As the head of Product Management at Denodo, Pablo Alvarez-Yañez is responsible for formulating product strategy, gathering customer feedback, and coordinating with engineering, marketing, and sales to execute on that strategy. Here he shares some of his top product management lessons with Samantha Meazell, including:

• How much should an important customer influence your product roadmap?

• Should you be glad, or worried, if you don’t have any competitors?

• Who’s fault is it when your customer fails?

Samantha Meazell (Slide UX): Hi Pablo! What insights about your audience have surprise you most?

Pablo Alvarez-Yañez (Denodo): As a product manager for a software company, your clients can surprise you very often. That surprise can go both ways. Sometimes they surprise you with varying novel scenarios that you haven't thought of before. It’s very interesting because you can capitalize on that and share that knowledge with others [on your team]. But in many cases they surprise you sort of on the other end. They surprise you by doing things wrong. I think one thing you need to understand is that software always needs to be foolproof. You always need to make sure that all those potential scenarios you didn’t think of are covered, otherwise you’re going to get those unpleasant surprises.

SM: What decisions have you had to go back and revisit based on things you’ve learned along the way?

PA-Y: Well, I joined the company when we were still in the startup stage. At that point, you sort of need to pay close attention to how much you are willing to adapt yourself to the needs of a specific customer. At that point, when you are starting, they becomes very important. But if you sort of veer the path of your evolution too much in that specific directions, you’ll inherit it a lot of capabilities that maybe are not what you wanted. When you’re developing enterprise software, capabilities that you add, you need to maintain for the coming years. That’s what’s called technical debt, and it costs a lot of effort in terms of maintenance, in terms of regression testing, things like that. So in retrospect, maybe some of those things were better left behind. Maybe the cost of that acquisition didn’t pay off in terms of what you had to do later to maintain those capabilities.

SM: Thinking about where you are today professionally, what advice would you give to your younger self if you could?

PA-Y: Well, I think professionally, something that I didn’t do back in the day. and now it’s, well, intrinsically part of my job, is paying close attention to what your competitors are doing. You don't want to fall into the same mistakes. Another very important thing to realize is, if you don't have competitors—if you are all alone doing something, you’re probably wrong. It's more likely that you are wrong than that you just had this crazy idea that nobody else had before. Most times people already thought about what you’re thinking before, and if they didn’t go in that direction, it’s for a reason. So be very careful when you think you’re there re-discovering the wheel, because you’re more likely going to fail than to succeed.

SM: Any parting words of wisdom or or hard-learned lessons you’d like to share with our audience of user-focused product and marketing leaders?

PA-Y: Yeah, you need to embrace the fact that the customer is always right. It sounds sort of cliche, but when you translate that into software, that means you can complain that the customer is doing something a particular way and that’s why they are failing. They are failing because your software allow them to do that and that very often means that you didn’t design the UI properly, or you didn’t put that app on rails to make sure you didn’t go in that direction, or the documentation wasn’t good enough ... it’s your fault. You need to realize that. Complaining about how they are doing things in an unexpected way, or a way that sounds “stupid” doesn’t really help. It’s your fault. And the faster you realize that, the better.

SM: Finally, any closing words on how Slide UX might have contributed to your success?

PA-Y: Absolutely. In software, you soon realize that engineers, including myself, are not great at designing user experience. So for us getting the help of Slide UX to do that analysis, to work on a design, and have that user experience expertise, has definitely been very important. Especially because we see a shift in the market where software, especially technical software, is transitioning to a scenario where less technical users are becoming more and more important. So if your software is very tech-y, is very complex, has lots of options, that’s great for those technical users, but for less technical business users, that’s not going to fly. So finding that balance and having the expertise to help with that, it’s very, very important. Especially, as I said, with these trends.

And having that support has gotten us, I think, a lot of good customer feedback; good recognition in the market. We just made it into the leader section of the Gartner magic quadrant, which is like the Oscars for what we do. So, yeah, I mean it’s being a great experience and I think that user experience focus is definitely something worth investing in.

SM: Thank you so much for sharing your time and insights with us Pablo. I hope you have a wonderful day!

About For Humans’ Sake

If you’re passionate about making other people’s lives easier through great user experiences, you’ll enjoy For Humans’ Sake, a video series from Slide UX that curates wisdom and helpful insights from experienced product leaders in a bite-sized format.

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