Product Agility

Hugo Froes: Principles First: Simplifying Organizational Change - Productized 2025 TalkInTen

• Saloni Seth-Watkins, Gábor Suhajda, Hugo Froes

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We're thrilled to be back at the outstanding Productized conference in Lisbon - a must-attend gathering for product people - and honoured to partner with them for the third year running. Productized brings practical, high-signal conversations from the global product community and Lisbon couldn't be a better host.

In this Talk in Ten episode, we speak with Hugo Froes, co‑founder of Feinova, about applying a first‑principles approach to organisational change. Hugo explains how principle‑led practices let you create lighter, adaptable processes that actually stick.

Key topics discussed

  • Why a principles‑first approach beats designing heavy end‑to‑end processes
  • How to keep principles short, practical and actionable (hint: fewer than five)
  • When to bring in external experts—why scale‑ups are the sweet spot
  • How principles become cultural, not documented bureaucracy
  • Practical canvases and exercises teams can use to start in the afternoon


Guest bio:

Hugo Froes is co‑founder of Feynnova, a practitioner and advisor focused on organisational design, product strategy and change programs. Hugo helps teams move from complex, fragile processes to principle‑led ways of working that scale and become cultural habits. He has led product and organisational initiatives across high‑growth and enterprise contexts and brings a pragmatic, experiment‑first approach.


We'd like to thank our partners and sponsors, Bobcats Coding, for making our Lisbon series possible. Bobcats is a Budapest-based digital product studio specialising in AI engineering and end‑to‑end digital product development. Download their latest AI economics guidebook for free at bobcatscoding.com.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast where we explore the ever changing world of product leadership and org design, helping you navigate complexity and build better outcomes for your people and your customers. This week we're coming to you live from Lisbon for the third year in a row at the Productize conference where I'm grabbing 10 minute conversations with product thinkers, leaders and innovators from around the world. These quick fire chats are all about what's shaping our industry right now, from AI and product strategy to the human side of building great products. Now a huge thank you goes out to Bobcatz Coding for making this Lisbon series possible. Bobcats is a Budapest and Lisbon based digital product studio specializing in AI engineering and end to end digital product development. They're also on a mission to educate the market, exploring a new topic every six months and this fall is no exception. Their latest AI economics guidebook is out now and you can download it for free@bobcatscoding.com now here's your talk in 10. Okay. And good morning from day three at Productize here in sunny Lisboa. And yet again, this is us at Product Agility Podcast. The only thing difference this morning is you may have noticed my voice has changed. I am not Ben Maynard, I am Saloni Seth Watkins and I'm going to be stepping into those very big shoes, or rather big socks because he often takes his shoes off when he interviews for the day. So hope you have as much fun with me as you would do with Ben. I am sat next to our wonderful sponsors again, Bobcat coding. And today I'm sat next to their product strategy lead and he is Gabor. You're going to have to say your own surname. Hi everyone. Good morning. And today this morning we are starting with Hugo Faresh, who is the co founder of Feinova. That's correct. And your talk is about first principles approach to organizational changes. Now your talk hasn't happened yet, so I can't say how did it go? So give us a little insight into what your talk will be covering this afternoon. Well, the thing is, usually when we go through a change, people have the concept of approaching it as I'm going to design an entire end to end process thinking about every single step. The problem is that process will break in less than two years, right? It never will last. It's not scalable, it's not adaptable. Whereas if we take a principles first approach, and that's what I'm going to be talking with folks about is there. What we do is we define and we sort of Shape the behavior and the direction people want to go, then we can actually decide and create processes that are lighter. Right. And they're very small changes. And they're also adaptable because they only have small areas where they need to be connected and really working together to work well. And so they're scalable, they flow. And no matter what happens, the organization can change. And they still. Because the principles are always there to guide people. And so it becomes the sort of protective layer around that process and it becomes much. And we also create less documentation, strangely enough, which I love. So I've been. I'm quite old, I've been around for a long while. And the idea of principle led is not a new one. It's something we've talked about many, many times. Principles of light and stuff. So what's different this time? What's. What's your new angle to try and get people to really buy into this messaging? Well, the truth is people sometimes focus it as on the principles as this is going to change my world and everything like that. People will spend months putting together principles and everything. And I have much practical approach. It's something you can do in an afternoon, right. And then you see the behaviors that it creates and then you, okay, let's try it again. And one of the first, one of the things I'm going to share is, you know, the principles for principles, right. Because the concept is. And we often forget this going to even more ancient than this is the first principles concept, right. And that's my first principle every single time. And it's with every team I work with, I go in and I say, folks, our first principle is always first principles thinking every single time. Because we often forget the reason why we're doing something. That's why we hope those principles exist. And we try and keep principles light. It's about driving changes. But I also tell people if they aren't driving that change, if they aren't driving the, you know, the behaviors we want, throw them out the window. You know, don't force it just because you spend time building them. Right? Yeah, fix them so it's not new. The problem is people forget to apply it. Right. People get so mixed up and that's. I actually share a story about how we did that. We spent so much time building this incredible. Mapping out an entire process. It was huge. It had inputs, outputs, everybody's involved. And you know, it was gigantic, the different loops and. And it was great at the time we had the conversations, but when we reached the actual, you know, looking back later we didn't actually get the results we wanted because people were so focused on the minute details that we're looking at this problem, that problem. And if we just step back and that's the concept, just step back and just look and say, just remember, why are you doing this? It's always the why. It's interesting because we forget the why. And this gives you the reason for why. I like to use it as it's kind of like your vision and your vision and strategy, but for your processes and your ways of working and functioning as a company. Okay. And this process, I mean like you said, it just sounds so simple and so obvious, but as we know, it's a very painful process. Do you have like a method to help people along? Do you say, hey, aim for this number of pro of principles or do you have some sort of like guidelines to help newbies who are a bit overwhelmed by this? Actually, I did something, I did a crazy vibe coding thing this last week which I actually made available on my site. And people are going to get access to it at the end of the talk, which is a simple little canvas that people can go through and give tips and tricks on how to get through it. But applying the first principles, thinking, you know, always thinking about why we're doing it and all this. And the idea is you come out with something at the end of it and even gets you to question the principles you've created to make sure they work well. In terms of the size, if you have more than five principals, you've gone way overboard. I see a lot of organizations and teams struggling with stuff that would require your expertise and they sometimes start to implement these changes themselves internally. So when do you think it makes sense for them to employ someone from outside the company, an expert or a company to help with these changes? Well, generally I like to think of it as from. The scale up phase is the best time because when you're in a startup phase, what happens is it's a few people in a room, you can make a change in five minutes, right? Whether it's the right one or the wrong one, you can just adapt it and everything. When you're an enterprise level doable, but you've already got so many things that are already working, you're working. So you need someone who's very resilient to come in because they have to know it's going to be complicated. The scale up is obviously ideal because you've got some things working and everything, but you now need to set up a structure that will Scale and especially when they're scaling up with the speed that some teams and organizations scale up, you have to be prepared at that stage. So that's generally the best time. But anywhere from there upwards it usually works. Do principals have an expiry date? Yes, of course they do. And is that one of the things that you talk about when you set them or is this part of that sort of habit of like going back to revisiting them stuff? Don't do that when I'm talking or sitting them with the teams because people then get scared or they seem, oh, it's going to break down in a few years. Right. I don't tell them that. What I do do is I forcibly present it at the end and I say, in a few years we have to revisit them. Or when you've been able to achieve this to a good enough state, you then have to be able to turn around and say, guess what? We need the next iteration of this principle or this change. So it is something I add in at the end. I never add in at the beginning because. Because then people like, oh, but why am I investing time if they're going to change in a couple of years? But they lost a lot longer than a process. Right. Because a process does break down very quickly, whereas principles can last for a lot longer. Yeah. It's funny because you've obviously been working in this game for four years as well and that your talk is about something so, so basic. So. So it's a fundamental. Is quite interesting that it just goes to show that this is what you've come back to with all your years of experience, you're coming back to this. I. The journey when, when they said, would you like to do a talk at Productize? Why is it this is. This has come from somewhere, this story. Right, of course. No. And it's interesting because, you know, even with all these years of experience and I found myself very often, you know, someone come up with a problem and you come and you say, oh, here comes a solution. I'm going to start designing something, I'm going to start creating everything. And I was part of a great team. Right. When we were working at OLX and we started looking at and we thought we realized bringing in tool, bringing in a process, bringing in framework, it was all always just not working. Right. Because the problem is it would kind of try and shift how people are working. Whereas if we look at it from the principles process, we started realizing that we adapt to how people live their day to day, their context by Doing that, it was a huge change. And it was an incredible thing was when we implemented and I used the OKR process and some people are talking badly about OKRs, but we implemented the OKR process. And it was interesting because two years down the line, we were the unit where the OKRs were working really, really well. Everybody was super proud of us and everything like that. Even the commercial side, they got it and it was great. And then people would turn around and said, hugo, can you explain it to me? How does it work? Can you share the documentation? I would turn around and I said, we don't have documentation. It's cultural. You know, you've just seen that change. And they say, but how do you onboard new people? And I said, well, in a month they just get onboarded. Their manager works with them, their teams, the rest of it. And it's just there. It's just become cultural. We don't even have to do training or anything like that. But does it work? And I say, no, everybody gets it incredibly well. It's like it's the first time I've seen, okay, I was really well done, right? And so with that, it was a learning for me where I looked. And I said, we get very often so mixed up in the mess and we just want to get a solution out there and everything like that. And this helps shape things. Sounds great. I mean, just as music to my ears, because I love this idea that normally when you scale up, people think of adding and you're talking about simplifying, and I love it. And that's exactly how it should be. So music to my ears. I wish you all the best in your talk and yes, we'll put all that stuff in the show notes, as you said. And thank you for kicking off the day in such a nice way with such a positive message. Okay, thank you very much. Oh, and keep tuned for some more. Thank you.

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Ben Maynard

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