How to lead an agile transformation as a PM: lessons learned at Bitso with Alejandro Romo
When Alex joined Bitso as one of their first real Product Manager a year and a half ago, the company started its digital transformation. The founders and the Tribe leads heard about the Spotify model. Consequently, they noticed their ways of ideations and planning were not scalable. The pandemic hit, crypto boomed. Bitso had to adjust and be ready for the new normal. And numbers show the company did it pretty well as they just announced a new funding, making their valuation increase to 2.2 billion dollars! Let’s have a look at the behind-scene, narrated by their employee number 90.
How I met Alex
Alex is one of the few that tries to build the Product Management community in Mexico City. I met him through one of the Product School meetups he organized a couple of years ago. Alex is always ready for a new challenge and isn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves to reach his objectives. When you see him, he seems calm, very meticulous, and listens well to others. NDLR: Product Management is still a new concept for Mexico City. Start-ups are flourishing, and you can find great engineers. But good, seasoned product managers are still scarce. However, people showing up to the meetups are hungry and want to learn, which is a great point. It wouldn’t be a surprise if, in the years to come, Mexico City becomes the number one spot in Latin America for Product.
The interview: tell me about your move to Bitso and what it’s like to transform your ways of working.
JL: Could you start by giving us some context on your company and what was it like when you joined?
AR: With their seven years in the market, Bitso has become the largest cryptocurrency fintech start-up in Latam. The company enables crypto transactions via its website and applications. While business is flourishing in Mexico, they opened the Argentinian market recently and targeted Brazil as their next challenge. I think we can explain the company’s success with several factors:
- The right profile mix between their founders: design, business, and engineering. Each of them contributes on day-to-day to the excellence for their respective area
- Their desire to put the customers at the center of their decisions
- Regulation: the company follows Gilbratar’s and Mexico’s regulations, an important point in the Fintech environment. ** Actually, by focusing on regulations and offering high-security standards to their customers, it has been really hard for other startups to compete with Bitso.
- The interest increase in cryptocurrency worldwide.
These led the company to several series of investments. They raised 62 millions of dollars last year and just announced a new serie of investment of 250 millions of dollars, making it a company worth 2.2 B! (https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/05/latam-crypto-exchange-bisto-raises-250m-from-tiger-coatue-at-a-2-2b-valuation/)
JL: How exciting! Now, what role do you play at Bitso?
AR: I joined them at the end of 2019, as their employee number 90. Since that moment, it’s been a rollercoaster! Being one of the first official PM to join the company, I have been in charge of several different projects, mainly on the user experience within the Account squad. Those projects include security, password management, but also regulatory products and settings in general. I have also worked on acquisition in the Onboarding squad. My customers’ journey’s goal is to get to their “AHA-moment” of buying their first crypto. To do so, the enablers are wire transfers.
After a year and a half in the company, I am proud to say that I have been supporting them in their digital transformation.
JL: Thank you for the information, which helps me think of the following question: can you tell us a little more about the Product organization?
AR: As we said before, Bitso took the Spotify model as a basis and adapted it to their needs: we have different tribes, in which we have several squads and chapter leads. I am part of the consumer tribe, leading the product for acquisition and growth.
We are now more than 280 people in the company and want to duplicate this number by the end of the year. So obviously, we had to adapt and adjust our expectations to scale our business. And to be honest, we still are! We are better than yesterday, but tomorrow we’ll be even better.
JL: What a growth, impressive! How did this impact your day-to-day and transformation?
AR: I joined a team that had the ambition to be more agile. Naturally, I felt compelled to participate in the effort. They were still using waterfall as a development framework. So with the help of the VP of engineering, who joined a few weeks before me, the Tribes’ leads, and the founders, our first challenge was to implement agile methodologies and the SCRUM framework. I helped in setting up the rituals and promoting them with the engineering teams: daily stand-up, retrospectives, demo, etc. In parallel, I configured all the tools we were using, such as JIRA. While we were still trying to define the agile roles in the company, we asked for help. Then, the HR team recruited someone to lead the agile transformation. Bitso has a Head of Agile in their teams. Thanks to that impulse, we could go to the next level and start designing our tribes, squads, and chapters.
The founders already had a vision for the company for the next 10 years. From there, we defined our mission: make crypto useful.
Bitso has been leveraging cryptocurrencies since their humble beginnings but is not closed to new financial products. Their vision has shifted towards completely revolutionizing the financial system.
Being at the center of this transformation and having my voice heard by the leadership has been a great feeling. With the pandemic, we knew we had to change our ways of working, and we had to experiment fast. That’s what the agile framework enabled us to do: with several iterations in the digitalization process, we kept getting better.
JL: How about you, as a PM? How did this impact your perception of product development?
AR: I have always thought of Product Management as creating your own business or making a physical product. You have to own it to make the best out of it. Internally, I always say that I cannot decide if I don’t have the full context. Research and thinking of your customer are keys to deliver the best quality in your products. The passion I have built around the job is what makes me being good at it. While I am not the CEO of the product, as people in the area are debating, I am giving my best to polish it as it was my own business. Bitso is still looking at ways to improve that ownership feeling, following Amazon or Netflix’s examples.
I always feel like a baker who needs to adjust his recipes to sell to more customers and retain the existing ones. Internal and external feedback are keys to my growth! Selling is important, but the process of baking, the way you promote your final product, the way you maintain healthy finances on your purchases, will help you build your success. I guess it should be natural for a PM to feel bad when someone discovers a bug in your workflow. You think of ways to have avoided it and new ways of working to detect issues early. Not to voice in the debate of being the CEO of your product, the discipline itself is still in a grey area. That’s why I am not surprised when I see that numerous PMs have side projects and become entrepreneurs after all.
JL: Inspiring. With that said, any tips on how to maintain a healthy backlog between new projects, technical debts, bugs for our readers?
AR: The key is to communicate clearly on the benefits and the problems to be solved. You have to include the team bandwidth in the scale too. Our prioritization process is a combination of those 3. I said it before, it is never easy to say no, to a stakeholder or even someone from the product team. But, if we share common objectives, and support them with data it is easier to understand a decision. My role is to communicate what we cannot do and the reasons why. While Bitso gives full power to Product Managers to make those informed decisions, we are trying to work on engineering empowerment to decide as a team, including designers too.
A tool that helped us improve in that area is the demos. We open them to anyone in the company: product, business, finance, etc. We collect a lot of feedback. We take follow-up actions that help us refine our backlog. I also attend other product demos to adjust my backlog if needed and see dependencies.
JL: Wow, demos open to the entire company, these are making an impact for sure! Thank you for this tip. Apart from rituals, you also mentioned frameworks, anything drastic that Bitso implemented recently?
AR: Let’s talk about OKRs. When I joined, there was a roadmap meeting with the entire company to pitch in new ideas for each quarter. While I found this process interesting because it involved all the company, it was not scalable. With the curiosity and interests of our founders, and the coordination between Tribe leads and the Strategy department, we came across the OKR framework. We thought: how can we implement that at Bitso?
Implementing OKRs was a product-led approach to make sure we were keeping our customers in the center of our decisions. We set up objectives at the Tribe and Squad levels.
To do so, Product Managers and leaders met with the different business areas and shared the needed data to agree on common objectives. What is the right number of objectives to set up? How are we reviewing them? To be honest, it is still in process, but it has shown increasing interest from everyone at the company.
We still have our roadmap meetings each quarter, and that’s where we perform our OKRs review at the company level. The focus is more on how we’ve moved the needle on some specific objectives and how we can adjust for the following quarters. Of course, we mention projects linked to these, but we don’t spend much time on the project list. Instead, we focus on the objectives and problems. And then, it is up to the different squads to work on the solution approach. Inside the squad, we also do several OKR check-ins to make sure we are on track or not. And PMs have the responsibility to communicate with the stakeholders how we are doing, and why we cannot include more initiatives in a given period. Saying “no” is the most crucial part of our job.
JL: What did the stakeholder think about it?
AR: Timing has been the key. The pandemic hit, and we all started to work from home, so we needed a common objective, our North-star metrics. While at some companies, it might be hard for stakeholders to give up controls on what’s next, it hasn’t been such a challenge at Bitso. All employees are committed to set up the right objectives and reach them. Of course, it is hard to say no to a specific project. If you back up your decision with data, and put it into the global perspective, it is easier to agree on a strategy.
I am not saying that everything we propose as frameworks or ideas is always going in the right direction. We’ve embraced experimentation: if it makes sense at the company level, then we are trying it! Bisto employees are trusting the process and actively participating in it.
JL: That is great to hear! After all those changes and following the questions you already answered, would you think that Bitso is a product-centric company?
AR: I can clearly say that we are on the right path. It wasn’t the case when I joined the company, but the market moved so fast that we needed to adapt. Crypto and Fintech are booming markets. How can we acquire more customers and retain the ones we have? Competition is hard. At first, the teams focused on delivering the promises made to investors to make sure they could raise more money. Also, they had to work on some regulatory aspects that enable your company to survive. Once we completed these initiatives, and Bitso raised enough money, we wanted to make good use of it. With the OKR interactive process, and by including more UX research and discoveries, we started thinking and acting “customer-first”. We needed to use time wisely, and be more flexible in our thought-process. Again, the company helped us by hiring UX agencies to walk us through the Discovery and Research processes. As a result, objectives are shared and set up by several areas, backed by Product and Design data. Product leads initiatives and projects. Leadership validates if they fit into the global mission and OKRs set up. Don’t get me wrong, we are not one of these empowered teams mentioned by Marty Cagan, but we surely are on the right way to become one!
JL: For sure, that’s an exciting moment for any company. What was the support you received from the HR department in all this?
AR: They have been learning and adapting with us! I must say that they did a pretty good job to capture what the company needed to go the extra mile. First, they attracted new talents with key roles. I already mentioned the VP of engineering, the Head of agile for instance. But they also included specific profiles in their team. Someone dedicated to recruiting the best PM joined the team recently. Our collaboration with that person helped us ace our interviews and “profiling”. We’ve recruited more than 10 PMs in total and reviewed the whole hiring process thanks to that new person. As Reed Hastings from Netflix would say:
To make the right product and features, you have to get the best talents and retain them.
They also helped us share more transparency and implement a feedback culture. 1:1 meetings are becoming a habit between managers and employees. Assessments are done quarterly. 360 interviews and surveys are provided to anyone in the company, to help them improve at their current role. We design and review frequently the career paths from there. Finally, the HR team is ready to finance any training that will help anyone get to the next level.
JL: HR people, please take notes…
Before closing the interview, I would like to ask you some general questions: any interesting book or article on this subject you can recommend to us?
Recently, I read a lot of Product Operations Manager articles. I find them very interesting! A new role is coming to the product world, and we have to embrace it. I guess this type of position will be more interesting for big organizations.
Also, I am still reading Empowered by Marty Cagan. We all know Marty. We all wish we had him to drive the product mindset in our companies. Inspired was already a success, but what makes Empowered great is that it is full of clear actions for leaders to make Product Managers and their organizations thrive.
JL: And if you had to choose a couple of «cracks» that have inspired you in your journey, who would they be?
AR: First, I follow the Miro, Airbnb, and Spotify PM leads on LinkedIn and other social networks. Their focus on design is what has always inspired me. Similarly, I have been a fan of Gibson Biddle, ex-CPO at Netflix. His way of speaking of Product strategy is inspiring. Our scope inside Product Management is so vast! And he made the best of one part of the product journey: how to set up the right strategy. It is amazing to see that he left Netflix more than 10 years ago but still shares incredible anecdotes and content from his time over there.
JL: To finish, what are the subjects you would like ProductCracks to address in the upcoming articles? How can we make our content valuable to you and your teams?
AR: I would love to discover more on new Product roles, different from the original PM: Product Marketing Manager, ProductOps, Product Data Manager, etc. Share the value of their job and when a start-up needs to hire those profiles, and why.
As an agile advocate, I am a sucker for new methodologies and frameworks, specifically if we can get a deep-dive into the implementation and challenges.
Finally, I am always interested in how new PMs got into Product Management and how they are doing.
Huge thanks to Alex, always eager to help the Product community grow locally. It’s been great to deep dive into his journey at Bitso. Anyone in a company can help to get to the next level!
You have an interest in crypto and want to participate in what could be the future of finance, make sure you check out the open positions at Bitso on https://bitso.com/jobs
— Written by Jonathan Leonardo, based on video interviews with Alejandro.
