EP #321 - Laurent Decrue: Iterating Your Product To Greatness

About Laurent Decrue:

Laurent Decrue is the co-founder of the moving company MOVU and the software company Holycode, and the former CEO at Bexio. Currently he is active as CFO and co-CEO at Holycode. He holds an MBA from the University of Basel and previously worked at DeinDeal.

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Throughout his time at MOVU, Bexio, DeinDeal and Holycode, Laurent observed time and time again the following product building mistakes:

• Delegating product responsibility to a CTO who isn’t familiar with the necessary product architecture that needs to be set up early in the game;
• Not allowing your product team to grow as much as it needs to, when it needs to — i.e., not hiring a product owner but instead having one of the founders do that job part-time, on top of all their other responsibilities;
• Picking a technical co-founder without consulting with CTOs whose technical opinion you respect.

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What do all great products have in common, regardless of industry?

• They result from a huge focus on user experience;
• They come from working with a large set of data very early on;
• They were iterated continuously through fast product cycles.

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When it comes to KPIs which can keep product iteration on track, Laurent warns you not to focus too much on stuff like revenue or absolute number of users, but instead conversion rate, which points to stumbling blocks along your funnel regardless of your user scale.

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What are 4 key sub departments in a product team?

• UX research;
• Data/BI analytics;
• Requirements engineering;
• End tests.

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How can you cultivate a strong culture not only within the product team, but the whole team overall?

• The founders need to sit down and reflect on what the company values are. Write them down;
• Values should be emphasized during the hiring and onboarding process;
• Respect for company values should be taken into consideration when assessing someone’s yearly performance. Sometimes, disrespect of values is a good reason to let someone go;

• Company values should be revisited yearly, as the team grows.

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Memorable quotes:

"Values have to come from the founders. Otherwise it doesn’t work."

"You have to be naive when starting a business. If you actually knew how hard it was going to be, you simply wouldn’t do it."

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