Product discovery at Hemnet, with Francesca Cortesi

In this episode of Datadrivet, Joni Lindgren and Jasmin Yaya talk with Francesca Cortesi, CPO at Hemnet. The subject is how her team finds and validates new opportunities for one of Sweden’s most-used products.

Francesca leads six product managers, one user researcher and one UX director. She writes about product discovery often, on LinkedIn and on her blog. In the conversation she draws on four years at Hemnet, including the mistakes the team learned from.

Hemnet pairs a strong A/B-testing culture with continuous discovery. It benchmarks against international housing portals in France, Spain and England to give its own results context.

Francesca’s example is a smoke test called Min bostad (My Home). Users could register their property, get a valuation and see a demand estimate, before the full service existed. Data from international peers gave the team a reference point for reading the results.

Test small, read the signal against an outside benchmark, and let that decide what gets built.

Listen to the full episode of Datadrivet for the conversation with Francesca Cortesi.