Great company, wrong time

I left TheTool after five years: my first product project, started from scratch and followed all the way to the sale. I wanted a new challenge, but first I wanted to get my head in order: I had spent half a decade learning out of necessity and on the fly, with almost nothing contrasted.

So I trained formally, and in that order. Agility first: a master's degree in Scrum with theUncoding, with the Product Owner and Scrum Master certifications, because that was the framework I would be working inside anywhere. Product second, with TheHeroCamp's Product Management programme. What I took away was not so much the new as the name and the why of things I had already done at TheTool. Freepik came up before the course was over.

Freepik was the opposite of what I came from: around 400 people, a product with years behind it, results the pandemic had catapulted, and a product team that was reorganising and growing. On paper it was exactly what I was looking for: a large project, plenty of data and, for the first time, other PMs to debate and align with.

I landed in the contributors squad: the area that sources graphic assets from freelancers and individual creators worldwide. It is half the equation of a content marketplace, and until then it had grown organically.

The product analytics tool was being chosen right then, so the evidence had to be found elsewhere. I rebuilt the previous quarter's discovery (surveys, interviews and internal data), which was the base I would use to define and manage the first quarter's OKRs, and I joined the year-end survey Freepik ran with its contributors.

That is where I learned what volume changes. A survey at Freepik returns hundreds of responses in a few days, an enormous advantage and, at the same time, an analysis job that looks nothing like reading fifteen interviews.

Out of all that came the first initiative, which also matched the take-home exercise I had done to get in: 75% of contributors dropped off or got stuck during sign-up. We redesigned the flow, simplified the process and set up an email sequence walking through every step, with two goals: bringing that 75% down and reducing time to profile approval.

Three months in I had doubts: little output, little impact and a lot of meetings with people who, in many cases, had just landed like me. It was probably normal for a hypergrowth scaleup reorganising its product team. But I was neither adding value nor getting any, and that is not how I work.

That is when INDYA appeared, a much smaller project with the ambition of becoming the best nutrition app on the market. What told me it was time to move was not the offer: it was how little it took me to decide.

Nothing to reproach Freepik for. I arrived at the wrong moment in the wrong squad, and that was confirmed later: the contributors area did not continue and its goals were refocused towards acquiring graphic-resource companies.