Avoiding Distractions and Wasted Resources as a Product Manager - Mahdi Farra, Ronday

Product Innovation Series with Aram Melkoumov

About Mahdi Farra
Mahdi Farra began his fascination with products when he was just 14. Today, he is a Director of Product Design at Ronday. He held many various roles including Lead Product Designer at Airtime and Senior UX Designer at Rakuten Ready. Mahdi has many interesting ideas about common practices that, in his view, are nothing but expensive distractions.

Summary
Mahdi Farra joins Sergey to discuss a plethora of things he saw going wrong in his project management career. He tells the story of an expensive and time-consuming mistake he made in one of his posts at a startup and shares all the nuggets of insights he gained along the way. They then discuss other common practices that Mahdi believes should not take place.

SHOW NOTES:
00:05 | Who is Mahdi Farra?
00:37 | The worst product Mahdi worked on (an expensive lesson)
04:48 | Building your own software vs. using an existing product
09:30 | How to make sure your quality assurance is on point
13:25 | Why you shouldn’t invest in creating a design system
18:40 | Why you should ask your team to work on specific goals rather than high-level goals
24:11 | Having unrealistic expectations from your team (reality realignment)

QUOTES:
[08:06] “If you have a well-designed solution for a problem that nobody cares about, people are just going to look at it and say “Okay, this looks nice but I’m not going to use it”.”
[14:25] “I don’t think you should invest in building your design system or building a design system in general. I think you should try to focus on the build speed in other ways. Do not complicate things by trying to make sure that everything is standardised.”

Follow Mahdi Farra
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahdif/
Website: https://mahdif.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mahdif

Work with Crowdlinker:
https://www.crowdlinker.com/contact