Cracking the Product Manager Role: Inside the Mind of Răzvan Micorici

In today’s fast-paced tech landscape, the role of a product manager can be both exhilarating and daunting. To get an insider’s perspective, we sat down with Răzvan Micorici, a seasoned product manager shaping the core experience at Flipsnack. In this candid interview, Răzvan shares his journey into product management, what keeps him motivated, and how he approaches building products that make a difference.

1. First things first—coffee, tea, or something else to kickstart your day?

Green tea and homemade breakfast at the office with my team. It’s always refreshing to have a few informal minutes just joking around before starting the day. We’ve found out that in these cases, we usually tend to slip into work-talk pretty naturally, and this makes it feel more personal and fun.

2. What got you into Product Management?

I didn’t wake up one day with the decision to become a PM. It just happened. I started my career as a Motion Designer and gradually got myself into marketing campaigns and thinking strategy. Then, Flipsnack was looking into expanding the Product team, and I was taken into consideration because management wanted to promote from within the company and offer people the chance of accelerated growth.

3. What’s the best part of your job?

I think it’s finding solutions to users’ needs and implementing them. It’s always a great pleasure to see a feature/solution go from the idea phase all the way to post-launch analysis. The feeling that my work can help thousands of people achieve their goals with Flipsnack is priceless.

4. What’s in your Product Manager toolbox?

Together with my team, we’ve been experimenting a lot with different frameworks and tools. Here are some of the most helpful tools that we use daily:

• ChatGPT (for researching and better understanding different scenarios)
• Jira Discovery Board (organising ideas, syncing them with development, and keeping track of current projects)
• Dovetail (organising user interviews, insights, and other research; really helpful with all the AI features to help summarise and generate insights)
• HubSpot (feedback gathering, in-app messages, ticketing; not to mention its CRM features used by other departments)
• Flipsnack (shameless plug; we use our tool for internal communication, creating and sharing reports or other materials)

5. What’s the best product you’ve worked on so far?

Over the past four years, I’ve been working exclusively at Flipsnack. Although it’s the only product I’ve managed so far, it’s a remarkably complex platform with many areas for growth and innovation. This has given me the opportunity to explore and contribute to a wide range of product challenges and features.

One worth mentioning, and one of the parts I’ve taken the lead on, is the whole accessibility part. Since Flipsnack is mainly used to create and share digital documents online in an interactive format, we’ve realised that some of our users need to make sure their documents are fully accessible to people with disabilities. And if you know anything about digital accessibility, you know how tedious it can be to make sure your tool works well with keyboard navigation and screen readers so that no matter someone’s disability, they can experience the document just as everybody else.

There, I made an internal audit, gathered my development team, and created a spreadsheet with each and every button that the Flipsnack player had. After a few formulas and checkboxes, we had a percentage of how accessible our player is in terms of labels, contrast, keyboard navigation, and screen reader.

Fast forward a few months, and we had the most advanced player in terms of accessibility compared to our competitors, and we’ve started to see different government agencies and public institutions approach us to get their PDFs to the next level without compromising on accessibility.

I’m really proud to think that I could help someone with a disability to experience a digital document as close to anybody else as possible.

Here’s a video explaining the whole functionality:

6. What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a product manager?

Coming from marketing, one of the first challenges for me was navigating the whole technical space and talking with development. It might not seem intuitive to have a non-technical person manage development projects, but as I quickly found out, it was a blessing in disguise. I could wear the hat of the user in planning, filtering the technical details, and helping the devs focus on the outcome. It helped balance the discussion and led the team to less talking and more doing.

7. What’s more important when establishing a roadmap - rigid planning or big-picture flexibility?

Definitely big-picture flexibility. We’ve done both: got into really tedious quarterly planning, with projects organised on timelines and all. Needless to say that by the end of the first week, we discovered new priorities, and everything went south. For us, being flexible meant learning to have a north start, based on our users’ needs and the company’s objective, while being able to change plans as new opportunities emerge.

8. What’s your take on agile vs. hybrid methodologies?

We’re still exploring on our own. Honestly, we have some teams that really embraced hybrid methodologies and others that stayed on agile and scrum. At the end of the day, I think whatever drives growth and pushes us further is worth exploring.

9. What’s the latest product management trend you can’t stop talking about? (Or rolling your eyes at)

It’s got to be AI. Everyone jumped in this boat, some trying just to ride the wave, others just using this keyword because it’s trendy. When we started to think about ways to implement AI into Flipsnack, we tried to go past the most basic use cases and understand how this technology can help exponentially. One example that I can give, also related to accessibility, was to use AI to read each page of our user’s document and generate a summary as an alternative text.

You can imagine the amount of automation work that AI does here because it helps you generate a page summary in a few seconds. When you have a 100+ page document, it’s a game changer.

10. If you could go back in time, what advice would you give yourself about becoming a product manager?

• Be true to yourself and always try to put yourself in the user’s shoes. After all, you are the user’s advocate and should protect it’s interest and needs.

• Focus on the why. It’s one of the simplest yet important things to nail as soon as possible.

• Don’t be afraid to use your educated guess. Sometimes, you don’t have access to certain data, or it’s too time-consuming to gather what you need. Don’t be afraid to use your intuition and try to decide what’s best for both the user and the company.