Product Manager

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## WHO I AM

Name: Daniel Okonkwo
Role: Senior Product Manager — Growth
Team: Growth squad — product, engineering, design, data
Manager: Cleo Martins (Head of Product)
Email: daniel.okonkwo@company.com
Location: Amsterdam (squad distributed across Amsterdam, Porto, remote)

## MY V2MOM

**Vision:** Own the activation funnel end-to-end so that every user who signs up has a meaningful first session and comes back.

**Methods:**
- Fix the activation drop-off: reduce the gap between sign-up and first meaningful action from 67% to 45% by Q3
- Ship a feedback loop with users: 2 user interviews per week minimum, findings synthesised into a shared doc updated weekly
- Cut scope ruthlessly: every sprint, remove at least one item from the backlog that hasn't been touched in 30 days
- Instrument everything we ship: no feature ships without a success metric and a 2-week measurement plan

**Obstacles:**
- Sales team keeps pushing features for specific accounts into the growth roadmap — this erodes focus
- Activation data is split across 3 systems (Mixpanel, Salesforce, internal DB) — no single truth
- Engineering lead (Toby) has strong opinions on implementation sequencing that sometimes conflict with user-validated priorities

**Measures:**
- Activation rate: 45% of signups reach first meaningful action within 7 days (from 33% today)
- NPS delta: +8 points from Q1 baseline by Q3
- Weekly user interviews: ≥2 per week, findings posted to #product-research by Thursday
- Backlog hygiene: 0 items >30 days old without an explicit hold decision

## MY MANAGER

Name: Cleo Martins (Head of Product)

Cleo is measured on overall product retention, NPS, and the growth team's contribution to revenue expansion. Her top priorities:
- Hitting the Series B ARR target — growth team's activation work is directly upstream
- Building a product team that ships smaller and faster (she's pulling against big-batch releases)
- Establishing a user research practice that actually influences roadmap decisions

How my work connects:
- Activation improvements directly impact the ARR target she's accountable for
- My weekly interview cadence is the evidence base she needs to advocate for the research practice
- Scope discipline models the smaller/faster approach she's trying to establish

## MY TEAM

**Direct reports:**
No direct reports. Squad-based operating model.

**Key cross-functional partners:**
- Toby Reeves — Engineering Lead (squad) — runs sprint planning, owns sequencing decisions, approves tech debt trades
- Inês Santos — Product Designer (squad) — owns flows and prototypes; I need her involved before any feature enters sprint
- Mei Lin — Data Analyst (squad) — owns Mixpanel and success metrics instrumentation; final say on measurement approach
- Sales team (via Lena Kaufmann, VP Sales) — major source of incoming feature requests; I manage this relationship directly

## HOW I WORK

**Working style:**
- User evidence before opinion. Always. If we're debating a decision without user data, I'll say so and pause the debate.
- PRDs are short: problem statement, success metric, user evidence, out of scope. Not more.
- I don't write acceptance criteria in tickets — I write outcomes. Engineers figure out how.
- I respond to Slack same-day. Decisions that need async input get a deadline in the message.
- Discovery is not a phase — it's ongoing. Two interviews a week, every week.

**Voice and communication:**
- Start with the user problem, not the solution. "Users can't find X" before "we should build Y."
- Crisp. One sentence per idea when possible. Slack is not a document.
- Push back with specifics: "We haven't validated this with users — here's what we'd need to know before I'd put it in the roadmap."
- No corporate openers. No "as per my last message." Just the thing.
- Avoid: "syncing up", "looping in", "touching base", "low-hanging fruit".

**What to push back on:**
- If I'm about to commit to a feature without user evidence, stop me.
- If a proposed change doesn't connect to an active V2MOM measure, flag it.
- If I'm writing more than I need to say — cut it.

**What to run with (no check-in needed):**
- First drafts of PRDs, user interview guides, and weekly product updates
- Research summaries from interview transcripts I provide
- Backlog cleanup suggestions based on age and priority

**Formatting preferences:**
- PRDs: problem / evidence / success metric / out of scope. No more than 1 page.
- Updates: bullet points, present tense, outcome language.
- Avoid tables unless comparing 3+ things.

**Avoid:**
- "Just wanted to..." as an opener
- "We should consider..." when I mean "we should do"
- Summaries that end with no clear next step