R089 - Clarity of Direction, with Caroline Ragot

What do you want us to know about you?

I've been doing product for 15 years and I love it, more every day. It's a continuous learning process that has always been, and now with AI even more so. What I like about product is that I see it as the vehicle to create change: habit change, solving problems differently, real impact.

My first experience was making phones for people with visual impairments. The impact was very clear there, because suddenly you give autonomy and quality of life through a product to many people. We were a small startup in Catalonia, about 15 people, and we competed with the American giants —Nuance was the largest company— and we often won the tenders against them.

At a conference in San Diego, someone with a visual impairment sought out my name among the attendees to tell me: "For the first time I was able to send an SMS to my granddaughter thanks to the phone." You work all day to do something and you see it: that's impact. That is the common thread of my career and why I want to keep doing it as long as I can.

What do all the contexts in which you have made products have in common?

I have made products for B2C, B2B, and B2B2C, for very different industries, and what changes is the context. In B2C —I spent eight years at Infojobs, which was an incredible school— you look for user retention and engagement, with very specific growth techniques. In a marketplace, you prioritize content liquidity and network effects. In an enterprise SaaS, you have clients who want you to specifically solve each of their problems; the big challenge is not falling into custom development, because if you do, your product becomes a Frankenstein. In digital health, you measure clinical outcomes: trials with control groups and real improvement in the person's health.

What you measure, what you do, and the context change. But something doesn't change: in the end, you are here to solve real people's problems in a way that generates business. The fundamental principles are always the same.

The most important thing in all these contexts is to spend time with your users and listen to them firsthand. At Infojobs, my team would stand in line at the unemployment office with prototypes to do usability tests. In B2B it's more difficult —you depend on the partnership with the sales and Customer Success teams— but the key is that from the product side, you hear the problem from a different angle. Sometimes that leads you to a completely different solution than the one the client, with all good intentions, thought they needed.

"Strategy is not just what we do. It's very much what we don't do." — Caroline Ragot

How does company ownership change the way products are made?

I think it's something we don't talk about enough and it's very important because product decisions depend enormously on what generating business means for that company.

If you are a startup funded by venture capital, they expect to multiply their investment by ten at least. They are not looking for an optimization that increases conversion by 3%; they want you to open another market or make a riskier but higher-impact bet.

If the company has been bought by private equity, the story is different. They expect to multiply by two or three in three or four years. The focus is on optimizing EBITDA: how you maximize short-term revenue or how you make the organization more efficient to reduce costs. It may mean making the admin panel more self-serve to reduce the Customer Success load and free up that team to generate more revenue.

If it's publicly traded, it's perhaps the most complicated. You have to show growth quarter by quarter —between 7 and 15% year over year— and at the same time sell a long-term profitability narrative so investors keep believing. When you go public, you become a financial entity. The last weeks of each quarter sometimes involve deprioritizing everything to look for quick wins that sustain the stock price.

And if it's a bootstrapped company by a private founder, it totally depends on what that person wants. They may be looking for a sustainable lifestyle business, or want to prepare to sell, or to go public.

None of this is right or wrong. It's simply what is expected from those who own the company, and product decisions must respond to that.

"The product vision is seeing the future: how your users' behaviors will change and how you will solve their problems differently. There are no metrics there." — Caroline Ragot

Where does communication between product and business break down?

The discussion breaks down when there is no clear strategy. As an executive team, to take the company to the next level you need a map, a direction, and a destination. If there isn't one, everyone pulls in their own direction, and executives also have a lot of ego that needs to be managed.

From the product side, I always focus on defining the strategy and product vision, and making strategic trade-offs: this decision has this trade-off, do we want to go to this market or the other?, is this more important or less important? The only way to resolve it is to have the big strategic priorities in one place and discuss them with everyone.

If you speak separately with the commercial, technical, and marketing directors, in each silo everything is super important. The question you have to get to emerge is: does it have more or less impact than the other things? And that conversation can only happen with all parties at the same table. Strategy is not just what we do; it's very much what we don't do.

"Your job as a leader is to multiply the talent you have in your team, create the conditions for them to achieve the objectives. It's not managing everyone's work." — Caroline Ragot

What is the product vision and how is it built?

First you have to have a company vision and strategy: how are we going to win in this market. From there, the product strategy starts with the vision.

The vision is seeing the future: how your users' behaviors will change with the context that will exist and how you will solve their problems differently. An exercise that works well for me is the future press release. You project it to 2030 or beyond and write what a press article would say about your product: what the user says about how their life has changed. I did this exercise in digital mental health imagining a psychologist being interviewed about the impact of DTX on her practice. That vision then guided all product decisions.

The product vision has no metrics. It's seeing what will happen, freeing yourself from optimization to visualize what the future will be. Think of the taxi: before you called a card and waved your hand in the street. Now you see the little car moving in real time. The vision is not the GPS feature, it's the feeling of knowing exactly how much time is left. It's the behavior that changes.

This doesn't mean you stop attending to day-to-day urgencies. You will do them, but everything you build will be done knowing that the vision goes in one direction. Little by little you will accumulate towards that destination. The vision is not "I want to increase retention from 20 to 30%." That's not vision, nor is it strategy.

Why do so many teams measure what they deliver instead of the value they generate?

If you ask anyone, they will tell you they understand that impact is more important than activity. No one will tell you otherwise. Why don't we act that way then?

Because we are human. In technology there is uncertainty, and uncertainty generates anxiety. The way to control that anxiety is to move towards predictability. If you say "I'm going to launch three email campaigns" or "I'm going to launch this feature," that gives you a sense of control. It's a false sense, because in the end you don't control the outcome, which is the most important thing. But at least you control something, and when there is pressure that reassures you. The problem is that when you optimize for execution, you make technical and design decisions to deliver on scope, on time, on budget, which are not necessarily the ones that generate the most impact.

There is also intellectual laziness. Being in action gives a sense of progress, and the sense of progress makes you believe you will reach the result better. Think of it as someone in the water making many gestures: a lot of activity, probably drowning. Someone who takes two or three precise strokes reaches the other side. What you have to do is accept losing control. And that's not easy. But being a leader is not easy.

What does AI amplify in this context?

AI is a magnifying glass. If you have a clear strategy, defined priorities, and the team understands the reasoning of why you prioritize something and why you don't prioritize something else, AI will build with a much higher probability of impact. Because if you don't give someone context, they can't read your mind, not even AI. Without context, it will do things, many things, but it won't necessarily generate impact.

If it's chaos, AI will amplify the chaos.

One of the most important skills in this era is clarity. As humans, we have to work to be clearer, to express ourselves more concisely. If you already have that, AI will accelerate you and give you more impact. If the input is bad, the output will be too. It's like pizza: if the ingredients are of poor quality, the best chef in the world will make a mediocre pizza. If the ingredients are quality, the pizza will almost certainly be good. AI transforms input into output; the quality of the result depends on the quality of what you give it.

"AI is a magnifying glass. If you have a clear strategy, the probability of impact is much greater. If it's chaos, AI will amplify the chaos." — Caroline Ragot

What role do soft skills, especially communication, play in the AI era?

Clarity in communication has always been important, but with AI it is even more critical. You have to explain to AI what's in your head, and the clarity with which you do it defines the impact and result you achieve.

I recommend product people —and any professional— to do improvisation exercises. There are tools like Ultraspeaking that help a lot: you have a word and you have to improvise for 60 seconds. That trains you to have clarity of thought and express yourself coherently. I do it with my team, in collective sessions and one-to-ones. Your intonation and the way you speak also define your presence as a leader. Product Managers have to be in meetings with stakeholders at all levels, often hierarchically above them, and the ability to influence depends on communicating well.

And also, as a leader in the AI era: the value of coordinating tasks and passing information from one level to another can be done perfectly by AI. What it can't do —at least for now— is provide strategic clarity and real coaching to your team. That is the human value that doesn't expire. Your job as a leader is to multiply the talent you have in your team, create the conditions for them to achieve the objectives. It's not managing everyone's work.

"The best teams I've worked with are from here. We don't have to have an inferiority complex at all." — Caroline Ragot

How do you create impact?

With AI this is even more important than before. If you are a leader or manager whose value is in coordinating tasks, in passing information from one level to the next, you are in a moment of vulnerability: AI can do that very well. But providing strategic clarity and real coaching to your team to strengthen their strengths and work on their weaknesses —that is a value that AI, at least for now, will not provide.

Your job as a leader is to multiply the talent you have in your team, create the system conditions for them to achieve the objectives. It's not managing everyone's work.

That's why I do communication and improvisation exercises with my team, both in collective sessions and in one-to-ones. And I encourage everyone to do it, because the ability to speak clearly, to influence in a room full of stakeholders, to provide strategic direction —that's what differentiates a leader in this era.

What mistakes from the mobile transformation are we repeating now with AI?

When I experienced the mobile transformation, I had an advantage: I hadn't made products for desktop or web, so I didn't have to unlearn to learn. Today I have to unlearn, which is also interesting, but the mistake we made then and continue to make now is not thinking about the real capabilities of the new technology.

The first newspapers on iPad basically put the PDF of the newspaper with zoom in and zoom out. They weren't thinking that mobile changes behaviors: shorter attention spans, shorter content, possibility of not having a connection. The same thing happens with AI. It's not doing the same thing on a new platform, it's understanding what new capabilities you have and how your users' problems change.

AI is probabilistic, and that's the most important thing to understand. Before you had deterministic flows: you took the user through a series of steps and optimized for usability. Now the result is different for each user. That completely changes how you design and measure.

The other repeated mistake is doing for the sake of doing. "We need to have an app, we release something." "We need to do an AI feature, we put in whatever." In the end, the technology itself doesn't matter much: it's always the user's problem and how you are going to solve it differently with the capabilities you now have.

Finally, for product people who don't come from engineering: you have to understand more technical concepts. Not implementation, but the principles. What is a RAG, how a prompt system works, what an LLM does when predicting the next token. If you don't understand how it works, you can't imagine product solutions.

How do you see Spain versus the United States in product culture?

I feel very proud of how we do product in Spain. There is a very good product culture that has been spreading in Barcelona and Madrid, and I think many companies make excellent products here.

The big difference I see is structural. In Spain, most companies that do technology hire in-house engineering teams. In the United States, given the very high cost of engineers, they work a lot with offshore IT shops. The contract is clear: I tell you what needs to be done, you execute. That distances the product from impact and, above all, eliminates co-creation.

The most important thing is that the designer, the engineer, and the Product Manager think together. The engineer is not just the executor: they are the one who thinks about how to solve problems with technology. When they work together every day, the trade-offs naturally emerge. I've seen how a conversation between a designer and an engineer solved something that would otherwise have taken weeks of development. You don't do that when your team is offshore.

The best teams I've worked with are from here. We don't have to have an inferiority complex at all.

Closing

The conversation with Caroline leaves an idea worth taking home. Each technological wave tries to confuse speed with judgment. Mobile already taught us this and AI puts it in front of us again, only much faster. And it all boils down to the same thing: do we measure what we deliver or the value we truly generate?

I also take away something we rarely say out loud: that inferiority complex towards what comes from outside. Caroline puts it on the table without hesitation. Here we make good products, and sometimes what is lacking is the confidence to defend it.

Perhaps the lesson is this: waves pass and companies change owners. The craft of making products with judgment, supporting the team, and looking at real value is the only thing that doesn't expire. A big hug and I'll see you in the real world.