Episode 168: Cutting the Fat after a Crisis with Alex Wattrelos, Previous CPO of Sunday

In this episode of the Product Thinking podcast, host Melissa Perri is joined by Alex Wettrelos Chief Product Officer at Sunday. Join them as they explore the challenges of rapid scaling and then descaling during the 2022 tech-crisis. They discuss how Sunday, a fin-tech company innovating payment methods across the hospitality industry, went from an idea on a slide deck to 450 employees with $124 million of seed funding. They also touch on the differences between product management in Europe & the US.

Alex worked with Sunday for four years. He primarily built and led the product and product design team whilst also navigating the 2022 tech-crisis. He is now taking the experience of rapid scaling and subsequent downsizing to his new job as Chief Product Officer at Furious, the online system that integrates a business’s CRM, quotes, billing, and project management.

He is also a member of FrenchCPO, a non-for-profit community of French Chief Product Officers, bringing together top product leaders from French tech companies. Alex has worked in product for almost 10 years. Before this he was an Officer Cadet for the French Army between 2013-2014.

You’ll hear them talk about:

01:45 - Alex shares the key challenges he faced as the Chief Product Officer in the early stages of Sunday. It is important to have a clear product vision from the beginning, but this can be a struggle amongst all the other variables, such as partners, customers and employees, who are all competing for your time and attention. The key is to focus on the value proposition we want to bring, how can we then test that and how fast can we get it to market. Deciding what you want to bring makes all the millions of decisions easier, as you have something to base them on.

12:15 - Central to Sunday’s early success was their minimum viable product (MVP). In Europe, paying the bill is often a terrible experience. When you’ve decided to pay after a lovely meal in a busy restaurant, you could spend the next 15 minutes not talking to your friend but trying to gain the attention of the waiter to then pay your bill. It can be a real mood killer. After identifying this pain point, it was clear what Sunday wanted to achieve: speeding up this process. Prioritizing user feedback over the vision was key to getting this to work and focusing on improving the MVP, bit by bit.
32:16 - Alex discusses the importance of focusing on market fit and profitability, especially in the post-tech crisis era. After a period of rapid growth, Sunday needed to descale the entire operation, reduce the number of potential product features and the number of countries to focus on. It was a major challenge, but it also made working for Sunday all the more interesting. In times like this, the company couldn’t afford not to refocus on where the product would have readily available users that could see the value and how it was going to make money and become profitable.

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Previous guests include: Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue of Doodle, Jason Fried of 37signals, Hubert Palan of Productboard, Blake Samic of Stripe and Uber, Quincy Hunte of Amazon Web Services

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