From 4 to 40 Product Managers: How and How Not to Scale

Scaling a product team is one of the most written-about topics in product management. Every blog post makes it sound like a matter of hiring the right people and implementing the right frameworks. In reality, scaling from a handful of product managers to a team of forty is a messy, politically charged, culturally disruptive process that breaks things before it fixes them.

Arne Snauwaert, Product Manager at Mollie, brought this reality to PR_D_CT DAY 2023 in Ghent. Mollie, the Dutch-Belgian payments company, went from four product managers to over forty in a relatively short period. Arne's talk was a candid retrospective on what worked, what failed spectacularly, and what he would change if he could do it again.

For the product leaders in the room, many of whom were navigating their own scaling challenges at Belgian and European tech companies, this was one of the most actionable talks of the day.