100 PM: Recent Episodes
Suzanne Abate
Welcome to 100 PM – the show where we interview one hundred active product managers – from startups to enterprise and everything in between all from one great city every season.
If you’re joining us for the first time be sure to visit our website – 100productmanagers.com – the web’s largest single free resource for product management topics.
We’ve got tons of great articles about business, technology and design, fabulous contributors and recommended reads courtesy of our incredible guests, week over week.
In this episode:
- Where do startups go wrong with implementing OKRs
- Can OKRs really scale for enterprise?
- What are pipelines and how do they change the way we think about product roadmaps?
Product strategy answers the question, “How will your product delight customers, in hard to copy, margin-enhancing ways?”
You have ideas to delight customers, to build hard to copy advantage and experiment with your business model. Now what?
A roadmap is an expression of your strategy. It shows how projects fit together, along with a rough time estimate.
Applying the product strategy tools and frameworks to a textbook rental and education startup.
In this episode:
- Balancing strategic and tactical product management
- Common pitfalls of product teams and how to avoid them
- Making the leap from Sr. Product Manager to VP of Product
In this episode:
- Establishing a clear vision of your career path
- Using metrics to answer burning product questions
- What product managers can learn from biology
In this episode:
- Evaluating job candidates through take-home assignments
- Why companies should stop “hunting unicorns”
- Top 3 ways to stand out as a PM candidate
In this episode:
- Empowering teams through the Prezi Model
- Key differences between B2B and B2C product management
- Why embracing discomfort can boost your product career
In this episode:
- From customer success to sales to product leadership
- Why collective ownership is the key to success
- Implementing OKRs at a large scale organization
In this episode:
- From retail to product management
- Why relationship building is the number one required skill a product manager could have
- The value of having confidence with humility
In this episode:
- Skills of a great facilitator
- Finding your AHA moment through “micro learnings”
- Leading the Product: the birth story
In this episode:
- From Marketer to VP of Product at Netflix
- Delighting Customers through Consumer Science
- How to Hack your Product Leader Career
In this episode:
- Pros and cons of having a consulting background
- Importance of sharing "war stories"
- Embodying the persona as customer research
In this episode:
- From business development to product leadership
- How to structure (and restructure) product teams at scale
- Making process your product
In this episode:
- Understanding supply chain and working well with suppliers
- Why productifying operating systems matters in manufacturing
- Perfecting product through small batch production
In this episode:
- How and when to insource a product team
- Leaving leadership to become a founder
- Why you have to be excited by responsibility to lead in product
In this episode:
- A warm welcome to Women Who Code, NYC
- Product Management as Power
- Breaking it down and building it
In this episode:
- Where product marketers and product managers meet
- Why "moving fast and breaking things" isn't a mantra that flies well in enterprise
- Modified agile for big companies
In this episode:
- The rise and fall of Undercurrent NYC
- Grinding your way toward shared understanding
- Not getting caught in one identity
In this episode:
- Soft robotics, Exoskeletons, and 3D Printers
- From design thinking to product mindset
- Startup life in NYC
In this episode:
- How to structure and scale product teams
- Why non-technical PMs can better manage technical products
- Ideas for overcoming dependencies
In this episode:
- Why founders have to be product people (or learn to be)
- The blinding power of ignorance
- How to develop effective product training
In this episode:
- What Product Managers can learn from Marketers
- Adjusting from a large team to no team
- Essential skills for succeeding in product management
Trading Places! 100 PM host Suzanne Abate interviews Mike Fishbein, host of This is Product Management.
In this episode:
- How to avoid getting stuck in project manager tasks
- Organizing teams around problems, not products
- Advice for mastering quantitative inquiry
In this episode:
- What engineers really think about product managers
- How to brand yourself as a PM
- Adapting to a Kanban software delivery method
In this episode:
- The right time to bring in a product manager
- The difference between doing product management and teaching it
- The art of writing user stories
In this episode:
- What are Entrepreneurs so afraid of?
- Managing Freemium vs Subscription model products
- How to tell the right story to your investors
Dan Olsen is the author of The Lean Product Playbook and a product management consultant for leading companies in Silicon Valley. In this interview, Dan explains how to develop great ideas, play by play.
Brainmates is Australia's leading Agile and Product Management Training group. In this episode, Jen shares practical advice for enterprise teams who may be struggling to shift into a product mindset.
Have you ever wondered what it takes to build a massive customer base for your amazing product? In this episode, go-to-market pro Matt Althauser shares stories from the frontlines and advice for how PMs can foster better relationships with sales teams.
Mike Belsito wants us all to become better product managers. Tune in to meet the man behind Industry: The Product Conference.
Brent Tworetzky and Brian Smith are both deep supporters of the "let's go see" method of validating ideas. If you would like to learn more about the technique known as "user science" tune in now.
In this episode:
- Solving business problems at scale
- Why so many people fail at product discovery
- 10 different ways to say no
In this episode:
- First-wave Startup-ism
- Taking on Amazon
- How to know when you're doing it right
In this episode:
- Ideas for structuring product teams
- The merits of bottom up roadmapping
- How to be an ally and champion diversity in your organization
In this episode:
- Practical advice for finding your dream job
- The blessing (and the curse) of using your own products
- Why you shouldn't be afraid to fail
- Scaling a team from zero
- What PMs should know (or not) about Sales & Marketing
- How to be entrepreneurial in a large organization
In this episode:
- Is a startup really the right environment to learn product?
- Learning to let go of process as you scale
- A pro secret for eliciting honest customer feedback
In this episode:
- What makes a good Quality Assurance person (hint: you gotta like breaking things)
- A brief history of Braintree
- Why having competition is really good for you
In this episode:
- A brief history of Data Science
- How to avoid Excel hell
- Learning to ask the right questions
In this episdoe:
- Evolving team processes as your product grows
- Creating good developer relationships through your API
- Staying innovative even when your organization doesn't support it
In this episode:
- Why qualitative insights are as essential as data to product teams
- A new method for launching ethnographic research on demand
- The simplest, most underused approach for building better teams
In this episode:
- The Art of Decomposition
- Vendor Anti-Patterns in Agile
- One Word to Ban
In this episode:
- Having a healthy dose of curiosity
- Leveraging massive data sets and hacking major growth
- Unique tactics for building a marketplace business
In this episode:
- Dissecting the IBM ecosystem
- Radical collaboration
- Introduction to the APM Program
In this episode:
- How to apply pivots to your own career strategy
- The humble spirit of Chicago's PM community
- Practical advice for managing a globally distributed team
In this episode:
- The difference between practicing process and learning process
- Why it's so hard to be experimental in a waterfall environment
- Working the job that you have and the job that you want
- True stories from riding Groupon's growth wave
In this episode:
- Why every company should have their own API
- Assessing the impact of change
- Exploring the myth of the "full stack developer"
- Tips for keeping good developer team relations
In this episode:
- Managing the hardware product development cycle
- The importance of collecting feedback that ISN'T tied to your product
- How to effectively pivot once you've already shipped thousands of units
In this episode:
- A brief history of Extreme Programming (XP)
- Shifting enterprise from a project mindset to a product mindset
- Seeding a process-oriented company culture
In this episode:
- Technical debt and the cost of change
- The future of online advertising
- Reaping rewards through persistence
In this episode:
- "Your ideas suck" and how to get over it
- How to lead by influence
- The essential PM skill you can learn in couples' therapy
In this episode:
- Explicit expectations vs implicit - how is PM success truly measured?
- Get a PM job by thinking of yourself as the problem
- Leveling up the global potential
In this episode:
- Taking customer experience to the next level
- A brief history of internet music startups
- Diplomats, detectives and warriors
In this episode:
- What is Customer Development and why it's critical
- The benefits of bootstrapping your business
- When Founders need to hire Product Managers
In this episode:
- Intro to "growth hacking"
- Getting out of the building
- The importance of "telescoping"
In this episode:
- Starting with passion
- Conscientious career pivoting
- Getting your foot in the door
In this episode:
- The power of paper prototypes
- Scaling lean
- Projects that can change the world
In this episode:
- The art of faking it til you make it
- How content really gets made (the good, the bad and the ugly)
- Pros and cons of insourcing content production
In this episode:
- Balancing strategy and tactics
- Leveraging your past skills to find PM success
- Learning to be imperfect
- Filling the gaps
In this episode:
- How product roadmaps get built
- Persuading executives with data, not force
- The right time to hire a Data Scientist
- Comparing LA tech to SF tech
- How to get hired at Dollar Shave Club
In this episode:
- Building for speed and for scale
- Mastering UX Design in 30 minutes
- Applying Agile to romantic relationships
In this episode:
- A plea for female product managers to join the fun (and the uncensored truth about why the field is still male-dominated)
- Why you can't be commitment-phobic when roadmapping enterprise products
- Seeking wisdom in the fountain of youth, Neko Atsume and Venmo
The biggest challenge Andrew and his team at Inspire face today is learning how to leverage effective product management strategies to roadmap, market and sell "invisible" services.
In today's conversation, we talk about the Swiss Army approach to getting hired and six other Product Manager molds, Andrew's best friend "Eric," as well as how to deploy experiments when there's no code involved and "humble Product Management."
In this episode:
- Using SEO to build a content strategy that works
- How to tackle analytics and the power of lean metrics
- One critical piece of advice for not going down with a sinking ship
A veteran of the LA tech scene lays down hard truths about why many companies should never get funded, the real reason there are so many job openings in product management, and how to succeed with nothing but the powers of persuasion.
In this episode:
- Focusing on the right things at the right time
- Turning condescension into motivation
- How to get the job, learn the job and love the job
"For me that was a very hard thing to let go of. Like the fact that oh, it has to be perfect and then we put it out. Because that's the way I was used to with packaging. That's the way I worked with packaging or with exhibition. Like, you can't hang this on the wall if it's not perfect. You can't have people come and look at this beautiful exhibition if it's not well put together and everything is in its right place, so I looked at product the same way. Then I realized that it's not that way. It's okay to put something out and see what happens."
In this episode:
- Putting the user first - how to negotiate the needs of advertisers without disruping the reader experience
- Cool tools for design, prototyping and managing feature releases
- Learning to let go of perfection
100 PM sat down with Tyler Adams - winner of The Amazing Race and Senior Product Manager at BCG Digital Ventures to talk all about "Intrapreneurship" and how businesses can leverage existing data, customers and assets to create new products that drive growth.
In our eighth episode we talked to industry veteran Natacha Gaymer-Jones about:
- The business of launching a product
- Why “validated learning” is essential to success – whether or not your company is funded
- How even product experts fall victim to the trap of “starting with solution”
- The ugly truth about startup success (it’s rarer than the media will have you think)
If you’re looking for a fresh, female perspective on entrepreneurship and perseverance, tune in now.
If you're looking for Kellin Haley you're most likely to find her: on a surfboard, on a motorcycle, running product at NBCUniversal.
Haley is a self-described "minimum viable product manager."
In this episode she tells me what that means, as well as the naked truth about how to get founders to "give up their baby" to a product manager; the myth of "if you build it, they will come;" and things every man should know about working with women
"When I was an executor I was an asshole. I was on the bottom floor being the bulldog saying, I want it now. I want it this way," she tells me. "Now it's, Where do you think we can go? How are we going to get there? There's a lot more 'we' that happens."
We're speaking of lessons learned on the job and advice from Simon Sinek's latest book, Leaders Eat Last, and we're laughing, a lot.
The first product Jacobo Plu built was a hemp bicycle frame using soybean oil resin.
Today he is among of the founding four at Yoi (alongside Keith Ferrazzi, enigmatic entrepreneur, author and former CMO of Deloitte and Starwood Hotels) — a human resources technology company now with 22+ employees; a little engine that could, and did, and is.
Chris Brereton got his start in product management as the lead screamer for the band Avarice.
“The process for me is very much the same [as being in a band], where you’ve got multiple people with multiple talents that have to somehow come together and work on their instruments or their talents in harmony and come out with some product, or song, or record, and hope that somebody enjoys it enough to buy it.”
Armen Daniyelian doesn’t mind that our recording room is a little chilly —
“I’m Russian, so I’m used to it.”
Liam Oliver might be the only product manager who moonlights as a professional hockey referee.
He’s certainly the first person I’ve heard use refereeing as analogy for validated learning...
In this epsiode:
- Why routine and mindfulness matter
- Conducting thoughtful market research
- The power of curiosity