Iterating your way to success with Liyana Sulaiman - Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder @ Pollen

On today's episode, I sat down with Liyana Sulaiman, serial entrepreneur and Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder at Pollen. Pollen helps amplify brands by helping them convert social followers into a seller community. I love Liyana's story of how micro-failures can lead you through the necessary iterations to validate the market opportunity, your business model, and product market-fit. Liyana is super smart, thoughtful, and intentional in her work, and I'm excited for you to hear what she had to say.  Here's what we discussed: How Pollen is all about democratizing opportunity for citizens of Southeast Asia to earn extra income  The origin story of Pollen and why Liyana and her best-friend co-founder started it Pollen went through several rounds of iterations, trying to validate various hypotheses for the business model How Liyana and Pollen went about validating how Pollen could create and capture value from both sides of the market Why solving one problem is often not enough and how quickly the scope of the problems you need to solve can grow How Liyana and her co-founder navigated the complex situations they found themselves in to identify where and when they needed to pivot Questions you need to ask yourself as a PM or a startup founder Why defining the problem space well helps you identify the right opportunity The process Liyana recommends when you're building something from scratch How the cornerstone of product success is identifying your actual customer and the right problems to solve for them Why you should even challenge your mission and vision early on to make sure you're pursuing the right thing, in the right context Where Pollen is at today and how they're now well-positioned for rapid growth Here are the books Liyana Recommended: Lean Product Playbook - Dan Olsen My Product Management Toolkit - Marc Abraham