Product Love: Recent Episodes
Product Love Podcast
“Product Love” is the feeling you get when you have that incredible and joyous connection towards your favorite products. What makes certain products so lovable to us? I ask the leading industry product managers, and the brilliant teams that have crafted them for us. This podcast is essential for anyone who wants to learn about product management from the best executive product leaders across various disciples. Dive into topics about the evolving craft of product management, trends in the industry, and get even more insights into how the modern PM makes you feel “product love.”
Eric Boduch is the chief evangelist and co-founder of Pendo and a contributor to ProductCraft.
On this week’s episode of Product Love, I sat down with Howard Tiersky, the CEO of FROM, the digital transformation agency. He helps companies win with today’s customers who reserve their loyalty for brands that deliver elegant and convenient digitally-powered experiences. Before that, he was the Vice President of Media & Entertainment at Capgemini.
This episode, we talk about mapping out the customer journey, and the five steps to digital transformation.
Nik Parekh, author of The Future of Extraordinary Design: service design, and user experience by Eric Boduch
Carlos González de Villaumbrosia joins Product Love to talk about Product School by Eric Boduch
Jake Sorofman joins Product Love to talk about the 2020 State of Product Leadership by Eric Boduch
I asked Scott Belsky the age-old product cliché — is product management a science or an art? His answer was that it’s clearly both. Sure, product management has scientific themes — there’s the experimentation, testing, and data. But it also calls on some things that are more qualitative, like empathy for the user and the creativity necessary to stay competitive.
Before he was the chief product officer at Adobe, he was the CEO and founder of Behance, a platform that allows creatives to share their portfolios. He also had a brief stint as an entrepreneur and investor, and wrote two books: Making Ideas Happen, and The Messy Middle.
This week on Product Love, Scott and I talked about the science and art of product management.
This week on Product Love, I talked to Tatyana Mamut, the Head of Product at Nextdoor. Nextdoor is a social networking site for neighborhoods. Before that, she advised and consulted in the blockchain space for a year. She’s led the product team at Amazon Web services, Salesforce, and has even led a bunch of innovation products at IDEO. But her resume doesn’t stop there, she also has her PhD in economic and cultural anthropology.
On this episode of Product Love, Tatyana and I talked about building a team, evangelizing for customers, and the impact of a wildly successful product.
This week on Product Love, I talked to Christian Idiodi, a partner at Silicon Valley Partner Group. Silicon Valley Partner Group was created to share senior level experience and best practices with technology companies. At SVPG, Christian stays engaged with the product community by mentorship. He works closely with two student-led startups every year.
Like most people, Christian stumbled into product management unintentionally.
When he worked at CareerBuilder, he won an annual competition where individuals could submit their entrepreneurial ideas. If they won, they could get funding and time to work on it. Spoiler: He won the competition. So what does he do with a massive check and a responsibility to run a business? In some ways, product management probably called out to him first.
To this day, he's been a product leader for over 15 years and has launched over 120 products.
On this week’s episode, we talked about customer-centric product managers, and his favorite interview question.
This week, Product Love hosts Nir Eyal, author of Hooked.
Nir and I talk about how to build engaging products, ways to fight back against distractions, and why humans make terrible life choices.
Eric Boduch and Dan Olsen chat about his experiences building products, trends in product management and his advice for young and aspiring product managers.
Oh and we chat about DURF, we can't forget about that.
This week, Product Love hosts Alok Pareek. Alok Pareek is a founder and EVP of products at Striim, and is also a long-time friend of mine. He’s a passionate product person, and also has a unique perspective on what it takes to build products that last. I loved chatting with Alok in San Francisco about what rituals and cultural customs can teach us about building tech products that stick.
We also talked about what Alok looks for in a product manager (passion, a questioning character, and ethics), advice
This week, Product Love hosts Sam Boonin from Zendesk. Sam and I talk about all kinds of things product from how to scale product organizations at fast growing companies to the value of go to market skills in a product organization.
This week on Product Love we interview Greg Coticchia. Greg is the executive director of the Masters of Science in product management program at Carnegie Mellon University. Greg has been in fourteen start-ups and founded three, and worked in organizations, from '$0M to over $1B' in revenue.
This week on Product Love, I sat down with Rohini Pandhi, a product manager at Square, the payments giant. We talked about introverted product management, time management, metrics, and startups.
This week on Product Love, I sat down with Jorge Mazal, director of product management at Duolingo, the world's most popular way to learn a language. We talked about how to structure a product manager interview, building user frameworks and a shared vocabulary around users, and how behavioral psychology impacts his work.
John Weeke is an award-winning filmmaker and a product marketing manager at Insightly. With John, we talk about the operating system for human beings, we chat about The Hero with 1000 Faces, a classic book about story telling by Joseph Campbell, and we delve into how to integrate concepts of story telling into your products.
Kathryn Hume is the Vice President of Product & Strategy at integrate.ai. With Kathryn, we talk about a variety of AI and machine learning topics including some interesting uses of AI she has seen, like robotic prostate surgeons, we chat about integrating AI into existing product offerings, we touch on the implications machine learning has into our privacy, and we delve into what she loves about her favorite software product, Spotify
This week on Product Love, I sat down with Jon Noronha, Director of Product at Optimizely, the experimentation platform.
Not surprisingly, we talked a lot about product experimentation – this is not only what Jon does at work, it is really a product management philosophy he lives by. Jon started his career at Microsoft, working on Bing, where he was also really invested in experimenting, mostly in the form of A/B testing. He joined Optimizely when it was still very small, but it was really there that he
This week on Product Love, a podcast about product, I sat down with Kirsten Butzow, who is so prolific in her work that it’s hard to easily introduce her. Kirsten has more years of experience as a product management leader than almost anyone I know and has served in senior product management roles at a diverse set of companies, including Fujitsu, Pearson, and Blackboard. She is now a certified instructor and product coach with Pragmatic Marketing, and a speaker at many of the leading product events around
This week on Product Love, I talked to Steve Johnson, who believes that simplicity is key when it comes to product management. If you’re doing more than 10 things at once, then maybe you’re doing too much.
And as a bonus, he can sing! No really, some record company should sign this guy.
What do you consider a product?
Us product managers, past or present, are probably quick to point to our trusty smartphones, our favorite apps, and even our own software but Mike Belsito thinks otherwise. He considers everything a product.
Like many product managers we’ve interviewed in the past, Mike accidentally stumbled onto this role. He jokes that becoming a product manager was probably the next step after being a failed startup founder, but ironically, he’s the co-founder of the Product Collect
This week on Product Love, I talk to Jeff Lash, Vice President and Group Director of Product Management, at SiriusDecisions. With over a decade of experience in product management, he believes a key trait of product managers is empathy.
This week on Product Love, I sat down with David Schwartz, the VP of Product at Wix, who makes it a goal to talk to three customers a day. We discussed the importance of being able to say no and how features can make-or-break a user experience.
Peldi, the CEO of Balsamiq, embodies some of the best attributes of both successful CEOs and product managers. He is always learning and looking to learn. He strives to deliver not only a product that his customers love, but to build a company, culture and community that help his customers beyond the ordinary product features.
Despite his jokes to the contrary, Peldi is in no way clueless, his humility and thoughtful approach to his business are refreshing and he should serve as an inspiration to entre
This week on the Product Love podcast, I sat down with John Cutler, self-proclaimed “product agitator” and, most recently, a first-time dad.
John has worked in a variety of roles in product and consulted at top tier companies like Zendesk, Appfolio, and Pendo. John is one of the most active and prolific writers and thinkers, and if you don’t already, you should definitely follow him on Twitter.
This week on Product Love, I talk to Jeff about the source of our feedback, and why we should care more about customer success than customer happiness.
Cliff Gilley joins Product Love this week to discuss how product management is a lot like controlled chaos, and how he's not too fond of the tech industry's favorite new buzzword: Growth. Listen to this week's episode for a lot of great advice on how to help your teams prioritize, and how product managers can act as the sword and the shield for their products.
Have different opinions? Let me hear them at eboduch@pendo.io.
This week on Product Love, I talk to Teresa Torres, a product discovery coach. She authors Product Talk (https://www.producttalk.org/), a blog that provides best practices for product people.
It might be easy for us to fall in love with our products, but Teresa urges us to fall in love with the problems we can fix instead.
This week, I talk to Rich Mironov, the CEO of Mironov Consulting, and an all-around product guru. Rich has been practicing product management since the 80’s.
We discussed why a grasp of human psychology is crucial for PMing, and why it’s important to understand the difference between features that are for show and those that are actually used.
Bootstrapping instead of raising capital.
On one hand, you can retain control and can set your own course. On the other, the luxury of capital gives you the resources to add features, hire more engineers and grow quicker.
But maybe capital limitations can actually help you create a more focused product.
This week on Product Love, I sat down and talked to Jim Semick, founder of Product Plan, about bootstrapping a startup, key metrics for product managers and how to approach pricing.
Do most of us use prototyping and experimentation in the right way?
Do we use it to test buttons and copy and layout and flow -- and really features around the edges of our core product. Or do we use prototyping to learn and make major even radical adjustments in the direction of our products and companies?
This week on Product Love, I sat down and talked to Bob Moesta about systems thinking, prototyping, jobs to be done and more. For those who don't know him, Bob Moesta is a founder, maker, owner, inve
In this week's episode, I talk to Gibson Biddle, former VP of Product at Netflix and Chegg, about the DHM model--where we focus on delighting customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways. Customer delight is always in first place. But what measures are we taking to ensure that? Let me know your thoughts at eboduch@pendo.io.
Do our own experiences and biases work against us when we are building products?
I mean, we often start down a path based on our experiences and our owned learned biases. We often start with constraints, what we know how to build or what is convenient. It is rare we truly start from a blank slate.
This week on Product Love, I talked to the Head of Strategy at Basecamp, Ryan Singer, at their headquarters in Chicago.
What is powerful about Ryan and the team at basecamp is how they approach thinking abo
This week on Product Love, I sat down with Todd Olson, CEO of Pendo, and long-time friend. We discussed Todd's career, and highlighted on the ways he's strategically positioned against competitors in the past. We also talked a lot about value. Every product manager in the world wants to build valuable experiences for their customers. So how do product managers prioritize on delivering better experiences to users? Listen to this week's episode to find out.
Brian Brinkmann, VP of Product Marketing at Logi Analytics discusses embedded analytics, and the line between product and product marketing. Brian brings up so many good points about analytics and data--how often are we hiding our data from ourselves? From our users? Data helps us make great decisions, so why are there so many steps to reach it? Instead, Brian calls for embedded analytics--data that is woven into the product itself.
Adam Avramescu does Customer Education at the company, Checkr. Don't know what customer education is? Well, maybe you should invest in it. Adam truly advocates for the importance of customer education - it's seriously profitable, and it makes your customers stay and love you. So why not? Check out this week's episode of Product Love to learn more about it.
What's product sense? I would liken it to a product manager's spidey-sense. Jackie Bavaro, Head of Product Management, at Asana discusses how product managers can develop their product sense, and how they can incorporate parts of their favorite products into their own process.
Cindy and I talked extensively about customer interviews. Interestingly enough, while we should always listen to customer requests--we should note that sometimes customers don't always tell us what they want because they don't know if it's feasible. But we would know. Dig deep for answers, and listen to their problems. They might respond with a "safe" answer, but don't settle for that.
What's your favorite problem to solve? Maggie Crowley, Director of Product Management, at Drift asks. This week on Product Love, Maggie and I talked extensively about the worst feature she's ever shipped, as well as how to rally your team around a problem. Instead of wondering whether we should build feature A or feature B, we really need to ask ourselves: What can we build that would make our customer successful? What problem do we want to solve?
Maggie also talks about how she got a job at Drift (persis
This week on Product Love, Glen Holmes of Workday talks to me about how we figure out value. It turns out a lot of biases affect people's decision-making skills. We make different decisions on value if we think an item is going to become exclusive, or scarce. So how do we help customers determine value? How do we connect that to our product? Glen walks you through that in this week's episode of Product Love.
This week on Product Love, I went down to Patreon headquarters in San Francisco to talk to their SVP of Product, Wyatt Jenkins. It was awesome. We discussed pricing strategies and all the various tests you can use as a product manager. I would definitely try them all out in your next few customer interviews. We also talked about a red flag when it comes to hiring product managers, which really resonated with me. Check out the episode to see if you agree with Wyatt or not!
Emily Wang, Head of Product at Spoke joined me on this week of Product Love. We talked a lot about product principles, otherwise known as a framework that helps guide our decision-making when it comes to products. How do we come up with these principles? What is their shelf life? Emily answers all these questions in this week's episode.
In this week's episode of Product Love, I sat down with the SVP of Product, Christopher O'Donnell. We talked a lot about how Christopher built the startup, Sidekick, within Hubspot. Should all product companies be doing this? How does one go about implementing a startup within one?
This week on Product Love, I talk to May Habib, CEO, and co-founder of Qordoba, about emotional resonance.
This week on Product Love, I sat down with the VP of Product at Medium, Michael Sippey. We discussed a lot about hypotheses. We all know the theory of change--if you change X, it will lead to Y result. But why not apply it to product management? Well, first, you need a really compelling hypothesis that is bold enough, and worth the development cycle to produce Y. How has your team created hypotheses?
This week on Product Love, I sat down with Randhir Vieira, the VP of Product at Headspace. Headspace is a mission-based company, and that changes a lot of the things they do. They have the North Star of trying to uplift everyone's happiness and health, as something to guide their decision-making process. Is it better to have mission-based companies? Can any company become mission-based?
This week on Product Love, I talked to Kyle Poyar, VP of Market Strategy, about pricing. We discussed how pricing is seen as a dark art sometimes, but it shouldn't be. In fact, it's an essential part of product management that requires training and a lot more noise. Interested in hearing how to strategize pricing? Listen to the episode to learn more.
This week on Product Love, I sat down with Hannah Chaplin, the CEO of Receptive. We talked a lot about wanting to connect more with customers. Hannah finds it through roadmaps, which Receptive shares with their customers. This led into discussing feedback, which admittedly, is an emotional experience. Customers can be overly joyous when they share feedback, or extremely frustrated whereas product managers probably feel the same way. So how do we facilitate those conversations better? How do we make each sid
Mihir Nanavati joins Product Love to talk about alignment in product management by Eric Boduch
This week on Product Love, I sat down and talked to Daniel Elizalde. Daniel has helped over 1,200 product professionals, taught at Stanford for three years, and he's also now the VP, Head of IoT for Ericsson. I think it's safe to say he's pretty much the expert on IoT product management. We talked about his decision framework as well as the four pillars of product leadership.
This week on Product Love, I talked to Dheerja Kaur, the Chief Product Officer of theSkimm. We discussed topics of alignment--how do we get everyone in the company onto the product vision?? Luckily for her, their product vision ties into the company vision. Dheerja also makes the case that great product vision and alignment start from the top, and she also provides tips on how product managers can start evangelizing the roadmap within their own company.
This week on Product Love, I talked to Ryan Powell of SproutSocial about storytelling, and building creativity. He has a refreshing perspective on the role of the product manager -- there's just so many archetypes that try to encompass the role, but storyteller is definitely a unique way to look at it. Rather than being fixated on scrum versus kanban or grooming the backlog, think about how you can empower your teams and your customers through looking and listening for powerful stories.
When is the last time you witnessed something so random and delightful in a product that you had to tell someone about it? Think back to a time you shared that kind of excitement with your colleague over a software product.
This week on Product Love, I talked to Niels Hoven about those moments. Previously, Niels did Product at ClassDojo, and was the VP of Product Development at Pocket Gems. Currently, he’s a product manager at Cloudflare.
On this week’s episode, Niels shares his experiences as a pro
This week on Product Love, I talked to Hiten Shah, co-founder of FYI, Product Habits, KISSMetrics and Crazy Egg, about feature adoption and retention.
This week on Product Love, I sat down to talk to Hubert Palan, CEO and founder of productboard. Hubert believes that there are two parts to every product: delight and functionality. We primarily buy products for functionality, but delight is the factor that converts casual users to advocates. Listen more on why you should invest in product delight.
In this week's episode, Sachin Rekhi dives deep into every aspect of product management. He discusses the roles inside product management as well as hiring. Sachin also brings up the case-study question that uses when he's trying to look for great product managements. Check out the rest of this episode to learn about all the gems he's picked up during his 20-year career.
Supriya is a product technology executive with 20 years of experience at Amazon.com, Booking Holdings and stints at several startups including Zynga and Pro.com. She was with Amazon.com in Seattle for over a decade focusing on the core customer experience on a variety of products including retail, social and Kindle. Her last role at Amazon.com was the technical advisor to the Sr. Vice President of Amazon devices. Supriya was also the Chief Product Officer of Booking Go from 2016-2018, responsible for the pr
There are a lot of different facets to product. From UX design to engineering to development, Melissa Perri has had a stint in them all. When you look at product with those three different approaches, you come up with a foundation on how to work with these teams. Melissa believes that you get a holistic systems approach to product management, and can evaluate the product for its’ feasibility, usability, pricing, and more.
She’s had over a decade of product experience, and now she’s currently the CEO
Manish Patel joins Product Love to talk about communication as the key trait for all product managers. The core of product management is spreading influence, so communication must be the key tool to drive that. Despite all the demand for technical product managers or domain expertise, Manish still believes soft skills are the best to develop.
Jeetu Patel has run every function of the business in his career. He’s done his stint in marketing, engineering, sales, and now, product. But the one thing in business that has fascinated him the most has been scale. Early in Jeetu’s career, he’d travel a lot and was constantly amazed to see certain companies that were famous in the United States, have the same level of recognition and impact in a completely different company.
It inspired him to learn the global nature of the business, and how a comp
Product managers and business leaders often wax poetic about how they want to change the world with their products or ideas. It’s natural. As product managers, your mission is to obsess over a problem, and find a unique solution that impacts your customers. But how much of that impact are you responsible for? Radhika Dutt believes that you’re responsible for a lot more than you think.
Lewis Lin is a well-known product management author and career coach. He's written about acing product manager interviews, getting into top tech companies, and his latest book is all about scaling your PM career.
Lin reveals the ESTEEM Method™: six magical competencies to move ahead in your PM career. He explains why they’re the most critical competencies and provides specific tips and tactics on what you could do to demonstrate your capabilities.
Bootstrapping. Pricing. Freemium.
Three words that incite fear in most product-minded people. But don’t close your tab just yet. This week on Product Love, I sat down with Patrick Campbell, who has managed to turn those three things into a pretty successful company called Profitwell.
This week on Product Love, I sat down with Deon, the CEO of Forethought to discuss AI, and his perspective on increasing product-market fit.
This week on Product Love, I sat down with Nir Eyal to discuss his new book, what new technology means, and how to actually conduct good meetings.
This week on Product Love, I sat down with Oji Udezue, VP of Product at Calendly. Before Calendly, he was the Head of Product at Atlassian.
While Oji and I joked a lot about the enigmatic 10x product manager that came from Twitter memes, he also expressed how the role has gotten a bit mysterious.
We also discussed the human side of building software, and how to optimize customer calls.
This week on Product Love, I sat down with Benjamin Earl Evans, inclusive design lead at AirBnB. In this episode, Ben discusses the importance of inclusive design, and the three types of bias that product managers tend to fall victim to.
This week on Product Love, I talked to Mada Seghete, cofounder of Branch.io, as well as Head of Strategy and Market Development. Branch.io is a mobile linking and attribution platform. This week on Product Love, we talked about how companies can drive mobile growth and virality in product.
This week on Product Love, I talked to Jason Vandeboom, CEO and Founder of ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is an email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation and CRM software platform for small-to-mid-sized businesses.
Growing up, he always had a passion for building things. His entrepreneurial career started from finding jobs online where he could provide services like web design, custom solutions, or intranets. He even had a consulting job at a local internet agency. But unlike what you expected, he pursued fine arts in college. He admits it’s a weird blend, but the mix of science and art inevitably leads to product.
This week on Product Love, Jason and I talked about the freedom and limitations of bootstrapping, as well as making champions out of your customers.
At MemberClicks, product managers have to be entrepreneurs that own the product from top to bottom. Meaning, during pre-launch, they own the entire lifecycle. They do the initial marketing, positioning, sales, and support calls. This way, they're able to witness how the customer feels each product lifecycle, and they're able to make fixes as they go. This also helps build the credibility for product managers within their own organization.
This week on Product Love, I caught up with Jay Brewer, the VP of Experience Design at Rapid7. Jay shares what experience design entails in the security space, and how product managers can optimize from learning about experience design. He also shares how working in video games has benefitted his sense of product thinking.
This week on Product Love, I talked to Marty Duffy, VP of Product at G2Crowd. G2Crowd is is the world’s largest tech marketplace where businesses can discover, review, and manage the technology they need to reach their potential. We talked about how Marty hires product managers at G2 (he even provides a homework example!), and how he builds an environment for PMs to go faster.
Product has always encompassed more than just design and engineering. It touches everything in an organization, including sales and customer success. We might not often hear much about the last two, but Duncan McCreery of MemberClicks has had the experience of the more customer-facing roles. Today, he’s The Chief Experience Officer at MemberClicks. Before that, he was the Chief Product Officer, but even before that, he was the VP of Customer Success. But even way before that, he was an English teacher. He’s also had his hand in helping out at a potato farm. There’s no correlation between the latter and former, but it’s important to note Duncan’s breadth of talents here. I kid. It’s safe to say that entering the world of software was a big change. But that obviously didn’t deter him, as he has dramatically scaled his career and transformed his company. He started in the sales team at MemberClicks, and went through a self-discovery process where he developed a strong passion for the product. As he transitioned into customer success, he realized that there were more opportunities for product to do more, and get closer to their customers. While MemberClicks was a pretty nascent organization when it came to product management, Duncan transformed the organization, and helped rebuild their product. This week on Product Love, I sat down with Duncan McCreery to talk about why product management at MemberClicks is much more entrepreneurial than most organizations, and we also talked about the intersection between product management and customer success.
This week on Product Love, I talked to Jason Vandeboom, CEO and Founder of ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is an email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation and CRM software platform for small-to-mid-sized businesses. Growing up, he always had a passion for building things. His entrepreneurial career started from finding jobs online where he could provide services like web design, custom solutions, or intranets. He even had a consulting job at a local internet agency. But unlike what you expected, he pursued fine arts in college. He admits it’s a weird blend, but the mix of science and art inevitably leads to product. This week on Product Love, Jason and I talked about the freedom and limitations of bootstrapping, as well as making champions out of your customers.