7 Reasons Why Product Is Damn Hard In Europe

The art of killing of innovation

It was pouring heavily in São Paulo. I had a call at 08:15 am, but I had to be in the office by 09:00 am. I walked as fast as I could to get to a Starbucks close to the office. There I was, soaking wet, ready to jump into a video call I didn’t know would change my life forever.

“We want to hire you as a Product Manager for our back-end services team.”

I froze for a minute. I had a great life in São Paulo. The C-Suite listened to me, I was about to get promoted to Head of Product, and I was replacing my professor at the MBA for a few months. Life was awesome. Should I really say yes and move to Germany, a place I’ve never been to?

The hiring manager asked me: “Are you still there? I hear the noise of people but don’t hear you.”

I didn’t think any further, and I said, “Yes. I’m taking the offer.” I had no idea what I was saying yes to, and I still did it.

It’s been 8 years since that call took place, but one thing I know for sure. I’m no longer that person, and I haven’t been for years. I used to think product was actually simple, but we tended to make it more complicated. Today, I realize every company plays the game differently, and some seem to like to suffer more than they need. No need to blame, but a heavy need to take action when everybody accepts the status quo as final.

This newsletter is a highly opinionated one. It’s not based on statistics or strong research. It’s about my experience of working in Europe for 8 years, consulting 50+ companies worldwide, and having worked in South America for about a decade. I will touch on the hard topics, especially why the product world in Europe suffers too much.

It’s All About Perspectives

When I arrived in Germany, I thought I was going crazy.

In Brazil, we expect problems. We don’t try to prevent anything because everything is so unpredictable that heavy planning is useless, so we don’t even bother. We deal with things as they show up. We like saying we have two types of problems: the ones I have, and the ones I don’t.

I arrived in Germany in winter. I had never seen snow before. When I went to work on my second day, something shocked me. It was snowing heavily (or I thought so), I waited for the bus for 7 minutes, and nobody was at the station but me. When the timer showed 1 minute missing for the bus to arrive, about 20 folks showed up. Two minutes later, no bus, and I started hearing “Shit.” People got on the bus quite pissed, and I couldn’t understand why. For me it seemed pretty fine.

In Brazil, we don’t really know when the bus arrives. You go to the station and you wait, and the bus comes when it comes.

Perspectives matter a lot. Munich is predictable. You can plan everything to the minute. São Paulo is unpredictable, any plan needs to have wiggle room, and such simple things have a massive impact on product perspectives, not only in Germany, but in the EU overall.

Reality Is Tough, But There’s Hope

This episode will annoy many people. And I will do my best to give you antidotes to the issues you probably face. Also, I want to emphasize that Europe does have outstanding products, but not enough for its size.

We have GetYourGuide in Berlin, Spotify and Lovable in Stockholm, Booking in Amsterdam, Revolut in the UK, and many others. And somehow we have many other potential companies getting stuck and suffering to gain market share.

Why does that happen?

I believe 7 things make product success damn hard. And I urge you to simplify what others complicate.

Let’s get into it now.

1. The Roadmap Theater

Whenever I start a collaboration with any company, I ask the same question: “What’s a good decision?” I generally get lengthy answers, but no clarity. Then I ask how they ensure their teams make good decisions when they aren’t in the room. “The roadmap is the answer.”

In Europe, companies tend to have exhaustive roadmaps with detailed features. Often on a quarterly basis, and sometimes even yearly. Unintentionally, the roadmap becomes the strategy because a real one is absent. The result of it is sad.

Teams continuously compromise to deliver on what’s promised. Nobody can tell you how the dots connect, and you should not dare to do something that’s not on the roadmap. That’s the plan, and the plan is the goal.

Strategy is a loaded word, we all know that. So what’s a decent product strategy? The faster you can say yes or no to anything in front of you, the stronger your product strategy. The thing is that companies don’t like spending time on this because it’s intangible value while a loaded roadmap is clear.

Strive to get your company to answer the following:

Where do we want to be? (Objective)
Who do we serve and who do we not? (Audience)
What makes us different from our competitors? (Value proposition)
How do we know we’re succeeding? (How to measure results)

You can present that the way you want, but teams should be able to challenge the tons of requests they receive. How does this serve our audience? How does it help us differentiate? How does it contribute to success? If they don’t know the answers, and still prioritizes, that will distract them from what matters.

The reality is that almost no one asks such questions, and teams live in a roadmap theatre, and you become the clown.

Lesson: Dare to ask the questions nobody is asking.

2. PM Means Project Manager, Not Product Manager

What’s a PM? Probably you’ve got this question, and you’ll get many answers to it.

In Europe, a PM means Product Manager in fantasy, and Project Manager in reality. Your job is limited to scope, tasks, status reports, and continuously updating timelines. You get so busy with administrative work that you find no time to talk to customers, strategize, and make hard decisions.

It sounds depressing because it’s depressing.

The language is clear in meetings, hallways, kitchens, and everywhere. Which project are you working on? What’s the scope? What are the resources (I hate this word)?

This is project management language, not product. And this is a big problem because it forces us to do things that are detrimental to value creation.

Defining scope when you know little about what customers need, and how they will interact with your solution, is predictable waste.

Creating timelines when you can only imagine what you will deliver is asking for discussions about why you didn’t deliver “on time.”

Product language is different.

We talk about investment instead of timelines. You should clarify how much the initiative is worth, and then work incrementally.
We talk about initiatives instead of projects. Initiatives are bets that we can drop if we’re proven wrong.

Projects have a beginning, middle, and end. In product, you should not finish everything you start. Most won’t work, so you’re better off learning from them and dropping the distractions faster.

Lesson: Product management is language, adapt your language to build up influence. Talk product, not project.

3. Clarity Is A Prison

When I first became a CEO, the investors almost threw me out of the window because I didn’t know what we’d deliver in 5 years. They asked me what our roadmap and forecasts were. I knew whatever I said that moment would become expectations, which they’d nail me on once we failed. It would actually be my prison, so I acted differently.

I told them, we’re in a multibillion dollar market, and I’m confident we can capture at least 5% of it within the next few years. Given the investment size, you’re all going to make ten times your investment. How we will get there is what we need to discover, so I will not lie to you about what we will do because that will get us into discussions that lead to nothing but frustration.

They told me, “That’s not how it works. We need clarity before committing.” I had seen that in different setups already. We don’t hire because we lack clarity. We don’t work on it because we don’t know what to do.

Product is all about stepping into the unknown. It’s not about having clarity upfront. It’s about figuring things out relentlessly.

Abstract discussions dominate meeting rooms in European companies. We talk more about the work than we get things done. That’s embarrassing because I’ve been part of it, and I don’t like it.

I’ve often observed a flawed belief that the more we talk about something, the more clarity we get. This is plain bullshit. The more we abstractly talk, the more we fool ourselves.

The only way of building clarity is by stepping into the unknown.

Lesson: Be the hands-on PM, talk about results, not opinions.

4. Consensus Is How Good Ideas Die Slowly

Let me share with you a story that even today I cannot understand why it keeps repeating all over the place.

“Does everyone agree?”

Three people raised their hands and shared their points, purely opinion based.

They challenged the design, the solution, and the usability. None of them had ever talked to a customer, but all of them disagreed with the PM who had interviewed 10 people. The meeting was disturbing, and the PM was clearly frustrated. She left the room with a solution that everyone agreed on, but real evidence was plainly ignored.

In Europe, consensus drives most decisions. That sucks. Everything takes too long to move because someone doesn’t “feel” it’s the right thing to do. And if someone thinks that, you’ve got to figure out how to get this person on board or nothing moves.

In Brazil, things were easier. The CPO would tell me what she wanted, and why it mattered. Then I’d get together with the team and come up with something. When I went back to the CPO, it was to show results, not to discuss what I discovered. We only talked about progress, and I was responsible for making it happen.

What people fail to understand in Europe is the different types of decisions. Overall we have four, not one. Collaborative, authoritative, democratic, and consensus. Each serves different purposes. Consensus is the best model for irreversible decisions, which are the rare ones, and collaborative is my favorite for most decisions.

Don’t let organizations stall progress because they want consensus. Help them see different ways of making decisions.

Rule of thumb: the easier it is to revert something, the faster you should make the decision. And on top of that, make incremental decisions evidence based instead of upfront commitments with only opinions.

Lesson: A bad decision is better than no decision because it creates learning, while no decision creates nothing.

5. Risk Is The Only Word That Opens Doors

In Europe, product management is a mixture of project and risk management. Everyone wants to talk about risk, and until people get “comfortable,” they will keep discussing.

Whenever I presented a new idea, I got pushback on the risks. Although I always pivoted the questions to “what about the opportunities we’re missing?”, it turned out nobody cared.

Now, something funny happens in every roadmap planning session. Even though companies are risk averse, they commit to roadmap items without any real risk mitigating strategy. Ideas become projects. Projects get executed. Most fail. I learned to leverage that to shift to value.

You can play the same game. When you look at roadmap items, ask what the viability risks are. What are the desirability risks? And then you act differently than everybody else. You figure out how to de-risk the ideas.

In Germany, don’t waste your time talking about assumptions, people will ignore you. But when you name risks, everyone leans in. And that’s your chance of running real product discovery without ever using the word discovery.

Risk aversion is costly in Europe because it takes too long to start anything until risks are clear. Your chance is to leverage that and own the discussions. Play the game with the product management techniques.

Lesson: Talk risk, not assumptions. De-risk ideas faster than everybody else.

6. Process Is A Progress Killer

In Brazil, I was responsible for three product teams at once. We were flying high and shipping value like a machine. Our workflow was so simple that most would call it stupid: Backlog, Prioritized, In-Progress, Review, Done. That’s all. But then I came to Germany and things got different. It was the first time I saw a workflow with 30+ different statuses. I couldn’t believe it.

The company had 50 software engineers and 10 product managers. In Brazil, I worked directly with 27 engineers. The difference was simple, we focused on progress, and in Germany I had to focus on coloring inside the lines. Every PM had to go through complex processes before getting anything done. You may think we were in a highly regulated industry, but we actually were trying to sell diapers online.

I thought maybe that was an exception, but then I saw the same all over again, and again, and again. Talks about how to do the work got more important than the work itself. Process obsession is a progress killer.

Guess what happens?

The more process you add, the less people collaborate. Whenever some friction happens, they make the process more strict so they avoid the issue in the future. But nobody talks it through.

The game is about people and collaboration, but somehow that’s not what I often see in Europe. Germany tends to be more complicated, but I saw the same in Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, France, and the UK.

However.

You can be different. Instead of making processes more complicated, you uncover the root cause and solve that. You add value by avoiding future complications.

I’m not a fan of “process” because I know what they end up becoming. But I know teams need a minimum structure level to collaborate. Keep it stupid simple.

Lesson: Start with the bare minimum, and then adapt according to the challenges you have, not the ones that people only imagine.

7. The Job Description As A Shield

Europe is a great place to live and work. The balance you find here is incredible. Job stability is strong to the point that companies rarely fire people. In Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands, it’s close to impossible to let people go. That brings a lot of peace of mind and lets people live well, and it comes with undesirable side effects.

In Brazil, people get fired for no reason, and that’s about it. As a result, employees do all they can to show results. People have to be flexible and go the extra mile. And that goes to a point that becomes unhealthy. When I worked in São Paulo, I arrived at around 08:30 am, and generally left the office at 07:30 pm or so. When I left around 06:00 pm, people asked if I was demotivated, and they were serious about it.

In Germany, for example, many people will resist changes because “It’s not their job.” If it’s not written in their contract, they can actually reject new responsibilities. Brazilians, on the other hand, will not care about the contract because they want to remain employed, so they will adapt no matter what.

Once I had a situation with a few project managers moving to product management. The organization decided to merge the roles, and every project manager would become a product manager. Many people were vehemently against it, and told me, “I’m a project manager, and I will not talk to customers. It’s not my job.” Hands tied, I could do nothing.

This level of inflexibility is detrimental to growth. People very quickly lock themselves in the comfort zone and throw the keys away, never to be found again.

There’s a reason Germany’s economy is stalling and it struggles to innovate. When “it’s not my job” becomes wildly accepted, innovation becomes a daunting challenge.

You’ll find many Germans who couldn’t care less about their contracts. They are brave, creative, and collaborative. I’ve worked with a software engineer who attended several interviews, travelled to visit partners, and was very curious about everything. Sadly he was the minority of people I’ve worked with. I asked him why everyone was so conservative, and he told me:

“Because the stupid system rewards safety, not courage. If you step outside your role and something goes wrong, you carry the risk. But if you stay inside your limits, you’re protected. Most people optimize for not getting in trouble, not for creating impact.”

He paused and added, “It’s not that people don’t want to do more. It’s that over time, they learn it’s just not worth it. You do more, get the same salary increase as if you did nothing else.”

That stuck with me. Because it reframed everything, not as a people problem, but as a system problem. When you design environments where courage is punished, you shouldn’t be surprised when people use their job descriptions as shields.

And that’s the sad reality. Germany and other countries don’t lack talent, discipline, or intelligence. They lack permission, structurally and culturally, for people to step beyond what’s defined.

Lesson: When you hear “that’s not my job,” it’s rarely laziness. It’s learned behavior. You can still collaborate to do something better.

A Few Final Thoughts

In Brazil, I went from PM to Senior PM in 5 years. In Germany, within the same time frame, I became a CxO. The difference wasn’t my skills, but the courage to be different.

It became easier for me to stand out in Europe than in Brazil. Not because people around me were less capable. I actually believe they are more capable than me. But because I dared to do things nobody else was doing. Often, I looked foolish. Sometimes, a thing or another stuck with the right person, and that opened doors.

Yes, product in Europe sucks more than it should.
Yes, people will drive you nuts with stability and predictability stuff.
Yes, you won’t like many things.

And yet, you can stand out because too many people won’t dare to be different.

Will you?

Talk soon,
David

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