Evidence
What happened in the session
1. The burnout part
You asked how I deal with it. Two things helped me most.
First, treat other people's evaluation of your work as feedback, not as a verdict. Feedback usually says more about the person giving it than about you. When your effort gets no reaction from your boss, that is information about his priorities, not about your competence.
Second, do the three-circles exercise. Draw three concentric circles: what I am responsible for, what I can influence, what I cannot influence but which affects me. Write every worry on a sticker and put it in a circle. Your sprints, your testing, your interviews: inner circle. Whether Artur decides how the platform will earn money: try a few more times, and if nothing moves, it goes to the outer circle. Then spend your energy on the inner two. This is not giving up; it is protecting the part of the work that is yours.
And one reframe that I meant seriously: this job can be your product-management training ground. Delivery is well set up in your team. The part of the PM job that matters most right now, and that AI is not taking over, is understanding users. You can practise it here, in safe conditions, and get paid while you do. Think of it as paid learning.
2. The product part
Your product is described in features. That is the trap Melissa Perri describes in Escaping the Build Trap, the book I sent you: a company that believes the product is the list of features, so every user interview turns into a wishlist and every deadline is about closing tickets. When I opened your landing page I could not tell who it is for or what job it does for them. "Manage your property," but manage it for what? To rent it long-term, to keep the books, to file taxes, to sign contracts?
The framework that fixes this is Jobs To Be Done. A product is hired to do a job. Your job might be something like "keep my long-term rental income and paperwork under control without switching between five tools." Or it might be narrower, "file the tax report on my rental income without a headache," and that narrower job might be the one people would actually pay for first. You do not know yet. Neither does Artur. That is fine; the point is that it is a hypothesis, and hypotheses get tested.
One more thing: "everything in one place" is your CEO's hypothesis. It is testable. If you talk to five property managers and none of them mentions the pain of using several tools, but all five complain about the same thing, say tax reporting, then that is your core job. Build around it, then expand to the jobs next to it: collecting rent (cash, bank transfers, how that connects to reporting), signing contracts (e-signature, paperwork). Expand sideways, or deeper, or replace a tool they already use, or move to a different segment. But start by collecting what users actually do, in their words, not in feature names.
3. Use Artur as user zero
He owns rental property and has an account with real data. He uses the product, but lightly. That makes him your first evidence source, and probably the only one he cannot dismiss.
Ask him which functions he uses regularly. If it is three out of ten, ask him whether the users he wants are like him and do the same work. If yes, then the other seven are candidates for cutting, or at least for not touching until someone asks. "If these seven are not important to you, why do you think they will be important to anyone else?" Say it with the numbers in front of him.
Be aware of the bias: dogfooding makes founders assume everyone uses the product the way they do. But while you have no active users, it is the strongest lever you have to get him into a conversation about user needs instead of features.
4. How to run the interviews
You asked how many interviews are enough. Short answer: when the answers start repeating and each new interview tells you less. With a well-chosen audience and a clear goal, that usually happens after six or seven. But the condition matters: a clear audience and a clear goal. Right now you have neither, so do this in order.
Step one: define who you are talking to. Owners or hired managers? One or two properties, or two hundred? Someone who handles only the finances, or someone who handles everything? These people have different goals and different pains. Write out the segments, decide which one matters most, and interview that one first.
Step two: run problem interviews, not product interviews. Three rules from The Mom Test: ask about the past, not the future ("tell me about the last time you had to…"); ask about the person, not your product; never sell during the interview. You want to know what their work looks like today, what tools they use, what they have given up on, what still hurts. Do not ask "do you have a problem with too many tools?" Let them tell you their day and listen for it.
Step three: recruit. LinkedIn works. Unless your landing page is specific to Canada or the US, local people or people from anywhere are fine as long as the problem is the same; only the details differ. People from adjacent fields who understand the domain are also useful. People are more open than you expect, especially if you offer something back: a trial, useful information, or a summary of what the other interviewees said. Business people like knowing what their peers do. You do not need a big budget for this.
5. The cheapest test you can run this week
Take your landing page. Put a person on a call with you and, ideally, with Artur. Do not explain anything. Ask them to look at the page and answer only three questions: what do you see, what do you understand, what do you feel. Then stay quiet.
Do it with two groups, people who fit your target and people who do not. What they say out loud about your page often turns out to be the opposite of what you meant it to say. It costs nothing, needs no approval, and puts your CEO in the same room as the reaction. This is the first thing I would do.
Action plan
What to do next
Part 3 — Action plan
- Three-circles exercise. One evening, on paper or a board. Decide what is yours and protect it.
- Landing-page test. Two or three people from each group (fit / no fit), this week, with Artur on the call if he will join. Three questions only: see, understand, feel.
- Segment map. Write out the customer segments (owners vs. managers, portfolio size, scope of responsibility) and pick one to start with.
- Problem interviews. Six or seven with that segment, Mom Test rules. Record the pains in their words, not in feature names.
- Artur's usage audit. Which functions he uses regularly, and the "why would others care about the rest" conversation with the list in hand.
- Bring him the picture, not the argument. "I talked to seven people; none of them said X; all of them said Y." That is how vision-driven CEOs change their minds, if they do.
- Park the subscription plans until steps 2–6 are done. They will be much easier to design once you know what people are paying for.
I am in Yerevan most of the time, so happy to continue in person. If you run the first interviews and want to go through what you heard, write to me.
Good luck. You are carrying a product owner's job with a project manager's title, and you are doing it more carefully than most people with the bigger title.
