What I do
I’m a Product Manager with years of experience creating B2B software products that people love to use. I love solving big problems and making a difference in cross-functional teams, where everyone collectively defines and owns the product process.
The products I’ve managed over the years have been used by people working in a wide range of industries at any level—including FAANG, Enterprise, national governments, all the way to indie developers and family owned businesses.
Scroll down and you’ll find a few products and projects I’ve worked on. The most updated version of my full resumé is on LinkedIn.
How I do it
A big piece of the Product mentality is about balance, really—between client needs and engineering, budget and creativity, getting the work done and getting it done in the right way. I always adopt a user-centered mindset—this is key to build products that have market fit.
This rough framework outlines my process of developing digital experiences:
- Research. Gather present state, with the real problems and pain points we aim to solve. Outcome of research may or may not include:
- Personas and requirements
- Use cases and scenarios
- Business plans & models
- Sketches, wireframes, sometimes mockups
- Complexities
- Risks & mitigations
- Design. This doesn’t necessarily include turning myself into a product designer, but it’s sometimes a necessary step to help the rest of the company familiarise with early concepts.
- Deconstruct. I’m a big believer in breaking things down into digestible chunks of information. This is entirely context-dependant and depends on what your team works with—it can be PRDs, user stories / scenarios with details, etc.
- Get it done. My idea of product management is very “hands-on”—it’s important to be there for your engineers and stay close to the build phase.
- Monitor success. When something is available to the users, we must use all the data we have—from quantitative data coming from monitoring tools to qualitative data coming from interviews, conversations with other teams, etc.—to assess the success of a functionality.
I think investing early in research and testing is incredibly useful, in order to avoid mistakes that can be painful to amend once the product is getting mature.
I believe in using frameworks. I’m Pragmatic certified (PMC-III) and have occasionally used Design Sprint and Jobs-To-Be-Done product frameworks. I enjoy managing big projects on Kanban boards, and using EOS to make sure our business gets results.
What sets me apart
I’m curious. I’m in a constant state of learning and I get passionate about new things very soon, which means that I welcome any opportunity to research new markets, and get my hands dirty with new products.
I’ve worn many hats. In my early days I’ve been involved with customer support, sales, and customer experience. Having direct access to users’ thoughts and processes makes me understand why people do what they do, with no filters or sugar-coated truths.
I’m a big believer in the power of openness. I share everything I can—whether it is a rough sketch or wireframe, a document, an idea, etc.—with the widest group possible. This includes peer recognition and credit. When I see something great built by a colleague, most of the time, I just let everyone know. People have all kinds of troubles at work—from performance anxiety to imposter syndrome—so if I have a way to make someone’s day I’ll just do it.
Selected products & projects
Find below a selection of projects I’ve worked on in recent years.
The Bot Platform
Product Manager, 2021–today
I’m the PM of a product team of 6 at The Bot Platform, managing our ISO 27001-certified platform that empowers people to build a better employee experience by building bots and digital assistants on Workplace from Meta and Microsoft Teams. Trusted by Fortune 500 companies, national governments, banks, pharmaceuticals, telecommunication companies, luxury brands, retailers, hospitality chains, and recently included among the fastest growing scale ups in the UK.
Oxford Languages data products
Product Manager, 2019–2021
As a product manager at Oxford Languages I’ve overseen the roadmap for monolingual lexical data products, including a number of rich and structured dictionary datasets that you’ll find built-in in a number of product you likely use (e.g. Google search; iOS and macOS devices; Amazon Kindle); comprehensive and customisable wordlists; and semantic, interlinked lexical databases. Oxford’s data are used in a variety of applications throughout all types of industries—from simple dictionary lookups to training data for ML, NLP, MT, AI platforms, mobile word games, and support for text generation and augmented writing.
Oxford Dictionaries API
Product Manager, 2019–2021
Managed the Oxford Dictionaries API—a flexible API that provides reliable, up-to-date monolingual and bilingual JSON data in an accessible, scalable environment, very useful for word lookup, wordgame development, and AI/ML integrations. Featuring 30+ languages by the time I left the company, including a variety of languages that are under-represented online.
Human Made
Product Manager, 2013–2019
Most of the stuff built for clients at Human Made is approached with a product perspective. Features, prioritisation, documentation, research, analysis and much more, on the many internal and external tools built over the years.
Happytables
Product Marketing Specialist, 2013–2017
A website builder for restaurants, empowering moms-and-pops establishments with a powerful platform to be successful online and compete against chains. Content, partnerships, social media, customer experience & support, and the rest of the product marketing & management game.
WordCamp London
Organiser, Communication Lead, 2018
One of the biggest WordPress conference in Europe. Led communication for the event (team of 4) to build awareness in the lead up, resulting in a massively successful event—tickets all sold, sponsors slot all sold, more volunteer applications then actual spots, high quality talks, etc.
Out of Office
Marketing, 2016-2017
A virtual conference on remote work, organised with a bunch of humans. Mainly marketing & comms-related tasks. Talks from both editions are available on YouTube—2016, 2017.
Italian WordPress Slack workspace
Founder, 2015–today
A Slack workspace I kicked off with my friend Francesco Di Candia to give the Italian WordPress community a virtual place to manage all the WordPress things, from meetup to support forums and translations. Today it has more than 1500 members and has been instrumental to many online and offline events.
WP Remote
Product Marketing Specialist, 2013
WordPress plugin to update your WP sites in bulk. Did just some work on its user guides during my first retreat with the Human Made folks, but still feel attached to it.
Franz Drinks
Founder, Editor-in-chief, 2017–today
A website that I’ve built for myself, on drinks (not necessarily alcoholic) and travels. It also features a collection of my writings on how to build a pretty legit home bar, in case you needed some inspiration.
Labuonativu.com
Founder, Editor-in-chief, 2011–2012
An Italian speaking news site about the television industry I built during the last semester at Uni. It got some traction for its uniqueness—whilst most TV-related sites would cover everything, mine was focused only on high-quality TV content.