Bringing Product Management to the Next Level At Timechain With Talent Acquisition
Timechain is a Montreal-based fintech company that provides an alternative to traditional financial services; it is your one-stop shop for all things crypto! Founded by fintech entrepreneur Louis Cléroux, Timechain hopes to decentralize finance for everyone. Their investment tool helps customers grow and manage funds effortlessly. As one of the fastest growing fintech companies, Timechain is transforming the crypto economy into a more inclusive and transparent system by making their platform simple to use and understand.
Who is the face behind Timechain’s innovative product management?
Meet Mario Munoz, the Product Manager at Timechain. His job is to not only create and maintain a product roadmap according to the business ROI, but also lead the quarterly roadmap prioritization and help with development and go to market efforts. Mario plays an active part in mitigating any issues that could have an impact on the completion of new feature releases.
As part of his role at Timechain, Mario works with leadership to research and analyze the market, and define the product mission, strategies, tactics which lead to the product roadmap updates and product growth opportunities. Mario has to come face to face with Timechain’s customer problems, including their worst realities and pain points when using the Timechain financial and crypto trading tools. This helps him outline their challenges and present them to the leadership team so the product can continue to improve.
Mario pays close attention to Timechain’s competitors and industry trends, assesses the value, develops cases, and prioritizes feature mixes, ensuring everything aligns with the product strategy. The product strategy is something that he himself helps define and refine quarterly with the leadership team to make sure the product is up-to-date within an ever-changing landscape.
Talent Acquisition at Bain Public
Mario was hired by Bain Public as part of our new ‘Talent Acquisition’ addition to our SOAP™approach. Months ago, we introduced a well-oiled Talent Acquisition process where we’re not headhunting; rather, we design an optimized Product Manager recruitment process for product organizations with enticing copywriting for job postings and step-by-step verbal and written tests to help with the interview, evaluation, and final candidate selection. We work alongside our client’s team to uncover the diamonds in the rough.
When hiring for our clients, we look for a candidate who:
- Asks questions to deeply understand the problem (customer or business viewpoint)
- Considers the BHAG, Value Proposition and Product Mission, and jumps straight into the solution and details
- States the strategic importance for the company and defines the key metrics
- Is an independent worker who needs little guidance
- Seeks to define the customer, and considers multiple personas
The Talent Acquisition has two steps:
- The Interview Process: There are 5 main things we test the applicants on:
- Communication and Collaboration
- Leadership Fluency
- UX Fluency
- Technical Fluency
- Data Fluency
- The Training Process: After we hire the perfect product manager, we work on training them with our 12-week SOAP™ product planning and roadmap prioritization approach. This training process sets them up for success! During the 12 weeks of SOAP™, the newly hired product manager learns to contribute to the high level strategy, provide feedback to the team, evaluate the business cases, learn which part of the roadmap to prioritize and effectively communicate to their team.
Hiring and training for Timechain
Our ability to hire Mario as Timechain’s product manager led to a more efficient SOAP™ process, which helped Timechain grow even faster! We helped Timechain survive in such a fast-paced industry; the fintech/crypto industry is constantly changing and evolving, which means Timechain needed the best of the best!
With Talent Acquisition, we vetted Mario to make sure he was the right product manager; we trained him so he can perform his job the best way possible. Without our Talent Acquisition process, the candidate might not be the right fit; we make sure they are!
How does Mario spend his days as a product manager?
Mario typically starts with a weekly overview of his work to get an understanding of what lies ahead. This is broken up into three blocks:
- Collective product discovery: This is the collaboration of the product manager, product designer, tech lead and even stakeholders (marketing, sales, support) to discover a solution worth building. Essentially, the collaborative product discovery gives the product team the chance to feel respected and that their contributions are welcomed and valued.
- Content pillars: To protect an organization against pursuing seemingly good ideas without evaluation and prioritization, it’s best to invest in writing content pillars, also known as committing the collaborative discovery solutions to paper in a long-form document.
- Pre-wire meetings: A pre-wire is a quick 5 to 10-minute meeting in which you let a stakeholder or product leader know about the developing roadmap pillars. This provides them with the opportunity to process what you set down in writing, ask some questions, and discuss a few options, giving them fair warning of information that may come as a surprise.
How did Bain Public help Timechain reach their product goals?
Bain Public brought new processes, tools and increased support with our SOAP™ 12-module approach - that included talent acquisition - to help establish Timechain’s product culture and prepare their product practice.
SOAP™ is a methodology that Bain Public created for product planning and roadmap prioritization based on principles of Product Strategy, Lean Startup, User-Centered Design, Data Science and more. It breaks product innovation into three steps: Product Mission, Product Blueprint and Roadmap Pillars. This 12-week process covers the tactics, strategies and mindsets that underpin this three-step thinking. It's an approach designed to help organizations create knowledge and build product strategies. When employed, it will help create new value, respect stakeholder opinion while getting buy-in, and optimize product delivery through iterative releases while validating and eliminating waste. With SOAP™’s organizational models, operational tactics and online tools, you’ll shape harmonious collaborations, accentuate connections and ease information sharing.
Through product management training and working on their roadmap, Bain Public provided analysis, data and UX support to assist Timechain. Their processes — how you’re supposed to do things — shape the company’s culture.
Part of Bain Public’s approach was to guide Mario towards understanding the weekly step-by-step process of managing products. This process is done effectively through virtual weekly meetings with our consulting team and their product team.
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Case study written by Jessica Scandaliato. Thanks to Paul Ortchanian for reading drafts and overseeing aspects of its publication. Also, if you have any feedback or criticism about this article, feel free to shoot us an email at info@bainpublic.com.
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