#41 Product management principles & work-life lessons from building a Unicorn with Martin Henk 🇪🇪 (Pipedrive, Eventornado)

Martin Henk is the CTO and Co-Founder of Eventornado, a software solution for organising online hackathons and challenges. Martin is also a partner and angel investor at Honey Badger Capital, however most people will recognise him as one of the Co-Founders of an Estonian Unicorn, Pipedrive.

In this episode we do a deep-dive into product management, covering everything from best practices and building efficient product teams to common mistakes. We also talk about life after a unicorn exit, the current projects Martin is engaged in as well as overall work-life balance throughout different stages of one's career.

The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps

[01:45] - ON PRODUCT AND WHY PIPEDRIVE WAS SO SUCCESSFUL

• Creating a new user persona
• Focusing obsessively with the main end-user
• Super narrow product focus
• Saying no to immediate distractionary opportunities
• Unfair advantage from founders with industry experience

[09:30] - ON BUILDING YOUR FIRST PRODUCT TEAM

• Keep it simple, keep it small
• Avoiding premature scaling
• Focusing on customer feedback for PM
• Turning chaos into discipline
• Optimal product team size
• Enabling complete focus on the mission
• Cutting meetings

[13:50] - ON PRODUCT MISTAKES AND MEASURING PROGRESS

• Introducing too advanced procedures
• Scaling up technology prematurely
• Avoiding vanity metrics
• Focus on result-based metrics
• A/B testing

[17:05] - ON PRODUCT MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES

• Tailoring the process to specific company
• Keeping product focus
• Regularly communicate vision
• Best product examples

[24:00] - ON LIFE AFTER UNICORN EXIT

• Resting & investing
• Motivation to jump back in startups

[27:00] -  ON GREEN INVESTING

• Investing in Estonian forests
• Looking for ways to monetize without cutting down

[30:20] -  ON EVENTORNADO MARKET OPPORTUNITY

• Managing and organising hackathons as a challenge
• 100s of hackathons daily around the world
• Future of hackathons

[33:55] – ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP LESSONS FROM PIPEDRIVE

• Maintaining focus
• Knowing the right company size for yourself
• Evaluating if you need outside funding or not

[39:00] - ADVICE TO YOUR 20 YEAR OLD SELF

• How to approach work-life balance (hint - it’s overrated)
• Taking care of your health

To reach out to Martin use:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinhenk/?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_miniProfile%3AACoAAABrLbQBKuFPpBecxKVhTNLY1loCoUOQs-s 

Website: https://badger.ee 

Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/ 

Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/

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