Give Time for Opportunities To Present Themselves: Georgie Smallwood’s Lessons Learned
Product leader Georgie Smallwood believes there’s no template for success, and true success comes from building adaptability, systems thinking skills, and putting people first.
By Tremis Skeete, for Product Coalition
In a conversation with “Product with Panash” podcast host, Axel Sooriah, product leader Georgie Smallwood shares stories and lessons learned in regard to how she builds product teams where optimizing consumer adoption is the critical metric for company success.
Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Georgie began her career in media and advertising, and worked for magazines including Vouge and other titles. Over the course of her career, she’s worked and lived in Australia, Hong Kong, and now Germany, where she was Chief Product Officer of Europe’s leading shared micro-mobility provider, TIER (Now Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) at Moonpig).
According to her LinkedIn post, product is one of her favorite topics to discuss, and in light of the past few pandemic years, she admits that it has been quite the product leadership learning experience.
During the conversation with Axel, Georgie also talks about how she navigated her unique career path by sheer resilience and saying “yes” to opportunities as they came her way.
She also shared that while there were moments where her job experiences were very challenging, she chose to endure by believing that opportunities for career growth and success can eventually emerge, as she said:
“Give some time for opportunities to present themselves that maybe you didn’t realize were there before. Because certainly if I look back, those are the times where I’ve had the biggest jumps in my career, and you need to use them.”
Below you will find key quotes from Georgie, from her conversation with Axel — which have been edited and condensed for clarity:
“[In one of my previous roles] I grew the media business with the sales team and the business manager from three people where I was the campaign manager. I was managing campaigns and putting ads online and I grew that team to thirty people across Australia. As part of that, you really have to take a product approach.”
“You can’t scale the team just with people alone. You had to do it with technology. So every time we needed something, I would have to think about how we could do it more efficiently or better or with less cost. That really taught me about hyper growth and scaling and achieving things you didn’t think would ever be possible.”
“Then I went to Hong Kong and I was charged with a similar responsibility and I completely failed within six months because I assumed that you could get the same outcome the same way. That was my first really big learning in growing companies and growing teams and growing revenue — is that it’s not all the same.”
“You can’t always get the same outcome by doing the same things. You have to work out what the correct inputs are to get the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. That was a massive learning for me and was related to cultural differences and how different people work and what’s important to them.”
“I don’t believe that you can go to university and learn how to be a product manager. I’m very passionate about bringing people with expertise and the natural talent for product management. Great communication skills, good coordination, cares about making sure everyone comes on the journey and taking people out of those functional roles into product management.”
“I certainly didn’t craft my career. I wasn’t someone who thought I’m gonna do this way and then I’m gonna get this experience and then this experience, I really just said “yes” to lots of things. That has been my biggest opportunity, and I think that’s also probably something that I would advise people to think about when in their career and they think about what they can do. I get asked a lot how did you become and executive? ‘I don’t know. I just said yes’, is genuinely my answer.”
“I think if you embrace opportunity, more opportunities come, and that has certainly been true for me. I’m not sure if it’s something with the universe and if you put it out there it comes back. I don’t know. But that has been my experience. The more you say yes, the more opportunities come that you want to say yes to. I think because of that approach to things, that’s also why I ended up with this career, which looks a bit strange when you read my CV because it’s non vertical agnostic.”
“By looking at lots of different industries in the technology space, not just in advertising, but in software, b2b and b2c, is that they are all different, but they’re also all the same. I think that for me, learning in Hong Kong that there’s no template for success, what you also need to learn is that everything is a system. And the more that you learn, the more depth you can add to your systems thinking and then you can pull on tools depending on the situation that you’re in.”
“I really do think about companies. I do think when you’re working in tech, as a CPO, you’re a company builder, because if you don’t think about it that way, and think you’re just a product builder, you’re missing the most important thing I’ve learned in my career, which is people build products.”
“If you don’t think about it, like that, and you don’t think I’m building a company that builds products, and people are that company then it won’t work. It might work for a year, you might get some traction, but then you’ll forget that people needed growth plans, or that you needed to check in on them when there was a crisis, and then people leave, and then you lose your IP. The quality of your products goes down. The customers start complaining. Everything is connected. I think the biggest thing that I have learned is that people build those products and humans are complex.”
“And as I become more senior, I also had to learn to distance myself [from work, and have a life outside of work]. So in my 20s and early 30s, I’m your classic Product Manager — obsessed. I want to talk about it. I love it. I really do. I do lots of extra extra curricular stuff with women in tech and startups and pro bono. Because I get a lot out of advising young companies. They think I’m advising them but I’m also getting this fresh point of view and perspective on new things from them, and it’s exhausting.”
“The more senior I get, and the older I get, the more I realized that work cannot be everything. It doesn’t matter how much you love it. You really have to put that boundary in place. It’s a really hard boundary to put in especially if you love it. It’s like trying to quit Diet Coke. It can also be unhealthy. If that is everything, then it’s difficult because your work does not owe you anything. I think if you get into a mindset where you think that your company owes you something, and that’s the entirety of your being, you’re only going to be disappointed because no company can live up to that, because they have a different goal.”
“Make sure that you have other things going on because otherwise if you do get laid off or something happens which is completely outside of your control, everything else goes. So I think that’s the most important, for me working out how I can keep going and keep having these [senior product] roles. Lots of people talk about reading books, or having a career coach, and honestly the best thing for me has been getting a therapist.”
“Sometimes it’s better to stay [at the job] and see what’s going to happen. Not forever. Don’t get walked over, but give some time for opportunities to present themselves that maybe you didn’t realize were there before. Because certainly if I look back, those are the times where I’ve had the biggest jumps in my career, and you need to use them. It’s not all happy sailing, and the more senior you get in your career, the waters get choppier. The key skill to learn as a product person, but as anyone working in tech at the moment, I think is adaptability.”
