Scaling Smarter: A Conversation with Yanik Meili
Scaling doesn’t fail because teams move too slowly. It fails when product decisions lose sight of impact. The challenge is no longer doing more, it’s knowing what matters most.
Yanik Meili is a Product Manager with experience scaling products across international markets. In this interview, he explores how product teams can make better decisions as companies grow keeping impact, customer value, and business goals at the center of every roadmap.
Scaling with Impact
Hello Yanik, thank you for joining us in this new edition of Talent-R Tech Talks. Throughout your career in product, you’ve seen how scaling changes the way teams make decisions from roadmap prioritization to measuring real business impact. When a company starts scaling, how does roadmap management need to evolve and what gaps do you see most often?
“For me it comes down to one thing: impact. When the pace accelerates and teams get bigger, more resources actually make it easier to get distracted. You can suddenly afford to polish everything, so you end up busy with nice improvements that won’t drive the company where it’s aiming. The gap I see most often is exactly that: mistaking being busy for making progress. Company goals need to be clear, so product can build a solid vision and put the extra resources behind it.”
“The gap I see most often is mistaking being busy for making progress”
How do you keep discovery meaningful when you operate across multiple markets and can’t talk to every user?
“At Papernest, product is segmented by market, and honestly that was a great decision: each PM focuses on the specific needs of their own market. The other key is consistency in the rituals. Not every discovery session is insightful, and that’s fine. They still tell you where satisfaction stands and surface feedback you wouldn’t get otherwise. And because you never stop doing them, you catch how subtle product changes affect users over time.”
Smarter Product Decisions
How do you handle the tension between technical debt and the pressure to keep shipping, and how do you make that case to stakeholders?
“Honestly, this debate is simpler than people make it. What brings the most impact? You size how much the fix takes, you estimate what it brings to the company, and you compare it to the feature on the same scale. For me the debate is over at that point: we prioritize according to impact, correctly calculated, not according to who screams the loudest or has the fanciest title.”
OKRs, KPIs… Most teams have them but few use them well. How do you define the right metrics during a scaling phase?
“Start from the company objectives, then understand how to reach them while creating value for the customer. The right metrics live at that intersection. During a scaling phase the temptation is to track everything. I’d rather have a few metrics that clearly connect user value to business outcomes than a dashboard nobody acts on.“
Can you share a moment where strong adoption metrics didn’t translate into real business impact?
“I’ll keep this one high level, as the specifics are confidential. But the pattern is real: adoption alone can be a vanity signal. A feature can be heavily used and still not move retention or revenue. What it changed for me is that I now define success upfront as a business outcome, and treat usage as a leading indicator, never as the finish line.”
The PM Mindset
For a PM stepping into a scale-up for the first time, what is the one skill that makes the biggest difference and that no course will teach you?
“Languages, and a service-oriented mindset. In a scale-up you don’t just manage products, you manage people, and you need to adapt fast and respond fast. I come from a hospitality background, and the soft skills I learned there have genuinely made the difference for me in scale-ups.”
The future of product isn’t about delivering more features, it’s about making better decisions. When impact becomes the measure behind every roadmap, every metric, and every priority, product teams stop chasing output and start driving real business growth.
