The Speed Problem in Compliance Product Management — Lessons from Zalando's Head of Product
On iteration speed, cross-functional feedback, and why watching senior PMs work is the best PM school.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Mariya Mladenova is Head of Product at Zalando, Europe’s leading fashion marketplace — operating across 25+ EU countries, each with its own VAT rate, marketplace reporting obligation, and digital services tax regime.
That’s not just a logistics problem. It’s a compliance product problem.
Zalando’s platform teams build at the intersection of product speed and regulatory constraints — the same tension every TaxTech PM faces when shipping a new e-invoicing integration or updating a VAT calculation engine mid-quarter. When Mariya talks about iteration speed, feedback loops, and stakeholder alignment, she’s describing the exact failure modes that stall compliance-critical products.
In under 500 words, she shares how she manages her to-do list, what her biggest product failure taught her, and the one thing that shortened her learning curve the fastest. The TaxTech takeaways write themselves.
Enjoy!
“How did you get into product management?”
I was looking for a career change to something both more hands-on and strategic than my previous role. Product management was an easy fit. I invested time in product and coding courses to prepare and after many interviews, I was lucky enough to be given a chance.
“How do you start your mornings at work?”
With a big cup of coffee and an honest review of my longer to-do list, I can construct a realistic list of tasks for the day. On Mondays I do that for the whole week, purposefully reserving blocks of time for focus work and declining/moving meetings I have either deprioritized or I’m not essential for. Lastly, I go through emails and chats, focusing on reading only on the topics that are important and I can/want to take action on. Then the day begins.
“What do you know about product management now that you wish you’d known when you first started?”
In the first year or so, I was focused on understanding the product technically, the processes it enables, and its direct, internal users. This did me a lot of favors. However, I wish I’d spent more time connecting directly with Business Analysts and BizDev Managers outside of our department that establish the feedback loops with the end customer for this segment of the user journey. This would have made my business cases and pitches better, and quicker. Instead, I was using available end-customer research published internally.
“What did your biggest product failure teach you?”
“If you’re not quick enough, you might lose your chance”. In my experience, if there’s no traction on an idea for a while, it’s likely to be shelved. Iterating in a meaningful and impactful way is truly a master act I keep improving on.
“What’s the #1 thing that has helped you shorten your product management learning curve?”
Being able to watch seasoned PMs at work. I worked as a Sr. Program Manager before, which meant directly helping 20+ PMs with product delivery and cross-team processes. I learned so much from observing their work and communication styles.
“How do you stay updated on the best practices in product management?”
Colleagues I admire, especially coming from companies with structured product practices like Amazon,
Surprisingly, interviews. I conduct more than a hundred PM interviews a year. In most cases, we talk about ways of working, challenges, and successes/failures and it gives a good glimpse into current practices actually in use,
I prefer books to blogs and have a huge “backlog” :) Recently, I finished Team Topologies, and next up: How to Lead in Product Management and Product Leadership; I also try to read up on software architecture (e.g. A Philosophy of Software Design) and customer research and analytics (e.g. Data Science for Business),
Conferences, talks, and kind colleagues on LinkedIn who take the time to consolidate and share PM resources (people like Paweł Huryn).
Mariya’s answer on failure lands differently in compliance contexts: “If there’s no traction on an idea for a while, it’s likely to be shelved.”
In TaxTech, slow iteration doesn’t just kill a feature. It means shipping a VAT calculation engine after a regulatory deadline. Or watching a competitor land the e-invoicing mandate integration first while your roadmap is still in review.
Her other insight — about wishing she’d gone beyond internal research to connect directly with the people who actually use the product — maps precisely onto the most common blind spot I see in tax technology teams. Finance and legal stakeholders are always in the room. The voice of the tax operations user almost never is. And when you’re building on top of that gap, no amount of AI capability fixes it. I wrote about why that is — and what the constraint actually looks like — here.
Speed and feedback loops. The two levers that separate compliance products that ship from those that get shelved.