Antoine Fourmont-Fingal: Beyond the Basics - Elevating Product Management Through Adversity

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Matt

My name is Matt, and I will be talking with Antoine Fourmont-Fingal about the importance of mindset in product management. And so I really like to start with difficult questions. And I think you are the first one with whom I'm talking who work for Rocket Internet, Lazada, Alibaba. It's kind of like what I heard about those companies. It's like really specific work culture. So you need to be really hardworking, long hours. So it reminds me like a consulting, but more in a tech startup world.

Antoine Fourmont-Fingal

Is it true? What is true? No. So, good question. I think I'll make a difference between Rocket, between Lazada and between Alibaba. That the context being here that, you know, Rocket is a German based thing, Lazada was always Southeast Asian, and was eventually incorporated into Alibaba Group. So about, about Rocket Internet.

So, it's funny that you asked because we realized with quite a few other people whom I've worked with in Nasada and would've been worked with, but also evolved within the Rocket Internet universe, that we have a relationship with Rocket, which is a little bit like your mom. It's like, it defines you in many ways, but you kinda hate it. So And, we found that was kind of interesting to see that there was this thing where we would sort of trash it and so there's a very critical of it, but on the flip side, it would also very often still be a part of reference. And it last, last, job that I had, the last position, basically my CTO was also from Rocket, also from Lazada in that sense. And, it's funny, like we kept on having discussions where it was, oh, if it was a Lozada, this guy would have been, you know, this and this would have happened, right? So, it still feels like a very, firm reference. And it is very driven.

And to me, I think that the point about culture would be, yes, it's kinda hard, but I think it's not that specific to, Rocket. What I saw in my time at Lazada was August. It was basically, this expectation of the fact that if you want to create a 1,000,000,000 worth of valuation within just a couple of years, in a sense of Machiavelli, if you want, it's not going to be nice every day. And, if really this is why you're here, then everyone's gonna have to be aligned towards this, especially senior management, and there will be very unpleasant moments. But those moments are not to be lived like moral feelings or things like that, but rather as an expectable product of that relentless drive for speed. Okay? And so I would sort of requalify things a little bit like this because I think this is more appreciable. You know?

I I I'm not putting them as saints at all. Right? I mean, there was a lot of, like, really funny characters down there. But I think what interesting in terms of culture is that not to look at the symptom, which is like, are people working really hard? People are Antoine fired very often. Companies are getting shut down with no for no reason, etcetera. But more a question of, like, what was the purpose of this?

And the problem was that that understanding to me, that expectation, that realization Matt, there's not a second to to leave and being very, very, very, very drilled down. Right? So that's one point. The second point with Rocket is there was a clear preference from the outset for, a certain cohort. Right? So 30 years plus minus 2, 3, top 4 management consulting, and, driven, sorry, but male white, and just hit the sack. Right? That's kinda true, and it it has impact on the culture in terms of framework and attitude, in terms of work.

I want to say heavy, but in terms of endurance, if you want. Right? So that that's true. But it all you know, it was not all great, I would say. You could, you know, you could criticize a little bit, some added some things of I can give you an example Matt to me was a bit of a criticism is that it was very regional heavy in Lazada, which means that, you know, it was operating in 6 countries, and you had an- the headquarters that would be mostly in Singapore, although you had other regional offices in Bangkok and in Hong Kong and, very regional heavy. So quite a lot of people being like the air roles of best practices and things like this. And because we're trying to grow so fast and so hard, not everything was going perfect and we were, you know, there were misses on objectives regularly, right?

Or there was basically problems didn't. You can put down this. And there would be that reflex of basically sending the regionals. And so everyone who was regional were spending their life on the plane. So what I mean by this is that not usual to hit 3 South Asian countries in a week, which is not very good for your, you know, life expectancy, but, and so there would be that appearance and that performance of being, like, you know, regional as being on the ground. On the flip side, when I was there and I remember sitting with with local, people in Indonesia in the office and they were like, yeah.

Well, you know, it's kinda funny. There's a new cohort of people that get parachuted every 3 months. They are trying to do what they think is right, but it's also a point about trying to shine from a regional standpoint because this is their rotation time. And then they leave and then there's no dog control that comes and, you know, like, shit goes on. And, and that sort of got me this impression and I think it's fairly correct and something to try to avert in the next I think I did was say that it felt very consulting consultancy ish, Matt drop boots on the ground. Yeah. So, we're gonna do it. Yes. Perfect. We've understood everything like 3 decks and a poof.

Everyone's here anymore. Right? And the fact that you can sort of almost reinvent the wheel regularly, and at a more Matt or organizational fashion, I think it also pointed out to a relative weakness of the local teams, which I think is didn't contribute very positively to the growth at some point. In the consultation context, every country is fairly specific. Take the example of Indonesia, everyone is very attracted by this from a venture capital perspective.

It's like 250,000,000 people. That's amazing. It's also like 14,000 inhabited islands. It's also like thousands of kilometers and horrible logistics. At least very so you can sort of figure everything out from a simple.

So that's for Rocket, I would say. As for the Alibaba context, very, very different. To to put again that into the best context possible, so relative to other people in the Lazada universe, I was relatively spared Matt least in the local back of vocabulary because I was in corners of the business that were a little less frontally impacted by this. And, and I'm not qualified to sort of do a generalization of the work ethics of the alley group. I mean, this is comp that's that's topic of a book probably, but I can just share a couple of observations. Right? I remember that there was something about focus and about drive, and there was something about a form of individual agency, basically, a form of almost extreme, you know, it's a bit closer to anything that critics of neoliberalism would say is to say, like, it's always you have all of the cars to do whatever you Matt.

So if you're not successful, it's your fault. That mentality, I think, was soon like, was popping up quite often. There was this urban legend that, it was about Jack Ma, the the founder, and, the urban legend wanted that someone had asked him what to do if, you know, they were trying to do something and, you know, they were not beginning to support, etcetera, like, could they escalate? And the legend once Matt, Jack Ma said, like, you know, it's very simple. You can come to me the moment you've went with a knife in the office of the person that was not supporting you and still that didn't work out. And so I think it's your urban legend. I think, you know, I'm pretty sure the original quote is probably a lot less brutal.

But on the flip side, it has echoed a lot of everyone who worked with, the early teams. There was a sense of, absolute drive and, you gotta make it work. And I think it's quite interesting because if from a leadership perspective, on a personally, I have this sort of a very empowering, like, I'm I'm telling everyone who works with me like one of the most important thing you can do is to know out of the house for help, and be very, you know, being mindful and being quite self aware in this is what will actually get you through pretty much everything, right? Because you can't achieve anything at all. And if you make that close to the Alibaba situation, then it gets a little bit tricky, right, because is escalation help? Is it how will how will you formulate your situate your situation and your problem statement so that it's not perceived as a lack of drive, but rather something where you need the support. Right? I don't know the answer for this, but that's an interesting thing.

Otherwise, I mean, there's a lot of spectrum. Right? But in suspicion and take between, like, common and conquer, like, you know, top down versus bottom up versus, like, product mindset, etcetera. So that, was that was not much of a tech company, to be honest. I think it was much more finance and sales led company. Didn't matter where I don't think it Matt so much whether what we're doing was right or was beautiful. What mattered was that it worked, and it worked in time.

On the Alibaba context, like, one of the experience that one of this thing I spend the most time on was a replatforming exercise, which is a nice word to say that basically removed the entire tech stack of a company that was acquired and we replaced it with Ali Technology. And here in terms of ethics, I think what was interesting was that we did that within 5 months, and we're talking about company, it's called Daraz.

It's active in South Asia. It was, at the time, a 1,000 employees in 5 countries, pretty fast. And and here, I think what was interesting is that it was a lot more tech driven, but not so much in a broad, like, mindset sort of what it was. There's a stack. The mandate is to get done with basically overturning everything within time. Go and do it. The value that we added was to question certain specific details of the implementation, And it was basically about what do we keep, what do we just throw away.

And, yeah, I think in terms of the basic, what we could see is that, I mean, the the, most of the technical team was still based in in in China. And factually, yes, they were working pretty much all the time. And, which in even for us, Matt that sort of supposedly, you know, hardcore work culture, I mean, we're still we're basically working 5 weeks days, 5 days weeks, sorry, while they were working 6 days weeks. But, you know, it's also got to be said in context that it was Matt people had been approached and sort of internally hired for this benefit of that specific project, and there were incentives that were fairly specific and that were also respected the fact they were stammerited. It's it's not like people would maybe in certain parts of the business, but in what I've seen, those guys would not normally do 6 days weeks, but in the context of the replatforming where there was a very hard deadline, like, okay. Well, I'll do what would you so does that does that help with the with the work culture?

Matt

I I I think, yeah, I think you you paint a pretty good picture and, like, differentiation between those companies. But the funny thing is, like, we are now in Zurich. You're a French guy bombing from around the Paris, and you were worked and lived in Hong Kong for quite a while, like, a few a few years, then in Tel Aviv. And now we we are in Zurich. Matt, your kind of, specialty is all about the product. Right? So I'm wondering, commercial product alignment because I have a feeling that this is always a problem. Right? There's so much push from the sales perspective, so much push for the new features.

Like, how do you do you deal with Matt? Or maybe do you see other issues that, you you address?

Antoine Fourmont-Fingal

Big topic. I've just I'm Bradley. I I think maybe we what's interesting is to dig just one thing, right, which could be called synchronicity. It it basically to me yeah. Yes. There are challenges about this, but it stems, in my view, mostly out of misalignment. And so I would basically say that the direction that is gonna improve this this this apparent disconnection between product and sales is in an alignment, and it starts with an alignment of objectives.

So the one thing that I'm trying to do every time and that we're doing in the last thing was cocreate the OKRs on a quarterly basis, between product and whichever function this product team was working with, whether it could be at the team level or the tribe level. So it was always an Matt of co creation. And I think to me, that's fairly fundamental because it helps a couple of things. It helps us, the commercial teams to feel heard. Right? And to get a sense of really getting there. It also helps the product guys to not leave on the cloud so much because it's great to do technology, but if it doesn't sell honestly, like, what's the point?

And it also helps to work together towards one of the challenging Matt, which is to go past revenue as your metric of success. Now that's the other thing also which I think is structurally kind of challenging is that it's very easy to get back to, okay, does it actually creates revenue? And don't get me wrong, I think creating revenue is probably the most important thing, right, alongside with, you know, basically margin and and and a bit. But my point is it's very rare that revenue is the one thing that you should track The wrecking. Think that in terms of objective setting, it's I'm pretty sure that you can always find something which is a little more fine grained. Right? So you can look at Matt, you know, within your value chain of delivering the service that eventually generates the value, there is most probably multiple steps involved. Right? So in any commerce concept, you're typically gonna talk about a funnel, but you can generalize basically whichever line of events and of different nodes of value are delivered.

And even if you wanna keep it to a purely commercial standpoint, there is also different ways to look at this. Right? We the type of like, the the moment in the life cycle of our users, whichever the all users are, the group of users. So and you can already get a little bit more fine grained rather than say, like, when drive revenue, you can basically drive up activity within a certain moment of the user life cycle, forested in user cohort. And you're already getting a little more specific. Right? And then I'm pretty sure that you can do that exercise systematically. And if you do that exercise systematically with commercial teams or which any business team for that Matt, and you will end up with HRs which are not bullshit because they're not just revenue which you cocreated, which is that then when we're gonna start to look at the problem statement and you put your statements and say, like, okay.

What do we do about this? There's a much higher chance that the commercial plan for the quarter and the product plan for the quarter are not antagonistic.

They are cliff inflammatory. Right? Because we're trying to hit the same thing. Right? And, I would go as far as to say that, the product teams okay so really, like, I think the the o of the o car should be the same. The KRs should have some overlap and should have something that are specific. To give you a very specific example. Right? If I'm trying to if I think the driving revenue this quarter is about Matt changing the amount of sellers I have on my platform. Right? And if we come to agree that part of this comes through, the ability to deploy is a, a sales team on the ground.

The product team is not gonna hire those guys. Okay? It might be a key. You might get to the point of saying, like, we actually need to have 10 extra people on the ground every week. Possible. The product team is not gonna help out with this. Right? So it doesn't make sense to get this key to be relevant to the product team.

However, the the objective which is that we need to radically change the landscape and the volume of setters on the platform, this is something which is relevant to the product team. And then decals might be different. Right? Maybe they're gonna help with, the ability to recruit or the ability to train people really rapidly. Whatever that comes. Right? But fundamentally it's this, it's synchronicity.

So basically 2 things, it's like co create and, you know, whoever tells you that, you know, it's all about revenue, yes but no. And, recently when we when we discussed, you mentioned really interesting concept. I mean, the product has more principles than books,

Matt

maybe in Coachella or you don't know.

Antoine Fourmont-Fingal

Yeah. So, I mean, that's we're gonna try to make it not philosophical, but, we're having this conversation with, in with a group of friends and there was someone in the room who was a little bit, earlier in his career as a product leader. And, and there was a lot of questions about which framework and which book and which tools. And and and we came back to say, like, well, you know, the thing with product in a way is that it's exactly not that product specific. Like, it's a lot of mindset. There's this thing about condition improvement. There is this sort of humility and this belief that most things we're gonna do are not gonna be completely true.

They might be really horribly bad even, and it's about trying to figure that out as fast as possible. And it feels that doing this through an experiment and through, like, quantitative data is a sort of Matt often a safer way to do that rather than to go out of gut feels. Right? There is, you know, belief in flexibility and agility, things like Matt, but none of that is very specific to product. I mean like you would actually wish that most operations team in a manufacturing plant actually sort of work on the same principles. Right? And there is a clear affiliation of things.

And so what we're saying is, that there is, like, product is sort of it seems that product is, getting to a point which is kind of mainstream in a way. There's probably never been that many product people, you know, or wanna be product people. And so there is also and it also has become a label. And in a way, what what what I was saying here is, and some people are probably gonna shoot me down on this, but it feels a bit like agile. It just started this money show set as a set of principles that would probably be applied in many different ways. But now it's a 300 k worse, you know, training sold by corporate to other corporates. And I'm not saying this is wrong, but I'm saying that it feels that it's difficult to remain principle based when there is so much, like, structure in place. Right? And and it's book, and there's this book, and there's this author, and, you know, it feels a bit religious at some point. Right? There, like, there is the holy book, and there is the holder of the book, and there's the gospel, etcetera.

And what I'm trying to say, I think, with product is, I think as for the professional, we should be a bit mindful about this because, a a lot of or value add to the to any business is a bit that skepticism and that that critical mindset, which is a bit agnostic to this formalism. Right? And I'm I don't wanna throw away all of the all the books and frameworks, like, you know, I'm using some myself. I also think that, trying to slap frameworks onto your reality is very often a factor of learning. But it's like, don't mistake the tree for the forest. Right? I mean, you can do perfect OKRs.

You can do, like, this perfect sort of experimentation thing. It's like in a lab, you know, like, it's not because you have a perfect lab in Harvard that you're necessarily gonna get up with something great. Like, if your thing goes right in the wall. And and so that's the thing. Like, product is not mechanistic. You can't reduce it to, like, a set of practices. It there is something about mindset.

And the 2 things I would add, maybe in a bit of provocative manner is you gotta be especially careful because on top of this, none of this actually is, in my view, really protecting the existence of a product function, Because the moment business people, salespeople even, start to say that, you know, it's fine. I can talk to engineers. And they can have a meaningful, you know, linguistically okay dialogue with engineers. There's a huge barrier of entry which is gonna just vanish. Because let let's be, you know, realistically speaking, a lot of companies product are from a very basic standpoint. The only people that are okay to talk with engineers. Okay? There is, like, you know, the Polish guy at the back, you know, with, like, crazy tattoos and the huge headset.

It looks a bit scary. No one wants to talk to to this person. So, okay, like, you know, the product is gonna take care of it and try to sort of figure out what this person does, how do we influence this person. The moment this is disappearing, like, why do you need a product in the first place? I can exemplify this in a way, like, I I've been both on the business side and the product side all across, like, my short career. And, if I end up, you know, in a couple of years in a go to market, you know, commercial role, I will have reflexes saying, like, to tell the product to do I don't need you to talk to engineers. Okay? So you're gonna have to provide me another value than just like, oh, you know, just talking to engineers.

And you come back to principles. In a way, you come back with, you know, what I would expect if I was a business leader from the product guy is to say, my functional area Matt probably induces biases around my way of viewing the world because I have a very specific value to provide to the business in the oil the oil chain. So as a public person, you're here to counterbalance this with a horizontal view of the world. Right? The second point that I would say, which is a bit I'm just gonna be mindful is so as mainstream and as cool, like, product seems to be, we all also starting to get feedback about people being actually, having bad experience with product. And people were saying, like, we I even had a story which was quite interesting. Someone was so a friend was working within a, you know, a I think it was a public company on top of this.

I met that person that was I don't remember the title, like, improvement or something. And that person was basically doing product. It was really about, like, trying to find the right insights, formulating the insights, structuring them, helping people to take the right decisions. Matt takes with product. Like, we're here to take good decisions or any more people take good decisions. And my friend was like, oh, man, it's great. Like, you know, like, this is totally product.

And the person had a very violent and what's the reaction, but no. I'm not product. Like, product is the other douchebag here.

I'm none of this. And so I think we need to be careful because there's there's a plausible link between this dogmatism threat, the mainstream fact, and this very emotional reaction of, like, well, you know, those are, you know, these these dogmatic guys that under the protection of software is eating the world as enthusiastic as I am and will probably remain for the product mindset and this horizontality, this humility, and skepticism. There's a clear risk of the madism and of, you know, entrenchment of of something that I think is detrimental on

Matt

multiple levels. Makes sense? Makes sense. I want to ask you because you, like, you have pretty good view on, Asian market. You spend there, quite a bit, and you still work with those guys, there. And, you know, last year, it was, like, a huge recession in big tech. So for the first time, we have seen it after so many years.

And I'm just wondering, like like, do you experience it in, in Asia? Have you heard from friends there? Like, what influence it has or the companies there? Yeah. So,

Antoine Fourmont-Fingal

I can share things from the Southeast Asian context and the Central Asian context. From a Southeast Asia perspective, I also hear where things are difficult. A lot of people were laid off difficult markets. It is to be contextualized. I think it's still, you know, it's it's related. Right? So maybe it's it's still grows, but a bit less fast as it did at some point.

There's clearly a lot of people on the bench talking to friends in Singapore, etcetera. But there's also, like, a lot of smaller movements here and there. So Singapore has recently there was a bit of a realistic correction to it, which got it to be a lot more expensive, so people sort of left. There's also Hong Kong where a lot of people left because they were scared. And so some some of those guys are spread in the region and so are generating other things. So Sachin realized, but, you know, recession is probably half fact, half belief. And, at least the belief part I would say that at least the belief part in the Singapore context looks plausible.

From a central Asian perspective in the Middle East, this is I'm not I I don't remember really anything about recession. I think it's more geopolitics. As you know, the 24th February 2022 changed everything, and it had pretty big repercussion on the region. And typically, like, the central Asian area became a lot more relevant, interesting for Russian interests, which are not able to flow westwards anymore. And talk about something that I know from an Uzbekistan perspective, actually, it's not the recession is completely irrelevant. On the contrary, it's completely booming. And, out of a lot of Russian investment, but not only, and it's super dynamic.

It's not necessarily true of all of the adjacent markets, but it's also no. Actually, Matt probably is still true. It's just that it materialized a little bit differently. And, Uzbekistan is, I think, the locusts have a a bit of a more specific enthusiasm out of its size and population, the fact that we were still closed until until 2016. And so, like, the rent is just quite crazy, versus places like Kazakhstan was is is a bit richer in terms of natural resources and and started its sort of development, or, like, the most recent phase development, like, a bit earlier. And as for Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, they're smaller countries. I mean, Turkmenistan is anyway closed. In Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, those are, like, smaller countries.

But even Kyrgyzstan, there's really interesting development there. So I I don't think that recession really resonates in that region. On the flip side, think about places like Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, and and Pakistan, that was tougher. I mean, Lebanon and Pakistan, for sure, those two countries are hit by not only, like, a global standard, but local challenges.

And and, yeah. I think the bullet point of this would be Matt, in Southeast Asia, probably Matt least a perceived challenge and is materialized by a lot of layoffs. And at some point, those people are looking for jobs, etcetera, and it's just harder to just move on. And in the Central Asian Middle East context, not relevant at all Central Asia in my view, but, however, a much deeper geopolitical impact on things. And, the influence of China, the influence of Russia into this much, much bigger. I'm wondering what what was your biggest challenge in your career regarding product delivery, maybe, like, anything related to your career, and Antoine you have learned from it? Someone recently told me that I was really, really good, and maybe I was even obsessed of putting myself in the shit so that I could actually do fun stuff.

And that comes to mind because I'm like, okay. Like, everything has been challenges. Right? Maybe there's quite there's many different things. Right? But if, I'm gonna reorient the question a little bit and say, like, what's a bit of personal challenge probably, so far. And maybe the one thing that I can share, as a as a bit of a story, which I think was, was fairly recent in that got me somewhere.

2022 in August, 11th August to be exact, I had to sack 7 people out of 21 on the team, and within a few weeks, I lost another 3. And that got me within, within the big months. In August, September 2022, they got me to lose around I think I calculated I lost 44% of my of my team effective. Right? And and and that was far from nice. Right? I I have vivid memories of, you know, having a call at the end of the day and just basically getting 1 on camera, which we're doing quite a lot Matt frequently and basically telling them that despite the respect and the immersion I had for what they had done, The time Matt this time I'd come, and, and I was, I was basically giving them their freedom back. Right? And, and so a lot of anger, a lot of also internecine sort of fights around this about I mean, it was I thought that one thing was difficult is there was an an attempt, I think, with this in the management to sort of not really bear responsibility collectively, which is shit.

But what was interesting though is 1 year later, I came to realize from talking to someone that, the team actually, not only had we managed to keep the boat afloat, although, you know, it's like, but we also got better at what we were doing. And so we had not cut a lot of things. We just had got collectively a lot more intentionally. And I think that to me is the biggest learning in a way is we had my point is we had reached something as a team We've got to a point where we're Antoine fragile or basically Brazilian who had burst in ambiguity enough Matt such a Matt shock in a sense. Not only it didn't stop us, but it also actually got us to improve our in our craft. And you're, like, referring on to Nassim Taleb and, you know, the antifragile and all of the things. That was, you know, out of the, like, a really challenging experience where, basically, we lost a lot of people.

We managed to basically I managed to capture 3 extra resources after losing 9. 2 in generally that were that had never been PMs Matt we had to train on the spot basically within a couple of weeks. Another one where he'll magically appear right at the, the correct moment.

And, you know, we made it. And so what was interesting is k. Like, we got maybe a bit tougher, but instead of basically traveling down instead of, like, starting to not to do half of what we wanted to do or starting to do it in a not, you know, in a non quality way, factually, we we just kinda got better. And the funny thing is, a few people that I shared that with were like, oh, yeah. Matt basically you basically had way too much Matt on your team. Oh, like, the people are doing nothing. And I personally don't believe this because to give you a sense, right, so we went from with 15 product teams, and we never had 15 product people to actually take care of each of the teams. Right? And we got from, I think, 11 to 7 Product product.

And so it it it's like I hardly can believe that, you know, in all context where we didn't even have enough people to take care of all of the teams that were like proper practices with the business team in front. It was really a question of Matt. I think it was a question of practices and a question of collaboration. A question of concentrating what Matt, basically, and and sort of eating your own fucking bathroom. If you, allow me the expression, then you see, like, storm's coming. It's gonna be tough. But, we don't wanna take that as an excuse to sort of, like, you know, throw everything in the wind.

What matters now is to be quite selective and very disciplined about what we wanna do. It entails upgrading people. It entails training people right on the spot and being very in you know, again, intentional about their decisions. So the cap off would be what started as, like, a fairly kinda traumatic experience, like, watched, you know, very Matt, expanded, just so many people out, ended up, yeah, ended up at a catalyst and a and a sort of money moment that kinda prove the fact that we're just not serious people, we're actually a team, maybe we can even call it a collective Matt was able to get better through adversity. And to me, I think it basically got me to think that this is what you wanna do as a leader. You want you wanna concentrate on building those teams Matt even if shit hits the fan, they actually got better. And, so I'm gonna diverge for a second here because it's kind of related and funny.

I had this argument with a friend. It was about the next week's way and, their purpose practice of finding the bottom 10% of the people every year or every semester in November. Right? And I was like, this is shit. And my argument is this. If you if you tell people you're gonna fire the bottom 10% of them every year, you you instill and maintain a climate of ambiguity and fear. You're gonna basically keep people on their feet. Right? And I understand part of this because I do think that you have to get people past their comfort zone so that they actually get a chance of being antifragile and have a chance of growing in the face of adversity rather than, you know, cracking.

However, I don't think fighting them is the best thing. In the sense of there is basically the there's a lot of criticism, but it feels like a bit indiscriminate. On the contrary, I do believe in a bit like a elite sport coach of taking your team way past this comfort zone to a point where they might be close to breaking and maybe I sound like Rocket here, but I'm I'm also calibrated pain basically. And I think it also applies to teams to say, as long as you have their back and you're you're generally trying to calibrate, you will fail sometimes, but if you're genuinely trying, it's okay to have, you know, sweats, blood, and tears to an extent to an extent because it will definitely make them a better collective. Makes sense? And the act of firing the bottom 10%, to me, it does it it it it creates part of this environment, but it doesn't create for the teams. It only created for the individuals.

And and so I said, like, you may push some people up, but you're not gonna create a horizontal emergent property. At least that would be my belief.

End of aggression.

Matt

Sorry. No. It makes sense. Matt makes sense.

Antoine, so I have the last question. I'm just wondering, could you recommend any books, resources, conferences that have been particularly influential on your career Matt you had maybe this moment? Right. Right. I'm a

Antoine Fourmont-Fingal

I read quite a lot. So, but so I I'd say a few things. So I I quoted Nassim Taleb. I think that, even if you think that he writes like a brick and it maybe is a brick, the thing is that is it's probably true. What's equally probably true is that it's a very smart brick, and there is a couple of things here. So I can relate a lot of basic conceptions through a lot of the thing that he's explained. It's nothing new, you know, like, you can do and do Marcus Aurelius meditation since you prefer to have the hard stoic things, but I think he puts it into a modern context, which which is interesting.

So I would I would definitely recommend that. It's like and it's gonna sound a little bit, like, maybe funny, but, I would recommend everyone to read Machiavelli and to read around Machiavelli. So, I mean, everyone probably would have a good time reading your trains, but I would not stop there. I would try to read articles around Machiavelli and articles also related or directed the text of other texts from Machiavelli because I think that is vastly misunderstood. I think Matt, basically, Machiavelli Israeli said envy goes on the contrary. I think Machiavelli argues for a very fine grain evaluation of what emergency means, and this is something that everyone in our society can benefit from, in my opinion. And I think that Machiavelli is a wants us to get pseudo emergency.

He also and it's related to the firing story. I think he warns us against too much selling and not enough showing, and, it's something that I I come back to quite often. And, if I wanna make it 3, very classic, but think fast and slow. Von Kenman is something Matt, unfortunately, for you cannot be avoided. It's, yeah, it's it's just it it there's a lot of fundamentals. And maybe I'm gonna add a false bonus because it's a little less classic and maybe it could be useful to people that are from the product's stance. I've recently read a book called Range by someone called Dave Epstein, and I was quite reluctant at the beginning, such like another American business book with, you know, like 10 pages worth of content and 200 pages worth of, like, blah blah.

It's very readable, and I think there's a lot of pretty good points about how we learn, about the value of drawing connection between disciplines, about history a couple of cool stories about how things were developed. There's cool stories about typically about chess and AI.

There's a good story about Nintendo. It was very inspiring. I find there was a couple of moment where, like, okay. I basically am not gonna try to write my one pager anymore. I'm just gonna send people reading, like, chapter 11 because it basically it it it does a really good job at explaining couple of things that I I sort of would believe as, fundamental such as the generalist part of product. Right? So that's something that I would recommend. Awesome. Thank you very much, Anton, for the very interesting talk. Cheers. Follow Matt on LinkedIn and subscribe to the Better Tech Leadership newsletter.

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