Radu Țogui

Our latest launch—the Chrome Extension for LinkedIn—is a case study in how we think about product innovation at Common Room. We try to be very thoughtful about how we sequence our roadmap. Based on what matters most to our customers, it’s a healthy mix of new functionalities and quality-of-life updates. But here’s the thing: When your customers are on the bleeding-edge of go-to market, your EPD team has to be, too. Industry leaders like Notion and Zapier simply aren’t satisfied with the status quo. We constantly push ourselves to reimagine what’s possible because that’s where the alpha is for our customers. Our new Chrome Extension for LinkedIn is a great example. LinkedIn is hands-down the most important prospecting channel for B2B companies. We’ve always auto-captured LinkedIn signals for our customers—reactions to their company posts, comments that mention their companies—but these were explicit engagements. What about all the LinkedIn signals that don’t call out your company by name? People engaging with posts related to your industry. People engaging with posts from business-relevant thought leaders. People engaging with posts from your top competitors. Each one of these is a powerful signal. And each one is incredibly difficult and time-consuming to capture. Or at least they used to be. Our new Chrome extension allows you to: - Pull everyone who engages with any LI post into Common Room and send them to a prioritized burndown list. - Uncover contact details to outbound with AI-powered waterfall enrichment. - Access a contact’s Person360™ profile while browsing their LI profile page. - Take the next best action (think adding to a sequence or syncing with your CRM) with zero tab hopping or manual data entry. What does that mean for our customers? Social engagement plays powered by our Chrome extension produce: - 50% higher open rates - 3x higher reply rates - 2x higher booked meeting rates No more dealing with subpar web scraping tools. No more spending hours updating spreadsheets. No more struggling to manually qualify for fit. Just the ability to reach the right person, with the right message, at the right time—all on the most-important channel for modern GTM teams. LinkedIn is just the start. I’m so excited to see how our customers put our new Chrome extension to work. Sign up for Common Room and download our Chrome Extension for LinkedIn today. Or check out the blog post in the comments for more info ⬇️

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My colleague Grzegorz (Greg) Kalucki has recently published an article about experimentation. What does it take for companies to commit to a culture of testing and experimenting with their online content? In three points: 1. Set up the right team, with a Testing Manager at the heart of it. 2. Have that team cooperate with, inform, involve, and motivate the rest of the organization (at all levels). 3. Repeat and optimize to ensure ROI, KPIs, and business goal performance. I truly recommend reading it because it is full of insights on how to achieve this, including a template for test scenarios that I used for this post's image. Here 👉 https://lnkd.in/dsBa3zec Greg’s article is based on Madison Hajeb's talk at the Opticon conference in London. This week, we can attend the online version of Opticon. While the agenda of the online event is yet to be revealed, I plan to attend. You can also join by enrolling here: https://lnkd.in/d9J-pgBc See you there? #Experimentation #Optimizely #Opticon24

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The cost of poor quality is far higher than the cost of good #QA. At Quarry, we've seen firsthand how good QA can make or break a project. Why is QA so crucial? Let's break it down: Bugs are expensive. Catching them early? That's just smart business. User experience is everything. QA ensures your site works as smoothly as it looks. It's your reputation on the line. A glitchy site with delays is a fast track to lost customers. Security matters. QA helps catch vulnerabilities before the bad guys do. It saves time and cost in the long run. Trust us, fixing major issues post-launch is a hassle. QA isn't just about finding bugs. It's about ensuring your product meets your objectives and delights your users. But here's where it gets tricky: Many organizations undervalue QA. They see it as an extra cost rather than a necessary part of the process. We do things differently. At Quarry, QA is baked into our process. It's not an afterthought — it's a core part of how we deliver value. Have you ever launched a project without thorough testing? #QualityAssurance #WebDevelopment #BestPractices

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Would you ever go from being a manager to an individual contributor again? I had an interesting conversation the other day in one of the many WhatsApp groups, started by this proposition: 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗮 𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆, 𝗶𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗮𝘀 𝗮𝗻 𝗜𝗖, 𝗮𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗺𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿. As a manager, you’ll mostly have indirect information and are not affected by the processes most people are. This will accelerate your career instead of setting it back. I’ve heard a few reasons people give up being a manager for, but this was a new one.  People (engineers, product folks) usually go back to an IC role when they realize being a manager is a completely different job, and it is not "being a better engineer”. They end up hating the work: the constant meetings, administrative stuff, managing people and not getting that dopamine hit from feeling like actually doing something and making a difference. To quote my favorite existential comic: “𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘢 𝘰𝘧 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯” Then a few people chimed in, saying they moved from manager to IC (usually from a startup / growth company to big tech), and it worked out well for them. The thing I started thinking about is whether this would work in the Middle East? It surely depends on the company, but in general management works very differently here than in Europe or in the US (understatement of the week I think, and it’s only Monday) My theory is that this would work with only a tiny percentage of companies here. What do you think? One more thing: the podcast that stated the whole question is the Skip podcast by Nikhyl Singhal: https://lnkd.in/dhJkYwCq - it’s mostly about product careers, but I found the advice works well for most tech-adjacent roles too. 

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The problem with unchecked and unintentional complexity is that it gradually narrows the 'solution space' — the range of future improvements, adjustments, or innovations that can be realistically pursued. Picture the solution space as a playground where designers and developers have room to explore new ideas and tackle emerging challenges. As complexity accumulates without careful management, walls begin to form in this playground, limiting the freedom to experiment and improve. Changes become riskier, and small tweaks can lead to a cascade of unintended consequences. The more convoluted the system, the fewer opportunities there are to introduce meaningful, impactful updates without further complicating the product or alienating users. Read more in my latest blog post linked below. #ProductManagement #Complexity #Innovation #TechLeadership #DigitalTransformation #Scalability #TechDebt #IntentionalComplexity

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Is it time we rethink our approach to software quality? I think so. In the fast-evolving tech space, QAOps is reshaping how we approach software development. Instead of treating quality assurance as something to check off at the end, QAOps integrates it directly into the development pipeline, making it an essential part of every process stage. Why does this matter? QAOps is about bringing QA, DevOps, and development teams together. By leveraging automation and continuous integration, it makes sure that quality is maintained without slowing down delivery. Some core practices driving QAOps include: ➡️ Automated testing for faster, more reliable outcomes. ➡️ Shift-left testing, which moves testing earlier in the development process, leading to better test coverage, continuous feedback, and a quicker time to market. ➡️ Real-time feedback, allowing teams to identify and fix issues promptly. ➡️ Cross-team collaboration to break down silos between QA, development, and operations. With QAOps, the software development process benefits from: ✔️ Accelerated delivery timelines ✔️ Superior product quality ✔️ Better scalability ✔️ Fewer costly post-launch fixes QAOps isn’t just a trend—it’s the future of software development. As businesses demand quicker and higher-quality solutions, adopting a QAOps mindset will be the difference between staying ahead and falling behind. How are you addressing quality in your development pipeline? Could QAOps be your team’s next step forward? #QAOps #SoftwareDevelopment #DevOps #Automation #QualityAssurance #ShiftLeftTesting #ContinuousIntegration #TechInnovation #AgileDevelopment #SoftwareTesting #TechLeadership #ProductQuality #CI_CD #DevelopmentPipeline

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Have you heard the question, "Why do we need a Product Owner?" Yeah, me too... It's a question that keeps coming up, and for good reason. Many people still wonder about the real impact of having a Product Owner or Product Manager on the team. Our latest post dives into what happens when a development company tries to do without one. Spoiler: It usually involves a lot more headaches and a lot less clarity. If you've ever questioned the value of these roles, this one's for you. Read on and let me know your thoughts.

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Hey everyone! Here is my latest essay on roadmaps and their role in your product strategy. I hope you enjoy it!

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OK, I almost convinced you to look at Empowered Teams more closely. You would like to introduce "empowered teams" concept at your team. After all, in "Good to Great" book you have a lot of evidence that is really great idea to help the company be successful and that is enough to give it a try. But... What does it mean for you as individual/employee, right? Are there any examples of exact action points to start? What would be the first step? How this concept is related to self-organized or self-managed teams mentioned by Scrum Guide? And what Servant Leader has to do with it all? Let me address all those questions and concerns. Marty Cagan has been evangelizing about "Empowered Product Teams" for some time now, the concept is known under other names such self-organized teams (full autonomy) or self-managed teams (autonomy limited by some corporate rules) for very, very long time. But instead of focusing on having higher influence on product strategy, let's start with smaller step. As individual/employee, I would recommend to try to focus first on finding a way to bring "empowered teams" concept to your team as a vehicle to build high performing teams and deliver incremental improvements. If you are all-in on the idea: 1. Firstly learn more about Servant Leader model of leadership. Does not matter the formal title, we all can be such unformal leaders. Why it should be your first step? This is a leadership model that has biggest influence on team's engagement and performance. It is foundation that you will build on top. 2. Next, figure out what you can influence on your level to make the product better from your customer's perspective. 3. Share the idea with the team and get buy-in on the concept from stakeholders. DM if you want to discuss this step. 4. Observe small improvements that whole team brings thanks to all the brain power of empowered team. 0.1% gains every day compounds in a long term, so be patient. Disclaimer: focus on changing what you can control. Now, here are few examples from my experience of such journey: 1. You may not have influence over product strategy nor business model. But maybe if you & the team care about app/service performance such responsiveness or downtime, maybe improvements in those areas can decrease churn and improve customer's satisfaction a little bit (= 0,1% gains every day). 2. Share as much business context and data about the product and customers with your team. Remind constantly about success metrics that the whole team should care about. Now wait. 3. Be open and coach the whole team about communicating business value of their idea. Suddenly, team members will come to you with great ideas: - "Hi Jakub, we can implement Continues Deployment to decrease time-to-recover" - "OK, let's do it! Can you write Story with the business value it could bring so we could groom it?" - "Yes!" Result? Our Workflow Success Rate jumped from 80% to 95%

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Should the Product Owner role be performed by a Product Manager? According to Paweł Huryn yes. However, there is no one size fits all in software organizations. Oftentimes an engineering leader fills in the Product Owner role and I've seen that working great. Each organization is different and there is no one framework that will work for a tiny startup, huge enterprise, in-person teams, offshore teams, dev agencies etc. As organizations grow, the definition of each role becomes narrower and things that one person did in a small organization requires a whole team because it is too much scope for a single person. The key is to ensure that no matter what the scope of a given job is, the person performing it has all the context they need to own their part, collaborate well with others on the team, and be empowered to make good decisions within their scope. Whoever performs the Product Owner role should have the business and the technical context and whether this is a technical PM or business oriented engineer depends on the organization itself. Who performs the Product Owner role in your organization?

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😮 How bad is the current PM job market? What we've observed at Product People in the last few months is that the current market is like the Schrödinger's cat - it's both dead and alive at the same time 💀 - there are open positions and some companies are hiring as actively as ever - there are people who struggle to get anything going for them even with the big names on their CVs - there are people taking positions 1-2 levels lower than what they've had in the previous company I'll be discussing these insights and more at the TopProds Q3 Product Management Talent Forecast together with Ross Webb, Nick Charalambous and Chris Mason. Join us you if it's relevant for you! Link in the comments!

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Most PMs I have met underestimate the impact of localization. They look at the preferences of their current customers and end up underestimating the demand for additional languages. My son needed a new skateboarding helmet. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a size small enough in Lisbon. I ended up ordering the helmet from a store in Denmark. Why? Because that was the closest store my English search query produced. I got curious and searched for information in Spanish and French. I found stores that were much closer and shipped to Portugal. They lost my business because their sites were not available in English. According to Eurostat, only 18% of Europeans regularly buy products in a foreign language online. According to a CSA research global study of 29 countries, 76% Prefer Purchasing Products with Information in their Own Language. The image attached comes from Global Localization of Google Searches by Language by Martin Krzywinski. If you look carefully, you will find that English searches dominate a few German, Swiss, and Cypriot cities and English-speaking countries. However, the majority of people search in their mother tongue. If you want more prospects to find your business, it’s not enough to offer it in one language, even if that language is English. Localization is more accessible, cheaper, and faster than ever. It’s time to make your business discoverable and accessible to broader audiences. #productmanagement #leadgen #growth

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When you swing small the two outcomes are win or lose. Very rarely will you learn something. When you swing big the two outcomes are win or learn. Very rarely will you lose. By taking big swings we have been able to grow our web AOV 30%+ with no impact to CVR.

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According to Marty Cagan European companies are "addicted to process", which is a big barrier for doing proper product work. Here are some key points from Marty's talk that I personally found important: (1) Marty believes that real product work is about solving customer problems. The main negative character in Marty's world is feature teams—teams that just implement features following a roadmap someone else wrote, instead of engaging in product discovery. – You don’t want to be a feature team, do you? – Marty asks. According to him, teams should be actively searching for answers to questions like: → What problem should we be trying to solve? → How can we solve this problem? If you're just developing something, you’re not a product manager but a project manager at best, and you don't belong in the profession. In delivery, Marty values speed (in the spirit of CI/CD); he doesn’t see anything else as valuable or interesting. "Think about time to money, not time to market." (2) Marty strongly advocates for autonomous cross-functional teams that can quickly experiment with solutions to discovered problems. He believes that everyone on the team, including engineers, should be involved in product work. "We don’t hire great engineers to tell them what to do, we hire great engineers so they can show us what’s possible". (3) Marty views processes and frameworks as the main enemies of product thinking because they replace analysis and critical thinking. This is especially true for Agile; while the original principles are good, the way they're often implemented in practice tends to be just mindlessly following a prescribed process. (4) Instead of frameworks, Marty suggests a set of "first principles of product model", which you can interpret and practice to the extent of your understanding and talent. These principles are shown in a picture. (5) Lead with context, not control. To elaborate on this point, Marty shares a story of a product leader at Netflix. When his team started doing something weird, his first instinct was to fire everyone. But then he remembered that Netflix fires anyone whose performance is even slightly below "exceptional" every year. Then he realised that if a smart product person does something strange, it means he, as a leader, dropped the ball and didn't provide some crucial part of the context. So, he went to figure out what critical piece of knowledge the team was missing.

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Office Hours -> Meet "Experiment Hour" What's the best workshop we've ever run for product & experimentation teams? A format that gets superb feedback, fast results and changes the way that people work, irrevocably? Just 90 minutes chatting about your AB tests - asking good questions, looking at the research and data, asking more questions. We can then offer our advice, suggestions and potential improvements. It sounds obvious, but why does it work so well? * Sharing real work is way better than 'training' people - because you can give advice within the context of a particular experiment or series of tests * Everyone on the team and wider company gets to hear the advice or solutions for other teams, so everyone learns something useful * Having a live Q&A around a particular experiment, with a range of experts, leads to improved ideas, process, statistics or experiment designs * There's at least one 'teachable moment' for every test we discuss - where a key concept or critical insight needs to be shared. Since the feedback was so good, we started thinking about how we would do this with a live audience in public. Why not have a group of experts look over tests, ideas and important questions around experimentation - and share the 'teachable moments' with a bigger audience? So this is why Experiment Hour was started. To use discussion of experiments to fuel sharing of good knowledge. Our first episode is already in the works and will be announced shortly. Each month, we'll tackle a particular theme or area of experimentation. We need your tests! If you've got a test and would like a session with top testing experts on what to do next, let me know. Our first episode is going to be all about Landing Page Experiments, so if you have any experiments or questions, get in touch!

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Should I leave my team? Write a Rage Manifesto! Whenever I think about switching teams or companies, it's generally because something isn't going right. There are many reasons this can happen, and they vary from team to team. Whenever mentees asks "should I switch teams" I always advise them to make, what I lovingly call, a Rage Manifesto. Rage Manifesto is a list of all the things that annoy me, make my job harder, or cause me stress. Once written I try to identify high level themes or groups. At this point, it's easy to stop, but don't! Make 3 lists: 1. Things I can change 2. Things my boss needs to change 3. Things my org needs to change Then, schedule a meeting with your boss, or skip, and talk it over! The important thing is to be proactive and provide solutions and not complain. For "Things I can change" I've told my boss "I've noticed the following issues: issue1, issue2, issue3, and I think it's a problem. I'm planning on doing thing1, thing2, thing 3 to help solve these. I don't need anything from your right now but I want this on your radar too" This helps your boss realize you, as a leader, are aware of gaps and are actively trying to solve them. It will also help your boss know the awesome work you do. For things in which you need your boss to help, be honest on the problem and possible solutions you've thought about, explaining that you need their help. Instead of "I hate that we never address tech debt and everything is terrible!" Instead, consider "I've noticed we have a large amount of tech debt. As you know, this causes instability in code and slower delivery. I don't feel like I can prioritize this with my current work load but think it's super important. I think we can put a size-able dent by focusing on thingX over two weeks which will allow us to deliver faster but I need your support to prioritize it." Lastly org level changes. Schedule time with your boss or skip and have a conversation asking how they think we can proceed. "Boss, I've noticed product seems to be overly reactive, and frequently changes priorities. This leads to churn. I'm unsure how to fix this, but I think it's a problem we need to solve as an org. Have you noticed this or have any thoughts? Now here's the important part... wait. Change doesn't happen over night. Wait 2 - 4 months then check in again. If things are getting better, use this as a data point for your next steps, maybe wait another few months? If things aren't getting better, thats another great data point, maybe it's time to move on. I have done this on a few teams, sometimes I've helped orgs course correct, other times its helped to solidify my choice to leave. An added benefit of this - this list becomes questions to ask future employers! Was "no long term vision" on your list? Make sure your next company has that! Maybe you left because the tech debt was crippling? Figure out what mechanisms (not good intentions) are used to prioritize tech debt cleanup!

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I see it all the time—teams spending way too much time tweaking designs that are already fine. Instead of talking to users. They’re caught up in making everything look perfect. Truth is if your product doesn’t actually solve user problems, polish is not going to fix that. Start solving real user problems. Not design problems. It’s better to get your product out there, learn, and improve as you go. Focus on usefulness first—then worry about making it pretty.

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Some thoughts on versioning roles in startups: It is widely accepted that the team that starts a company is rarely the same team that scales it to a large or public entity. Yet in practice this transition is often treated as an unexpected anomaly at each step, causing internal tension and conflict that can be a major distraction to the company to say the least. What happens when the "hacker" CTO who built the v1 of a product is now needed to manage hundreds or thousands of engineers? They either get layered or pushed aside, or have leverage and stay in their role but hinder the company's growth – all of which cause internal strife and inefficiency. Yet, the "growth CTO" may lack the hacker mentality which is required for subsequent product innovation. If you subscribe to the 3 horizons model, you know that both of these CTOs are crucial to the company's future growth, since no company ever exists in a single homogenous stage of maturity. Segmenting roles by functional area is ubiquitous in today's business - CTO, COO, CMO, CSO, and so forth, but segmenting roles by maturity stage is almost unheard of. I have been thinking about this recently, and one of the ideas that comes to mind is formally versioning or staging roles. In software systems, it's very common to use multiple versions of a software package or ML model simultaneously, so perhaps companies, too, can benefit from a "CTO 1.0" and "CTO 2.0", or an "Horizon 1 CTO" and a "Horizon 2 CTO" or a "Pre PM-fit" and a "Post PM-fit" CTO working alongside each other, which is proactively reflected in their titles and responsibilities, rather than a reactive change once the gap between their skills and talents and the company's needs arises. -- I'm curious if there are businesses out there that have successfully addressed this issue in practice, so if you know of any examples please share them below 🙏🏻

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"How do I write a good user story?" In today's video, we INVEST into writing a good user story. High-level, what does a good user story need beyond the usual pieces (request, context, acceptancr criteria, etc.)? If you have a question about product management, shoot me a DM. ✉️ I'm here to help! #productmanagement #productmanagers #careeradvice #askaquestion #askmeanything

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