Yours Productly: Recent Episodes
Sapata Ravi Kumar
YoursProductly is a weekly podcast series where we talk about the building great software products (B2B and B2C)with product rockstars and marketeers like Punit Soni, Michael Eckhardt from Chasm Institute, Rich Mironov, Roman Pichler, John Mansour.
Startup advisor and early-stage investor focused on network effects. "Creator" of Breadcrumb.vc and Applied Network Effects (one of the highest rated courses on Maven) — both are globally renowned resources to learn about network effects. I'm also part of the Atomico Angel Program, where I invest in early-stage startups with network effects. Please direct all pitches and consulting/speaking requests to sameer@breadcrumb.vc. 14 years of experience in the technology ecosystem — distributed between technology startups and investing. For much of this time, I studied technology business models and network effects in a professional capacity and via independent projects. Previously, spent 5 years at App Annie, a Sequoia-funded, late-stage startup during its hypergrowth phase. There, I led a global, cross-functional team, working across product, marketing, and sales. Advised leading tech companies like Spotify, Shpock and Trainline. Before that, I was an early-stage investor focused on commerce businesses. I have been quoted or mentioned in leading publications, including Reuters, Sifted, Business Insider, The Guardian, Sifted, and Techcrunch. My prior independent work has also been referenced in Philip Tetlock's book, Superforecasting.
How To Unlock Product Growth With A Kickass API Strategy Vijay Bhaskar Rao, Lead PM, Integrations
How To Be Vision - Led Than Iteration - Led - Radhika Dutt, Radical Product Thinking Movement
How I Build Value - Driven Products - Jens - Fabian Goetzmann, Head Products , RevenueCat
Lessons From Designing World Class Software Products: Laks, Director, Product Design, Zendesk by Sapata Ravi Kumar
Episode 2: 3 Important Lessons/ Trends I Picked In Last 2 Weeks
In this episode I cover three topics: 1. Ideas on Content Creation by Shaan Puri 2. Opportunity cost of pursuing career/business choices 3. How high agency is a reflection of your success in life
Demystifying Hardware Product Management : Andreas Koenig, CEO of ProGlove by Sapata Ravi Kumar
In the book, Build what matters, Rajesh and Ben introduce you to their methodology for becoming a product-driven company. Through their tested strategies of stories and success. You'll learn how vision-led product management helps you achieve company objectives by meeting both current and future customer needs.
THE POWER OF PRODUCT-LED GROWTH (PLG) By Wes Bush, Best Selling Author by Sapata Ravi Kumar
Marisa Sires, VP, VP, Product, BuildingLink On Lessons Drawn from her product leadership journey
join me in LIVE conversation with Bala Subramaniam, Ex- Head of Fulfilment Product at Instacart. In the conversation, we will learn: 1. How he built a supply-side framework (activation, engagement and retention) for marketplace equilibrium. 2. What is product operations? 3. War Stories 4. How to build influence as a product leader? So thrilled!
Lewis Lim sharing the ESTEEM framework from his book, Be the Greatest Product Manager Ever
Graham Kennedy, COO, MyDoc on Navigating PM Careers, Choosing right startups to work for, negotiating salaries for senior roles etc.
Mrinal Sharma, Sr PM, Flipkart interviews Renuka Thakur, Sr PM, Shopify on Product Management Craftsmanship. They touch upon varied PM skills like Prioritization, Stakeholder management, leadership etc.
Mukesh Ghatiya, Product Strategy Consultant,Ex-PM leader, OLX & Common Floor on Real Estate Product Management
Alexandru Bleau, Product Manager at Trivago on A/B and Multivariate Testing. Trivago is a hotel and lodging meta search engine based in Germany and serves over 55 countries worldwide.
Peter Stadlinger, Group Product Manager at Adobe on Why personas, use cases, and verticals are lifeblood of PMs.
Matthias Walter, Founder, Platform Innovation Kit on which business canvases to use to build platform products and businesses.
Lewis Lin, author of the very popular PM book, Decode and Conquer on lessons learnt in building his latest startup, PeopleMaven.
Vishrut Shukla, PM, Product Partnership & Growth at Microsoft on fundamentals of Product Partnership.
In this mega episode of 2 straight hours, Sachin Rekhi bares it all with meticulous details on how he built his latest product, Notejoy from scratch. You are gonna love this!
Blair Reeves, Principal Product Manager at SAS talks about his book, Building Products for the Enterprise. In the episode Blair talks about what it takes to build products for Enterprise customers and how different it is than building for SMBs and startups. You can pre-order Blair's book at : http://buildingforbusiness.com/
Saswati Saha Mitra, User Research Manager, Uber on how she manages user research at Uber Questions: 1. Though I briefly mentioned about your career, do your career? 2. Help us understand a regular day or week at Uber for you? 3. What is your approach to solving a problem or building a new feature? 4. Uber is in 59 plus countries how does she make sure the research findings are valid for all. As in do you just research in the US and extrapolate? 5. I am sure you work closely with product managers in day to day work. How do you compliment product managers with your effort? 6.When should a product company invest in user research? 7. How to make sure research scales? How to get PMs involved in inception research and designers to do their own validation research of their designs? 8. How can product managers hone their user research skills? 9. War Stories: This is an important segment where our guests share with us the most important product challenge they faced in their career and how did they succeed. Or even if they could not, what were the lessons learnt. 10. What is the advice she would give to someone interested in ux research career? 11. What are some qualities do you look for while hiring researcher in your team? 12. What according to you are the vital skills needed for a product manager to succeed in building successful products?
Here are the questions I had for Nitin: 1. Give us a brief rundown of your career so far. 2. Talking about blogs...What gives you the motivation to write blog posts? Why do you think that is important for you? 3. You wrote a Linkedin blog post in 2014 that became so popular and viral. It was titled How I got my first valley based product management job in 5 weeks. Do you want to share the story. 4. What does Group Product Manager mean? How does it differ from a Sr Product Manager? 5. How do you plan a roadmap? 6. Share a war story from your career 7. What according to you are the most vital skills for a PM. 8. You are an avid reader. What are your best books recommendations for PMs
In this second part of Product Management Festival, Zurich summary, I caught up Mina Radhakrishnan, the first Product lead at Uber, Ram Papatla, VP, PM, Flipkart, Tim Herbig, Head of Product, Iridion, Dave Meyer, Sr PM from Atlassian and others.
Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality, and Continuous Improvement, based in The Netherlands. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives, What Drives Quality and Continuous Improvement. Creator of the Agile Self-assessment Game.
Ben is an active member of networks on Agile, Lean, and Quality, and a well known speaker and author.
As an adviser, coach and trainer he helps organizations with deploying effective software development and management practices. He focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration and communication, and professional development, to deliver business value to customers.
I recently attended Product Managememt Festival in Zurich and was blown away by its sheer quality of content and inspiration. I have attended most product conferences here in Europe and I must admit PMF’s bar is very high on content and value. More than 750 product people attended from over 28 countries. It was brimming with energy and passion. Being the ambassador of the Festival, I was also the official podcaster of the event. As part of this arrangement, I was interviewing speakers after their talk asking them to summarise their talks within 7-8 minutes. I was also able to capture some off stage conversations that the audience was having with the speakers after that talk.
In this podcast I am attempting to stitch them all together and present to you a summary of the action. I have split the entire summary into two episodes. In this episode, I am covering day 2 of the conference. In episode 2, I will cover day 1.
Ash Maurya, creator of Lean Canvas and author of the very popular book, Running Lean. He has built many product over the last decade and while doing that shared his learnings from his experience to the world. He talks about how Customer Focus Canvas helps define problems better.
Tim Herbig on Using Hypothesis Template for Product Development, Lateral Leadership and other PM insights
Kalyan Nistala, Product Manager, Netflix shares about how he builds products at Netflix and previously with Amazon.
This is a second episode with Alan Klement on book on Jobs to Be Done called When Coffee & Kale Compete
Geoff Beresford Product Manager, Google shares what does it take to be a PM in Google, how are PM teams structured, best practices etc.
He is Tony Ulwick, Founder and CEO of Strategy. Tony is the pioneer of jobs-to-be-done theory and the inventor of Outcome-Driven Innovation® (ODI), a powerful innovation process with a documented success rate that is 5-times the industry average. Tony has been granted 12 patents for his game-changing innovation practices, which result in products that help customers get a “job” done better. This is what Philip Kotler, the marketing guru says about Tony, “I call Ulwick the Deming of Innovation because, more than anyone else, Tony has turned innovation into a science.”
Another Harvard Prof and Management Guru Clayton Christenson, in his popular book, Innovator’s Solution cites Tony Ulwick as the originator of Jobs to be done.
Tony has contributed many times to HBR and MIT Sloan Management Review.
Suresh Krishna, Director, Product Management, Oracle on How he Builds Products in a Large Enterprise
Bruce McCarthy, also known as the PMs' PM talks about his new book, Product Roadmapping
Jeff Gothelf on his book, Sense and Respond-How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers & Create Products from Harvard Business Review Press
Questions we asked Marc Abraham:
- Please tell us about your career trajectory?
- Tell us a bit about World First, the product you currency lead.
- How do you define a product culture?
- How can product managers help create a product culture?
- What do you mean by a product mindset?
- How can product managers instill a product mindset?
- We know that product managers lead by influence and not authority. You have some opinions on this topic. Do you want to talk about them please?
- You also talk about ‘product janitors’. What do you mean by that?
Abhishek Rathore, Director, PM at Snapdeal on how he built search and discovery for Snapdeal
Roman Pichler on like PM roles, leadership styles, mindfulness, decision-making, and stakeholder management etc.
Nishant Pandey, Head Products from Naukri.com, Jeevansaathi.com and Siksha.com
I asked the following questions to Nishant:
-
Nishant, you have had a vast career experience. Do you want to Share with us your career journey?
-
You have worked for different ventures within Info Edge like Shiksha.com, Jeevansathi.com, Naukri.com under the umbrella of InfoEdge. Tell us about Info Edge India group of companies.
-
What are your roles and responsibilities now as EVP, Naukri and Jeevansathi?
-
What does a typical day or week look for you?
-
I usually ask this to all senior PM leaders. What is your process of coming up with strategic product plans? How does it translate into execution? How do you ensure the success of your strategic decisions?
-
How do you pick new product opportunities ? Do you kill unsuccessful projects? How do you do it?
7 . In your Linkedin profile you mentioned you were involved in turning around and reinventing Jeevansathi. Do you want to share key lessons from this experience?
- What is your product philosophy? I began this asking this question to my guests after I interviewed Graham Kennedy who shared about his product philosophy (http://grahamkennedy.com/#/)
9.One of your most popular blog post is titled, “Product Managers: Becoming Dispensable; Becoming Invisible”. Do you want to summarise it?
-
What is the “The Anna Karenina Principle in Internet Product Management”?
-
There is one question I had not planned before to ask but it just occurred to me that I ask you. Your Linkedin profile introduction reads as “Product Management, Analytics and Consumer Behaviour”. I am getting to hear a lot on consumer phschology and consumer behaviour lately and the need for PMs to pick their skills on this field in particular. I also had Karthik Srinivasan, Director PM at Eros Digital and Sachin Rekhi, Director, PM, Linkedin, Help us understand why this field is so much important these days.
-
War Stories: This is a segment where my guests share with me the most important product challenge they faced in their career and how they resolved it. We spend a good 10-15 minutes on digging deep into this.
-
What are some of the books that may have shaped or influenced you in product?
-
What are some of the vital skills you think product managers cant do without?
Nishant Pandey, Head Products from Naukri.com, Jeevansaathi.com and Siksha.com
I asked the following questions to Nishant:
-
Nishant, you have had a vast career experience. Do you want to Share with us your career journey?
-
You have worked for different ventures within Info Edge like Shiksha.com, Jeevansathi.com, Naukri.com under the umbrella of InfoEdge. Tell us about Info Edge India group of companies.
-
What are your roles and responsibilities now as EVP, Naukri and Jeevansathi?
-
What does a typical day or week look for you?
-
I usually ask this to all senior PM leaders. What is your process of coming up with strategic product plans? How does it translate into execution? How do you ensure the success of your strategic decisions?
-
How do you pick new product opportunities ? Do you kill unsuccessful projects? How do you do it?
7 . In your Linkedin profile you mentioned you were involved in turning around and reinventing Jeevansathi. Do you want to share key lessons from this experience?
- What is your product philosophy? I began this asking this question to my guests after I interviewed Graham Kennedy who shared about his product philosophy (http://grahamkennedy.com/#/)
9.One of your most popular blog post is titled, “Product Managers: Becoming Dispensable; Becoming Invisible”. Do you want to summarise it?
-
What is the “The Anna Karenina Principle in Internet Product Management”?
-
There is one question I had not planned before to ask but it just occurred to me that I ask you. Your Linkedin profile introduction reads as “Product Management, Analytics and Consumer Behaviour”. I am getting to hear a lot on consumer phschology and consumer behaviour lately and the need for PMs to pick their skills on this field in particular. I also had Karthik Srinivasan, Director PM at Eros Digital and Sachin Rekhi, Director, PM, Linkedin, Help us understand why this field is so much important these days.
-
War Stories: This is a segment where my guests share with me the most important product challenge they faced in their career and how they resolved it. We spend a good 10-15 minutes on digging deep into this.
-
What are some of the books that may have shaped or influenced you in product?
-
What are some of the vital skills you think product managers cant do without?
Sachin Rekhi, Ex-Product Head, Linkedin on Continuous Feedback loop, Understanding User Physchology, etc
Mark Hull, Sr. Director, Product Management, Linkedin on product philosophy, strategic product planning and his principles of PM hiring
Yevgeniy Brikman talks about his book, Hello, Startup: A Guide to Building Products, Tech, and Teams by Sapata Ravi Kumar
Arne Kittler & Marc Kadish, Director, Product Management, Xing on Auftragsklarung collaborative alignment framework.
Jason Fraser is Principal Product Manager at Pivotal Labs. Jason is passionate about implementing Lean Startup in product organizations and building innovative teams. This includes teaching, coaching, speaking, and developing new tools and approaches. Jason worked with startups all over the world to help them refine their product vision and inspire them to deliver real products to real customers.
In this episode we will learn from Jason about building better products with Extreme Programming.
Elizabeth Burstein, VC at Mohr Davidow, Ex-PM at Linkedin talks about the Traction Gap framework, her transition from PM to VC, her product philosophy and how she led one of the biggest overhaul of the Linkedin homepage.
Karthik is a master on the subject of applying behavioural Psychology to building products. Karthik also guest lectures on the subject at IIM Bangalore, his alma mater. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation which was packed with deep practical product wisdom.
Anupam Kundu, Global Strategic Advisor,Thoughtworks on how to kill your products, how to fire your product managers, etc
Punit Soni, Ex-CPO, Flipkart and Advisor/VP, Google on Executive Product Management and other product wisdom.
Harsha Kumar, Ex-AVP, Ola shares a lot of insights on many topics that included her product journey through Zynga and Ola, her process of solving a challenging problem, and other topics
Graham Kennedy covers a wide array of topics from Product Philosophy, Design Jams, Product/Market fit and a lot more
In this podcast, Norma Watenpaugh and Deborah Henken, two very senior and highly respected professionals in the industry and an authority on the topic of Build, Buy, and Partner share insights on the subject.
Emily Tate shares her experience on how mobile product management is different than regular product management.
Gopal Shenoy on self awareness, org savvy and other soft skills for product managers by Sapata Ravi Kumar
Alan Klement shares about why job stories are more important than user stories. He also reveals about his upcoming book on Jobs to be Done methodology.
Amanda Ralph explains everything about Jobs to be Done Framework to understand the real outcomes of the customers
Greg Geracie on the dynamics of high performing teams, ProdBOK, and other product management research findings his firm conducts.
In this interview Henrik-Jan Van der Pol, CEO Perdoo helps us understand what Objectives and Key Results (OKR) are.
Steve Portigal in this interview shares insights from his very popular book Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights.
For all our listeners, there is a 20% discount on purchasing a copy of Steve’s book if you purchase through Rosenfeldmedia.com. Here's the link: http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/interviewing-users
Donna Imam on the #1 game changer in technology product management & Other PM wisdom by Sapata Ravi Kumar
In this episode we talk to the "Godfather of Product Management", Steve Johnson where he shares with us key insights from his book Look Beyond the Product - The Business of Agile Product Management.
Mike Smart, Founder and Principal Consultant, Egress on Measurement-Driven Product Management
Prabhakar Gopalan is Principal & eponymous founder at PG Consulting. He works with Venture Capital funded Startup CEOs and Fortune 1000 executives to help them with growth strategies. His background spans a diverse set of roles in systems engineering, consulting, product management, product marketing, corporate strategy and mergers & acquisitions. He has worked at pre-revenue startups with the concept on the back of a napkin all the way to large technology companies. He teaches a 2 day workshop The Craftsman Product Manager. Prabhakar is also founder of Product Austin - a Meetup group for Product leaders with over 700 members.
In this episode Prabhakar shares with us about the Whole Product concept, difference between whole product and the MVP, and what it takes to be a Craftsman Product Manager
Michael Eckhardt, Managing Director of Chasm Institute shares the 7 deadly sins of crossing the Chasm derived from his vast experience of 500 client engagements in the last 15 years. He also shares about the new edition of Crossing the Chasm, talks about market development for enterprise cloud organizations and shares other product management wisdom.
Minette Norman, VP, Autodesk on Building Org. Savvy, Surviving office politics, Planning Career etc by Sapata Ravi Kumar
Rich Mironov on his upcoming book, why PM is inherently political, paying it forward and much more by Sapata Ravi Kumar
John Mansour is the founder and managing partner of Proficientz, Inc, a training and consulting firm that specializes in B2B Product Management & Marketing. John has more than 25 years experience in high technology product management, product marketing, marketing communications and sales in B2B organizations ranging from start-ups to Fortune 1000. Prior to those roles, John had extensive operations management experience in B2B software companies, healthcare administration and retail distribution.
As the managing partner of Proficientz, John has worked with more than 2000 organizations that span high technology, business services, telecom, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and many others. John served as the chairman for the Technology Association of Georgia's Product Management Society from 2006 – 2010 and has been a regular keynote speaker at product management conferences and association meetings since 2001.
Micah Dickerson, PM Autodesk on Managing Remote teams, on Managing Upwards and other PM issues by Sapata Ravi Kumar
Amar Hanspal, SVP, $ 2 Billion Autodesk on Product Strategy, Decision Making & other PM wisdom by Sapata Ravi Kumar
About Daniel:
Daniel Elizalde is a seasoned Enterprise Product Manager with a consulting and technical background. He has extensive experience managing the full product lifecycle for web, mobile and desktop applications for Fortune 500 companies and startups alike.
Today, Daniel is head of Product Management for Stem, Inc, a fast-growing startup in the Clean Tech industry in San Francisco. Daniel is also the author of TechProductManagement.com – Best Practices & Inspiration for Product Managers and Leaders.
Show notes:
3:00: Daniel’s career journey
8:35: About the blog, techproductmanagement.com
13:10: Why is feature prioritization so challenging and draining?
15:00: Key missteps product managers take while prioritizing features?
21:00: Feature prioritization techniques
30:00: Jeff Sutherland’s prioritization rule
37:00: How to align organizational vision and strategy with an individual product features?
43:00 Kano Model
48:00: Daniel’s 4 Pillars of Product Leadership
53:00: Daniel’s biggest challenge in his product management career
56:00: Daniel’s book recommendations for product managers
1:00:00: Tools to use for product manager
Resources and links:
Daniel’s blog: http://techproductmanagement.com/ How calling yourself a CEO of your product can backfire Podcast on Jeff Sutherland’s book Scrum Understanding the Kano Model How to use a Scorecard to Prioritize Features The Simple Rule for Feature Prioritization Books recommended by Daniel in the show: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazi Other books at Daniel’s website that map to his 4 pillars: http://techproductmanagement.com/books/
Boris Masis stumbled into his first accidental Product Management job when he became the internet director for an education company in Boston, Massachusetts. Boris then went on to work as a web product manager at Shutterstock in New York, and as an Android product manager for Samsung in Singapore. Boris is currently at Google Singapore where he is the country lead for the Google Developer Platform. In this interview shares about his experience user researching for his products.
- Meri Rosich: CEO, App Strategy Labs on Successful App Marketing Strategies by Sapata Ravi Kumar
Shesh Vasudevamurthy with 18 years of experience in product management, product development and strategy consulting shares his knowledge on OEM Negotiations, Technology partnerships, product management, and books that have shaped him.
A book summary of Anthony Ulwick's What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products
In this episode we talk to Souad Marie, Head Product Management, Luxola and understand what are the challenges of a new product manager, how to win the respect of a development team, some secrets from the ecommerce industry and much more.
In this podcast we learn from Robert his own career trajectory, we will understand about standard product management frameworks in the industry, we understand the power struggles between a product manager and a product owner. Robert also shares his most challenging case he resolved as a product manager and ends it up with sharing the best books that shaped his career. It was a podcast with a wealth of knowledge for all product managers experienced and young.
Show Notes:
5:00: Robert's career trajectory 9:02: Robert shares the products he manages 15:05: Robert defines product manager 25:05: Robert settles the debate between a product manager and product owner 35:05: Who has the final say: product owner or product manager? 43:05: Product Management frameworks 48:05: Why havent we had a standard product management framework globally? 53:05: Robert shares his most challenging problem as a product manager and how he solved it 1:06: Books that has influenced Robert in his career.
Theme: What makes a career in Product Management Rewarding and What does it take to move to Product Management?