Client Success · Frontiers

We all talk about empowered product teams, discovery and clear strategy — and when your team is small, that’s relatively easy. But as you scale, things get complex fast. How do you bring the product mindset back?

Frontiers, now the world’s 3rd most-cited academic publisher, grew its tech team from a 50-person startup to a 700-person org. As product complexity increased, delivery slowed and clarity faded.

Daniel Petrariu, partnering with Elias Lieberich from Product Matters, steered the team from scattered efforts to a more focused, empowered product org. In this story, we share how Frontiers rebuilt alignment, confidence in product, and collaboration — and what it really takes to create lasting change, step by step. We discuss how hard this really is, what worked and what Daniel’ recommendations are for other leaders.

Daniel Petrariu is a technology and product leader with a background in computer science. Daniel graduated from the University of Ulm, Germany, and specialized in the design of interactive system, usability engineering and architecture of distributed systems. He began his career as a software engineer, gradually transitioning into product management roles. Since joining Frontiers in 2013, Daniel has led the Product Management team from 2015 and was appointed Chief Technology Officer in 2020 and Chief Product Officer in 2023.

Daniel, tell us a bit about your journey in product and how you ended up at Frontiers

I started out as a software engineer and I never planned to move away from that. But I always had an affinity for user experience and finding the best ways to to solve real problems with software. At one point an amazing product manager joined a company I worked for and this was a pivotal moment for me. It was just really mind blowing to watch this person work. It opened my eyes to there being a role that seems to combine all the things I really cared about and was good at. It inspired me to solve those types of problems first as an engineer, then as business analyst and product designer and eventually as product manager.

When you first started at Frontiers, where was the company at?

When I joined Frontiers there were around 50 people in total, lots of interns, everyone was new and it really felt like being on a university campus (because it was). The company just started to gain some traction in the research community and had received an investment from a large publishing house.

We only had one product team at the time and our engineering was completely outsourced. It worked well for us for a while and allowed us to invest more and more into the platform. Soon we began to grow and pretty quickly we went from one product team to 20, mixing outsourced with internal teams.

That must have been a big change, going from 50 to 700 reports very quickly. How did you cope with that?

I started as a product leader and grew into a leadership role over time. It all happened very rapidly and looking back I’m not sure I got the chance to spend enough time in each role to really embed all the skills I needed. Experience comes from living things, not just reading them in books and I definitely had to catch with the rapid growth in responsibility that happened especially at the beginning of my career. With growth that big and rapid I realised that my role is changing dramatically and I had to build systems to support the size of the team and the work we were doing. We experienced what seems like a lifetime worth of change within the 12 years I am with frontiers now and I am incredibly thankful for this opportunity.

And what kind of problems did it throw up?

The change in scale doesn’t just happen on the technology side, it affects the whole organisation. Different areas of the company grow and mature at different speeds under different leadership. That’s bound to create friction in relationships and ways of working. At the same time, as your technical team grows and you accumulate depth in your products your delivery time slows down. Combined, those factors really affected our ability to create value. We just weren’t delivering things that excited us anymore. Two or three years ago we were a bit all over the place in terms of our planning and operations. We knew we have to disrupt ourselves and that’s when we started working with you.

Can you paint a picture of those early days when we started working together?

Most managers grew with the company and were learning on the job. We had a lot of great talent but not a lot of experience, particularly in management and leadership. While we had good ideas on how to approach things, we couldn’t communicate them well and they weren’t based on real life experience. Our confidence was quite low and our ability to execute was far from ideal. We needed an outside perspective to help us understand how to best move forward and we didn’t have time to make mistakes. What we learned throughout this partnership also helped us to become a better team and collaborate better – our mantra these days is that we’re one team constantly working together to get to where we want to go. All the right parties are involved in decision making. Our confidence has really built since then. Our ability to plan and execute has increased dramatically and this shows in terms of clarity of our roadmaps, our product deliveries and also in terms of business results.

We did a lot of early assessment work on things like team topology and strategy. Then we moved on to a pilot.

In the early stages of growth, product decisions often sit with just one or two people—usually you, and perhaps the CEO. But as the company scales, that approach stops being sustainable. You have to shift from making every decision yourself to building a team you trust to make decisions independently. That transition isn’t always easy, and it doesn’t immediately resonate with everyone. That’s why we introduced the pilot team: it allowed us to test and refine a new model in a controlled way, and it gave us a clear success story we could use to bring the rest of the organization along with us.

How have things gone since then?

It hasn’t always been easy. We’ve grown a lot but we’ve also had a lot of set-backs. We’ve had phases where we’ve over-hired, for example, and after the pandemic we realised some of that growth wasn’t sustainable so we had to cut back. But because we’d worked with you guys and had a plan, we used it as an opportunity. We knew what we wanted, how to execute and finally we came out stronger on the other side.

What’s it actually been like to work with us?

The kind of growth we’ve been through at Frontiers isn’t all roses, some of it has been really hard, and we’ve only managed to make it work because of great people in the company and partners like you who really understand and believe in what we’re doing. Right from that first assessment you helped us not just to identify the right actions but also articulate them clearly and convince our leadership of the direction of travel. Most importantly you helped us start the transformation successfully by coaching our first teams in the new approach – I think that’s the special value here. It’s not like “I’ve analysed what you’re doing, here’s how to fix it.” You’ve given us the confidence in the approach, helped us kickstart the transformation and then then gave us the space and support to execute it ourselves while bringing people along on that journey.

What advice would you give to someone who might be in the same place you were a few years ago?

Don’t dilute your efforts trying to transform everything at the same time. Pick a plant, water it, make it grow. Then show it to everyone and say “look how amazing this plant has become.”

And ultimately, be resilient! Very few things work on a first attempt and then you need the conviction to keep improving until it works out. Building this conviction has been a huge value add that you and your team have greatly contributed to.