Be the Whale: A Conversation with Anna Jagiello

Most product managers follow a predictable path: startup, bigger startup, tech giant. Anna Jagiello did the opposite. She came up through SEO, and it made her a sharper product leader than the conventional route would have.

Anna started in spam control at OLX in Argentina (hired because she spoke Polish and French), found her way into SEO, moved through content and product at Docplanner in Barcelona, and is now Head of Product at Surfer in Poland, an SEO tool competing with the likes of Ahrefs and Semrush. She's built enterprise products from scratch sold across seven countries, cut churn by 25%, and driven 140% year-over-year bookings growth through experimentation.

SEO was product all along

At OLX there was no product department, the SEO team decided what got built, so Anna was doing product from the start, just aimed at bringing traffic to the marketplace. Her point is that the two disciplines are converging harder than ever: SEO is an acquisition channel, and a badly overlooked part of the PM job is go-to-market and acquisition. PMs, she argues, need to get better at marketing and at seeing the whole picture, because the marketplace products she's built are really B2B2C, a balance of many moving pieces where you build for doctors but have to care for patients.

Watch them, because they can't lie

When Docplanner needed to build for clinics, not just individual doctors, Anna took her whole team, developers and designers included, to squat in a friendly Barcelona clinic for a week. They watched the receptionists work, the monitors, the gazillion post-its, the phone that never stopped ringing, the 1980s software. Observing, she says, is the best form of customer discovery, because people can't lie about what they actually do. Most of us don't have that luxury, so the next best thing is talking, and since that relies on memory, she runs story-based interviews: not "how do you like to track your progress?" but "yesterday, how did you do that thing?" That surfaces real habits and needs instead of what people think they need as a solution. She credits Teresa Torres's Continuous Discovery Habits as her north star here.

Be the whale

Asked how she prioritizes when everything feels urgent and every channel is screaming, Anna reaches for a metaphor a friend gave her. The PM is a whale: you absorb all the water, everything, then distill it and find the most important thing. That's the superpower, finding the essence, the core, and not losing sight of it. Frameworks like ICE and RICE help, but nothing beats the product sense you develop over time, and that only works if you keep your eyes on the prize: a clear North Star, a defined customer, a real problem. A churn problem, for instance, immediately narrows your choices toward engagement.

Why she refuses to give deadlines

Anna famously doesn't give deadlines. Sales sometimes has to sell something that isn't there yet, but sales works with enterprise, where everything moves slowly and being two or three weeks late is never a life-or-death deal. Her preference is not to tell marketing or colleagues that something is coming until it's genuinely ready and tested. Surfer rolls out slowly, to maybe 10% of users first, confirms it works, and only then communicates to the wider audience. It's part respect for colleagues' planning, part acknowledgment that software timelines are simply unpredictable.

Product and sales tension

There's always tension between product and sales, and they're different personality types, which is exactly why you have to stay close. The basic move is to make trade-offs explicit: we can do A, but it will cost you B, C, and D. Show the trade-off and compromise gets easier. The roadmap is the basic tool for sales, plus a way to report requests, but nothing beats sitting on the calls and debriefing afterward, because a PM, an engineer, and a salesperson all hear the same conversation and take away different things. And you don't let sales lead you anywhere, because the buyer often isn't the user, and if the team using the tool isn't satisfied, you won't retain the account no matter what the buyer wanted.

SEO isn't dying, its accent is just moving

Anna has been in SEO since 2009, and her verdict on the "SEO is dead" panic is blunt: it's never dying. Google's traffic pie has gotten bigger, not smaller. AI search is just another acquisition channel, growing fast and impossible to ignore, but the old channel still exists and the new one is built on it, SEO is the base for AI-search optimization. SEO has survived social media and YouTube; the accent simply shifts, lately from content toward backlinks, mentions, and citations, and it'll swing back to content again. On AI-written content, she's unbothered: writers don't write from scratch anymore, and that's fine, AI does the heavy lifting and research while the writer becomes the manager who decides the message and the information gain, then edits and adds their flavor.

AI value versus AI for AI's sake

Her litmus test for adding AI to a product is simple: does it deliver value that couldn't exist before the technology, and does it simplify rather than add complexity? Slapping on an AI badge can complicate or break things, especially in a product that needs to be precise and reliable, where a hallucinating model is the wrong tool. Not every product needs AI, it's also costly and eats your margins, and the wave of little AI stars everywhere will fall over.

The thing PMs get wrong

The number-one mistake she coaches out of PMs: thinking the work ends when you ship. Shipping is the beginning. Everyone loves starting projects; closing is a different story. You have to plan the launch, sync with marketing, brief support so they can help users, roll out progressively, measure, iterate, and sometimes sunset features that have become noise. Ship the essence early to get real users' eyeballs on it rather than disappearing into a cave for three months, then follow up and iterate.

Key takeaways

SEO was product all along. Acquisition and go-to-market are underrated parts of the PM job. A marketing mind in product is an edge, not a liability.

Observe, don't just interview. Watching customers work beats asking them, because they can't lie about what they actually do. When you must ask, use story-based questions.

Be the whale. Absorb every input, then distill it to the essence and don't lose sight of it. That's the PM superpower.

SEO isn't dying. The pie grew. AI search is a new channel built on the old one. The accent moves between content and backlinks; it always comes back.

Shipping is the beginning. Launch, roll out slowly, measure, iterate, and sunset. The feature isn't done when it goes live.

Frameworks worth stealing

Story-based discovery

Don't ask customers general questions about how they like to do things, they'll generalize and hand you a solution. Ask them to walk you through a specific recent instance: yesterday, how did you actually do that? Better yet, watch them work, because observation captures what they really do rather than what they think they need. That's where the real needs, thoughts, and feelings live.

Make the trade-off explicit

When sales or a stakeholder demands a feature, don't just say no or yes. Say: we can do A, but it will cost you B, C, and D. Showing the trade-off turns a standoff into a negotiation and usually makes the compromise obvious, while keeping everyone focused on the underlying problem instead of jumping to a specific solution.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

Observing is the best discovery, because they cannot lie. It's what they actually do.

The PM is a whale. You absorb all the water, then distill it and find the most important thing.

SEO is never dying. The pie got bigger. The accent just moves.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. Quick questions, quick answers.

Best advice you've ever received? Just keep at it.

Advice you ignored and wish you'd listened to? Nothing came to mind.

What would you tell your younger self? Try more things. Optimize for variety, in life.

Favorite spot? Ida, a restaurant in Wrocław, where she lives.

Tool you can't live without? Google Sheets. She's convinced it will outlive every other tool.

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Anna Jagiello is the Head of Product at Surfer, an SEO tool competing with the biggest players in the category. She came up through SEO at OLX in Argentina and product at Docplanner in Barcelona, building enterprise products from scratch across marketplaces, booking systems, and health tech. Find her on LinkedIn.