I believe that every product manager dreams to have at least one opportunity in its career to get to work on a product that can make an impact in its community. That perfect moment when the stars are aligned and you have the right opportunity in front of you, the market window is perfect, the technology is ready and you happen to have just the right people working with you. 

One of those moments arrived for me on Friday the 13th of March 2020. Yeah on Friday the 13th of a leap year, right in the middle of a pandemic. If I now think back at it, I wouldn’t call it a coincidence. I think instead that the universe wanted to give me something back right in one of the most challenging moments of my life. On the second day that I was working from home to avoid the spread of covid-19 and right at the time when I couldn’t stop being worried for my hometown and my family fighting their battle against the virus.

It was exactly at that moment that the opportunity arose, the possibility of working on a product that I think is a great example of product innovation and business agility. That is the day that the idea of Hemnet Live was born. 

The starting point was simple but powerful: at Hemnet we wanted to use our position to help the property market in a moment of crisis and enable social distancing by technology. That was our mission and I believe that mission-driven goal was one of the keys to our success.

From that idea to the time of the first digital open house hosted on Hemnet passed 7 days. 

A week of intense work, dedication, sweat, and some tears contributed to creating one of the products I am most proud of. After the launch of Hemnet Live, I talked with quite many people from around the world that were impressed by the work that we have done and almost everyone had the same question to me: how did you manage to have such a product in the market so fast? The answer is simple: magic, of course!

Jokes aside I have been reflecting quite a while on which were the key success factors for us to be able to pull it off and that is what I want to share, hoping that it can be of inspiration for other product people to bring innovation and change into the world.

Lesson 1: Seize the opportunity when you see it - working with product development doesn’t mean that you have to build everything yourself. A partnership is a great way to innovate.

Lesson 2: Culture + mission = magic - while working on Hemnet Live I was driven by a mission and so were all my wonderful colleagues. By seeing a greater meaning, we all went the extra mile, never underestimate the power of a purpose.

Lesson 3: You can’t have a great product without a great experience - we took a lot of shortcuts, but we never compromised on users' experience.

Lesson 4: Dare to lose control - I know that as a PM it could be scary to lose control over product decisions. But distributed decision making is the only path to success. During Hemnet Live I set the directions for the team by telling them what I was not willing to compromise with and I let all the other decisions to them. The result was faster and better development than the one we would have had if I had been involved throughout all the steps.

Lesson 5: Communicate, constantly - while working distributed on Hemnet Live we experienced the power of having the right people communicating openly. We had a channel in slack where everyone was able to comment and I have never seen so fast feedback loops in my life, mesmerizing.

Lesson 6: Divide and conquer - every great product is bigger than a product team. We had to work fast and in parallel, therefore we just had one choice: we opened up to all our stakeholders at once. Legal, business development, and communication were involved in parallel while we were building the product. By separating concerns and syncing daily, we delivered at lighting speed to market and we also took all the requirements into consideration from the beginning.

Lesson 7: Have one single point of contact - while is important that everyone can work independently and in parallel, it is equally important to give everyone one single point of contact. If you want to succeed, be the servant leader that your team needs you to be and make your focus keeping it all together. Especially if you have to move fast.

Lesson 8: Think big, start small - you do not have to have all the pieces in place to make it work. We had crazy fast time to market which also means that we did fake it until we made it. Sleeves up, I and many others were running a lot of manual flows before everything was automated. Which also gave us data on which parts were really important to automate and how to do it. This is in every product management book, you know the theory, you need to start practicing it and get your hand dirty while at it.

Lesson 9: Enjoy the ride by doing this sustainably, not like we did - I must admit that the 2 weeks I worked with Hemnet Live were a lot of fun, but also not a walk in the park. High tempo, deadlines, stress, early mornings, and late nights. I would definitely say: do not try this at home! If you are bringing change but you are not battling against a pandemic, always develop at a sustainable pace. Stress and busyness are not good or glamorous, they are just unhealthy.

If you have more questions, ideas, or even better you got inspired by this, reach out to me. I would love to hear your product story.