Startup Life: Unscripted is a TNG Media newsletter, as part of The Nudge Group, where we feature candid conversations with startup operators about their career journeys and experiences. If you received this email as a forward, you can read all our past interviews and subscribe right here.

Navigating Tech Transitions: Brod Gaggi Unpacks his Shift from Finance to Product Management

Welcome back to Startup Life: Unscripted! Today, we're chatting with Brod Gaggi, Senior Product Manager at Zoomo. Brod's journey, shifting from studying finance and info systems to leading tech roles, is filled with interesting turns.

At Zoomo, a company at the forefront of urban mobility, he wears many hats, balancing product strategies, global collaborations, and the occasional tech challenge. In our conversation, Brod pulls back the curtain on his life at Zoomo, sharing insights on everything from the nitty-gritty of product management to the broader shifts in the mobility sector.

Key interview takeaways:

📚 Shifting Paths: Brod talks about his move from finance to tech and the experiences that influenced his decisions.

🌍 Zoomo's Day-to-Day: Brod gives us a look into his daily tasks and responsibilities, detailing the ins and outs of managing products for both B2C and B2B sectors.

🚀 Startup Environments: He shares insights into the differences and similarities of working in bootstrapped vs. VC-backed startups.

🛠 Product Management Tips: Brod dives into some hands-on advice for those in or looking to venture into product management.

🔮 Looking Ahead: He touches upon future trends and what’s next for tech startups.

Welcome Brod, great to have you here with us today! Your journey from a finance and info systems student to Senior Product Manager at Zoomo is certainly interesting. What sparked that switch from finance to tech for you?

Thanks for having me! "Interesting" is certainly one way to put it! It boils down to the value of experience over education. I made the trade-off in my later years of high school, where I'd go down to a local accounting firm every afternoon and observe the accountants working through quarterly BAS statements and tax returns.

Observing real-world applications and comparing it to what was taught were two different things. During that time, I grew an appreciation for experience over education. Consequently, that extended throughout my university degree, where I focused on doing two activities in parallel:

1. Earn money

2. Get a degree

Getting a degree was achievable through the university; however, to earn money, I worked at a small Brisbane-based startup focused on providing an omnichannel CMS to businesses. I decided to pursue the tech path over finance but committed to completing the degree.

You've experienced bootstrapped and VC-backed startup environments with your roles at Tanda and Flare. Could you compare the two experiences, especially in terms of the operating models and decision-making processes?

Anyone reading this should take what I say with a grain of salt because the sample size I'm working with here is 1x bootstrapped and 2x VC-backed, so proceed with caution.

Tanda was (I assume still is) a bootstrapped company with a great Founding Story and Founding Team. Day 1 for me was hopping on a plane and going to Tanda's Manila Office to understand our international customer base whilst also gelling with AU and PH Teams. Honestly, I had little idea what I was doing, but Tanda's way of educating new hires was to fully embrace the Customer. That meant it wasn't uncommon to do a "Customer Support Rotation" or attend Sales Demos to understand Customer needs.

The founders used the "Three Horizons Framework" to guide both short-term and long-term decisions for the teams. It then became the responsibility of the operational teams to formulate their local strategy and quantify their "bets" with incremental Payback Periods. Everyone knew how things should be done, but opinions were always loosely held. That level of candour spanned the entire organisation, which made decision-making and operations smooth.

Flare was a VC-backed company before its successful exit in 2022. During my time there, there was a shift to more greenfield projects to complement the core HR offering. Like Tanda, the Product & Engineering Team operated in their own squads, taking outside counsel from internal teams and Customers.

Ideation of problems and solutions at a higher level and then fleshed out using Opportunity Assessments (an SVPG Framework) before being critiqued at a Table Read - a similar ceremony of the famous Amazon 6-Pager - where Core Stakeholders were invited to peruse the OA silently and markup with their comments before circling back for discussion. Once OAs were socialised and approved, projects moved from their Discovery Phase to Development Phase.

With VC-backed companies, you can sometimes feel the presence of the Board in decisions coming top-down. For Bootstrapped companies, it was less Board-presence but more diligence with the R&D investment. Good management helps protect the team from those Board discussions, and both Flare and Tanda did a great job at that.

How does an average day pan out for you at Zoomo? And with everything moving at lightning speed in the startup scene, how do you keep up and handle your day-to-day responsibilities?

No day is the same! We run a lean Software Team that supports 7 Countries and +15 Retail Stores whilst developing new products to support our B2B Customer-base.

My responsibilities are split across B2C and B2B globally, with our primary interfaces being the Central Operations Team, Regional Marketing Managers and Hardware Team. On any given day, we could be rolling out new firmware to our IoT Devices, launching a new referrals campaign in Australia or opening a new Zoomo Store in the UK.

To help manage the various Regions and their operating models, we have the Central Operations Team that we interact with regularly. They're a massive help and enable the Local Teams to run autonomously with minimal Software support.

Regarding the Software Team, we're highly autonomous - opting for Kanban over Scrum and working software over comprehensive specs. We prefer to establish a consistent pattern across the products before introducing comprehensiveness into the domain or design. We have strong Engineers across the Web, Native Mobile and Backend who like to explore the product-domain, which helps in alignment and delivery.

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Zoomo seems to have experienced significant growth with regional expansion and the introduction of new products. Can you tell us about your role in these developments and what it was like managing these concurrent, large-scale projects?

While the software team is an enabler for new initiatives and launches across Zoomo, it is a team effort.

We can only provide our customers with IoT capabilities with the hardware team and data team. We can only offer a consistent customer experience with the local front-of-house staff, mechanics, marketing or support team. We can only operate our business at scale with the central ops or finance teams.

When it comes to managing concurrent large-scale projects, here are the three main things we usually start within the development phase:

1. Uncover the unknowns

2. Map high-level dependencies

3. Start on the piece with the most dependencies

Overlaying that with some order of sequencing is helpful for communicating back to stakeholders.

Given your diverse experiences in various startups, how has your career pathway evolved, and what advice would you give to someone aspiring to a product management role in a tech startup?

The pathway constantly evolves, and I prefer an open mindset rather than becoming too fixed on an end destination. Early on, experimenting in different domains and getting a feel for how industries operate is worthwhile.

If you're aspiring to become a PM - get experience from the industry! Early in your career, find a company with established Product Leaders (like a great VP of Product or CTO) and learn from them; let them mentor you.

Read Product Management in Practice by Matt Lemay for a sobering reality on PM-life. If you're stuck and need a push - read/watch something from Basecamp / 37Signals. Some of their old YouTube videos are gold!

Lastly, doing something that motivates you is important. Nikhyl Singhal was on Lenny's Podcast recently, and there was a great section (around ~1 hour in) about how our careers will likely be 60 years long. If you've reached your North Star (like a VP or Exec etc.) by 20 or 30 years into your career - you're only halfway through your working life. What are you going to do after?

Working at startups often requires a different set of skills compared to more established companies. In your experience, what skills have been most valuable in navigating startup life?

This feedback is probably more geared toward someone who’s a PM at a startup than someone just starting out. The following three “skills” I’ve found helpful:

1. Getting Closer to Engineering: understand the basics of an API, client-side vs. server-side, how the development and deployment cycle works and how to query a DB. Knowing this helps gain the Engineers' respect and enables smoother, candid conversations. It also helps communicate with Customers and Stakeholders what can (and often cannot) be done.

2. Python Scripts: learning Python to do basic stuff like wrangling CSVs, hitting an API, or crunching some numbers is helpful. It's always great throwing up a Python script on share-screen to a Senior Engineer and watching their soul leave their body but admit "it does work".

3. Become Familiar with a UI Framework: familiarise yourself with a popular UI framework. It helps when working with Design and Engineering when you use the same nomenclature when describing UI and interaction across designs. I still suck at this and looked like a clown when describing BottomSheet "detents" on iOS to my colleague, Ethan, a Senior iOS Engineer.

Lastly, having been part of multiple startups and seen different facets of startup life, how would you describe the culture at Zoomo and how it influences your work as a Senior Product Manager?

Like most startups, it’s a fast-paced environment with new challenges bubbling to the surface everyday. There’s no shortage of opportunities, and there’s a great commitment to cross-team collaboration in domains that are a bit foreign to the Australian startup landscape. It’s a positive influence on me, personally, and I’d say that extends to others across Zoomo!

From the Startup Life team

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