Richard Abi-Chahla on Fractional Leadership & Building Smart
Alright, folks. Welcome to another episode of Grown Up Product, the podcast for founders, CEOs, and operators who are curious about how to really build successful product orgs in a post product market fit environment. Today, we have a really exciting guest, Richard Abichala, who's a fractional CPO all the way from Beirut, Lebanon. Always fun to have guests from from other locations. Richard, welcome.
Brian Root:I'd love for you to share a little bit about yourself with our our audience.
Richard Abi-Chahla:Thank you, Brian. Thank you for having me. So I'm a product manager. I have eighteen years of experience. I started my own agency Purplebrains in 2011, and we had two tracks.
Richard Abi-Chahla:The first one is to create our own products, which was our main passion. And the the second part is to help other people create their products, either start ups or SMBs or enterprises. And, yeah, so far, we've been having a diversity of products. We have worked across more than 50 products across 15 different industries. And we make sure to help people get the maximum chance of success with the minimum use of risk and resources.
Richard Abi-Chahla:Let's say it's a startup that is in agriculture, an ag tech startup.
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Richard Abi-Chahla:Me as a product manager, I would respect the knowledge they have in ag tech and the knowledge they have for the ag tech users, but I always rely on research to take a decision to move forward to something, especially if that something is really critical. If we are relying on our gut feelings and it is an ag related topic, for example, I would go with their instinct. If it's a product related, how we're going to price it, what's the experience going to be, what kind of technology we're going to use, I try to stand my ground because you brought me because you're lacking the product and technology. I'm not arguing with the ag information. And also the problem is that they always tend to build more because a founder or a project manager, they want to see the full fledged solution the way they see it in their head.
Richard Abi-Chahla:But they don't, some of them don't understand that this is the end goal and we might not reach that end goal because after we build the MVP and we start validating, we need to listen what the user want. We cannot go into the direction you want specifically. If the user feedback takes us somewhere else, you might end up with a totally different product. And this is critical for their success. For me as a fractional person, I would love if every product I work on is a major success, but sometimes you have to go with whatever they want.
Richard Abi-Chahla:And by the way, there's a lot of times that I stop working on a project because I tell them I am not convinced with the approach that you are going with.
Brian Root:I will say for my my own part, I've worked for several companies at least. I won't throw anybody under the bus, but where you know the culture has certainly been much more argumentative than average I guess in The US. And I think in my personal experience, the ability to kind of inject a testing framework, right, you may be a 100% correct with that but you know, let's let's at least invest a little bit of resources in testing alternatives and make sure that, you know, we get some proof, some data to to reinforce that. And so I kind of think of that as the the Trojan horse of, you know, shortcutting those those argumentation cycles. Right?
Brian Root:If I can just get you to agree to any test at all, then that kind of opens the door to, you know, how do we start to to bring other perspectives, data, you know, really reliable sources to the table to help, you know. Is that something that you've also seen success with? Or I'm curious if you have other approaches that have worked for
Richard Abi-Chahla:I've seen success in this. This is like whenever I make my case that this is not validated and we will end up paying that much money, and we might throw them away. Mhmm. Yeah. Some some leaders or some founders or project managers, they end up listening.
Richard Abi-Chahla:Mhmm. But whenever you are dealing with the c level, and the c level of a small to medium start up, like 50, 100 people, they start going to conferences and speaking to people about their products, and they start listening interesting feedback from other c level players and other companies. They start giving them ideas. They might not be the users or they might not they might have a different problem that they are solving than the one we are solving. Mhmm.
Richard Abi-Chahla:And they come back super excited. Mhmm. Like, if you if I put myself in their shoes, they have been in a conference, let's say, on Thursday. They heard those opinion Thursday, Friday. They spent the weekend thinking about them.
Richard Abi-Chahla:They came back to our weekly meeting on Monday or Tuesday, and they have been brewing that for so long. And at the beginning, four or five years back, they come, they give me the big idea for them and for me, I see clearly that this is something we're not going to do. Like this is clearly not suitable for that kind of persona that we're building for. It is solving a different problem. It will cost us a lot.
Richard Abi-Chahla:So I took two approaches. First one is I start probing with them, asking them, reminding them what's the short term goal that we're working for and what's our current progress on the on that short term goal, and when is the deadline of that. And I give them the choice. I tell them, from now until then, we have a capacity of let's say 80 story points or 100 story points. My estimation of the thing you want to build, of course I need to refer with the team, but my estimation is that it's 20 story points.
Richard Abi-Chahla:Look at the backlog and tell me what features you want to remove and how do you convince me that this one is more important than this one. Whenever you quantify it for them that we have limited resources, we need to build by that time. You either push the deadline and the deadline is entangled with other commitments that we have made with other companies, with partners, with our investors, whatsoever. Whenever you put it that way, they start making sense of what they are asking for. Sometimes they say, yes, I want you to remove this and that, and they give a valid reason, and then I say, then you're right, let's do this instead.
Richard Abi-Chahla:Some other time, they are just like in front of the team, you told them that this is not suitable or this is not what we need to build, they start pushing back, then my way to get me out of it and to get them out of it because of course this is a conversation they also want to end. They are a C level person and they have a fractional person in front of them that's telling them your big idea that you came with is not suitable in front of the whole team. So I tell them, all right, let's write this down in details into the backlog and let's decide later on on its priority. So my approach is to give it a low priority. If you can convince me on increasing the priority, then it will take precedence over something that has lower priority.
Richard Abi-Chahla:And this has been, so my previous boss Simone used to laugh about it saying, this is your very diplomatic way of telling me we're never going to do that. But actually this is not that I'm never going to do that. It's that now in the next three, four, five months, this is not my priority. You're shifting my priority away. We can do this as another milestone after we have researched it.
Brian Root:Yeah, yeah, I mean I think you're hitting on honestly one of the more important part, soft skills I would call it as a PM, certainly as a PM leader, right? You can't really ever say fully no to almost anything, right? Because I think that really at the end of the day also undercuts your own authority, right? If you can look at somebody else's idea and say, that's absolutely not correct, we're never doing that, delete it. You're kind of opening the door for them to be able to do that to you too in some cases, right?
Brian Root:So I think, you know, keeping that healthy skepticism and saying, you know, I think I'm right but we should always be willing to test this. We should always be willing to revisit our assumptions and reprioritize, you know, if if circumstances change. I think honestly, in my in my estimation, that, increases your authority, right, and your believability when you do that and and and show that you're truly willing to, you know, to follow through on it too. Weaving together a couple of the things you were just talking about, I mean, it it's definitely resonating strongly with me, right, of, one on one hand, the CEO, founder, you know, leader of the company. I think even if they are outwardly the most, you know, resistant to change person, they are to your point still looking for inspiration and insight from somewhere that often will come from their peers or, I don't know, people on Twitter or whatever.
Brian Root:But it is often really frustrating, I think, as as the person who's hired to come in and help enact that change that you find yourself being the person who's, you know, in some cases being stonewalled or listened to the least. And and what I've actually experienced, I don't know if this has been your experience as well, but, my corporate career, when I was hired into those roles full time, I felt like I was listened to even less than, you know, I am as a fractional CPO. Right? I've actually had a very positive experience there of of
Richard Abi-Chahla:Mhmm.
Brian Root:Me coming in and and feeling like, you know, the the messages, the strategies, the, you know, the themes that I've been trying to communicate for decades now, right, are actually listened to ironically more when I'm only a part time employee versus when I'm full time and often have stock and you know, fully invested in the success of that company in a, you know, even deeper way. So finding ways to become the person that's actually listened to, I think, is is part of the challenge, right, for for us as, both Fractions and just as leaders in general. But, you know, to to your to your second point as well, right, the the situation that a lot of employees find themselves in at these companies is they've had these ideas for years. They haven't been listened to. They're not being incentivized to even speak up anymore.
Brian Root:Are Mhmm. You know, just kind of grinding it out eight hours a day because they're like, well, you know, I know how to improve this but nobody's listening, right? And what I found is kind of blending those two thoughts together. A lot of the time, like I'm coming into a new engagement, really all I have to do on some fundamental level is listen for a month or two. I wanna go to listening tour, you know, compile all the different ideas that I'm hearing from, you know, from the various employees and then just, you know, use our put our PM hat on and start to, you know, filter out the ones that are good from the ones that are bad and, you know, just bring those to the surface.
Brian Root:Right? And they just get listened to differently because you're a new outside voice even if it's the same thing that somebody's been saying for literally five years. But it helps to build credibility, I think, not only with the CEO, right, because you're saying, I listen to truly to your employees. Here's what I'm hearing. I a deep understanding of the problems and likely solutions.
Brian Root:Like, you look good really quickly, but then you can also go back to those people and say, hey, I listened. And now you can come to me with all all your other ideas. So I think that that that dynamic, is really, you know, beneficial, right, for these companies. But then you take a step back and you're like, why did I need to be part of this? Right?
Brian Root:Like, these ideas existed before I came, you know, that you really just needed somebody to come in and unlock them. So I I look at that as kind of one of the, you know, the kind of like foundational mistakes, you know, that a lot of companies are making obviously that we as fractionals can help unlock in a really powerful and and rapid way. But I'm curious, on your end, that that being kind of one aspect of of thematic problem or challenge that you see in a lot of companies, are there any others that you find yourself thematically encountering frequently at your various clients?
Richard Abi-Chahla:I I noticed when I worked to enterprises or or startups that are trying to behave like large enterprises Mhmm. With all this, like, levels, organization, very rigid workflows. I noticed that sometimes the solution is so simple, but for them it is something they would have never thought of. And for a normal startup, small startup, it's something like a no brainer. One example, I was working for a large enterprise.
Richard Abi-Chahla:I'll try to tell this without calling names. And it was a very proud enterprise. Very, very proud enterprise. And whatever they do, they want to put their logo, their stamp, their branding everywhere. They want to show the name of the company that we've done that Mhmm.
Richard Abi-Chahla:Even if this is not their core service or their core offering. And they had a mission to build technology that will provide them data for them to provide a better product, a better physical product for the one they are offering. Mhmm. And for me, what's the end goal? The end goal is to sell your product.
Richard Abi-Chahla:The end goal is to develop your product. So the technology is not your end goal. So instead of you building one more competing solution in the market and trying to compete with the existing players that have been there before you twenty years probably. And to get that amount of data, why don't you API your technology through their tools and be able to expand very fast and be able to get all their data and to enable them to serve their customers better. And you're still getting the data and if you remove your logo, you will face less resistance from the users to use you because they don't know that the data they are putting here, it will end up building their product because that kind of consumer always feared that there's a conspiracy theory on them and they are always, people are taking their data to make things more expensive for them the next year or so.
Richard Abi-Chahla:So removing their logo played a lot for them like it was on their behalf. And for them this was a no brainer. And I really had to tooth and nail and to speak to their managers and to do those big pictures convincing them that that's your product. The technology is not your product. It's the means that you need to develop a better product.
Richard Abi-Chahla:So just let go of your logos and branding and having your own solution there because based on previous experiences, look what you've done here and it didn't work out. Look where you're still trying to push your this kind of solution here it's not getting all the information you need. While in that case you are able to get 100 times more data with 10 times less budget and you'll be able to expand, it's much more scalable. And whenever this worked out, for them it was an moment. Like it changed their mentality inside the enterprise and they started adopting that for different purposes after I ended my project and my engagement.
Richard Abi-Chahla:So it's often that your mindset working and I come from a startup background mainly. Mhmm. And I grew to be an enterprise player. So coming from a startup background where you put multiple hats, where you try to make means and in whatever way possible, makes you more of a jack of all trade, being able to combine from different industries the solutions like I remember the solution, we applied it in health tech, probably it would work in legal tech as well if we try to change this, if we try to do that. Engineers work a little bit like lawyers, so let's try to apply that solution for them.
Richard Abi-Chahla:And this have helped me a lot. I worked across 15 different industries, from health tech to ag tech to legal tech to CRMs, enterprise solutions, FMCG, I've been everywhere. And getting this cross experience across sectors helped me a lot to be able to innovate. And for me it comes as a no brainer. Like for me, I just see it in front of me, while for them it is really a revealing moment for them.
Richard Abi-Chahla:Because they have been working in this same sector and this same enterprise for a certain number of years, they are set in their ways. They only refer to the peer solutions that they have seen in that same sector or organization.
Brian Root:Yeah, Yeah. I I mean, I certainly your your your breadth of experience and the benefit that you, you know, are are saying you you've derived from that in terms of, coming up with innovative insights and solutions. That certainly resonates with me. I I don't know that I've worked in quite as many, you know, different, industries as it sounds like you have, but I I have always intentionally been a generalist myself as well and, you know, I'm constantly drawing those connections that you referenced, right, between, you know, this worked in e comm. This should also work in fintech, and, you know, therefore, it should also work here and there.
Brian Root:Right? I I think that that is really a very strong tool, right, in any PM's quiver. I'd love to go a little deeper though. Right? I I think I have my own, you know, lens on on why this is the case.
Brian Root:But, you know, from your experience and your opinion, what holds companies back from thinking more more innovatively or you know, being more open to to alternative solutions? Right? I hear the we've done this the same way, we've been in the same industry for for decades, so we're just gonna kinda default to the the thing that we're comfortable with and I think that is one aspect of it. But a lot of these companies also hire, you know, McKinsey, Bain, whatever to come in with, you know, these massively expensive innovation packages, right, which don't really seem to move the needle in any tangible way often. Right?
Brian Root:So there there's a gap, right, of they they they they're spending millions of dollars to say we want to innovate, and then it doesn't happen. Right? Like, what's what's holding them back in your estimation?
Richard Abi-Chahla:I think the corporate world has been working in a certain way for the past probably fifty something years, and they used to go for the big consulting firms for advice, but now they are using them as scapegoats, the people to blame whenever things don't work out. And if you look at it, the CEOs of those organizations blame the consultant, and the consultant blames the CEOs saying like, we gave you the right advice, you did not implement it well. And the CEOs say, we took your advice, it didn't work out. And I guess the amount of money that has been spent, and this is my personal opinion, the amount of money that has been spent and thrown away in the tech sector over the past fifteen or twenty years Mhmm. Pushed that sector to develop those new, like, UX research, product thinking, the lean methodologies, the agile way of building stuff.
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Richard Abi-Chahla:It pushed the thinking forward. And now, like five to especially in the COVID time, a lot of the organizations needed to do this evolvement in their processes. So they started adopting the product mentality, the startup mentality, they started hiring entrepreneurs and residents inside their company to give them those insights. And this is changing. I'm seeing a lot of a lot of organizations are coming to me asking me to do some task for them, while a few years back, they used to go to McKinsey, Bain, and they used to ask them for that advice.
Richard Abi-Chahla:And I think that the consulting firms are catching up to that. Mhmm. Because when I was at the Web Summit last year in Lisbon, I met a lot of consulting firms that come on board and these are pitching that came to the event and they were pitching the different startups that we will help you, we will help you innovate. And I was, okay, we are your startup consultants. And they were targeting series A and series Bs.
Richard Abi-Chahla:So I was having coffee with one of those and I was asking her like, okay, whenever, if I have a series B startup and I went to you, what are the resources that will be working on my project? Are they ex founders? Are they people who got their hands dirty? No. We are expert in innovation.
Richard Abi-Chahla:Okay. You're expert in innovation. Cool. But have you You know theories. Theories, impractical, they don't work.
Richard Abi-Chahla:Did you have your hands on experience in a certain number of startups and you know what worked, what didn't work? And even more, were you founders in some of those startups or were you very early employees? Like your neck was on the line, if this does not work you will lose your job. Or you were always in the consultant seat or in a large organization seat where they would throw a couple of million dollar project if it doesn't work out we go to the other the next project. They said no, no need.
Richard Abi-Chahla:We don't get our hands on. We just give them the theory and they have to apply it. So they are catching on, but still from the same perspective where they cannot be blamed for anything. This is really frustrating for organization and this is why they are seeking fractional people like us. We are individual contributors.
Richard Abi-Chahla:We are give our opinion. We help them implement it. If it doesn't work out, we help them pivot and we test again until things work out. Otherwise, we both failed. It's not that they failed, we did not.
Brian Root:Yep. I think you're hitting precisely on honestly one of the reasons that I wanted to start this podcast and have these conversations, which is, you know, when you talk to I don't want to pick on consultants, know, purely in this conversation, but you know, just to continue that theme at least, right? When you talk to a lot of these, consulting companies, they are trying to package innovation into something that sounds certain, right? And then I can say, know, in my personal experience, one of my enterprise clients, I joined directly after a consulting engagement from, you know, one of the the big consulting companies, and I got to look at some of the materials that they had handed off, and it was absolute certainty, on, you know, three or four slides, you need to do this, this, and this, but the this, this, and this was like, you need to use AI in your tool. Okay.
Brian Root:That's so unhelpful. How? Right? Not to mention that's just, know, kind of boilerplate advice that you could get from anybody off the street these days probably. Right?
Brian Root:So it it looked just absolutely certain, like, we've, you know, we've done all this research, we know exactly what you should do, zero implementation behind it, you know, and really at the of the day because of that zero value. Right? But I think, you know, the companies have to maybe go through that experience a couple of times to realize that certainty is not actually valuable in this context. Right? Like, I think what you're referring to is is is the reality, right, of Mhmm.
Brian Root:Of building good products. Right? It is messy. I can come in with a thesis, you know, a hypothesis, but I have to be ready to be wrong. I have to be ready to be wrong in this particular way potentially, right, as I, you know, hear things from from users and customers that, may not be anything I've ever heard for or expected to hear, right?
Brian Root:And for me to tell anybody like founder CEO, you know, that you know that's not going to happen. I know exactly what I'm talking about you know and you know, we've done this for 50 other companies like that's it's ignoring how know, how messy the process really is fundamentally and I think much better to embrace that and say, we're gonna learn things that we don't know and therefore we need a testing approach, we need to be humble about our beliefs, right, and proceed accordingly. But it's just very hard, think, for the bigger the company even, like
Richard Abi-Chahla:Yep.
Brian Root:For that message to resonate because they do, broadly speaking, operate on certainty and predictability and, you know, anything that is unknown is is bad and must be either squashed or
Richard Abi-Chahla:Yeah, the biggest asset of a product manager is to be able to take decisions with very few certainties or very few data that he has in front of him. Mhmm. And to be able to have the courage to take this decision because it might threaten his position. Like Mhmm. It's not easy for people to say I was wrong.
Richard Abi-Chahla:We need to be comfortable saying, I'm taking this decision. I don't have enough data. Based on my previous experience, based on my gut feeling, and based off what I'm seeing in front of me, and the few data that we have, this is the best approach. And we need to be lenient enough to be at any point able to say, alright, stop. I was wrong.
Richard Abi-Chahla:Let's pivot a little bit. Let's change course a little bit. And that's that. I cannot tell you the amount of time that I gathered the team and I said, guys, we need to stop whatever we're doing because we didn't have this knowledge that we now have. And if we continue on that course, we will fail.
Richard Abi-Chahla:There's a war at the end. We need to shift course into doing that. And what makes that affordable to do is if whenever you don't have enough data, you build the minimum possible.
Brian Root:Mhmm.
Richard Abi-Chahla:You don't build a lot, you build the minimum possible, so the amount you lose is a lot less than the amount you would have lost if you have built the full fledged thing.
Brian Root:I I I'm curious, I mean, that that I think you're articulating a a strategy that has worked well for a lot of, successful companies certainly. The prevailing sentiment in tech in Silicon Valley right now seems to be due to to AI and vibe coding. Throw all that out the window. Build as fast as possible. Right?
Brian Root:Like, I can I can do whatever I want in Lovable and Replit in these tools for $20 a month, so go crazy? Build build everything, right? Which I think is directly in conflict with what you were just articulating. How do you see that? You know, is there a middle ground or are those people just wrong?
Brian Root:How do you
Richard Abi-Chahla:It's not really in conflict, but like the validation part shifted. Instead of doing a lot of UX research and a lot of interviews and a lot of surveys and spending two, three months analyzing those, You can do that in one week, just get the high level sense because, all right, you're not spending a lot of time on developers now and a lot of money on developers and the development effort is less, but you're still spending time. So if you don't want to build 10 solutions and then learn from them every time, just do a little bit of UX research. You don't do it over the course of two to three months, do it over the course of one or two weeks. And then prototype, we used three years back, we used to do two to three months UX research and get really thorough with that.
Richard Abi-Chahla:If we don't have twenty, thirty interviews, if we did not have 500 survey replies, we would still be shaky on our assumptions. But now even if we have four or five interviews and we are convinced this is our target audience and we have like 5,100 surveys, we can move. We used to validate the prototype before building it, now we can just prototype the designs and build them fast using lovable, replicas or whatever and then put them in front of people. Just don't build the full fledged solution, just build whatever you need to understand if you build more, the time you are investing, even if it's costing one person $20 per month on that person's time, it's still cost that you're putting. So if you stay within the range of validating as much as we can with our target audience, instead of doing a lot of UX research, then building a prototype like UX wireframes and so forth, and then showing them to our user and then going and building that, you can skip a lot of parts but still do them.
Richard Abi-Chahla:If you don't want to validate the UX UI, it's fine, just build that fast because it's much more interactive whenever you built it into a piece of software and put it in front of your users very early on. Just now you used to be able to do that every month, now you can do that every week. Do it every week, give it to them, let them test it, let them give you a feedback and then you iterate. Because even in that case if you've been building for two months, if there's something early on that you've done wrong, those two months you'll have to throw them away. It's the same case.
Richard Abi-Chahla:It's just that mistakes are cheaper now, but there are still mistakes you have to pay for.
Brian Root:Yep. Yep. That's absolutely right. Well, Richard, we're coming up on time here, but I'd love to leave you with with one last question. I think you've had a lot of good insights and certainly advice on some level for founders, CEOs, people who are actively trying to scale companies, with a product lens.
Brian Root:If there's one thing you could advise people to do differently or change in order to have a more significant impact, what would that be?
Richard Abi-Chahla:They need to be comfortable. They need always to think from their users' lens. They need to be comfortable taking assumptions and building on them, and they need to be comfortable building slow. Like, be quick to market, but don't build too much. Just don't wait a lot of time until you get feedback.
Richard Abi-Chahla:So constantly stay in the loop with your customers to get feedback from them and build slow. And please stop hiring consultants to blame them and resources to blame them. Hire people to really put their hands in your project or product and really push it forward. I'm not trying to market for fractional people, but the amount of risk you're saving whenever you hire a fractional person is tremendous, because you can start right away, instead of for you to hire or waiting for a consultant to build you a nice presentation and then based on that you have to hire, you can hire someone for an engagement, a fractional person for an engagement within days if not weeks probably. We start working right away, and then if your project doesn't pick up, we just stop working, and this is when you stop paying.
Richard Abi-Chahla:If the project picks up, we can always train someone to take over if you want an employee, if you need a full time employee. So it's practically reducing your risk as a company owner, as organization, and increasing your chances of success. And if it doesn't work, we will get blamed. It's not that we'll throw the blame on you and you will throw the blame on us.
Brian Root:Yeah. Alright. Folks, you heard it here first. Stop hiring consultants, start hiring friends. Richard, thank you so much.
Brian Root:Richard Abicella from Purple Brains. Appreciate you.
Richard Abi-Chahla:Thank you, Brian. Bye bye.
