My annual retrospective - 2023

2023 has been a very busy year for me, filled with professional accomplishments that I'm proud of. As the end of the year approaches, I'd like to share a retrospective with some lessons learned.

As a business unit leader, my job involves products, people and business - a delightful fusion of three elements I thoroughly enjoy working with. For the fourth consecutive year, I've had the privilege of doing this in a fast-paced environment such as Arduino.

My goals for the year were to consolidate Arduino's leadership in the maker market, renovate the product portfolio and expand market share to new segments. Let's delve into the main aspects of this journey.

Hardware products

• UNO R4. I had the privilege and challenge of leading the redesign of the most iconic Arduino product and handling one of the most critical new product introductions in the Arduino history, carrying a high potential risk for the company's reputation and revenues. It has been a huge success in terms of popularity, media coverage, and community engagement. Sales are being extraordinary - exceeding the already very challenging goals set in the budget. The complexity of the project stemmed mainly from 1) the need to preserve retrocompatibility with a big ecosystem of third-party resources, and 2) the need to balance innovation and new features with ease of use, being this a product for beginners.
• GIGA R1. The challenge I proposed to the team was to conceive the most advanced and professional product ever designed for makers, preserving the well-known Arduino user experience at an affordable price, while incorporating new technology and addressing a new segment of more sophisticated users to expand our user base. Released earlier this year, big success, exhausted stock quickly, then suffered from chip shortage and delayed components deliveries, then restarted in Q3 with strong demand. Very happy with the perfect product-market fit, overall strategy and execution. Later in the year we also released the GIGA Display Shield, a touchscreen with extensive software support and well-crafted documentation (product vision: the most powerful and easy-to-use display in the market) which is getting a great traction.
• Nano family. One of the first determinations I made when taking over Arduino maker products' strategy was to invest in the Nano family as a unitary product line thanks to its consistent user experience, ideal form factor and versatile mechanical specifications combined with a large variety of architectures and on-board sensors. This year, we added the Nano ESP32, which is the first Arduino board using an ESP32 chip as main microcontroller (product vision: the ESP32 board with the best UX in the market). While relatively simple from a hardware design standpoint, the project was more complex in terms of software support. Establishing a strategic collaboration with Espressif was key to its success. No surprise, the Nano ESP32 is already a very popular product. I'm proud of the lean execution and short time-to-market achieved here.

Digital products

• Arduino Cloud. I'm very happy about the results achieved this year in terms of growth, trust, user satisfaction and revenues for our SaaS product line. We improved our ability to listen to the community, make data-driven decisions and shape the product according to real needs and use cases; this, combined with a significantly increased development velocity and quality, resulted in strong growth of all KPIs.
• Open source tools. Significant development occurred on our desktop and command line applications, striking a balance between supporting our new products and at the same time keep serving the entire ecosystem in an open way, consolidating Arduino's central role in our industry.
• MicroPython. I believe there's no growth without innovation and some amount of disruption. I have been a strong advocate of bringing Python to Arduino with a mixed approach (UX, API, library ecosystem, tools, content) and I can proudly say that after one year of hard work, Arduino is now leading in this field.

Lessons learned (or confirmed)

• Every single hour spent in outbound product management pays off in terms of product-market fit improvement. That's the best way to invest the time of your team.
• The classic model where product/business managers write specifications and engineers execute may help with efficiency but sacrifices innovation. A healthy bidirectional collaboration between product teams and engineering teams is needed to ensure that market requirements are combined with state-of-the-art ideas coming from the tech people in your company.
• The best creativity comes when you get full buy-in from your team members. People may get incredibly creative if they feel allowed to go beyond the scope of their role and assignments.
• When a product goes to the market without at least a second design iteration that's not necessarily a sign of efficiency, but actually a strange beast to evaluate carefully. Iterations are not failures.
• One of the key factors for the success of the UNO R4 has been the early access program we run for a few months by involving a group of power users who received prototypes before the official release and provided feedback talking to us on a daily basis. Running such a program at scale requires planning and good execution (we even created a dedicated web platform to manage enrollment and shipments), and I'm really proud to have introduced this new way of working.
• Surprise: there's no good product without strong product vision, paranoid execution, clear release/go-to-market/pricing strategy. We all agree on theory, but that's just theory until you do it for real :-)
• Have your marketing people follow the entire product development since the beginning.

I'd like to spend a few words on the team. Nothing is possible without a good team, and I've been lucky to work with extremely talented engineers, designers, product managers, content writers, marketing experts, sales managers, supply chain managers and more. The success we had in 2023 is thanks to their skills and passion. I care a lot about the people I work with, and I keep learning continuously how to be the best leader for them. If I had to pick one word, I'd say that "trust" best represents my management style. Speaking of this year, my efforts on people management have been focused on three main goals:

1. Hard skills. I'm a big fan of continuous training, especially when it enables people to work across multiple domains with a good level of proficiency.
2. Customer centricity. As the overall UX for a hardware product requires strong collaboration between multiple teams, being obsessed with customer centricity is not just a matter of mindset but also something you need to enable with workflows, good team management, and leading by example. Your goal is to shift customer centricity from a top-down objective to a distributed, spontaneous, proactive attitude of all team members.
3. Last but not least, I wanted to grow a real product team that could collaborate better with the engineering team. Instead of having single product managers acting as the only owners of the products and dispatching tasks to the various people, I involved other professionals in product management duties, such as tech writers and customer support specialists since they are directly or indirectly exposed to customers. The result is a larger team that follows the product in its entire development and post-release lifecycle with full visibility, ownership, and agency. I am very happy about this transformation as it allowed team members to be more autonomous, proactive and creative in identifying the needed tasks, and this has been one important key factor for this year's achievements.

In this write-up I focused a lot on the product side, but there would be more to say related to the business development and go-to-market side. Maybe I'll leave that for another post.

All in all, it's been a very positive year full of milestones and successful experiments. I'm grateful and happy for all this, but since I never stop learning I look forward to doing more in 2024.

And if you had the patience to read till here, feel free to drop me a line if you want to talk about these topics or have more new challenges for me in mind. ;-)