Marcel Furmie: Creating Groundbreaking New Products Global Online PMDay Website - https://opmday.org Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/startuplviv FB - https://www.facebook.com/edunomicaone

1. Lessons learned from
Creating
Groundbreaking
Products
© Marcel Furmie, 2021

2. Bio
Product Director & Inventor
• TED Emerging Innovator 2019
• London School of Economics
• USC Marshall School of Business
• Successful exit (marketing tech)
• Medical/health tech
• Director of Product @ Quantgene
• Founder and CEO @ Fifo Technologies
2/15
Marcel Furmie

3. Lessons learned journal

4. Favorite PM
bloggers:
Alexis & Adrienne
https://productmanagers.substack.com/arc
hive?sort=top
Lenny Rachitsky
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/archive?
sort=top
Julie Zhou
https://joulee.medium.com/

5. Lesson 1:
Framing
Define the
problem/
vision/ goal
well

6. • If that question divides your user group, which user group has the
biggest market opportunity - is it people sending critically important
messages like OTPs or a marketing company sending big volumes of
lower importance messages?
• What inherent problems, constraints and limitations lie in dealing with
regulations and the cellular networks?
• Who are the people sending SMS?
• Who are they sending it to?
• What companies do they rely on now and how can we be different?
• What is the content matter of the messages?
• Is performance or deliverability the biggest priority?

7. Framework
• Competition
• user experience/design
• Economics
• Technology
• Market
• user segments
• business models?

8. Level up to
great PM
• Add insights from your
own experience and
knowledge to the
problem

9. New
definition
• My problem was then defined as
“high volume transactional
SMS senders hit huge
delays when sending time-
critical SMS to millions of
users”

10. be in love with the PROBLEM
and never with your
solution
3/15

11. Lesson 2:
Goal setting
Goals cannot be attained
without a medium: an
organization's culture. -
John Doerr

12. goals are just a concise
expression of two things: a team’s
(1) prioritization and (2) speed. -
Adrienne and Alexis

13. Journal :
Always solve
the biggest
problems

14. Journal entry 1:
Pick something
you enjoy doing

17. Fighting cancer is personal
for me.

18. *Source: American Cancer Society, American Cancer Society, USPSTF
† For the average risk population, some high-risk patient standards may vary

19. Early Detection is the Best Protection
†
200,000+
American Lives

20. “current cancer screening methods don’t
routinely search for most of the common
types of cancer so when we do find it, the
mortality rate is often times 10x worse”

21. if the goal doesn’t scare you, it’s
probably too mild!
-Alexis and Adrienne

22. Great PM’s

24. 3 areas of risk:
User risk
Business risk
Ops + technology risk

25. User risk: PMF
“When we hit PMF, we
started feeling pull for the
first time”
“Like getting pressed into
the back of your seat by a
fast car or a plane taking
off”
“Word of mouth was
uncontrollable”
Lenny Rachitsky

27. TIME

28. “Great PM’s aren’t the
glue”. - Alexis and Adrienne
3/15

29. As Boz puts it,
“communication is the job.”
3/15

30. Lenny’s
communication
tricks
• Emails
• Docs
• Meetings
• Presentations
• Storytelling
Lenny Rachitsky

31. It is VERY hard to over
communicate as a Product
Manager.
3/15
Lenny Rachitsky

32. THANK YOU
Email: marcelfurmie@gmail.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcel-furmie/
“In God we trust; all others must bring data.” –
W. Edwards Deming
3/15

33. Sources in the notes
3/15