Product in Practice #3: Hemnet with Francesca Cortesi (CPO)
Creating and sharing strategic context, balancing exploration and execution, Opportunity Solution Trees (OST), organizing teams around customer segments, and more.
👋 Hey there! I’m Afonso, founder of Scandinavian Product Group.
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Today’s deep dive is about Hemnet - Sweden's largest housing platform - with its Chief Product Officer: Francesca Cortesi.
Francesca is a passionate product leader with over a decade of experience in creating and scaling digital products that not only are loved by users but also drive substantial business growth.
In her career, she has put her hands on some amazing digital products, and what sets her apart is her openness and generosity in sharing her journey. She regularly writes about her learnings, the challenges she has overcome, mistakes, and how she concretely pushes herself and her team forward.
You don’t want to miss this one, so let’s dive in!
1. How do you create a clear strategic context at Hemnet?
The million-dollar question! Creating a clear strategic context is, in my view, the essence of product leadership. It involves synthesizing all different needs—technical, business, and user—into a coherent direction. And it is easier said than done.
There are of course processes for this, but to me, the key to establishing a clear strategic context isn't found in any specific framework; it's rooted in active listening.
The initial step is to engage deeply with your team. Are your Product Managers finding it straightforward to prioritize? Can others in the organization articulate what matters and why? What about the perspective of upper management and the board on the impact of what you currently work on?
If you're encountering any 'no's to the questions above, this signals a gap in either your strategy's clarity or its communication. So, my first advice is: start by listening and you’ll know where your challenge is.
When it comes to devising a new strategic context from the ground up, here's my approach:
Define Core Goals: Start with clarifying the company's key objectives. Understand what are needles that are important to move, why they are important, and how to measure success. In short: define what is the desired value. This responsibility lies with management and should align with the company’s vision and strategy.
At Hemnet, we anchor this in our 3-year company strategy and annual OKRs.Identify Strategic Opportunities to drive your goals: Once you know what value looks like, you need to make it clear how you get there. This involves a thorough analysis of potential opportunities and selecting those most aligned with your goals. It's essential to gather all necessary inputs for informed decision-making.
We navigate this through our product strategy and opportunity roadmap.Monitor Market Dynamics: Staying alert to market shifts is a must, and you need to be able to adjust your strategy as necessary. The important thing to do here is to make conscious choices on when to deviate from the plan and why
And remember: the key is repetition. Ensure everyone involved in decision-making understands what's important and why. And, importantly, never stop listening.
An example to visualize all the layers of the strategy
2. How do you approach planning?
In my experience, planning is one of the most critical alignment tools that Product has. Therefore there is not one approach to planning, but it must evolve to meet the changing needs and expectations of the company.
During my five years at Hemnet, our planning methods have shifted multiple times to find the perfect balance between execution and the return on the time invested. Planning for us is about creating transparency on what we work on and aligning priorities among teams to handle dependencies effectively. I’ll share some context on our planning evolution across different phases to highlight why we adapted our methods.
Beginning Phase: We faced challenges with no alignment and issues in execution, the main challenge for us to solve was executing on a quarterly basis.
The reason why we weren’t succeeding with it was the overwhelming number of tasks without clear priorities. At this point, we planned quarterly and we planned mainly features/output. The focus was on executing key initiatives, with planning aimed at immediate results for the upcoming quarter.
Mid-way Phase: As we gained alignment and defined a cohesive company and product strategy, our planning horizon expanded to one year. We started planning for outcomes and impact, aligning with the company's long-term vision and product development.
The main challenge at this point was the large amount of time spent on planning. We were doing quarterly planning but realized the inefficiency due to the planning overhead with our goals now set yearly.
Current Approach: To reduce time spent planning and maintain flexibility for external changes, we've moved to bi-yearly planning with quarterly reviews. We've also introduced opportunity roadmaps.
Now, PMs bring forward opportunities they believe best align with our strategic goals and desired outcomes. This planning phase is crucial for setting clear priorities and understanding how opportunities relate to each other.
As you see, we tested different ways of planning depending on company needs and the challenge we had in front of us. But the essence of planning remained.
Example of opportunities roadmaps (deep dive in this article)
3. Tell me more about how you use OKRs.
To define what product teams focus on at a yearly level (their objectives), we follow a structured approach:
Company OKRs (Yearly): These set the overarching goals for the year, providing a clear target for the entire company to strive towards.
Opportunities Roadmaps (18 Months Rolling): Based on the yearly OKRs, we plan how to achieve these goals using an 18-month rolling opportunities roadmap. This helps in setting a direction on how we plan to meet our goals.
Bi-Yearly Planning with Quarterly Reviews: This step dictates what we're actually executing on. It's where the rubber meets the road, translating our strategic intentions into actionable plans over six months, with quarterly check-ins to ensure relevance and adaptability.
Teams have the responsibility for creating and aligning their opportunities roadmaps. They're tasked with selecting the most pertinent opportunities to bring to the planning discussions, ensuring that what we work on is directly contributing to the company goals.
4. Overall, how’s your product development process - from generating ideas to launching a product?
At the heart of our product development process lie three key elements:
Our three-year product strategy, our yearly company OKRs, and the Opportunity Solution Tree (OST).
These components together guide us in choosing what to work on and which products to bring to market.
The product strategy clarifies the behaviors we're targeting, emphasizing the importance of aligning all efforts with our long-term goals.
Our yearly OKRs specify the targets we aim to hit within the year, helping to identify which opportunities are most relevant.
The OST is instrumental in mapping and comparing opportunities, helping us in evaluating the best paths forward.
Once the best opportunity is identified, we move into execution mode, engaging our go-to-market machinery.
The Product Manager (PM) has a central role in this entire process. They're tasked with aligning stakeholders, gathering inputs, and ensuring everyone's involvement is timely and effective.
Ideas are funneled through a PM, who works closely with the product trio (PM, design, and engineer) and stakeholders to decide on priorities. PMs are responsible for guiding this process.
5. Hemnet and your work have been featured in Teresa Torres’ newsletter a few months ago. Can you tell me a little bit about how you approach OST and what your main lessons learned were?
Last year, I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Teresa at the Product at Heart conference, and told her about our journey. When she highlighted our work on continuous discovery, it was a great milestone for me.
Over the past three years, we’ve integrated continuous discovery into our product development process, a practice I highly recommend to anyone aiming to center their product development around customers and generate value. It has significantly helped us in quickly choose between opportunities, fostered a culture of engaging with customers regularly, and has been instrumental in mitigating risks associated with development.
There are two key takeaways from our journey that I’d like to share:
Start Small and Demonstrate Results: Echoing Teresa Torres, it's crucial to "meet people where they are." Adopting any new framework requires demonstrating its value to gain buy-in.
We began with a team already engaged in user conversations and not focused on the company’s top priorities, minimizing risk. By showing positive outcomes, we gradually expanded the practice. The lesson here is to take incremental steps, not going fully all-in.Emphasize the efficiency of discovery: A common challenge I hear about is the misconception that discovery is time-consuming and only a cost.
Still today this is one of the first things that come up when the pressure is turned on: why do we have to invest time in discovery? This is a constant struggle, even for us who have been working with it for a while.
I believe that the only way to attack it is to show that discovery doesn’t have to take long, and especially that the time used is well spent to avoid the risk of building the wrong thing. You can do assumption testing in less than a day, you can time-box your discovery effort, and you can prove a pipeline of products that have created business impact - and saved a lot of money that would have been wasted otherwise.Make sure to keep track of the products you do discovery for, and the ones you don’t. And then show the difference.
6. How's Hemnet organized to build products?
The approach that I chose to align the product organization with the business needs is to create product teams that directly serve one customer group.
We have identified key domains tied to our main customer segments—property seekers, sellers, and real estate agents. Within these domains, various teams focus on addressing the most critical challenges and opportunities for their respective customer group.
This structure has proven highly effective for Hemnet for two key reasons:
It is stable yet flexible. Hemnet's core mission is to deliver value and drive innovation for these three target groups. This setup ensures we're always focusing on our core stakeholders. Yet, it's flexible enough to allow for the introduction of new customer groups, enabling us to broaden our business scope as needed.
End-to-end innovation responsibility: Our product strategy aims to shift customer behavior. Having teams dedicated to deeply understanding the challenges and opportunities of a specific group makes it easier to execute this strategy effectively. Additonally, this setup fosters healthy debates and diverse perspectives, which is crucial when navigating the sometimes conflicting interests of our varied customer bases.
In short, it’s a setup that really works for us, keeping us grounded yet flexible enough to expand if we need to.
This is how our teams are structured to support the business.
7. How many PMs and Designers do you have? Any Product Leaders?
The entire product-development organization at Hemnet is around 80 people, organized into 9 cross-functional product teams. We have 9 PMs (one per team), and 8 designers. We also have a UX and User Research Director who works cross-team to make sure that we deliver a cohesive experience and that we constantly talk to users.
We do not have at the moment any product leaders, it is a really flat organization. But I believe we are at the tipping point there, and adding product leaders is definitely something that we are considering.
8. Anything you want to leave us with and want the community to know?
I hope that what I shared resonated and that you can have some concrete takeaways you can apply to your organization. If you want to know more or continue the conversation, please do not be a stranger.
I deeply value learning and collaboration, especially with diverse and talented product minds. This year, I've committed to working with this drive more broadly—through inspirational talks, participating on product advisory boards, and mentoring. These interactions energize me immensely and create valuable opportunities for mutual growth.
If you’re looking for fresh perspectives, a sounding board, an inspirational talk, or advisory services to elevate your product strategy, I’d love to help. Learn more about how we can work together at www.francescacortesi.com. Let’s explore how we can achieve great things together.
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