How Our Product Manager Zuzka Crafts Products with Purpose

Zuzka Zatrochová is Dataddo’s Senior Product Manager (PM). With her background in research, computer science, and programming, she brings a seasoned perspective to Dataddo’s product team in her constant quest to streamline and improve the Dataddo platform. We spoke with her to get her outlook on being a PM in a startup environment, what attracted her to Dataddo, and more.

How would you describe the Dataddo product? 

Nowadays companies use dozens of cloud services like CRM, advertising tools, social profiles, customer care tools, payment apps, and so on. All these services generate tons of useful data. The real challenge is how to aggregate this data to do advanced analytics and data-based strategic decisions.  

Instead of wasting internal resources to gather data manually, or hiring developers to execute a long data project, they can use Dataddo: our platform automates data collection and transfer while minimizing time and cost. Our mission is to provide our customers with better access to their data, helping companies work with data more efficiently.

What do you believe is Dataddo’s main value for customers? 

Because we’re automating their data pipelines, they can focus on analyzing their data and creating better products. More specifically, developers don’t need to spend time building integrations for their companies, which means they can devote themselves to the tasks they were actually hired for. Plus, our no-code approach makes it accessible to smaller companies without data departments.

What do you enjoy most about it? 

The feedback from our customers. We are receiving a lot of positive feedback and sometimes you can really feel the excitement of the customers from their words.

Dataddo is a data-driven company by nature. How does that translate into a PM’s job?

For a Product Manager, it should not matter whether a company is data-driven, because they should make it so anyway. Data is alpha-omega. Intuition will only take you so far, but you need granular data to learn what really influences your company’s successes and failures. Dataddo empowers people to adopt the data-driven mindset that they should have had from the start.

When you changed jobs, what considerations did you make about the product?

With Dataddo everything clicked: the people, the size, the product, the vision. But more importantly, I was looking for the purpose: is the product constructive or destructive? Is it ethical? Is it about making money, or bringing real value? In Dataddo, it’s all about improving how people work with their data, which means that any company in the world (and that includes healthcare, education, and other vital institutions), can do their work more efficiently thanks to our product. 

How do you compare working as a Product Manager in a large, established company vs. a startup? 

Larger companies suffer from organizational silos that prevent efficiency, and changes can only happen slowly. When change is slow, the learning experience is slower, and that affects your future development as well.

The advantage of a small company is a small product. With that comes the flexibility of change. The smaller the product, the fewer people you need to go through to agree and make changes, which means faster development and a better product being created all the time.

How do the Dataddo customer and developer teams work together? 

We are in daily contact with each other and work in 1-week sprints. The people in Dataddo are amazing, and it is effortless to work with them. Every team in the company is an important resource to me for new product ideas. 

Why do you think a skilled PM should join Dataddo?  

There are so many opportunities to grow, experiment with new ideas, and bring them to life. Any new person who comes on needs to come with an open mind; being a startup, every role typically has some overlap into other areas and tasks, but I see that as part of what makes it interesting.

Who are you looking for in terms of personality to join the team?

I love the open-minded inclusive culture we have in Dataddo. I personally like to work with people that are independent and self-driven, who appreciate a certain amount of freedom in their work to go in their own direction.

Looking a bit into the future, what will the Product team be focusing on in the coming months? 

One of our main focuses right now is planning our growth the right way so we don’t suffer from poor structure later. In that respect, we’re looking to split the team into different subdomains so that each team can really focus on particular aspects of the platform. Building a team structure that can scale is a major challenge, but needs to be addressed now, not later.

Otherwise, our constant mission is to strengthen the qualities of the product that bring value to our customers, like the ease of use and flexibility in building data connectors. We are also making small improvements to the user interface which help to streamline our Solutions team’s workflows, so they can focus on helping customers and adding connectors to the platform.

A personal question at the end. What do you like? How do you spend your free time and when are you happiest?

I’m happiest when I have the freedom to do what I want. In the past few years, I fell in love with nature and I like to spend my free time outdoors, hiking, traveling the world, and recently I’m learning to climb. One day I would like to start more advanced mountaineering and hopefully conquer one of the highest peaks in the world. I have a puppy dog, and I’m looking forward to the time when he grows up and joins me on my adventures.