving them an an opener essentially, a message that says, hey.

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I just saw you got this new job.

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We'd love to talk to you about how we can help you with your problem next.

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Or I just saw that you had a great quarter.

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We'd love to talk about how we can help you grow even more over the next year, using our service, whenever it might be.

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But focused on, business to business sellers, focused on, AEs, account executives, and, SDRs,

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sales sales development representatives, and just helping them do their jobs faster and with

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with a lot more coverage,

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Okay. So there are two sides to it. 1 is recognizing the opportunity, and the second one is

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actually the super weapon, providing the context, providing everything to make the salesperson

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extremely successful at their job.

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That's right. I wouldn't describe it as a weapon, but maybe a tool.

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Tool. Sorry. Sorry.

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That they can deploy for for their needs. But yeah.

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Essentially, you know, if I'm a if I'm a seller with a 1,000 prospects or a you know, booking

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business of a 1,000 accounts, how do I know when account x is ready to have a sales conversation?

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You know, that might be because, they've just raised funding or it might be because that that

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particular contact just got a new position or a new title.

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Or it could be because, they visited our pricing page, for example.

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And so how do we take all the signals that we get from around our product, the Internet, etcetera,

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and work that into an opportunity for me to connect with that person.

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Rather than just the the traditional approach is kind of spray and pray.

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Like, every quarter, I email all 1,000 people and I say, hey, I'm still here.

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I would love to sell you something.

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And, you know, the efficacy and and, and frankly, the the appeal of that approach is just not Sure. Not great.

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Or, manually set set, processes or flows that are arbitrary, as said by some analyst rather

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than AI who can recognize much more and have much more context than, you know, setting in a

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lab, like a theoretical process or anything. Yeah.

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Yeah. And it seems like there are lots of examples around industry of companies doing just that

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and sort of understanding that AI may not necessarily solve every problem perfectly, but it

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can it can make humans more efficient, essentially.

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And I think that's kind of what we're finding as well.

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And the the big question is, when when will humans be comfortable letting go of the controls

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or that letting letting the reins go and letting the AI do things on its own, kind of autopilot mode, if you will?

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And when do they wanna be more of a copilot and really man managing the whole process.

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What we found in our research is that sellers are still very much in copilot mode.

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They don't anything going out under their name that doesn't absolute you know, that they haven't

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reviewed and doesn't absolutely sound like them using their voice, etcetera.

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Because AI is not perfect, despite how how great it can be.

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And so that's to me, that's one of the interesting questions remaining to be answered.

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Okay. Very interesting. And, how do you actually ensure personalization of communication?

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You said every sales conversation is relevant.

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I'm asking that because AI can sometimes lead to a personal customer experience.

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Probably that's why the salespeople wanted to want to use it in a Copilot setting or and, how

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to basically maintain this balance between automation, personal touch, and all that, stuff?

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Yeah. So so so far we have not pursued automation.

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It's not a we don't have a autopilot mode right now where somebody can just say go.

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And and this, system is just shooting at emails.

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We do spend a lot of time on, making sure that the prompts are right and providing AI with good

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good examples of the messages that we expect to write.

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I mean, a sales a sales outreach message has a fairly predictable pattern that we that we follow.

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And then we'll also observe what kinds of patterns are most effective and and sort of feed that

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back into the system so that they improve over time.

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But we also take messages that the sellers have actually edited themselves, and we use those as examples as well.

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Like, hey, the last time this scenario came up, this person wrote something more like this.

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Please use this as your as your framework for developing the next message. Sure.

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And so far what we've seen is that it's pretty good at at taking the context from what where

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what the seller is trying to do now, but the style or the template from what they did in the

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past and we're merging those together something pretty useful.

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On the other hand, in the context of recognizing opportunities within your profile database,

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do you, consider, what kind of events are you looking after?

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Is it like, is there events related to, I don't know, purchases, conversations?

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But do you also consider some other relevant external, say, events, say, weather?

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It seems that it's, weather, as an example, it seems relevant in many industries, say, like fashion, shoes, whatever.

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What kind of events do you actually put in the system or try to, interpret to to to recognize the opportunities?

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Yeah. So we're we're still about a year into this process, and so still and I that still feels

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pretty early, to be honest.

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And I've only been here for 5 months myself.

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We don't have weather incorporated as a factor yet.

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It'd be interesting to know if that has an impact on sales conversations.

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But, right now, it's kind of a confluence of the seller's goals themselves.

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So, like, what is the what are the audience or what's the ideal customer profile that they're going after?

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How well does the prospect match that that goal?

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So if you have a book of business of a 1000 contacts, you know, there might be a 100 that are

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actually the really hot ones that are super important to you, interesting to you.

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And so we wanna fact we wanna factor that into our our scoring.

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We essentially score all of the all of the signals that we get.

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And we wanna also take into account sort of the the closeness or the relevance of the signal to that person.

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So one of the most successful signals we use today is, LinkedIn posts. Mhmm.

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If you post something on LinkedIn about, your podcast, and I'm a podcast software vendor or something like that.

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Like, that's a highly relevant signal for me to reach out and offer you, something.

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We also use, company news as a as a signal.

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But what we find is that if you work at a large company, a large industrial company like Siemens

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or Volkswagen or something, and you know, it's just an article about the new car that Volkswagen developed.

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But you're in the, you know, you're in the manufacturing department.

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May actually not be a great Mhmm.

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Opportunity to connect with you.

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So it's one of the things that we're trying to figure out is how do we how do we find the most

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relevant signals and and also deliver them in a way that's useful.

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I'd like to shift gears a bit and talk about product management.

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So my first question here is in the light of the financial uncertainties, capital not being

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so abundant and, well, all over the place, what, I'd like to ask about the measures we've taken

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to ensure product development remains agile and cost effective.

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There's a lot of talk about that readjustment, these days, and I I'd like to ask about your perspective.

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Part of the reason that I joined Honeywells is because I recognize that the founders already

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had a very capital efficient, company running. Mhmm.

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And, part of that is obviously the amount that they wanted to allocate to product and engineering.

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And the team that we have is, very slim.

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It's basically a product manager and 4 engineers.

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And what we do is try to make the most progress as we can with the team that we have, while

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also bringing in specialists when we need them.

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So if we need a security specialist, we'd bring them in.

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If we need a designer to help us with something, we'll bring them in as needed.

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And so far, that's worked out fairly well in the sense that we can make measurable and and specific

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progress while not having to hold on to people for a terribly long time.

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But that core team also kinda maintains the the core the knowledge that we need, in the long run.

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Obviously, I'd love to have more engineers.

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I'd love to have a full time designer, you know, all of those things.

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But, think the the big challenge for us as a company right now or or for any company at at our

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stage is finding product market fit.

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And so until we really have that locked down and we know both what the product needs to be,

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how we bring it to market, all of those things that bring you that get you to start scaling,

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it doesn't necessarily make a a lot of sense to invest a ton, until we find it.

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You worked in different settings, and you've probably seen the other way to do it or the other

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end of the scale or spectrum.

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Could you say what what were your experiences in the past?

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And there are many stories out there, about, you know, overgrowing, or over engineering, overgrowing the employee base.

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I'm wondering if you've you've seen such such approach in the in the market.

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I actually I guess I'm lucky to say I haven't been in a situation where a company over overgrew

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and then had to dramatically shrink back down, I guess, thankfully.

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And and I would say that the the the situation of the last few years is not in distinct from

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what happened in the late nineties with the dotcom Mhmm. Bubble. Companies were

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companies over hired and then had to cut back when when cash became scarce.

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And the the same thing is happening here and frankly, I think it was a bit overdue.

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I mean, we probably shouldn't have had to wait 20 years for everyone to remember what what that was like.

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So to me, it's not necessarily like a unique, situation.

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But it is I I think it's just a, a cautionary tale to anyone at any stage of building a company

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that you really have to be precious with your resources.

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And not only that, but the the costs of constantly hiring and and and also even just losing

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people through attrition are very high.

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And so when you're Happy.

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When you're when you're recruiting, like, you gotta be sure that you're fire you're finding the right people.

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Exactly. So

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And and I I would also say that, you know, the the firms that were founded after the dotcom

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bubble, Facebook being the main one that comes to mind right now, Like, the reason that company

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was so successful for so many years is because they had that memory, you know, that so many

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of the managers and executives from that firm had participated in the previous, downturn, and

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so they they understood what it meant to be.

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A large portion of the most successful companies were born out of a crisis.

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And that'll happen in this case, too.

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You know, it's just we just don't know who they are yet.

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I'm very much into trying to get some practices or approach or mindset in terms of being innovative,

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taking risks, and just from US and transplanting it to European way of building, new things, innovating.

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And I'd like to explore that for a for a while since you've been on both sides of the pond.

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And, in that theme, I'd like to ask you about the pitfalls of scaling product teams and processes

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and how how to make it successful, how to make, the processes your friend, not your enemy.

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At the same time, keep you, make you innovative, but also agile.

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You know, this is one person's perspective and I don't mean to, you know, diminish anyone on

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either side of the pod about how they how they do things.

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So my experiences are only my own.

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But my my observation, having been having worked in Germany now for a few years.

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And to be clear, it's not just a German thing.

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It's, you know, I've worked with people from across Europe, from across the world as well.

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I mean, the world of product and engineering is international everywhere you are, whether you're

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in the US or Europe or or anywhere else.

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But generally, if I had to boil it down, the mindset, in the US, I think, is much more, is much less risk averse.

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So much more interested in taking chances, seeing what happens, shooting first, and asking questions later.

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Whereas the the the European approach, I would say, is a lot more conservative. And it's like, listen. Let's plan this out.

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Let's make sure we know what we're doing. Let's test it.

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And then maybe we'll maybe we'll put it out there.

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And, and this this translates not just to to product development, but just to the, you know,

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frankly, to to labor laws, to the way that the way that business operates, generally.

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Maybe also gene pool. That's you know, there were lots of entrepreneurs from Ireland who basically

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had nothing, nothing, but their own will, to go, you know, through the sea, set it up there,

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and, like, that these are, like, a natural selection of entrepreneurs.

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That's at least I don't I don't think this explains it all, but I mean, that I think that's

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a part of it as well.

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But that's my own theory.

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Could be. But, but I think what this translates into, you know, across thousands of examples

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and assuming that this is true, what it what it sort of translates to is that there's a little

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less risk taking, and so that multiplied over 1,000 of weeks or months and thousands of companies

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and so forth means that there's just been a little bit more of a, a slower mentality to to getting things done.

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So that's what I've observed on the on the innovation side.

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And so I think what I try to do when I when I come to my teams is, you know, it's not so much

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shoot first and ask questions later, but it's like how can we how can we learn something as

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quickly as as possible in this situation? Right?

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Obviously, we don't know the answers to everything, and and anytime you try to pin someone down,

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the answer is always, I don't know yet.

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And I I need some time to figure it out. I say that myself.

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And so it's that's natural.

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But the question is, what's the smallest piece of progress that we can make so we can learn

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something new and then go figure out the next small piece of progress so we can build upon it?

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And so just to give you a very specific example, when I joined Honey Sales, we had our work split up.

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We use Notion for for task tracking, and we had things split up into tasks, stories, and epics,

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and kind of just the classic, agile, or the scrum model. And I said, listen. Epics?

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Like, let's get rid of that.

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Like, let's just operate at the story level.

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Like, what are the things that we wanna learn about and what to do so we can learn about them?

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And let's just do them as stories.

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And a story shouldn't be more than a couple of weeks of work.

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And let's just, like, let's just try to make some progress and actually get things going, and,

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you know, and basically finish things rather than constantly starting new ones.

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And the stories are aligned towards experimenting and learning. That's the

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Yeah. In some cases, they're in in some cases, they represent just progress that we need to

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make on a certain component or whatever.

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But, ultimately, the the idea is every story is a hypothesis that we wanna prove. Nice.

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And, my point being that rather than saying, look, this is a big 6 month effort where we're

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gonna not have something until the very end.

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Like, what can we have next week?

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And and how can that help us move forward with our with our goals?

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And and if you don't release something next week that you can evaluate, then you won't know

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where to go for the following week. Right?

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Like, it'll give you hints that help you help point you in the same direction in the right direction, hopefully.

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Anyway, so that's that's on the first question about innovation.

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And the second one on on process, the the observation that I had when I moved to Hamburg, initially

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was how obsessed everybody was with Agile, and how job listings said, you know, you work in

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an agile way and you're familiar with the agile methodology and and so forth.

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And as much as I I'm it's not that I disagree with the the agile manifesto or anything like

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that, but, my sense was that people put a lot more energy than they needed to into process.

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And so, like, how are we going to do this rather than just doing it? Mhmm.

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And so, again, it's one thing that I try to, to push for in the team is, like, let's not get

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hung up in ceremony or in whatever.

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Like, let's do it because it's there is value there.

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But let's not let's not be too orthodox about it, I guess. That's right.

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And let's use what's gonna make sense for us at our size, at our company maturity, at the

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level of product market fit that we have and so forth. Nice.

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I think there's, coming back to the financial uncertainties and capital being so abandoned,

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I think it also there's an aspect of it that, results in shift in agile where it's less about ceremonies.

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Generally, I'm not referring to Honey Seals, but I'm speaking generally that there's a less,

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like, the ceremonies become less important.

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There's also, like, a shift from, you know, Scram Masters, adult coaches, that are not really bringing that much value.

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It's it's it's more, I think it's more about getting things done these days.

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So, actually, I think it's really cool, considering what we discussed so far, and that's actually

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some kind of, you know, rebirth of of, of having rebirth of getting things done with having

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constraints on the capital side and timeline.

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Yeah. I'm glad to hear that.

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I I I haven't observed that myself, but I would be very happy to to hear it.

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Yeah. I think I mean, I think it like, that's one side of it, but, also, I think from the engineering

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perspective, there's also a lot of stuff happening.

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For example, there's a I think there's a, 10 trend to go after simpler architecture.

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For example, let's not do, like, complex, microservices that can handle 1,000 or 100 requests

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more than we actually need, and it's built for the future, let's build something simple, and

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a monolith that will do the job itself for, and will do for the time being.

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So, like, there are many, you know, aspects of it, but I think it's actually, I I I really enjoyed these times.

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Yeah. It's good. I I hope that's a I hope that's a trend.

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About my final question to you is related to leadership and specifically about, your style and

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how it evolved over the years.

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You've been in the industry for over 20 years, and I'm just wondering how your style has evolved

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to what are the and also maybe what are critical lessons you've learned along the way?

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It's not I don't think it's in my resume, although it might be that, right after I started at

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this company US Web, we were growing very fast.

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This was the the the boom time of of the late nineties.

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And I was promoted into a management role, for the UI design team.

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And I had this very specific, style of doing design work, which was actually in code.

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So I was writing HTML and a little bit of script to make things to build these prototypes and

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to show people how to actually do things.

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And I was we were hiring people into the team who didn't have experience doing that.

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And I had this, I would say, very stubborn approach of like, hey, if you're gonna join this

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team, you're gonna learn how to do this too.

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Because this is to some extent what we expect for our customers and and it's and we and I thought

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it was the the right way to do things.

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Made an assumption that it's

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Yeah. Essentially. So you see where this is going.

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Like, I don't think I was a very good, I wasn't a very good manager at all.

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I I may have been going in the right direction of leadership, but I it was not necessarily a

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productive, method of leadership of, like, showing people where to go, but I was a lot more

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focused on showing them how to do it or how to how to make that happen.

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And thankfully, that period only lasted a little while.

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And and, and then I went back to being an individual contributor.

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And it wasn't till I I had a a lot more sort of, I would call, formal management experience

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or or I had the experience of being managed by more formal leaders, by more trained leaders,

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essentially, that I understood that, you know, management is a completely different job than being an individual contributor. Right?

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If you're a product manager or an engineer who wants to move into a management role, you you

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sort of need to understand that, like, your life is gonna change from one day to the next.

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And your skill set hopefully can still serve you in terms of how you coach your team, where

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you work with them, but the job itself is It's a new game. Change a lot.

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It's a whole new, you know, ballgame.

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And I think what I experienced was that being a manager and and I think I eventually became

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a fairly good manager, But being a manager is different than being a leader.

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And you you asked about leadership specifically, and I think the thing I've been trying to,

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steer myself back into more over time is actually being a leader.

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And and from from what I understand about what that means is that to some extent, it's the management stuff.

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It's the day week to week one on ones and the coaching and all those things.

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But it's also frankly pointing a path for the team and helping helping them understand, again,

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not necessarily how to do it, but where we're going.

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And, like, what is the goal that we're trying to achieve?

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How will we measure ourselves when we get there?

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That I've been that's been a bigger part of my recent leadership, journey.

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And in this in this role, because I am the, basically, executive in charge of the product and

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engineering team, I find myself having to use that or or develop that skill, or I feel myself

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needing that skill a lot more in this role because it really is about helping the team understand

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where we're going and and kinda letting them figure out, the rest as much as possible. Nice.

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So that's been it's, like, I guess to summarize, it's been like I think I started as a just

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maybe too strong of a leader.

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I, over time, realized what it meant to be a manager, and then I've realized, actually, management

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is not leadership and that and that that's also a skill worth worth developing. So who knows?

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Maybe I'll find some third dimension of this that I that I hadn't before.

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But, for me, it's been a sort of an interesting journey.

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But also, I think it also comes down to there's there's one requirement here, which is you also

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already mentioned that you have to have a great team as well to, to grow as a leader, and not

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being the manager, but also a leader at the same time. Right.

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And, Lewis, thank you very much.

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It was really a pleasure.

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Yeah. You're welcome. I'm glad.

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