In this interview, we chat with Nuno Oliveira Silva, a Lead Product Manager at RemotePass, to learn about his experience launching new features, overcoming hurdles, and driving product improvements based on real-time user feedback. 

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From the most challenging project he has worked on to the proudest moments of their journey so far, Nuno shares insights into what it's like to build impactful tools for remote teams around the world.

What has been the most challenging project you've worked on at RemotePass, and how did you overcome the hurdles? Conversely, what's a project you're especially proud of?

Even though I’ve only joined less than 3 months ago, a couple come to mind 🎉. 

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The most challenging I’d say was the first initiative to launch the Time Off Policies feature, due to the fact that I was still knowing the team and also had to get to speed on the customer needs on the time off topic, which can be quite extensive. We overcame the hurdles with the great support from everyone in the team from product to Customer Success and Engineering.

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I’m especially proud of the Time Off Policies new feature, as I believe we offer a very flexible, yet simple experience for managing time off.

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How do you and your team gather and incorporate user feedback into product development? Can you give an example of how user input led to a significant change or improvement?

We have many open channels of communication from all customer facing teams, including ad-hoc informal chats. The key way we gather feedback is by everyone in the company posting customer feedback into a dedicated Slack channel that the product team uses to clarify and quantify needs. Additionally, a key part is talking directly to customers and understanding their pain points and motivations.

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An example is from our recently released Slack notifications feature, that we understood that a big pain point for HR and Payroll teams in SMBs was having to navigate/log in through several different applications to get informed and then process requests. This led us to add the ability for users to approve/decline time off/expenses requests directly from Slack.

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What’s a common misconception about product management that you’d like to debunk?

That Product Managers = Project Managers. Both are important, but have different purposes. Product Manager's main responsibility is to identify what are the opportunities worthwhile pursuing and then helping in delivering the best product experience that customers see value in and are willing to pay for.

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What’s a fun fact about you that might surprise your colleagues?

I have owned 5 different Mazda Mx-5 in my lifetime.

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What advice would you give to someone aspiring to enter the field of product management?

Be close to customers and understand their needs. Also, try to incorporate Product Management tools/frameworks in your daily work, so that you build experience, e.g. prioritization, affinity mapping.

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If you could have any superpower to help you with your job, what would it be and why?

Having the ability to see the future so that I could prioritize the most impactful opportunities 😀

What’s one feature of RemotePass you’re most excited about, and how do you see it evolving in the future?

That would be adding the Local Payroll offering, as this will mean that an organisation will have the ability to have all their global workforce in a single platform, where they can process payroll, manage time off, pay out End of Service benefits, essentially covering the complete lifecycle, from onboarding to offboarding.

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