Productized Podcast — Sebastien Prioris— Creating meaningful conversations within tech teams
Recently we’ve had the great pleasure of chatting with Sebastien Prioris, the VP of Product at Unbabel and we’d like to tell you about it.
Main topics covered:
👏🏻 The importance of STEAM areas in education for the future
☺️ OSI instead of OKR standing for Objectives, Strategies and Impacts
💯 Strategy is about making decisions, building your roadmap and understanding how you can empower your team
🔥 Meaningful conversations mean a change to achieve our product value
As a long-term technology aficionado, Sebastien enjoys building products and businesses bringing together people, technology and information. He is passionate about leveraging data insights and has hard-earned experience across a broad range of disciplines to create great value for customers and companies of all sizes. In this episode we’re going to talk about Sebastien’s interests and why he advocates that companies should review the OKR methodology to facilitate strategic discovery in order to create meaningful conversations within tech teams.
Time notes:
[02:35] A zoom conversation that led to joining Unbabel and a move to the city of Lisbon[17:40] If I could have 14 years next, I would have chosen…
[18:43] Moving from STEM to STEAM: STEAM areas in the future of technology companies
Integrating that with the main curriculum is the future!
[24:20] Why the PhD choice: Turbulence measurements in transonic shock wave/boundary layer interactions using LDA
[27:40] Transition to the product area and all the challenges that it brought
[34:41] Language as the foundation of our civilisation
[37:00] Let’s look at product management as a spoon or an avocado
[39:50] Unbabel technology helping to remove language barriers
“3 ecosystems: platform (the heart of translation), customer applications (integrations where you will scale in the future), power (all the structure)”
[43:17] What are the companies that look for Unbabel nowadays?
“At the moment we have 30 languages that do most of the operations that we support at the moment…”
[46:10] Where do leadership conversations usually take place, and what is their value
“You have to be thoughtful and proactive about it! Making sure you have dailys and weeklys! The key is communication, it won’t happen alone! You have to make sure that you should start as an enabler, that you are the one who brings value and connects the dots: business to product, be able to make it happen… and then everything happens from then!”
[49:13] Why the OKR method should be reconsidered
“The adoption of OKRs is not getting it right. Teams use it, they read the books, but it’s not working. Why is that?”
[52:56] How the OSI model can be translated into product
“The importance of why! OSI stands for Objectives, Strategies and Impacts. Once you have that, that’s the way you bring meaningful conversations”
[56:15] Create meaningful conversations within tech teams applying OSI at Unbabel
Sebastien Prioris recommends 📚 on product and leadership:
Productized may get commissions for purchases made through links to books pointed in this post.
📙 The Hard Thing about Hard Things (Ben Horowitz)
📙 Inspired/Empowered (Marty Cagan) and everything from the SVPG
📙 User Story Mapping (Jeff Patton)
📙 The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman)
📙 Continuous Discovery Habits (Teresa Torres)
📙 Zero to One (Peter Thiel)
📙 Innovator’s Dilemma (Clayton Christensen)
📙 Competing Against Luck (Clayton Christensen)
📙 Escaping the Build Trap (Melissa Perri)
📙 Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey Moore)
📙 Product-Led growth (Wes Bush)
📙 The Product-led Organisation (Todd Olson)
📙 Hooked: Habit-forming Products (Nir Eyal)
📙 Output vs Outcomes (Joshua Seiden)
📙 Measure what matters (John Doerr)
📙 High-Output Management (Andy Grove)
📙 Up the Organisation (Robert Townsend)
📙 Naked statistics (Charles Wheelan)
Naked Statistics
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📙 Weapons of Math Destruction (Cathy O’Neil)
📙 Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed (Ben Rich)
📙 Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (Richard Rumelt)
📙 Any book on success stories from famous entrepreneurs or successful companies.
The Productized Podcast is produced by Productized — a series of interviews with product innovators, successful makers, and entrepreneurs. We hope those who listen to the ideas on this show are inspired to productize.
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