Fabrice des Mazery – Founder of ProductROI

Fabrice des Mazery – Founder of ProductROI & Product Strategy Executive

Fabrice des Mazery is a French technology entrepreneur, product executive, and advisor best known for his work helping technology companies turn product strategy into measurable business results.

He is the Founder of ProductROI, a product strategy and advisory practice focused on helping founders, CEOs, and executive teams improve the return on their product and technology investments. His current work also extends into GenROI, where he applies the same investment-oriented thinking to generative AI. ProductROI describes des Mazery as an entrepreneur with two exits, a former product leader at Deezer, TripAdvisor/TheFork, and Thiga, and a startup advisor since 2018.

His career combines three distinct experiences: building companies himself, leading product organizations inside major technology businesses, and advising founders and executive teams.

Before launching ProductROI, des Mazery served as Chief Product Officer at TheFork, the restaurant reservation marketplace owned by Tripadvisor, where he led a major product transformation. Earlier, he was Chief Product Officer at Thiga, a leading French product consultancy, and held product and growth leadership positions at Deezer and IBM.

He has also founded three companies, with two ultimately resulting in exits. One of his early ventures was acquired by Havas, while another neurotechnology company was acquired by NASA, according to La Product Conf.

Today, des Mazery's philosophy is increasingly centered on a simple question: Does a company's product investment actually create economic value?

Who Is Fabrice des Mazery?

Fabrice des Mazery is a product-management veteran who has spent more than 15 years moving between entrepreneurship, product leadership, technology strategy, and advisory work.

His current professional profile describes him as a fractional CPO and CEO advisor who helps technology founders and leaders determine where and how to invest to maximize returns from product and GenAI initiatives.

This represents a natural evolution of his career.

At companies such as Deezer and TheFork, he managed large product organizations and worked on products serving millions of users. At Thiga, he helped scale a product consultancy and develop its organizational capabilities. As an entrepreneur, he experienced both failure and successful exits.

Those experiences shaped his current approach: product teams should not think of themselves simply as feature factories. They should think like investors allocating scarce capital toward opportunities that can produce measurable business outcomes.

That philosophy is at the heart of ProductROI.

Education and Early Career

Des Mazery studied at NEOMA Business School, completing its Grande École Master in Management program in 2010. He later completed an Executive Program in Product Leadership at INSEAD in 2021.

His early professional journey moved quickly toward entrepreneurship.

According to La Product Conf, des Mazery created his first startup in the legal technology space when he was just 20 years old. The venture failed, but the experience did not end his entrepreneurial ambitions. Instead, it became the beginning of a much longer career building and leading technology businesses.

That early failure would become an important part of his professional philosophy.

Rather than treating entrepreneurship as a linear sequence of successes, des Mazery has spoken openly about the uncertainty involved in creating products and companies.

From Startup Failure to Successful Exits

After his first startup failed, des Mazery continued building companies.

La Product Conf describes him as a three-time entrepreneur. His subsequent ventures included businesses in digital marketing and neurotechnology. Those companies eventually produced two exits—one to the French communications group Havas and another to NASA, according to his La Product Conf biography.

The experience gave him something that traditional product-management careers often cannot provide: direct exposure to the complete lifecycle of a business.

As a founder, he had to think about customers, product-market fit, commercial strategy, hiring, technology, capital allocation, and ultimately the value created for investors and acquirers.

That experience later influenced the way he approached product leadership.

IBM and the Move Into Product Leadership

Des Mazery subsequently worked at IBM, one of the world's largest technology companies.

His career at IBM helped establish him as a product and growth leader capable of operating at scale. Product School identifies IBM alongside Deezer and TripAdvisor as one of the three major publicly traded technology companies where he developed his product leadership experience.

Working within a global technology organization exposed him to the complexity of large-scale product development and the organizational challenges that accompany it.

But his career would become particularly notable through his later work at Deezer.

Building Product and Growth at Deezer

Des Mazery joined Deezer, the French music-streaming platform, where he became a senior product and growth leader.

His time at Deezer gave him experience operating a consumer technology product with a large international audience and a highly competitive market.

According to his professional profile, he helped manage product and growth activities while the company expanded its user base and commercial operations. Malt's current biography states that he helped increase Deezer's ARR to as much as $304 million.

Deezer was an important stage in his career because it brought together several areas that would later define his advisory work:

• Product strategy

• Product growth

• User engagement

• Business models

• International expansion

• Monetization

• Technology investment

The experience reinforced the idea that product decisions cannot be separated from business outcomes.

Chief Product Officer at Thiga

In January 2018, des Mazery became Chief Product Officer at Thiga, a French product-management consultancy. He remained there until May 2022.

His role at Thiga went beyond advising individual companies.

He helped transform the organization itself.

According to his Malt profile, Thiga grew from an organization of 36 to 101 product managers, designers, and product marketers during his tenure. Revenue increased from approximately €5.7 million to €12.5 million, representing average annual growth of around 30%, while EBIT remained above 12%.

This experience was important because it required des Mazery to think about product management from the perspective of organizational design.

A company cannot become product-led simply by hiring product managers.

It needs the right structures, decision-making processes, incentives, leadership culture, and business strategy.

Chief Product Officer at TheFork

In May 2022, des Mazery joined TheFork, Tripadvisor's restaurant reservation marketplace, as Chief Product Officer.

TheFork represented a much larger operating environment.

His responsibilities included product strategy and the management of a large international product organization.

During his tenure, he reorganized 26 product teams across four countries and 12 nationalities, managing more than 60 product managers, designers, researchers, content specialists, marketers, and SEO professionals.

He also helped guide TheFork toward a more Product-Led Growth (PLG) model.

The objective was to move the business beyond a predominantly marketing- and sales-driven e-commerce model toward a product experience capable of driving engagement and growth across both B2C and B2B audiences.

TheFork's Business Results

The results during des Mazery's final year at TheFork provide an indication of the scale at which he was operating.

His professional profile reports that in 2023 TheFork reached:

• More than 20 million users

• More than 55,000 restaurants

• Operations across 11 countries

• Approximately $1.4 billion in GMV

• Approximately $154 million in revenue

• 27% revenue growth

• Reduced marketing costs

• Profitability

The company's consumer mobile applications also achieved strong ratings, including 4.9/5 on Android and 4.7/5 on iOS, according to his profile.

The experience gave des Mazery an unusually broad perspective on the relationship between product investment and financial performance.

Founding ProductROI

In February 2024, des Mazery launched ProductROI.

The company was built around a problem he had encountered repeatedly throughout his career: product teams often make major investment decisions without expressing those decisions in terms that the rest of the business can easily evaluate.

ProductROI's proposition is therefore deliberately financial.

Its website describes des Mazery as the company's "operational partner" and emphasizes his experience across entrepreneurship, product leadership, and startup advising.

The firm works with technology companies to determine:

• Where they should invest in product

• Which initiatives deserve additional resources

• How product investments affect revenue

• How to evaluate risk

• How to connect product strategy with business strategy

• How to improve product-market fit

• How to build stronger go-to-market strategies

The objective is not simply to build better products.

It is to build products that generate better returns.

The ProductROI Philosophy

Des Mazery's philosophy can be summarized in one idea:

Product is an investment portfolio.

Instead of treating every product initiative as equally important, companies should evaluate investments according to potential return, risk, strategic importance, and time to value.

He argues that product organizations have historically struggled to communicate with finance and executive teams because they often speak in terms of features, roadmaps, discovery, and delivery rather than revenue, risk, margins, and return on investment.

In a 2026 Product Thinking podcast discussion, des Mazery argued that product leaders should translate their decisions into investment language and treat stakeholders as co-investors rather than simply as customers of the product department.

This is one of the clearest expressions of his current thinking.

From Feature Management to Investment Management

Traditional product management often revolves around questions such as:

"What should we build?"

"Which feature should come next?"

"When can we ship it?"

Des Mazery believes senior product leaders need to ask a different set of questions.

What is the expected return?

What is the risk?

What is the cost?

How quickly will the investment pay back?

What strategic objective does it support?

What other initiatives could use the same resources?

This shift transforms product management from a delivery function into a capital-allocation function.

For des Mazery, that is especially important when companies are operating under financial pressure.

ProductROI and Generative AI

Des Mazery has extended his ROI-focused approach into generative AI through GenROI.

His LinkedIn profile currently identifies his professional affiliation as productROI / GenROI and describes his work as helping companies evaluate their product and GenAI roadmaps.

The central question is not whether a company should use AI.

It is whether a particular AI investment is likely to create enough value to justify its cost, risk, complexity, and organizational impact.

That distinction is increasingly important as companies invest heavily in AI experimentation.

For des Mazery, the same discipline that should govern product investment should govern AI investment.

A Responsible Approach to AI

Des Mazery's thinking about technology is not limited to financial returns.

He has also consistently advocated for responsible product development.

His earlier writing addressed responsible products and the need to consider the impact of technology on people, the planet, and the business environment.

More recently, his GenAI work has emphasized the importance of evaluating AI investments through a combination of business value and responsible implementation.

His approach therefore combines two ideas that are sometimes treated separately:

economic discipline and responsible technology.

The ParentTech Project

In 2026, des Mazery also publicly disclosed that he had been working for approximately a year on a deep-tech project focused on preventing parental exhaustion.

In a LinkedIn post, he described the project as an adaptive AI designed to help prevent parental burnout. He said the team was developing a proprietary reasoning engine rather than simply building another GPT wrapper, with an emphasis on safety, auditability, privacy, efficiency, and technological sovereignty.

The project illustrates another side of his entrepreneurial interests.

Rather than applying AI exclusively to enterprise productivity, the initiative explores how adaptive AI could address a significant human problem.

He described the project as an impact-oriented startup being developed with a CTO and psychologist, while looking for applied machine-learning expertise.

Building the French Product Community

Des Mazery's influence extends beyond his companies.

He has spent more than a decade helping build France's product-management community.

In 2013, he co-created FrenchProduit, a community for product professionals in France.

The organization grew into a substantial professional network, with thousands of members across Meetup and Slack and chapters in cities throughout France. His LinkedIn profile says the community has more than 12,000 Meetup members, around 4,000 Slack members, and chapters in 11 cities.

After 13 years of leading the organization, des Mazery stepped away from executive leadership in 2026 and became honorary president.

He described the transition as an opportunity to spend more of his time helping CEOs and executive teams address product and technology debt.

La Product Conf

Des Mazery is also one of the founders of La Product Conf Paris, a major product-management event.

The event began in 2016 with approximately 220 attendees and grew to more than 1,000 attendees by 2024, according to des Mazery's LinkedIn profile.

He left the event's board at the end of 2024 to focus on his new entrepreneurial projects.

The conference nevertheless remains an important part of his professional legacy.

It helped create a meeting point for product managers, designers, executives, and technology leaders from France and beyond.

La Product Conf's current speaker information still lists des Mazery as a Founder of ProductROI and highlights his experience at TheFork.

FrenchCPO

In 2019, des Mazery also founded FrenchCPO, a community for senior product leaders.

The group is intentionally selective, consisting primarily of CPOs and product leaders serving on executive committees.

His LinkedIn profile describes the community as having more than 185 members.

The initiative reflects his broader interest in strengthening product leadership at the executive level.

Rather than focusing exclusively on individual contributors and product-management techniques, FrenchCPO creates a network for executives responsible for product strategy and organizational outcomes.

Leadership Philosophy

Des Mazery's leadership philosophy is closely connected to ownership.

He believes product leaders should think like business owners rather than feature managers.

That means understanding the financial consequences of decisions, communicating in business language, challenging assumptions, and accepting responsibility for outcomes.

His 2026 Product Thinking appearance provides a particularly clear example.

He described product investment as a portfolio-management problem, where companies should balance strategic investments, lower-risk improvements, and higher-risk opportunities rather than expecting every initiative to become a transformational success.

This approach resembles venture investing.

Not every bet will work.

The objective is to construct a portfolio where the successful investments create enough value to justify the inevitable failures.

Managing Large Product Organizations

One of des Mazery's strongest credentials is his experience managing large, multidisciplinary teams.

At TheFork, he managed more than 60 professionals across product management, design, research, content, marketing, and SEO.

At Thiga, he helped scale the product organization from 36 to 101 professionals.

That experience has given him a practical understanding of organizational design.

Product strategy does not exist independently of people.

The structure of teams, reporting lines, incentives, decision rights, and communication channels can determine whether a strategy succeeds.

This is one reason his current advisory work focuses not only on roadmaps but also on organizational transformation.

Responsible Product Management

Another recurring theme in des Mazery's career is responsible product management.

He has spoken publicly about building products that respect people, the planet, and the business environment.

This philosophy is particularly relevant in an era of AI, where product teams increasingly have access to powerful systems capable of affecting users at enormous scale.

For des Mazery, responsible product leadership means understanding consequences before optimizing growth.

It also means recognizing that business performance and responsibility do not necessarily need to be opposing goals.

A Career Built Around Product Entrepreneurship

Des Mazery's career is unusual because he has experienced product creation from almost every angle.

He has been:

• A startup founder

• An entrepreneur who experienced failure

• An entrepreneur who achieved exits

• A product manager

• A product-growth leader

• A Chief Product Officer

• A consultant

• A community builder

• A startup advisor

• A conference organizer

• An author and speaker

• A GenAI strategist

That combination gives him a broad perspective on technology businesses.

He understands the founder's need for speed, the executive's need for predictable economics, the product manager's need for autonomy, and the investor's need for returns.

ProductROI is essentially an attempt to bring those perspectives together.

The Future of ProductROI and GenROI

The technology industry is entering a period in which companies are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the economic value of technology investments.

AI has amplified that pressure.

Companies can now build prototypes faster than ever, but speed does not automatically translate into value.

The challenge increasingly becomes deciding what should be built, what should not be built, and where scarce resources should be allocated.

That is precisely the problem des Mazery has positioned ProductROI and GenROI to address.

His future work is likely to remain at the intersection of product strategy, financial accountability, organizational design, and AI.

Why Fabrice des Mazery Matters

Fabrice des Mazery's importance in the technology industry comes from his ability to connect product thinking with business economics.

For years, product management focused heavily on users, discovery, roadmaps, and features.

Des Mazery's argument is that senior product leaders must go further.

They must understand capital allocation.

They must quantify risk.

They must understand payback.

And they must accept responsibility for the business consequences of product decisions.

That philosophy is increasingly relevant as companies face tighter capital markets and unprecedented investment in artificial intelligence.

His career—from failed startup founder to successful entrepreneur, from Deezer and IBM to Thiga and TheFork, and ultimately to ProductROI and GenROI—has given him the experience to make that argument from both sides of the table.

Rather than asking whether a company can build something, his work increasingly asks a harder question:

Should the company invest in building it—and will that investment create enough value to justify the cost?

That question sits at the center of des Mazery's current work.

Key Facts About Fabrice des Mazery

Category	Details
Full Name	Fabrice des Mazery
Current Venture	ProductROI / GenROI
Current Position	Founder, ProductROI; Fractional CPO & CEO Advisor
Primary Focus	Product ROI, GenAI ROI, Product Strategy
Location	Paris, France
Education	NEOMA Business School
Executive Education	INSEAD, Product Leadership
Entrepreneurial Experience	Three companies founded
Exits	Two successful exits
Former CPO	TheFork / Tripadvisor
Former CPO	Thiga
Former Product Leader	Deezer
Former Technology Employer	IBM
Community Founder	FrenchProduit
Community Founder	FrenchCPO
Conference Co-Founder	La Product Conf Paris
Product Organization Experience	Up to 300 people managed
Key Expertise	Product Strategy, Growth, GTM, Product-Led Growth, GenAI
Current Philosophy	Treat product and AI decisions as investments

Summary

Fabrice des Mazery is a French technology entrepreneur and product executive whose career has been defined by a consistent pursuit of better product decisions.

After founding three companies and achieving two exits, he moved into senior product leadership roles at IBM, Deezer, Thiga, and TheFork. At TheFork, he led a 26-team product organization spanning four countries and helped the company transition toward a Product-Led Growth model.

In 2024, he launched ProductROI, turning his experience into an advisory business focused on helping technology companies maximize the returns from product investments. His current professional work has expanded into GenROI, applying the same investment discipline to generative AI.

At the same time, his influence extends through the French product community. He helped establish FrenchProduit, founded FrenchCPO, and co-founded La Product Conf Paris, contributing to the growth of France's product-management ecosystem for more than a decade.

His current philosophy can be summed up simply: product teams should stop thinking only about what they can build and start thinking like investors about where the business should place its bets.

That perspective makes Fabrice des Mazery an increasingly relevant voice as companies attempt to balance product innovation, profitability, and the enormous opportunities—and risks—created by generative AI.