The Truth Behind the Data – Jimena Almendares on The Product Experience

Jimena Almendares has held senior product roles and leadership positions at Zynga and Meetup, and now runs the Global Expansion efforts for Intuit. She has plenty of great stories to tell from those roles, but it’s her time as Chief Product Officer at OKCupid that we wanted to talk about. Jimena’s team completely revamped the customer onboarding flow and profiles using a data-informed approach that led to some amazing results – and some learnings that can help super-charge your own approach to dating.
Quote of the Episode
We don’t launch product features or products themselves just for the sake of it. We think about them as: How are they going to change our business? Are they going to bring more customers? Are we going to be able to monetise more? So how does that affect the P&L? You’re going to have arguments that are mostly around technology or innovation but are missing the part that ultimately companies and products are businesses, and we need to think about expressing that in the same way.
Listen if you’d like to learn more about

* How to observe patterns in data
* Understanding human behaviour
* Women in Product
* Dating apps

Links mentioned in this episode

* Find Jimena on Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as on her own site
* Jimena’s ‘Run Your Life Like a Product Roadmap’ article
* John Sterman’s book,  Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modelling for a Complex World

Hosts
The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.
Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. Lily has spent 13 years in the tech industry working mainly with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She has worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank in Bristol, the Product Managers’ meetup with regular events and talks on Product now with 800+ members and growing. Now the Product Director at Symec, Lily also runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.
A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. After launching Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, Randy has worked with museums and arts groups, online education, media and entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. Now a trainer, Discovery and Leadership consultant, he’s spoken at Mind the Product Engage (Hamburg and Manchester), the Business of Software, Turing Festival, a number of ProductTanks (London, Zurich, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford, and Brighton… so far!) and at conferences across the US and Europe.

Music
Our theme music is from Hamburg-based Pau,