One Knight in Product: Recent Episodes
One Knight in Product
This is a podcast for people interested in building or designing tech products.
At least once a week, I speak to product managers, product leaders, product marketers, UX professionals, and anyone else involved in product management and product delivery. Come and listen to some great conversations and get inspired!
Listen on your favourite podcast app or on https://www.oneknightinproduct.com
On this episode, I speak to Pavel Samsonov, Principal UX Designer at Justworks and author of The Product Picnic newsletter. Pavel has spent his career working across UX, service design and product management, including roles at Amazon and Bloomberg, helping organisations design better products by understanding the systems, processes and people behind them. We explore why great products start with better problem definition, how organisational silos undermine customer experience, why AI is making it easier to build the wrong things faster, and why genuine user understanding remains a uniquely human advantage.
Episode Highlights* Design for understanding, not simplicity - Complex B2B products don't need to hide complexity; they need to present it in a way that users can understand, navigate and act upon confidently. * Customer journeys don't follow organisational charts - Teams optimise their own domains, but customers experience the whole service. The biggest opportunities often lie in fixing the gaps between teams rather than improving individual features. * Problem design matters more than solution design - Before discussing features or interfaces, ask whether you're solving the right problem, why it exists, and whether it's important enough for customers to actually care. * Actionable beats visible - Dashboards, analytics and metrics only create value when they help someone make a better decision. Data without action is little more than decoration. * Optimising your work can create someone else's workload - Shipping work isn't the same as completing work. Teams should think about who consumes their outputs and whether they're genuinely fit for purpose. * AI accelerates production, not learning - AI makes it dramatically faster to generate prototypes and features, but it doesn't shorten the time required to validate ideas, learn from customers or understand real-world usage. * High-fidelity prototypes can create false confidence - Just because AI can generate something that looks finished doesn't mean the difficult work of alignment, prioritisation, research and iteration has been done. * Synthetic users aren't a substitute for real customers - Large language models can reproduce existing knowledge but can't uncover the tacit insights, unmet needs and market opportunities that come from talking to real people. * Good product decisions require shared language - Cross-functional collaboration improves when teams focus on the decisions they're trying to make rather than debating ambiguous labels like "prototype", "MVP" or "research". * Ask better questions before building faster - AI has made building dramatically cheaper, increasing the importance of asking why something should exist in the first place. Better problem framing remains one of the highest-leverage skills in product development.
Connect with Pavel* Newsletter: https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/ * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavel-samsonov-44ba2833/
On this episode, I speak to Be Kaler Pilgrim, founder of Smithfield Search and original founder of Futureheads Recruitment. Be has spent more than three decades helping organisations build technology and product teams, and recently conducted an in-depth study of senior product leaders operating in investor-backed businesses. We explore what effective product leadership really looks like in high-growth environments, why so many organisations still misunderstand the role of product, and how AI is forcing leaders to rethink organisational design, capability and value creation.
Episode highlights* Product is still too often treated as a delivery function - One of the strongest themes from the research is that organisations frequently position product management as an execution capability rather than a strategic commercial function, limiting both its influence and its ability to create value. * Leadership roles fail when organisations cannot define the problem - Businesses often hire senior product leaders without first agreeing on what challenge they actually need solving (or whether there's even a challenge to solve), creating misalignment before the role even begins. * Product leadership should be designed around organisational needs, not trends - Whether hiring a CPO, CPTO or another senior product role, organisations need to understand their specific context rather than simply adopting structures that appear fashionable. * Feature factories remain one of the biggest barriers to growth - Teams can become highly efficient at shipping work without creating measurable business impact, leading to activity without meaningful outcomes and missed opportunities to execute the investors' value creation plan. * The "Land of Lost Toys" affects more organisations than leaders realise - Many companies accumulate partially completed initiatives, abandoned priorities and unfinished experiments that reduce focus and create organisational drag. * Technical debt is ultimately a business problem - Whilst often discussed as an engineering concern, accumulated technical debt reduces confidence, slows execution and directly impacts commercial performance over time. * Commercial fluency is becoming a core product leadership capability - Product leaders increasingly need to understand business economics, value creation and financial performance, rather than focusing exclusively on product process and delivery. This enables them to have conversations that resonate with PE leaders. * AI increases the importance of judgment rather than reducing it - Whilst AI can automate many activities, strategic decision-making, prioritisation and organisational leadership remain fundamentally human responsibilities and, thankfully, humans seem to be coming back into fashion! * Product, sales and customer teams succeed or fail together - Sustainable growth requires strong alignment between teams responsible for building, selling and retaining customers, rather than treating commercial outcomes as somebody else's problem. Everyone should care about NRR. * The biggest organisational problems are often hiding in plain sight - Many of the factors that ultimately constrain growth are visible long before they appear in financial performance. PE firms need to look beyond financial metrics and get product experts in early to catch and mitigate these issues earlier.
... and much more.
Check Out the CPO ReportYou can view the CPO Report and take the Smithfield CPO Readiness Index here: https://cpo.smithfieldsearch.com/
Contact BeIf you want to get in touch with Be, go here:
- Smithfield Search: https://www.smithfieldsearch.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bekalerpilgrimexecsearch/
On this episode, I speak to the returning Petra Wille, product leadership coach, author of Strong Product People, and founder of the Product at Heart conference. Petra has spent years helping product leaders and organisations develop stronger product cultures, leadership practices, and team structures across a wide range of industries. We went deep into product leadership, especially in an age of AI where we're all being told to be builders again, and how her Product Leadership Wheel helps product leaders up their game.
Episode highlights* Leadership is a distinct discipline - Strong individual contributors do not automatically become strong leaders, and leadership requires deliberate development rather than promotion by default. * Product leaders need directional clarity - One of the core responsibilities of leadership is helping teams understand where the organisation is going, why it matters, and how everyday decisions connect to broader strategy. * Coaching is an underused leadership skill - Petra argues that many leaders underestimate the importance of coaching capabilities and fail to invest enough time in helping teams grow and improve. * Culture is often invisible inside organisations - Teams frequently struggle to articulate their company culture because they are immersed in it every day, making reflection and intentional leadership even more important. * AI is changing the demands placed on leaders - Product leaders are being forced to rethink team structures, workflows, decision-making, and product experiences as AI reshapes how organisations operate. * Efficiency gains can create new problems - Faster delivery is not automatically better. Petra warns that organisations risk creating more technical debt, burnout, and shallow thinking if speed becomes the only goal. * Leadership requires optimistic narratives - In periods of uncertainty, leaders play a critical role in creating credible and motivating visions of the future for their teams and organisations. * Feedback gaps exist between leaders and teams - Many product leaders believe they are performing well, while individual contributors often see significant shortcomings, partly because organisations lack shared frameworks for discussing leadership quality. * Reflection matters more than benchmarking - Petra emphasises that leadership frameworks should help people identify growth areas and learning opportunities rather than turn development into rigid performance comparisons. * Leaders should focus on the "shipyard" - Rather than constantly jumping into delivery work, product leaders should concentrate on improving the systems, structures, and environments that enable teams to succeed.
... and much more.
Contact Petra* Website: https://www.petra-wille.com * Product at Heart: https://www.productatheart.com * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petra-wille-b8b1329/
On this episode, I am joined for a third (and probably final!) time by April Dunford, renowned positioning expert and author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch. We explore what's changed in her updated edition of Obviously Awesome, what she's learned through delivering hundreds of positioning workshops and how she's honed her approach to reposition positioning to make it clearer for the next generation of product people.
Episode highlights* Positioning is how you win - Positioning is the answer to "why pick us now?", grounding your product in real value for a clearly defined customer segment. * Positioning vs strategy - Strategy defines where you're going, while positioning reflects where you are today and must evolve as your product and market change. * AI isn't a position - Simply adding AI is no longer meaningful; if everyone has it, the focus shifts to what tangible value you deliver right now. * From unique to distinct - Capabilities don't need to be truly unique, just meaningfully different in the context of your real competitors. * Trends matter less than clarity - The industry's baseline understanding of positioning has improved, making abstract ideas like "trends" less useful than clear market definitions. * Readiness before action - Teams need to decide what they're positioning, whether they have real customers, and how product structure (single vs multi-product) affects the work. * Positioning as hypothesis - Without customers, positioning is a best guess that must be tested and refined rather than treated as fact. * Sell to the champion - Positioning should resonate with the internal champion, while objections from other stakeholders are handled separately. * Test through sales, not copy - The real validation of positioning happens in sales conversations, not by endlessly tweaking website copy. * AI is a tool, not a shortcut - AI can support positioning work, but it can't replace the thinking, collaboration and deep company context required to define real differentiation.
... and much more.
Buy the new version of Obviously AwesomeLook for the yellow "updated" sticker!
- Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Obviously-Awesome-Product-Positioning-Customers-dp-1999023056/dp/1999023056/
- April's website: https://www.aprildunford.com/books
Contact April* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aprildunford/ * Website: https://www.aprildunford.com
On this episode, we try something a little different. ProdPad and Mind the Product co-founder Janna Bastow joins as guest host to interview me and Saeed Khan about our recently released research report "The State of B2B Product Management". We go deep on the key findings of the report and what to do about them.
Episode highlights* The sales-led roadmap reality - In many B2B organisations, roadmap ownership effectively sits with sales, driven by short-term revenue pressures rather than long-term strategy * Customers vs markets tension - Product teams often fail to shift from building for individual customers to designing for scalable market opportunities * The leadership perception gap - A stark ~50-point disconnect exists between how leaders assess themselves and how their teams experience them, pointing to either deluded leaders, poor communication or unreasonable IC expectations * Lack of strategic foundations - Weak or absent vision and objectives create a vacuum where every deal feels equally valid * Product leaders as system designers - Leaders must take responsibility for shaping environments where good product work is actually possible * Discovery isn't just external - Product teams neglect internal discovery, failing to understand stakeholders, sales processes, and organisational dynamics * The cost of short-term thinking - Chasing large deals often creates hidden long-term costs that outweigh immediate revenue gains * AI as efficiency, not transformation - Current AI usage is reported as largely tactical (summarisation, documentation), not fundamentally changing product outcomes * Optimism despite dysfunction - Even with systemic issues, many product managers remain positive about the future of the discipline
... and much more.
Check out "The State of B2B Product Management" reportYou can check the full report here - no email address required: https://b2bproduct.io/?okip
Check out ProdPadJanna is the co-founder of ProdPad, a roadmap, idea management and feedback platform that brings clarity to your organisation. She was kind enough to step in as a guest host for the episode, so why not check what the platform can do for you? https://www.prodpad.com/
Find us all on LinkedIn* Janna: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jannabastow/ * Saeed: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saeedwkhan/ * Jason: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-knight/
On this episode, I speak with Nick Kenn, interim Chief Product Officer at Winmau, the world's leading darts brand. Nick's career spans companies such as Betfair and Redbubble, and he now operates in interim and advisory product leadership roles across private equity and venture-backed businesses. He's now on a mission to hit the bullseye and revolutionise a traditional sport with a new, fully digital experience.
We cover a lot, including:
- Digitising a traditional sport – Building a connected darts experience requires blending physical play with digital layers like tracking, stats, and online competition without losing the tactile essence of the game
- Balancing heritage and innovation – Introducing new product experiences in a 100-year-old brand demands careful alignment between modern features and long-standing identity
- AI as a pragmatic tool – Rather than chasing trends, AI is applied where it adds clear value, such as computer vision for scoring and an AI referee for dispute resolution
- Focus over experimentation – In a high-pressure delivery environment, prioritisation matters more than exploring every new technology or idea
- Building inside a non-digital organisation – Establishing product thinking in a manufacturing business requires translation, education, and patience on both sides
- Hardware and software alignment – Unlike pure software, product timelines are constrained by manufacturing cycles, creating hard deadlines and forcing disciplined execution
- Hiring for passion and proximity – Teams perform better when they have genuine interest in the product domain, especially in consumer experiences tied to physical interaction
- Differentiation through awareness – Deep competitor understanding is essential not for copying, but for identifying where to stand apart and create unique value
- Private equity vs venture dynamics – Product strategy shifts significantly depending on ownership model, with PE favouring speed and certainty, and VC allowing more exploration
- Book smarts and street smarts – The most effective product leaders combine formal knowledge with real-world experience, adapting frameworks to context rather than following them rigidly
... and much more.
Find our more about fractional product leadershipNick mentioned an article I wrote about fractional product leadership - you can check it out here: https://oneknightinproduct.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-fractional
Check out Winmau* Winmau: https://winmau.com * Winmau careers: https://winmau.com/pages/careers-with-winmau
Contact Nick* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-kenn/
In this episode, I speak with returning guest Dan Olsen, product management trainer, consultant, speaker, and author of The Lean Product Playbook. We go deep into the rise of "vibe coding" and what it means for product teams. Dan has gone deep into vibe coding, is offering training courses in it, and believes it firmly sits within his existing Lean Product Playbook process and supports the Product/Market Fit Pyramid.
Episode highlights* AI shifts the product bottleneck – As AI tools make engineers more productive, the limiting factor increasingly becomes product discovery and decision-making rather than development capacity. * Product management isn't going away – AI can automate some tasks, but judgement, prioritisation, and making decisions under uncertainty remain core human responsibilities. * The rise of the product builder mindset – New AI tools allow product managers to prototype ideas directly, giving them a more hands-on way to explore solutions. * The vibe coding spectrum – AI development tools exist on a spectrum from simple browser-based tools through to full developer IDE integrations, letting teams adopt them at different levels of technical depth. * Vibe prototyping vs vibe coding – For most product managers, the real opportunity isn't replacing engineers, but quickly generating interactive prototypes that help teams explore ideas before committing to production code. * Divergent thinking still matters – AI tools often generate a single solution, so teams need to deliberately explore multiple directions and alternatives rather than blindly optimising the first result. * Prototypes have four key audiences – Early prototypes help clarify ideas for the creator, align the product team, communicate concepts to stakeholders, and gather feedback from real users. * Context beats clever prompting – The quality of AI-generated output depends far more on the context, requirements, and constraints you provide than on the prompt itself. * Iteration beats one-shot builds – The real power of these tools comes from rapid experimentation and refinement rather than expecting a perfect result from a single prompt.
... and much more.
Dan's stuff* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danolsen98/ * Dan's Website: https://dan-olsen.com/ * Dan's Vibe Coding Template: https://dan-olsen.com/vibe-coding/ * YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/danolsen * Lean Product Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/lean-product/ * The Lean Product Playbook: https://amzn.to/1EYCUdP
On this episode, I speak to Hugo Alves, co-founder of Synthetic Users, about one of the most controversial topics in modern product development: using generative AI to simulate users for research and decision-making. Hugo has a background in clinical psychology and product, and has spent the past three years building a platform that generates synthetic qualitative interviews to help teams reduce risk and make better decisions.
Episode highlights:* What Synthetic Users actually is - generating in-depth qualitative interviews with AI-powered "synthetic" participants to help teams reduce risk and accelerate discovery * Most companies don't do enough, or any, research in the first place, and they need as many tools in their locker to help with the ultimate goal: making great products. * The pragmatist's view of AI - why Hugo doesn't care whether LLMs are "conscious", only whether they produce useful outputs * The agentic "swarm" approach - using specialised sub-agents (planners, interviewers, critics) instead of one giant prompt to improve quality and reduce drift * B2B vs B2C - why synthetic research works well in B2B contexts, and the harder (future) problem of modelling organisational dynamics * Bias, sycophancy and realism - the technical concerns around LLMs and how to validate responses with pilots and human comparison studies * How to use synthetic research in practice - filtering ideas, informing human interviews, and treating it as an accelerant rather than a replacement * "It shouldn't exist" - the moral argument against synthetic users, reacting to UX thought leaders and their objections, and why some of those objections aren't really about evidence
... and much more.
Contact Hugo* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugomanuelalves/ * Website: https://www.syntheticusers.com/ * Twitter/"X": https://twitter.com/Ugo_alves
In this episode, I speak with Jessica Hall. Jess is the Chief Product Officer at Just Eat Takeaway, a global leader in the on-demand delivery space. With a professional pedigree that includes leadership roles at UK retail giants like Tesco, Argos, and Sainsbury's, Jess brings a wealth of experience in navigating complex, high-stakes consumer environments. Our conversation delves into the "big idea" of managing a massive three-sided marketplace, balancing the needs of consumers, partners, and couriers while transitioning from a food-centric brand to an "everything delivered" platform.
We cover a lot, including:
- Navigating the Three-Sided Marketplace - Jess describes the Just Eat Takeaway product as a complex ecosystem connecting 60 million active customers with nearly 400,000 partners and a vast network of couriers. The core insight here is that the "product" isn't just an app; it is the seamless orchestration of these three distinct groups, where a failure in one branch inevitably disrupts the value for the others.
- Scaling Global Platforms with Local Nuance - Despite operating a global tech platform, Jess emphasises the importance of "optionality" to respect regional differences, from currency formatting to cultural preferences like cash usage. This approach allows the company to maintain a unified technical infrastructure while remaining flexible enough to adapt when a specific market, like the UK or Canada, leads the way in new category demands like grocery delivery.
- The Power of Customer Closeness - Moving beyond data and reports, Jess advocates for getting "on the ground" to talk to couriers and visit partner restaurants. By understanding the physical realities, such as a busy kitchen staff finding a feature too cumbersome to use during peak hours, product leaders can solve real-world friction that data trends alone might overlook.
- Cultivating Dual-Track Career Paths - Recognising that not every brilliant product mind wants to manage people, Jess champions the value of senior Individual Contributor roles. She highlights that technical and strategic mastery is just as vital as people management, and providing high-level growth opportunities for ICs ensures the organisation retains its most creative and experienced problem solvers.
- Leading Through Influence and Commerciality - Jess argues that the best product leaders act as "first-rate business partners" rather than just a bridge between engineering and the business. By focusing on "win-win" outcomes and deeply understanding commercial metrics like order volumes and market trends, product teams earn the credibility needed to influence strategy at the highest levels.
Check out Just Eat TakeawayCheck out Just Eat Takeaway's website: https://justeattakeaway.com, or their careers page: https://careers.justeattakeaway.com.
Connect with JessYou can connect with Jess on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicalrhall.
In this episode, I'm joined by the returning Michele Hansen, co-founder and CEO of Geocodio and author of Deploy Empathy, now out with a second edition. Michele brings deep experience as a former product manager turned founder, and has spent over a decade helping teams understand customers through rigorous, human-centred research.
We explore what customer research looks like in an AI-accelerated world: where AI genuinely helps, where it falls short, and why talking to real people remains irreplaceable. Along the way, we dig into interviewing craft, curiosity, synthetic users, and some enduring myths that still undermine product discovery.
Episode highlights:We cover a lot, including:
- Why customer interviews still matter in the age of AI - why large language models can accelerate research workflows but cannot replace the insight, judgement, and transformation that comes from engaging directly with customers.
- AI as a research intern, not a strategist - AI performs well in certain tasks - transcription, tagging, and basic analysis - but prioritisation, interpretation, and strategy must remain human responsibilities.
- The neuroscience of listening and curiosity - both interviewees and interviewers experience genuine pleasure when curiosity is satisfied, reframing interviews as a mutually rewarding process rather than a chore.
- What AI misses in real customer conversations - considering the "spiky", unexpected insights that emerge in interviews - and why these often get lost when teams rely too heavily on automated summaries.
- Synthetic users, digital twins, and their limits - breaking down different types of simulated users, where they can be useful, and why they depend on high-quality human research to be credible at all.
- The problem with the "faster horses" myth - dismantling the misattributed Henry Ford quote and exploring how it's often used to avoid engaging with customers rather than to encourage innovation.
- Research as a way to change teams, not just products - how involving teams directly in research builds shared understanding, alignment, and better decision-making across organisations.
- Why AI accelerates confusion without product clarity - AI only compounds impact when a clear product vision and customer understanding already exist - otherwise, teams simply move faster in the wrong direction.
Connect with Michele* Learn more about Michele's company, Geocodio: https://www.geocod.io/ * Check out the new edition of "Deploy Empathy": https://deployempathy.com/. * Connect with Michele on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mjwhansen/ * Meet Michele at the pub in London! We'll be there on Jan 15th 2026: https://luma.com/xyqi9e2z
On this episode, I speak to Tim Herbig, long-time product management coach, speaker, and author of the new book "Real Progress". Tim has worked with companies like StepStone, Chrono24, Deutsche Telekom and Specsavers, and has spent years helping product managers stop hiding behind frameworks and start making a meaningful impact. His work focuses on helping teams connect product strategy, OKRs and discovery without falling into the trap of rigid process correctness.
Episode highlights:* Alibi Progress vs Real Progress - how teams hide behind "the right way" of doing things, obsessing over methods and templates instead of asking whether any of it actually works * The Progress Wheel - Tim's diagnostic loop that ties strategy, OKRs and discovery together so teams can see where they're actually stuck and what to do next * The three attributes of good product strategy: Decisiveness, Layering and Executability * How to handle OKRs when leadership gives you metrics you can’t influence using zones of control and contribution * How to sell discovery to sceptical stakeholders - by framing it as "protecting the company's investment", not a fluffy UX ritual * Reverse-mapping discovery when you're handed a solution - even if you have to build it, work backwards to define the outcome * Why frameworks should be starting points, not destinations - and why Tim would be disappointed if anyone adopted his wheel dogmatically
... And much more.
Buy the bookYou can grab a copy of Real Progress here:
- Tim's site: https://herbig.co/real-progress-book/
- Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/398275190X
Contact Tim* Website: https://herbig.co * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/herbigt/
On this episode, I speak to Sean O'Neill. Sean is the Chief Product & Technology Officer at Syncron, and an executive product leader with a storied career spanning companies like Amazon, Tesco, and GfK. We bond over our shared history at GfK, speak about how Amazon has influenced his product thinking, how it's developed since he moved on, and his approach to portfolio management and right-sizing investments across the product portfolio.
We cover a lot, including:
- There's no greater crime than building something the universe doesn't need: Sean's ten key product principles that he lists on LinkedIn - first developed at Tesco - all matter, but building pointless stuff tops his list of product sins.
- Use the right tool for the job: Amazon shaped Sean's product DNA, but he's clear that context is king - you can't simply transplant Big Tech practices into legacy environments and expect them to work wholesale.
- Most companies under-invest in their strategy: When progress stalls, it's usually because teams are spread too thin across BAU work and one-off feature requests. The best product firms align time and capacity to strategic bets (or admit that they're a professional services company).
- Adopt a portfolio mindset: Sean's capital allocation framework helps leaders size and re-balance investments, ensuring resources go where they'll have the biggest impact - and revisiting regularly (but not too regularly) to stay honest.
- Learn the language of money: Too many product leaders avoid finance. Sean argues that financial literacy isn't optional if you want credibility with the board and real influence on business outcomes. Learn the numbers!
Connect with SeanYou can connect with Sean on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanon/. There you'll find a number of articles, including the one we discuss in this interview: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-dont-need-more-engineers-better-strategic-bets-sean-o-neill-s0vze/
Connect with Sean's "mystery caller"You can connect with special guest interviewer Sterling O'Neill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sterlingoneill/.
On this episode, I speak to Georgie Smallwood. Georgie is Chief Product, Technology & Data Officer at Moonpig - the UK's best-known online gifting and greeting card platform. Georgie has built a global career leading product and technology teams at companies like N26, Xero, and Tier Mobility, before joining Moonpig to help transform a 25-year-old household brand into a modern, tech-driven organisation. In this interview, she talks about what it means to create "moments that matter", how Moonpig balances emotional connection with innovation, and how to lead when you're responsible for product, tech and data all at once.
We cover a lot, including:
- Making technology more human: Georgie believes technology should make the world smaller, not bigger - by connecting people, not distancing them. At Moonpig, the goal isn't just to sell cards or gifts, but to help people express love and connection through meaningful gestures.
- Product with purpose: Moonpig's mission is to be “the world's greatest gifting companion.” Every card printed represents a moment of love, humour, or memory between people. Georgie sees product management at Moonpig as building moments that matter, not just features.
- Balancing connection and innovation: Moonpig has embraced AI and personalisation, but Georgie cautions against rushing ahead for technology's sake. Instead, the team focuses on introducing innovation in a way that feels natural and accessible to mass-market users.
- Leading product, technology, and data together: As CPTDO, Georgie bridges three major domains. She admits she's not a data scientist or engineer, but focuses on seeking to understand - asking open questions, learning continuously, and leading through consistency rather than control.
- On empowerment and leadership: While she values empowered teams, Georgie is pragmatic about balancing autonomy with business realities. She also believes true innovation needs governance, not chaos.
Check out MoonpigCheck out Moonpig's website: http://moonpig.com/, or their careers page: https://www.moonpig.group/careers/.
Connect with GeorgieYou can connect with Georgie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginasmallwood/.
On this episode, I speak to my friend Nesrine Changuel, product coach and author of the new book "Product Delight". Nesrine started her career at Bell Labs as a research engineer before moving into product management at Microsoft, Spotify, and Google, where she even held the title "PM for Delight" on Google Meet. Her work focuses on how products can go beyond functionality to create genuine emotional connections with users.
Episode highlights:* Why Product Delight is more than just a “nice to have”, and isn't just confetti on your boring app * The three pillars of Product Delight: reducing friction, anticipating needs, and exceeding expectations * The difference between surface delight (like balloons on your Apple Watch) and deep delight (features that serve emotional and functional needs together) * Why delight matters just as much in B2B products as in consumer apps, and why everything is B2H * How to get buy-in from leaders and stakeholders by linking emotional connection to revenue, retention, and referrals * The Delight Grid and Nesrine's four-step model for embedding delight into your product process * The risks of chasing the wrong kind of delight (like Deliveroo's failed Mother's Day campaign or Apple's awkward gesture fireworks)
... And much more.
Buy the bookYou can grab a copy of Product Delight here:
- Nesrine's site: https://nesrine-changuel.com/product-delight-book/
- Amazon UK: https://a.co/d/1J7JLZZ
Contact Nesrine* Website: https://www.nesrine-changuel.com * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nesrinechanguel * Newsletter: https://nesrinechanguel.substack.com
In this episode, I speak with Katya Denike, Chief Product Officer at Holland & Barrett, the 150-year-old health and wellness retailer that has become a household name on the UK high street. Having previously worked at McKinsey, Yandex, Ozon, and Beyond 100, she now leads Holland & Barrett's ambitious digital transformation - helping the company evolve from a traditional retailer into a global wellness ecosystem.
We cover a lot, including:
- Transforming a heritage retailer: Holland & Barrett is delivering double-digit growth through a sweeping digital and cultural transformation, investing in everything from supply chain systems to customer-facing apps.
- Global vs local: The company builds strong global digital capabilities (like search and e-commerce infrastructure) while tailoring ~20% of the experience for each market to meet regulatory and customer needs.
- High street resilience: Despite doom-and-gloom headlines, Holland & Barrett is thriving by focusing on product-market fit, preventative healthcare, and efficient tech-enabled operations.
- The app transformation: Taking the mobile app in-house turned it from a struggling third-party product (<5% of digital revenue, 3-star rating) into a core strategic channel (>30% revenue share, 4.5+ rating).
- Internal product management is sexy too: Katya insists that logistics, pricing systems, and data management are some of the most rewarding areas for product managers, enabling everything else to work.
- Team structure: Around 100 people in product, design, and research, split between "firm foundations" (core systems) and "omnichannel customer experience", plus a small but mighty product ops team.
- Leadership leap: Moving into her first CPO role was daunting, but support from her manager pushed her to take the leap and build a truly independent product function inside the company.
- Skills for success: Katya highlights high agency, emotional intelligence, and the ability to navigate crucial conversations as must-haves for product leaders.
Check out Holland & BarrettCheck out Holland & Barrett's website: https://www.hollandandbarrett.com/, or their careers page: https://apply.hollandandbarrettjobs.com/jobs/vacancy/find/results/.
Connect with KatyaYou can connect with Katya on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denikekatya/.
You can also check out Katya's podcast, Rocking Cribs & Careers. here! https://open.spotify.com/show/3rheb2Q1YuUvdmeYS8ngqA.
In this episode, I speak with Jamie Mercer, Chief Product Officer at Trusted Housesitters, the global pet care and travel marketplace disrupting two industries at once. Jamie has previously held senior product roles at VoucherCodes, Skyscanner, Student Beans and IVC Evidensia, and now leads product at a scale-up known for putting trust at the heart of its community-driven business.
We cover a lot, including:
- TrustedHousesitters' unique proposition - a two-sided marketplace mixing travel and pet sitting, where both pet owners and sitters pay a subscription to help create mutual trust and respect.
- Scaling through word of mouth - 70-75% of members join via a friend, and how the team are working to amplify that growth while keeping trust at the centre.
- Balancing marketplace dynamics - keeping supply and demand in sync, supporting new sitters with no ratings, and using AI and personalisation to build confidence.
- Using AI responsibly - from accelerating customer insight analysis to improving customer support, AI speeds up decision-making but always in service of company strategy.
- Building empowered product teams - why Jamie invested early in product ops and product marketing instead of hierarchy, and how she's now preparing to scale with Product Directors.
- Commercial product management - the importance of PMs with business acumen who can link solving customer problems with driving commercial outcomes.
- Executive alignment as the hardest (and most valuable) job - why alignment across the C-suite is the best air cover a leader can provide for their teams.
- Lessons from leadership - why some of the hardest decisions are killing months of work, the surprise of soft skills dominating the CPO role, and why leadership still matters in the AI era.
Check out Trusted HousesittersCheck out Trusted Housesitters' website: https://trustedhousesitters.com/, or their careers page: https://www.trustedhousesitters.com/careers/.
Connect with JamieYou can connect with Jamie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiemercer/.
In this episode, I speak with Shiri Mosenzon Erez, Chief Product Officer at commercetools, a global leader in enterprise composable commerce that supports thousands of retailers in hundreds of countries, enabling tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually. Shiri's career journey has taken her from consulting into her first product role at Tesco, through product leadership at Ocado, and now leading at a scale-up with a global enterprise footprint.
We cover a lot, including:
- What commercetools does: An API-first, composable commerce engine powering online trade for major global enterprises and manufacturers, enabling flexibility, resilience, and constant uptime for B2C and B2B commerce.
- Composable commerce explained: Allowing customers to mix and match best-of-breed components across the commerce value stream or opting for "pre-composed" solutions built on the same composable foundation.
- Strategic focus in a flexible platform: How the team decides where to build, buy, or partner, using value stream mapping to prioritise and avoid being pulled in too many directions.
- AI and agents in commerce: From data tagging to conversational assistants and dynamic pricing, Shiri shares early enterprise adoption patterns and the role of commercetools' MCP layer in letting customers plug in the agents they trust.
- Product team structure: A 55-person product org spanning UX, product management, and close engineering partnerships, with domain-focused teams and a strong CPO–CTO pairing model.
- Balancing explore vs exploit: Encouraging teams to pivot to higher-value domains when propositions mature, and celebrating decisions to stop work that’s no longer impactful.
- Customer-led vs strategy-led delivery: Using proactive roadmap communication to align big customer requests with company strategy and KPIs, turning reactive asks into collaborative problem-solving.
- Technical and business balance in PMs: Moving from a largely technical PM base toward a mix of skills, with growing focus on business value and direct engagement with business stakeholders.
- Leadership approach: Shiri's focus on connecting product strategy to company strategy, advocating at the executive level, and ensuring her teams feel purpose, autonomy, and mastery in their work.
Check out commercetoolsCheck out commercetools's website: https://commercetools.com/, or their careers page: https://commercetools.com/careers/jobs.
Connect with ShiriYou can connect with Shiri on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shiri-mosenzon/.
In this episode, I speak with Hannah Kershaw, Chief Product Officer at Domestic and General, a company that you might not have heard of but absolutely need in your corner the next time your dishwasher breaks. Hannah's journey took her from marketing to e-commerce, into product leadership at GoCompare, and now to transforming Product at a billion-pound growth organisation.
We cover a lot, including:
- What Domestic and General actually does: A century-old, billion-pound business with 6.5 million subscribers across 12 markets, providing repair and replacement services for household appliances through service plans and insurance products.
- A behind-the-scenes powerhouse: Domestic and General powers customer journeys via major retail and manufacturer partnerships (e.g. Argos, AO, Hotpoint), often handling registration, support, and repair logistics under their partners' brands.
- Product complexity in a partner-led model: Coordinating customer experience, retailer requirements, manufacturer constraints, and service delivery logistics - without directly employing a single repair technician.
- Building product from scratch: How Hannah established a product function at Domestic and General, moving from a traditional delivery model to domain-based product teams focused on growth and customer retention.
- Evolving team structures: Starting with customer and partner-aligned squads before transitioning to domain-oriented teams, reflecting shifts in strategic focus and incorporating feedback from engineering and delivery teams.
- Product vs Proposition: Domestic and General brings together digital product managers and proposition managers - handling platforms and customer experiences on one side, and the commercial performance of insurance offerings on the other.
- Philosophy of simplification and belief: Encouraging resilience and optimism, Hannah champions a mindset that anything is possible - helping teams cut through complexity and deliver tangible outcomes.
- Pragmatism over product purism: While Domestic and General aspires to be product-led, the focus is on real-world delivery - balancing best practice with the pace and realities of a high-growth, partner-centric business.
- Executive-level impact: Demonstrating the value of Product by delivering outcomes. Early wins - such as improving online claims and conversion rates - helped build credibility and demand for product ways of working.
Check out Domestic and GeneralCheck out Domestic and General's website: https://www.domesticandgeneral.com/, or their careers page: https://careers.domesticandgeneral.com/.
Connect with HannahYou can connect with Hannah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-kershaw-421b7b25/.
In this episode, I speak with Simon Cross, Chief Product Officer - now Chief Product & Technology Officer (congrats, Simon!) - at Native Instruments, a company at the heart of global music production. Music lover Simon's journey spans broadcast engineering at Global Radio, product roles at the BBC, product leadership at Meta, and now, shaping the future of audio tools for creators worldwide.
We cover a lot, including:
- What Native Instruments actually does: From DJ hardware to post-production tools for Netflix and the BBC, plus powering other companies' products via their platform.
- The intersection of creativity and technology: How Native Instruments empowers artists with tactile, high-fidelity tools, and why they're a side-gig for superstar DJs on staff.
- AI in music creation: Where it fits, where it doesn't, and the ethical principles Native Instruments uses to ensure artists retain full creative control.
- Product in a hybrid model: Balancing perpetual licences and growing subscription models, and how business models shape product release strategies.
- Pragmatism over idealism: Why product managers must adapt frameworks to the business "physics" of their company, especially in an era of tighter budgets.
- A unique form of product management: Building physical hardware, mission-critical desktop software, and cloud services... all under one roof.
- Team structure and specialisms: How PMs, designers, engineers, QA, and unique "sound designers" collaborate to shape sonic outcomes.
- Why legacy is both a strength and a constraint: Navigating customer expectations, technical debt, and platform longevity.
- Why big-shot product leaders from established big tech companies need to take a pause and not just try to install something that worked before in a company with a very different context.
Check out Native InstrumentsCheck out Native Instruments' website: https://www.native-instruments.com/, or their careers page: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/careers/.
Connect with SimonYou can connect with Simon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sicross/.
Benji Portwin has a CV stuffed with recognisable names, from Spotify to Monzo bank, alongside product leadership roles at accuRx and New Look. These days, he's running an agency dedicated to helping organisations learn how to design and build awesome products.
Benji's hot take? Having been diagnosed with ADHD relatively recently, he's come to regard ADHD as somewhat of a superpower for product managers, and something that enables him and others to be more effective at their jobs rather than being something to be suffered from.
- Find Benji on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjiportwin.
- Or check out People Building Products: https://pbp.team/
Shobhit Chugh is a former Google PM who now helps product managers build their own brand, habits, confidence and career with Intentional Product Manager, and he also runs his own podcast of the same name.
Shobhit's hot take? That too many product managers think that their work will speak for itself but, if they want to get ahead, they should start relentlessly promoting themselves; both inside and outside of the company they work for.
- Find Shobhit on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shobhitchugh/.
- Check out Intentional Product Manager: https://www.intentionalproductmanager.com/
Check out my appearance on The Intentional Product Manager podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2399157/episodes/16218073-fractional-product-management-with-jason-knight
Valeria Stromtsova is a Product Manager who traded fintech for sustainability and now works at Treeapp, helping plant trees where they're needed the most.
Valeria's hot take? That product managers need to take the lead in creating a sustainable future, making sure they make a difference by considering the impact of their product decisions on their users, their stakeholders... and the planet we live on.
Find Valeria on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerastromtsova/.
Welcome to CPO Stories!In this new "podcast within a podcast", I'll be speaking to executive product leaders from the UK's biggest companies as well as up-and-coming stars of the future. I'll be digging into how they approach product management within their organisations, how they approached the leap into executive product leadership and trying to get some deep insights into how they view product management practices and culture. If you're a CPO and would like to come on, drop me a line! Or, forward this episode to your CPO and tell them you want them to come on 🙂
About this EpisodeIn this episode, I speak with Bhavesh Vaghela, Chief Product & Technology Officer at London Marathon Events. Bhavesh started out working as an engineer at HP before a rich career journey through Barclays, TSB, Callsign and Collinson, before moving into the CPTO role at London Marathon Events.
We cover a lot, including:
- What London Marathon Events actually does beyond race day, and how it drives physical activity across society
- How London Marathon Events approaches Product in a hybrid digital/physical world, and why product goes far beyond apps and websites
- Balancing a seamless B2C customer experience with the hard technical demands of world-class live events
- What it means for Product and Technology planning when the date can't slip, and getting it wrong could ruin a world record attempt
- Balancing the CPO and CTO hats: how combining Product and Technology under one role can drive alignment and delivery in the right type of organisation
- Product Management at London Marathon Events: a small team of unflappable, smart people driving high impact with strong purpose
- Why domain expertise matters, but curiosity matters more, and what to do when everyone has an opinion about your product
- The importance of building a culture of learning through experimentation, humility, air cover and making it ok to fail
- Why now is a brilliant time to join London Marathon Events: purpose, opportunity, and the irresistible rise of running
Check out London Marathon EventsCheck out London Marathon Events' website: https://www.londonmarathonevents.co.uk/, or their careers page: https://www.londonmarathonevents.co.uk/london-marathon-events/careers.
Connect with BhaveshYou can connect with Bhavesh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhaveshvaghela/.
Kanika Tolver is a Senior Product Manager by day and the founder of Career Rehab. She's also the author of a book of the same name, "Career Rehab: Rebuild Your Personal Brand and Rethink the Way You Work"
Kanika's hot take? That some project managers out there are actually product managers in disguise. Their responsibilities have changed, their job titles have yet to catch up, and it's up to them to seize the opportunities of the new world of product management.
Find Kanika on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanikatolver/ or check out her website: https://kanikatolver.com/.
Welcome to CPO Stories!In this new "podcast within a podcast", I'll be speaking to executive product leaders from the UK's biggest companies as well as up-and-coming stars of the future. I'll be digging into how they approach product management within their organisations, how they approached the leap into executive product leadership and trying to get some deep insights into how they view product management practices and culture. If you're a CPO and would like to come on, drop me a line! Or, forward this episode to your CPO and tell them you want them to come on 🙂
About the EpisodeIn this episode, I speak with Maud Larpent, Chief Product Officer at Treatwell, the largest hair and beauty booking platform in Europe which works with 75,000 salons across 15 countries. Maud started out working at Reuters, before moving into product leadership at TripAdvisor and Expedia and onwards to Treatwell.
We cover a lot, including:
- All about Treatwell and how it's more than just a booking app
- How Treatwell balances B2B and B2C needs, and why the B2B side is central to delivering a great consumer experience
- Structuring product at Treatwell: team size, "three-in-a-box" model, and balancing tech ownership with customer problems
- How B2C product teams can stay motivated and aligned in a surprisingly sales-led organisation
- The importance of being honest about your product maturity when hiring, and hiring people who want to help you get better
- Making the transition to leadership: letting go of needing all the answers and learning to lead through others
- Balancing strategic and tactical involvement, and making sure you encourage teams to solve problems instead of blindly executing executive ideas
- Why Treatwell is a great place for product people: meaningful challenges, international teams, and a mission to support entrepreneurs
Check out TreatwellCheck out Treatwell's website: https://www.treatwell.co.uk/, or their careers page: https://apply.workable.com/treatwell/.
Connect with MaudYou can connect with Maud on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maud-larpent/.
Alex Rastatuev is a Senior Product Manager for Keyhole, a social media insights company, and is passionate about product-led growth. He's also an active mentor, looking to pay it forward to the next generation of PMs.
Alex's hot take? That thoughtful product onboarding and education is more important than showing all your features all at the same time, and will lead to better activation rates and product growth.
Find Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-rastatuev/ or check out his mentoring profile: https://partnerup.intelligentpeople.co.uk/mentor/alex-rastatuev/.
Welcome to CPO Stories!In this new "podcast within a podcast", I'll be speaking to executive product leaders from the UK's biggest companies as well as up-and-coming stars of the future. I'll be digging into how they approach product management within their organisations, how they approached the leap into executive product leadership and trying to get some deep insights into how they view product management practices and culture. If you're a CPO and would like to come on, drop me a line! Or, forward this episode to your CPO and tell them you want them to come on 🙂
About the EpisodeIn this episode, I speak with Debbie McMahon, interim Chief Product Officer at the Financial Times, one of the UK's most well-known and distinctive newspapers. Debbie started out working at the Department for Work & Pensions, moving into a product strategy role there before spending time at the BBC and onwards to the FT.
We cover a lot, including:
- All about the FT and its move away from being "just" a newspaper
- How the FT structures Product; size, scope, dependency management and whether they have product owners
- How to advocate for the value of product management with non-tech leaders and editorial stakeholders
- Balancing product management idealism and book principles with the real world of the FT
- The importance of being honest upfront about your organisation's context when hiring people
- Making the jump to CPO; what was different, what was the same
- How CPOs can avoid being seen as ivory tower thinkers or, worse still, "poop and swoopers"
- Why product people should work at the FT
Check out the FTCheck out the FT's website: https://www.ft.com, or their careers page: https://aboutus.ft.com/careers.
Connect with DebbieYou can connect with Debbie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmcmahon/.
Returning guest Rich Mironov is a B2B product management legend, long-time blogger and author of "The Art of Product Management". He's recently moved to Portugal to sample the best of European product culture, and is currently actively coaching and mentoring product leaders. His goal is to help them understand what business leaders really care about and ensure that they make an impact by speaking the same language as the rest of the executive suite.
Episode highlights:1. No one in the leadership team cares about how products are made; they care about making moneyWe product people can often be so in love with our craft and our terminology that we forget that no one else wants to hear it. We need to craft a narrative that moves beyond esoteric, fuzzy concepts about delight and happiness. These are important, but not as important to the leadership team as how those things make money for the company. We need to get off our high horses and meet our stakeholders where they are, just like we would with our users.
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Product Managers need to know how their product and their company make moneyToo many product managers are not aware of how their company makes money, how things are priced and packaged, and the effect that this will have on the types of decisions they can make. We need to up our game when it comes to financial literacy and understand the growth levers that we can pull if we want to have an impact at the top level.
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It's important to build internal coalitions to get support early, rather than being the one person who dissentsIt's always hard when there's a seemingly blockbuster deal on the table that has big revenue numbers attached, but is going to derail the roadmap for months. It's important to understand the positions of other non-product stakeholders and get their buy-in so that you're not the only person against the deal. Make sure you build bridges with your colleagues and go in with a united front.
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Learn to tell "Money Stories" to get alignment around your roadmap and calculate the true cost of trade-offsThere are four different types of money stories: Cost savings, Upselling, New Market and Customer Satisfaction. These all use simple heuristics to sense-check the revenue impact of any initiative. Product people can get obsessed with accuracy, but your colleagues are guesstimating all their numbers, so get comfortable with directionally correct numbers. You can still make prioritisation debates clearer by "counting the digits" or comparing orders of magnitude.
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Organisational context is everything, so you need to understand itThere are big differences between how Private Equity-funded and Venture Capital-funded startups work. They have different timeframes, different goals and, ultimately, a different mindset. There's no right or wrong here, simply an acknowledgement that your company's investment context will dramatically impact the types of decisions the leadership team will make. If you know this context, it can help you make better decisions (as well as decide whether it's the type of company you want to work for)
Check out Rich's essay "Business Cases are Stories about Money"Rich's original essay, which has led to conference talks as well as this interview, can be found here: https://www.mironov.com/moneystories/
Buy "The Art of Product Management (2nd edition)""The Art of Product Management takes us inside the head of a product management thought leader. With color and humor, Rich Mironov gives us a taste of Silicon Valley's tireless pursuit of great technology and its creation of new products. He provides strategic advice to product managers and tech professionals about start-ups, big organizations, how to think like a customer, and what things should cost. He also reminds us to love our products and our teams."
Check it out on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Product-Management-Second-Innovator-ebook/dp/B0CVL45F36.
Contact RichYou can catch up with Rich on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richmironov/. Or check out his website: https://mironov.com.
Tami Reiss (aka "Tami from Miami"!) is an executive leadership coach, corporate trainer and upcoming author of a children's product management book.
Tami's hot take? That all product managers are leaders, even if they don't feel like it. As a PM, whatever your situation (and however high or low your sights) it's your job to inspire the team and influence your colleagues.
Find Tami on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamireiss/ or check out https://tamireiss.com/.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot
Alexandar Murauski is an expert in all things related to product localisation and the CEO of Alconost, a platform that aims to help product teams unlock global growth through AI-enhanced localisation.
Alexander's hot take? That the language your product "speaks" is a fundamental part of the product's user experience, and is often left lacking. It's important to consider localisation upfront, and ensure that you take cultural considerations into account, not just Google Translate the text as an afterthought.
Find Alexander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amurauski/ or check out his company, Alconost, at https://alconost.com/en.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot
Andriy Burkov is a renowned machine learning expert and leader. He's also the author of (so far) three books on machine learning, including the recently-released "The Hundred-Page Language Models Book", which takes curious people from the very basics of language models all the way up to building their own LLM. Andriy is also a formidable online presence and is never afraid to call BS on over-the-top claims about AI capabilities via his punchy social media posts.
Episode highlights:1. Large Language Models are neither magic nor consciousLLMs boil down to relatively simple mathematics at an unfathomably large scale. Humans are terrible at visualising big numbers and cannot comprehend the size of the dataset or the number of GPUs that have been used to create the models. You can train the same LLM on a handful of records and get garbage results, or throw millions of dollars at it and get good results, but the fundamentals are identical, and there's no consciousness hiding in between the equations. We see good-looking output, and we think it's talking to us. It isn't.
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As soon as we saw it was possible to do mathematics on words, LLMs were inevitableThere were language models before LLMs, but the invention of the transformer architecture truly accelerated everything. That said, the fundamentals trace further back to "simpler" algorithms, such as word2vec, which proved that it is possible to encode language information in a numeric format, which meant that the vast majority of linguistic information could be represented by embeddings, which enabled people to run equations on language. After that, it was just a matter of time before they got scaled out.
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LLMs look intelligent because people generally ask about things they already know aboutThe best way to be disappointed by an LLM's results is to ask detailed questions about something you know deeply. It's quite likely that it'll give good results to start with, because most people's knowledge is so unoriginal that, somewhere in the LLM's training data, there are documents that talk about the thing you asked about. But, it will degrade over time and confidently keep writing even when it doesn't know the answer. These are not easily solvable problems and are, in fact, fundamental parts of the design of an LLM.
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Agentic AI relies on unreliable actors with no true sense of agencyThe concept of agents is not new, and people have been talking about them for years. The key aspect of AI agents is that they need self-motivation and goals of their own, rather than being told to have goals and then simulating the desire to achieve them. That's not to say that some agents are not useful in their own right, but the goal of fully autonomous, agentic systems is a long way off, and may not even be solvable.
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LLMs represent the most incredible technical advance since the personal computer, but people should quit it with their most egregious claimsLLMs are an incredible tool and can open up whole new worlds for people who are able to get the best out of them. There are limits to their utility, and some of their shortcomings are likely unsolvable, but we should not minimise their impact. However, there are unethical people out there making completely unsubstantiated claims based on zero evidence and a fundamental misunderstanding of how these models work. These people are scaring people and encouraging terrible decision-making from the gullible. We need to see through the hype.
Buy "The Hundred-Page Language Model Book""Large language models (LLMs) have fundamentally transformed how machines process and generate information. They are reshaping white-collar jobs at a pace comparable only to the revolutionary impact of personal computers. Understanding the mathematical foundations and inner workings of language models has become crucial for maintaining relevance and competitiveness in an increasingly automated workforce. This book guides you through the evolution of language models, starting from machine learning fundamentals. Rather than presenting transformers right away, which can feel overwhelming, we build understanding of language models step by step—from simple count-based methods through recurrent neural networks to modern architectures. Each concept is grounded in clear mathematical foundations and illustrated with working Python code."
Check it out on the book's website: https://thelmbook.com/.
You can also check out Machine Learning Engineering: https://www.mlebook.com and The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book: https://www.themlbook.com/.
Follow AndriyYou can catch up with Andriy here:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andriyburkov/
- Twitter/"X": https://twitter.com/burkov
- True Positive Newsletter: https://aiweekly.substack.com/
Sam Greenwood is an emotional resilience coach who works with product managers to help them survive at the intersection of emotional stress and product leadership. His goal is to help product managers build EQ, communication and leadership and AI-proof their careers.
Sam's hot take? That we are on the cusp of societal collapse and product managers, as well as people in tech in general, have taken their eye off the ball. Product people need to adopt new mindsets and build different kinds of products to help us weather the storm... although, maybe the storm can't be weathered at all.
Find Sam on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-greenwood/.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot
Olha Yohansen-Veselova is a product growth and product optimisation expert who has now gone solo and is helping companies with their onboarding. Olha is also a startup mentor and advisor, and is passionate about product managers living up to their full potential.
Olha's hot take? That product managers need to beyond being facilitators and unblockers, and move towards being true growth partners to the business. Too many people are working in a bubble and not taking account of the commercial impact of their roles, and the ones that do will outpace the ones that don't.
Find Olha on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oyohansen/.
Or check out Olha's newsletter: https://oyogrowth.substack.com/.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot
About the EpisodeElena Verna is a renowned growth consultant who has worked at and with a glittering array of well-known tech companies. She's a strong advocate of career optionality and solopreneurship, as well as the author of a popular growth newsletter, Reforge instructor and popular LinkedIn content creator with her insightful posts and searing memes. Just don't call her an influencer.
Episode highlights:1. Solopreneurship is about having optionality; it doesn't mean you never take a full-time job again.You can build a portfolio career with a variety of different offerings, and get involved in the types of problems that excite you. This feels risky, but people get laid off from "real" jobs all the time. The most important thing is to optimise for what you're passionate about, and it may well be that you move between full-time employment and advisory or fractional roles. It's not a one-way street, and you're in control.
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Humour disarms people, so memes are a great way to talk about difficult topics and build empathyContent creators should not be scared of poking fun at meaningful topics. Using humour is a great way to help build connections with people around potentially sensitive areas. That doesn't mean you should make everything a joke, but you can certainly mix it up. You might think it's risky for a solopreneur, needing to build credibility, to be seen as an unserious clown. But, do you really want to work with people who can't take a joke?
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Product-Led Sales is all about using self-service as a lever to fill up your sales pipeline with healthy, qualified leadsSpeaking of knowledge (nice segue!), Elena has written a lot about Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Product-Led Sales (PLS). PLG is the strategy of using your product as its own acquisition channel through enabling a great self-service experience, quick time-to-value and all the other things that B2C apps have had to worry about for years. PLS, on the other hand, is about filling your sales team's pipeline with high-quality leads that have already experienced your product through PLG, and demonstrated enough usage to make it worth having a data-backed conversation with the buyers at that organisation.
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There are signals that it's time to try out Product-Led SalesDon't adopt PLS for the sake of it; instead, look for signals that it's appropriate for you. Traditional sales-led motions focus on the buyer but, if you solve a problem that matters more to end users than buyers, you should consider Product-Led Sales as a method for building internal champions and advocacy for your product. You should also be conscious of competitive threats; your traditional, top-down buyer-led sales motion may work today, but keep your eyes open for new PLG players attacking your underbelly.
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You probably need new capabilities (and talent) within your organisation if you want to get started with Product-Led Sales.Let's face it, most sales-led organisations are terrified of giving sales prospects access to their product without supervision. The user experience is almost certainly terrible and there's no "Aha!" moment to speak of, just a pile of features that got added to satisfy procurement teams. You need to get a good product manager in to overhaul the experience, good product marketers to work on optimising acquisition, and great data analytics so you can make sure you aren't just sending garbage to the sales team. If you don't send them high-quality leads, they'll stop trying to sell to them.
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Product-Led Sales is not an on/off switch but a dial.Traditional sales-led organisations that are crushing their quotas don't need to go down the product-led growth or product-led sales route if it doesn't work for them. Similarly, product-led companies shouldn't have to go upmarket to succeed. The most important thing to consider is how to build on your existing strengths and complement them, and getting the mix right. You can run both at the same time, and this is better than throwing all-in on a go-to-market motion where you have no credibility, experience or right to win.
Contact Elena* Check out Elena's newsletter and other work: ElenaVerna.com * Follow Elena on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenaverna/
Zoe Laycock is the Product Marketing Lead for Diffblue, an AI-powered testing platform, and is passionate about promoting and elevating the role of product marketing, as well as advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the tech sector.
Zoe's hot take? That product people need to get serious about ethical AI, and put people, processes and protections in place to ensure that AI products create the impact that we all want to see in the world.
Find Zoe:
- ...on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoelaycock/.
- ...on "X": https://x.com/firestartr.
- ...on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/firestartr.
Or check out Diffblue: https://www.diffblue.com/.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot
Myles Sutholt is a Germany-based product leader working for an Africa-based startup where he's helping to digitise the health supply chain across the continent, with a "laser focus" on creating user value alongside business value and fostering motivated, dynamic teams.
His hot take? That leaders too often rely on gut feel and recency bias when performing performance reviews, relying on point-in-time assessments and trying to be nice rather than supporting the career growth of their teams.
Find Myles on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/myles-sutholt/.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot!
Martin Eriksson is the co-founder of Mind the Product, and co-author of the "Product Leadership" book. Martin has worked with a multitude of companies and has been heavily involved in the VC side of product management. These days, he's advising and coaching companies as well as trying to help us all make good decisions by writing a new book, "The Decision Stack", alongside its supporting website.
Episode highlights:1. The vast majority of company employees don't know what their company strategy is...It's important for everyone in the company to be aligned on what's important, where the company's going and how they're going to get there. It's crucial for product and business leaders to do the work; both to create a vision and strategy and to share it with everyone who is needed to execute it.
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... but, worse still, the vast majority of companies don't even have a strategy to speak ofStrategy is about making a coherent set of choices about how we're going to achieve our goals or make our company vision real. But, too many companies have fluffy, vague vision statements that could mean anything, and leaders who want to do everything all at once and don't want to make choices. This limits their ability to actually achieve anything.
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It's hard to create a product strategy if you don't have a company strategy, but you should do it anywayA product strategy should support the company strategy and vision but, if there's no company strategy or vision, it's hard to create or defend such a strategy. On the other hand, you should still do the work to create one; either you'll get to go and execute the strategy or you'll have a straw man proposal to provoke further discussion around what the strategy should be.
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A lot of product people are pretty bad at strategy, and we need to get betterBack in the day, a lot of product managers were expected to write specifications and get stuff done. They weren't even expected to be strategic, and many still aren't to this day. These skills are learnable; product people need to do their best to up their game, and company leaders need to get more comfortable both delegating responsibility and coaching their employees to have these skills.
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The answer is not "Founder mode""Founder mode" can be used to justify just about any behaviour, invites "hero syndrome" and can lead to micromanagement and single points of failure. Good leaders absolutely need to be deeply involved in their business, but this should not be at the expense of creating strong, aligned teams that can take many day-to-day decisions without them.
Contact Martin* You can catch up with Martin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martineriksson * You can also check his website: https://martineriksson.com * Keep up-to-date with The Decision Stack: https://www.thedecisionstack.com/
Martijn Versteeg is the founder of Group Effort, an organisation that fosters connections & facilitates the growth of scale-up leaders through peer groups, offsites and workshops.
His hot take? That product people should stop looking for the "golden nugget" of knowledge. Martijn argues that instead of seeking a single breakthrough insight, product managers should focus on consistent iteration and learning through small, incremental steps.
Find Martijn on LinkedIn or check out Group Effort.
Also, remember to check out the conference that he's organising, and we'll both be speaking at: Product Mastery Conference
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Martijn Moret is the founder of DataSquirrel.ai, a company focused on leveraging AI to humanise and simplify data analysis for product managers and non-tech managers.
His hot take? Most product managers neglect data—not because they dislike it, but due to a lack of time and skills, which can lead to wrong priorities and poor decision-making. He also highlights the current limitations of AI in data analysis, emphasising that while AI accelerates workflows, it still requires human oversight for reliable outcomes.
Find Martijn on LinkedIn or check out DataSquirrel.ai.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
🎄 Deck the Halls with Go-To-Market! 🎄
I spoke with Maja Voje for a convivial Christmas chat about all things product and growth. We discussed:
- 2024 Retrospectives and 2025 Predictions
- Product Management and Go-To-Market Strategies
- AI in Workflows and Whether Product Management is Dead 💀
- LinkedIn Growth Strategies
- Balancing Opportunities and When To Say No
- Networking and Community Building
This is the audio of that conversation, but you can see us both (complete with Christmas hats!) on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/XdjiVO-gXOg?si=XM1wQs-QwP6lx_rr
Check out my appearance on Maja's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6kip2mtuyE
... and Maja's previous appearance on my podcast: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/maja-voje
Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays to you all!
Adam Dille is the SVP of Product Engineering at Quantum Metric, a company specialising in experience analytics for some of the world's biggest brands. Despite his engineering roots, Adam's relentless curiosity about the WHY behind building products led him to embrace product thinking and how to build products better.
His hot take? The traditional product trio - PM, design, and engineering - isn't enough anymore. He advocates for transforming the trio into a square by adding a customer-facing, "operational" team member. This person, deeply connected to customer needs and speaking to customers every day, can help to bridge the gap between the product team and the customer and enable stronger customer focus and faster iteration cycles.
Find Adam on LinkedIn or check out Quantum Metric.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Grace Yusuff is a London-based "reluctant product manager" and introvert who thought she could never do the job. She has since fallen in love with the role and now works as a product manager and early-career mentor, helping others get into tech.
Her hot take? That introversion is a superpower for product managers and something to be embraced rather than overcome. She is a strong advocate for people to find their own way in product management, and not having to live up to clichés or stereotypes.
Find Grace on LinkedIn.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Assaph Mehr is an Australia-based product & people leader as well as a published fantasy author, who also uses his writing chops to produce a newsletter, "Rise of the Product Leader".
His hot take? That LLMs and other generative AI tools are the equivalent of an angle grinder. For those who don't know, angle grinders have big, spinning metal discs that make them ideal tools for certain use cases (like cutting up concrete) but are terrible for anything else. Assaph believes that LLMs have a large number of use cases where we should use them, but that there's still an inevitable need for human decision-making and a sense of taste that AI will never have.
Find Assaph on LinkedIn or subscribe to his newsletter. If you're interested in fantasy novels, check those out too.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Matt Maier is a product marketer and AI enthusiast from Irvine, California, with a background spanning the Air Force, aerospace, healthcare, and startup consulting.
His hot take? Within 5 years, employment as we know it will sharply decline. Matt predicts that advancements in AI will render traditional employee-employer relationships obsolete, because why would companies hire people to do easily automatable tasks? On the other hand, Matt believes this is a good thing and will enable an entirely new way of working.
Find Matt on LinkedIn or drop him an email at Solo Scale AI.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Related episodes you should like:* Is Product-Led Growth Really For You? (Leah Tharin, Product-Led Growth Guru & Head of Product @ Jua) * Embracing Change to Innovate in Product Management (Greg Coticchia, CEO @ Sopheon) * The Big Pivot to Reinvent Product Management (Yana Welinder, Founder & CEO @ Kraftful) * Debbie Levitt's Hot Take - Democratising our Work means AI is Going to Steal all our Jobs Sooner (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck") * Greg Prickril's Hot Take - AI is going to change everything for Product Managers (Greg Prickril, B2B Product Management Coach, Consultant & Trainer) * Andy Walters' Hot Take - We’re Soon Going to be Living in an AI-Assistant-First World (Andy Walters, CEO @ Emerge Haus & Generative AI Expert) * Bjarte Rettedal's Hot Take - AI Models Should Be Under Public Ownership or Completely Transparent (Bjarte Rettedal, UX Designer) * Reinventing the Future of Customer Success with Human-First AI (Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight)
Yael Mark is a behavioural scientist turned product manager, who is passionate about helping others unlock the power of user-centred product design by embracing behavioural science. She believes that understanding human behaviour and cognitive biases can drive better product decisions and stakeholder alignment, as well as make sure we do it ethically.
Episode highlights:1. Behavioural science helps product managers design for real-world usersBehavioural science is the study of how people think, act, and interact with their environments. By understanding human "bugs" and irrational behaviours, product managers can create products that align with user needs, addressing pain points inside and outside the app.
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Ethics matter when applying behavioural scienceIt's important to align behavioural tactics with user goals. Ethical applications, like encouraging language learning with Duolingo streaks, contrast with manipulative design patterns that exploit users for profit without delivering real value.
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Cognitive biases can be leveraged for better product outcomesCognitive biases are the shortcuts our brains take to help us make decisions. Common biases like anchoring, cognitive dissonance, and the sunk cost fallacy have an impact in product decisions. For example, Amazon Prime uses cognitive dissonance to encourage consolidated deliveries, appealing to users' environmental consciousness while reducing costs.
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AI offers opportunities and challenges in behavioural scienceAI can accelerate behavioural research by simulating user responses, though it is not yet capable of replicating cognitive biases fully, even when told to exhibit them. However, biases in AI training data may introduce new challenges, requiring vigilance in its application.
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You can prove the ROI of behavioural science through small winsSome people will be sceptical, so it's important to tie behavioural science theory to measurable KPIs and you can use A/B testing to demonstrate value. Not everything has to be a big development effort. Even reworking copy to focus on gains instead of losses can drive changes in user behaviour.
Contact YaelYou can find Yael and learn more on YouTube at ProductBS or connect with her on LinkedIn
Related episodes you should like:* Valentine's Special! A Love Letter to Problems, not Solutions (Uri Levine, Founder @ Waze & Author "Fall in Love with the Problem, not the Solution") * Understanding & Interrupting Cognitive Biases in Product Design (David Dylan Thomas, Author "Design for Cognitive Bias") * Using Solution Tests to Make Sure You're Building Products Users Want (Jim Morris, Founder @ Product Discovery Group) * Standing up for User Research... and User Researchers (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck") * Building Life-Centred Products with Collaborative Product Discovery (Sophia Höfling, Co-founder & Head of Product @ Saiga) * Betting on the Value of Product Design at the Organisational Poker Table (Andy Budd, Executive & Design Leadership Coach & Founder @ Clearleft) * Moving Beyond Survival and Paying Off Your Vision Debt (Radhika Dutt, Consultant and Author "Radical Product Thinking") * Bjarte Rettedal's Hot Take - AI Models Should Be Under Public Ownership or Completely Transparent (Bjarte Rettedal, UX Designer)
Returning guest Eisha Armstrong is the co-founder of Vecteris and author of books like "Productize" and "Fearless", which talk about that tricky journey from a professional services to product organisation. She's back to talk about her latest book, "Commercialize", which gives us the skinny on how to monetise, sell, and market productised offerings in transforming B2B professional services firms.
Episode highlights:1. Product strategy is the heart of successful commercialisationA successful product commercialisation strategy needs five key elements: Clear market understanding, monetisation approach, marketing strategy, sales process and plan for renewability. More than anything, company leaders need to think about this stuff upfront and not just wing it.
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Selling to existing customers is often the most effective strategy for B2B services companiesThe data shows that selling products to existing service customers, especially as bundles, is typically more successful than trying to enter new markets. It's tempting to try to go downmarket with cheaper, standardised offerings, but this is challenging due to lack of brand recognition and relationships.
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Packaging is more critical than pricing for successMany leaders focus on pricing, but packaging is often the bigger challenge. Packages should be designed around market segment needs rather than defaulting to simple "good, better, best" tiers without clear rationale. There must be a clear story for why customers would upgrade from one package to another.
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Companies need to invest in new capabilities for product successA common mistake is trying to commercialise products using existing service-oriented sales and marketing teams. Organisations need to plan and budget for different kinds of capabilities and talent, rather than expecting current staff to develop new skills while maintaining their existing responsibilities.
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Moving to recurring revenue requires organizational changeShifting from one-time service engagements to recurring product revenue requires changes in how companies measure success, moving from annual revenue targets to customer lifetime value. This transition typically takes several years and requires sustained leadership commitment to stay the course.
Buy "Commercialize""More and more professional services firms are “productizing” their services to grow and scale. But successfully marketing and selling standardized services or products is very different from marketing and selling traditional professional services. Commercialize, a follow-on book to Productize, explores why commercializing new ideas is the most significant stall point when B2B services organizations productize. The book then outlines how the most successful firms commercialize packaged services and new products and get to revenue impact fast and efficiently."
Check it out on Amazon or the book's website.
Contact EishaYou can find Eisha and learn more on the Vecteris website or connect with her on LinkedIn (mention you heard her on the podcast when connecting!)
Related episodes you should like:* Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude) * The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Productization (Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author "Productize") * Making Sure you REALLY Know your Customers and Pulling out of Growth Stalls (Adrienne Barnes, Founder @ Best Buyer Persona) * Fearlessly Defeating the Four Horsemen of a Product-Friendly Culture (Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author "Productize" & "Fearless") * OKIP LIVE! Is Product/Market Fit Really Dead, or Just Resting? (Andrea Saez & Dave Martin, Right To Left) * Chris Locke's Hot Take - Product Leaders Need to Adopt a VC Mindset (Chris Locke, CEO @ Aspire) * Jeremy Kirouac's Hot Take - Founders Need Product Management Training (Jeremy Kirouac, Fractional Product Leader) * Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant)
Andy Budd is a designer-turned-venture partner who founded one of the UK's first UX agencies before pivoting to help early-stage startup founders make good product decisions and get to product/market fit. He's recently released "The Growth Equation", a book that distils some of the common themes he sees across early-stage companies and aims to give them the best chance of success. We spoke all about the themes from the book, as well as where product management fits into the early-stage equation.
Episode highlights:1. The Growth Equation is made up of a combination of factors that both drive and drag growth effortsDriving factors include audience size, audience motivation, speed of value delivery, stickiness and virality. Dragging factors include friction and competitive pressure. There's no specific solution to the Growth Equation, it's about optimising the factors to deliver startup success.
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Most founders massively overestimate the scale of their MVP, and it could kill their companyWhat founders think is "minimal" often isn't. Startups burn months and months on what they think is a minimal solution, but it rarely is. There are stories of startups spending 18 months getting their first version out, getting excited, seeing no traction, and then repeating the doom loop. It's important to get stuff out there and into people's hands quickly to see if you can get traction rather than get stuck building things that no one wants.
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Targeting sophisticated ICPs too early is a death trapEarly-stage founders often aim to attack a broad Ideal Customer Profile, believing that it gives them the best chance of getting traction. They make the mistake of tackling sophisticated, mature customers with a never-ending list of "yes, but also..." requests. It's important for early founders to target beach-head customers so you can land and expand. You also need to ensure that you can respond and adapt your early ICP based on real-world feedback.
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Founders might not enjoy things like Sales or Marketing, but they've got to do what's right for the companyBeing a startup founder means you get to do things you love, like building a product, but you're also responsible for getting it to market. Early sales efforts must be led by the founders; it's a mistake to hire experienced salespeople too soon and expecting them to build your GTM playbook, and external SDR agencies are not going to get your target customers excited about your vision.
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In early-stage companies, the product manager is generally a project manager and has to bide their timeIt's a common problem: A startup founder is encouraged to hire a product manager, but they're still too close to the vision to want someone to join and start challenging everything. They just need to get the ideas out of their head and into the world. "Proper" product management can come later, developed over time, rather than arguing the toss upfront and never getting anywhere.
Buy "The Growth Equation""The Growth Equation is your roadmap to early-stage growth, designed specifically for founders navigating the toughest part of the journey: from zero to one. Finding your first customers, figuring out your go-to-market strategy, and scaling your revenue can feel overwhelming when you're up against limited resources and conflicting advice. That's why this book provides clear, actionable steps to help you break through those barriers and take your startup to its first $1M in revenue and beyond."
Check it out on Amazon or the book's website.
Contact AndyYou can catch up with Andy on LinkedIn. You can also check his website.
Related episodes you should like:* Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary) * Nailing your Product/Market Fit Strategy by Focusing on the Mission Critical (Maja Voje, Growth Strategy Expert & Author "Go-To-Market Strategist") * The Big Pivot to Reinvent Product Management (Yana Welinder, Founder & CEO @ Kraftful) * Building Great Companies through Community-Led Growth (Lloyed Lobo, Author "From Grassroots to Greatness") * Nailing your Brand Marketing by Embracing your Zone of Genius (Orly Zeewy, Brand Strategy Consultant & Author "Ready, Launch, Brand") * Helping Superhero Startup Founders Stay Away from their Kryptonite (Richard Blundell, Founder @ Vencha & Co-author "The Go To Market Handbook for B2B SaaS Leaders") * Upping Your Odds of BEATING the LinkedIn Algorithm (Ivana Todorovic, CEO @ AuthoredUp) * Jeremy Kirouac's Hot Take - Founders Need Product Management Training (Jeremy Kirouac, Fractional Product Leader)
Jas Shah is a fintech product consultant based in London who helps small startups and management services organizations build winning products, whilst keeping his pulse on the fintech scene.
His hot take? That product management is one of the least glamorous functions in an organisation. It's often portrayed as a sexy role where you're the "CEO of the product" with autonomy and responsibility, but for most product managers, the role is arduous and grating, involving invisible work like coordinating between teams, dealing with competing interests, and working with less authority than expected.
Find Jas on LinkedIn or check out his newsletter, Fintech R&R.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Related episodes you should like:* Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude) * John Cutler's Hot Take - The Instagram-ification of Product Management is Driving us Crazy (John Cutler, Product Educator & Author @ The Beautiful Mess) * The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs) * Practice Makes Perfect: Embracing the Messy Reality of Product Management (Matt LeMay, Product Management Consultant & Author "Product Management in Practice") * Applying Product Management Principles to Life (Miloš Belčević, Author "Build Your Way") * Dean Peters' Hot Take - There's More to be Said About the Instagram-ification of Product Management (Dean Peters, Principal Consultant & Trainer @ Productside) * May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport (May Wong, Product Operations Consultant & Coach) * Chris Butler's Hot Take - Product Managers DON'T Need to be Technical (Chris Butler, Staff Product Operations Manager @ GitHub)
Victoria Sakal is a growth and go-to-market expert who loves to turn customer, market and competitor insight in product, brand and business growth strategies.
Her hot take? That companies are either paying the "research tax" - spending too much time and money on research and never making a move - or the "stupid tax" - making decisions based purely on gut feel and no evidence. Both of these taxes can get your organisation in trouble, and the best path is to strike the right balance of speed and quality.
Find Victoria on LinkedIn.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Related episodes you should like:* Standing up for User Research... and User Researchers (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck") * Getting into the Habit of Continuous Discovery (Teresa Torres, Author "Continuous Discovery Habits") * Making Sure You Make an Impact through User Research (Steve Portigal, User Research Consultant & Author "Interviewing Users") * Product Leadership Principles for Tumultuous Times (Giff Constable, Author "Talking with Humans" & "Testing with Humans") * How to Deploy Empathy to Truly Understand User Needs (Michele Hansen, Author "Deploy Empathy") * Chinese Startup Culture & Putting the Minimum into MVP (Carlos Lastres, Creative & Marketing Director @ Kaiyan Medical) * Reducing Waste by Only Spending Time on Really Good Ideas (Julia Shalet, Author "The Really Good Idea Test") * Retail Product Management in a Global Pandemic (Rhiana Matthew, Senior Product Manager @ Publicis Sapient)
Boluwaji Alepaye is a product manager who works for Moniepoint, a Nigerian fintech firm that aims to power financial dreams in emerging markets. He's also an active mentor, aiming to help Nigerian product managers thrive.
His hot take? That the classic product management advice that comes out of the US and Western Europe just doesn't apply to Nigeria, where market dynamics mean that you have to make very different product decisions, and even the local training courses are dominated by Western voices.
Find Boluwaji on LinkedIn.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Related episodes you should like:* Supporting Product Managers & Standing Up for the Value of Product Management (Princess Akari, Founder "People in Product") * Building Disruptive Products by Harnessing Power Users (Moustapha Seck, Founder @ Fluid) * Making our Product Teams Stronger through Building Communities of Practice (Petra Wille, Author "Strong Product People" and "Strong Product Communities") * From Physiotherapist to Product Manager (Samuel Ogunkoya, Product Manager @ ProducteevTech) * Challenges & Opportunities for Africans Making Products for Africans (Abisoye Falabi, Senior Product Manager @ TradeDepot) * Product Management in Africa & Dreams of an African Silicon Valley (Layo Ogunbanwo, Founder @ Practical Product) * Product Processes & the Importance of Work / Life Balance (Busayomi Omotosho, Product Manager @ Softcom) * Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")
Christina Wodtke and Danielle Barnes join me to talk about their new book "Present Yourself" and their work with Women Talk Design, an organisation aimed at increasing diversity in public speaking. We went deep on public speaking, the importance of authenticity, storytelling, and finding your unique voice as a speaker. We also talked about the value of diverse perspectives in public speaking and the power of sharing personal stories to connect with audiences.
Key takeaways:1. It's important to embrace your unique voiceDon't try to fit a stereotypical mould of a "good speaker" - authenticity resonates more with audiences.
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Before you start speaking, make sure you know your "why"Everyone has their own motivation for public speaking, and anyone can fall in love with it if they're doing it for a reason they care about.
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Share your unique perspective with the worldEven if you feel that other people are already talking about your topic, or that it's all been said before, go and say it anyway. You're the only you.
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Humans are hardwired to respond to storiesYou can make your presentations more engaging and memorable by incorporating stories, even in stuffy business settings. Your audience will thank you for it.
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It doesn't matter if you're talking to a big crowd, as long as you're talking to the right crowdYou don't need to be a big name to make a big impact. You just need to find the people who need to hear what you have to say. You can still make a difference.
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Everyone has a bad talk but this is fine as long as you learn from the experienceEvery speaking opportunity is a learning experience. Some of them will go great, some of them will go terribly, but you can learn something from all of them.
Check out "Present Yourself""Present Yourself is for everyone who has ever fought for an equal shot at the spotlight. Christina Wodtke, Danielle Barnes, and a diverse group of accomplished speakers share stories that will inspire you to communicate with authority. This self-guided, step-by-step framework features practical, actionable advice for authentic and effective public speaking."
Check it out on Amazon or the book website.
Contact Danielle & ChristinaCatch up with Danielle on LinkedIn or check out Women Talk Design.
Catch up with Christina on LinkedIn or check out Elegant Hack for details of all the other books she's written.
Related episodes you should like:* Diving into the Deep End as a Woman in Product (Darby Maloney, Product Manager @ Divvy & Occasional Swimming Pool User) * Closing the Gender Pay Gap and Hiring Diverse Product Teams (Chris Mason, Co-Founder @ Intelligent People) * Standing Up for Diversity & Inclusion When No One Looks Like You (Merina Khanom, Product Manager @ BBC iPlayer) * Maintaining a Collaborative & Inclusive Product Culture at Scale (Anna Curzon, CPO @ Xero) * Defeating Bias, Prejudice and Bullying in the Workplace (Kim Scott, Author "Radical Candor" & "Just Work") * Building Your Product Muscles & Developing Strong Product Teams (Petra Wille, Product Leadership Coach) * Product Management in Africa & Dreams of an African Silicon Valley (Layo Ogunbanwo, Founder @ Practical Product) * Building Data Driven Products & Dodging Unsolicited Advice (Emily Reid, Product Manager @ FCT)
Mark Gray is a product manager with nearly 12 years of experience across various roles in the UK and Europe. He has worked in both B2B and B2C sectors, progressing from delivery-focused product owner roles to more strategic product management and leadership positions.
His hot take? Product managers should stop defaulting to prioritisation through value divided by effort, which he argues can stifle innovation. Value and effort aren't unimportant, but they're just part of the puzzle. He believes the path to deciding what to build next should emerge from discussions with smart, diverse teams, focusing on the desired outcomes and business goals.
Find Mark on LinkedIn.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Related episodes you should like:* OKRs: The Gateway Drug to Agility & Good Product Management (Jeff Gothelf, Product Management Consultant & Co-author "Lean UX" ) * Adventures in Product Management (Dan Olsen, Author "The Lean Product Playbook") * Fighting Fires in B2B Product Management (Rich Mironov, Author "The Art of Product Management") * Your Product is a Joke - How to use Improv Comedy Principles in Product Management (Amogh Sarda, Co-founder @ Eesel) * Putting Customers at the Heart of your Product Decisions (Hubert Palan, Founder @ Productboard) * Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant) * Jordan Dalladay's Hot Take - We Should Build Roadmaps Of Risks, Not Features (Jordan Dalladay, Product Consultant @ inherent ventures) * Build Better Products at Scale with Product Operations (Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles, Product Consultants & Co-authors "Product Operations")
Jordan Dalladay is a product strategist and leader who works with startup founders to help them turn ambitious ideas into market successes. He specializes in "dragging a vision kicking and screaming into reality" with his consultancy, inherent ventures.
His hot take? We should invert our approach to product roadmapping. Instead of listing features to build, create a "risk-based product strategy" that outlines all the assumptions and potential pitfalls that could prevent success. This approach helps teams prioritize learning and experimentation, validating their riskiest assumptions first and dragging their vision into reality more effectively.
Find Jordan on LinkedIn and you can check out his firm, inherent ventures.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Related episodes you should like:* OKRs: The Gateway Drug to Agility & Good Product Management (Jeff Gothelf, Product Management Consultant & Co-author "Lean UX" ) * Adventures in Product Management (Dan Olsen, Author "The Lean Product Playbook") * Fighting Fires in B2B Product Management (Rich Mironov, Author "The Art of Product Management") * Your Product is a Joke - How to use Improv Comedy Principles in Product Management (Amogh Sarda, Co-founder @ Eesel) * Putting Customers at the Heart of your Product Decisions (Hubert Palan, Founder @ Productboard) * Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant) * Build What Matters with Vision-Led Product Management (Rajesh Nerlikar, Author "Build What Matters") * Build Better Products at Scale with Product Operations (Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles, Product Consultants & Co-authors "Product Operations")
Chris Butler is a "Chaotic Good Product Manager" who has worked for companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook. He's currently Staff Product Operations Manager at GitHub, and current running an online course on AI Product Design Patterns.
His hot take? That product managers don't need to be technical and that it might even be a net negative to their relationship with the engineering team.
Find Chris on LinkedIn and remember to check out his AI product course, "AI Product Design Patterns" .
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
A message from this episode's sponsor - LeadfeederThis episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
Related episodes you should like:* Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude) * The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs) * Practice Makes Perfect: Embracing the Messy Reality of Product Management (Matt LeMay, Product Management Consultant & Author "Product Management in Practice") * May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport (May Wong, Product Operations Consultant & Coach) * Dean Peters' Hot Take - There's More to be Said About the Instagram-ification of Product Management (Dean Peters, Principal Consultant & Trainer @ Productside) * Applying Product Management Principles to Life (Miloš Belčević, Author "Build Your Way") * Product Processes & the Importance of Work / Life Balance (Busayomi Omotosho, Product Manager @ Softcom) * Jeremy Kirouac's Hot Take - Founders Need Product Management Training (Jeremy Kirouac, Fractional Product Leader)
Jeremy Kirouac is a "Pan-Canadian" product leader and former startup founder who has thrown himself headlong into the world of fractional product leadership, as well as helping advise companies in all things product-related.
His hot take? That startup founders live in information bubbles that concentrate solely on revenue and don't spend enough time teaching them good product management fundamentals. This impacts their chances of building a good product company and impacts their relationship with product management teams as they scale.
Find Jeremy all over Canada, or on LinkedIn.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Related episodes you should like:* Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary) * Build Products Businesses Want with the Lean B2B Pyramid (Étienne Garbugli, Author "Lean B2B", "Find your Market" and "Solving Product") * Your Product is a Joke - How to use Improv Comedy Principles in Product Management (Amogh Sarda, Co-founder @ Eesel) * Chris Locke's Hot Take - Product Leaders Need to Adopt a VC Mindset (Chris Locke, CEO @ Aspire) * Upping Your Odds of BEATING the LinkedIn Algorithm (Ivana Todorovic, CEO @ AuthoredUp) * Greg Prickril's Hot Take - AI is going to change everything for Product Managers (Greg Prickril, B2B Product Management Coach, Consultant & Trainer) * May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport (May Wong, Product Operations Consultant & Coach) * Dean Peters' Hot Take - There's More to be Said About the Instagram-ification of Product Management (Dean Peters, Principal Consultant & Trainer @ Productside)
Chris Locke is a long-time product leader who has taken his passion for educating product managers into his agency, Aspire, with which he aims to help product teams bridge the skills gap and equip them with the skills and resources to build products customers love.
His hot take? That product leaders need to adopt the mindset of Venture Capitalists to truly drive growth through their product initiatives; placing a series of bets, backed by data, with clear stage gates for decision-making and adopting a portfolio approach to product prioritisation.
Find Chris on LinkedIn and remember to check out his training company, Aspire.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
A message from this episode's sponsor - LeadfeederThis episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
Related episodes you should like:* Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary) * Paying Off Your Organisation's Human Debt Through Agility & Psychological Safety (Duena Blomstrom, Founder & CEO @ People Not Tech) * Fearlessly Defeating the Four Horsemen of a Product-Friendly Culture (Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author "Productize" & "Fearless") * Greg Prickril's Hot Take - AI is going to change everything for Product Managers (Greg Prickril, B2B Product Management Coach, Consultant & Trainer) * May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport (May Wong, Product Operations Consultant & Coach) * Dean Peters' Hot Take - There's More to be Said About the Instagram-ification of Product Management (Dean Peters, Principal Consultant & Trainer @ Productside) * Build Better Products at Scale with Product Operations (Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles, Product Consultants & Co-authors "Product Operations") * Applying Product Management Principles to Life (Miloš Belčević, Author "Build Your Way")
Ivana Todorovic is the co-founder of AuthoredUp, the "Ultimate LinkedIn Content Creation & Analytics Tool", and wants to help YOU get better at standing out from the crowd and beating the LinkedIn algorithm. We spoke about all things LinkedIn, including the dangers of "engagement pods", whether it matters where you put your links in the post, how to engage with larger accounts, the power of secondary comments, and much, much more. We also spoke about her startup journey, the pros and cons of being reliant on a larger platform, and why she's so happy she bootstrapped rather than seeking VC funding. Check the episode out now!
A message from this episode's sponsor - LeadfeederThis episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
Episode highlights:1. There's no "Quick Fix" for your LinkedIn profileBeware snake oil salespeople who claim to be making millions off of their LinkedIn content and are trying to sell you frameworks to be just like them. There's no cookie-cutter approach, the algorithm is changing all the time, and the majority of these people are basically lying about the results you will get and laughing their way to the bank.
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It's Important to Soft Sell on LinkedInDirect sales pitches underperform compared to content that offers value with a subtle call to action. Posts with a soft sell, focusing on the audience’s needs and delivering value without the CTA, perform better. You can't just keep selling things or trying to get people to click links... LinkedIn hates you leaving the platform and they will de-boost your posts.
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The Pros and Cons of "Link in Comments"Posts with external links often get down-boosted because LinkedIn wants to keep users on the platform. Adding links in the comments or at the very end of the post is a better strategy, though even this approach reduces post impressions.
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LinkedIn doesn't want your posts to go viralHowever it might look, LinkedIn explicitly prioritises real conversations and interactions rather than people mindlessly sharing clickbait. Concentrate on having real conversations, replying to comments, and replying to the comments on comments. This will boost your own impressions.
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LinkedIn Blue and Gold Badges are Statistically MeaninglessThere's no statistically significant impact on having either of these badges. The badges are just there to make you feel special and keep you coming back to LinkedIn so that they can keep advertising to you. People with blue badges don't obviously have better content than those without, and people with gold badges are just being rewarded for feeding the AI-training hamster wheel.
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Beware Engagement PodsEngagement Pods are private groups of people who share their posts with each other so they can game engagement and try to defeat the dreaded algorithm. However, these are super-easy to detect and they show up quickly even to external analysis. There are better ways to win at LinkedIn than paying exorbitant fees to snake oil salespeople.
Contact IvanaYou can catch up with Ivana on LinkedIn or check out AuthoredUp.
Related episodes you should like:* How to Move Fast Without Breaking Things (Dani Grant, Co-founder & CEO @ Jam) * Valentine's Special! A Love Letter to Problems, not Solutions (Uri Levine, Founder @ Waze & Author "Fall in Love with the Problem, not the Solution") * Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary) * The Big Pivot to Reinvent Product Management (Yana Welinder, Founder & CEO @ Kraftful) * Nailing your Product/Market Fit Strategy by Focusing on the Mission Critical (Maja Voje, Growth Strategy Expert & Author "Go-To-Market Strategist") * Nailing your Brand Marketing by Embracing your Zone of Genius (Orly Zeewy, Brand Strategy Consultant & Author "Ready, Launch, Brand") * Helping Superhero Startup Founders Stay Away from their Kryptonite (Richard Blundell, Founder @ Vencha & Co-author "The Go To Market Handbook for B2B SaaS Leaders") * Building Great Companies through Community-Led Growth (Lloyed Lobo, Author "From Grassroots to Greatness")
Jenny Wanger is a product consultant and coach who loves to educate PMs around the world and is doing just that with her product operations course on Reforge.
Her hot take? Product leaders send their teams off for training but then don't do anything when they come back, and nothing changes. This leads them to question the value of the training, but it's almost never the quality of the training that's at fault, it's what they (don't) do with it.
Find Jenny on LinkedIn and remember to check out her course on Reforge.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
A message from this episode's sponsor - LeadfeederThis episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
Related episodes you should like:* The Role of Product Management on Truly Agile Development Teams (Allen Holub, Software Architect, Consultant & Outspoken Twitter Agilist) * Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude) * Escaping the Build Trap with Product Operations and Strong CPOs (Melissa Perri, Product Management Leader, Educator & Author "Escaping the Build Trap") * OKRs: The Gateway Drug to Agility & Good Product Management (Jeff Gothelf, Product Management Consultant & Co-author "Lean UX" ) * The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs) * Going Beyond the Dreaded Product Demo and Creating the Perfect Sales Pitch (April Dunford, Author "Obviously Awesome" and "Sales Pitch") * Enabling Strategic Product Decisions through Product Operations and Portfolio Management (Becky Flint, CEO of Dragonboat) * Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")
Nick Mehta is the CEO of Gainsight, a leading customer and product experience platform that aims to be the operating system for your customer journeys. He's a passionate advocate for Customer Success as a function and as a business strategy, an author of several books on the topic, and recently super-excited about the future of Customer Success in an AI world. We talked about all of these topics and much more.
A message from this episode's sponsor - LeadfeederThis episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
Episode highlights:1. Customer Success is not the same as Customer SupportYes, they both have the same "CS" initials, and this can confuse people, but it's not the same role. Customer Success conceptually sits somewhere in between Sales and Customer Support and drives customer value and retention. Customer Success is also more than a role, it's a company strategy. It's also part of the product you sell.
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The end of the zero-interest-rate climate has had a profound impact on Customer SuccessThese days, CEOs and investors value profit today over profit tomorrow. Retention is a huge driver of pure profit, and it's one of the highest-leverage activities you can invest in for a recurring revenue business. On the flip side, leaders are looking to become as efficient as possible and reduce the human effort to drive this retention, leading to a requirement for digital customer success strategies.
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Yes, you probably do need a Customer Success team in your organisationChris Degnan (CRO at Snowflake) recently opined on the 20VC podcast that he sees no use for Customer Success teams and would immediately get rid of them. That doesn't work for everyone though, and there are many companies that legitimately need Customer Success teams. It's fair enough to say "Customer Success is a strategy" but someone needs to wake up thinking about this and having it as their biggest priority. Customer expectations are rising all the time, and not all products can look after themselves.
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Product teams and Customer Success teams need to have a good relationshipToo many teams have almost no relationship, or only speak when there's an escalation. Both teams have a legitimate claim to own the customer experience, but they should own it together. The best Customer Success teams don't just bring escalations, or even the "What" but the "Who" and the "Why". This makes the relationship strategic and helps build a great product.
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AI is going to change everything, but it has to be human-firstIf you're not keeping up with AI you're going to be left behind. It's important to focus on the evolutionary and revolutionary changes that you can bring to your product. There need to be guardrails in your product to ensure that the customer experience doesn't degrade, and you need to be sensitive to the fears and paranoia of internal teams that might feel threatened... but it's going to happen so you need a strategy to survive and thrive in the AI-powered future.
Check out "Digital Customer Success""In Digital Customer Success: The Next Frontier, a team of trailblazing Customer Success professionals and digital entrepreneurs delivers an insightful discussion of the next stage in Customer Success management. In the book, you'll discover how to design and deploy touchless and automated digital interventions that help your software users learn and grow as they use your product and unlock the value trapped within it — without ever needing to reach out to a live Customer Success Manager. "
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact NickYou can catch up with Nick on LinkedIn or check out Gainsight. You can also check out the blog post that Nick mentions, The One Thing Billionaire Frank Slootman Got Wrong.
Related episodes you should like:* Is Product-Led Growth Really For You? (Leah Tharin, Product-Led Growth Guru & Head of Product @ Jua) * Embracing Change to Innovate in Product Management (Greg Coticchia, CEO @ Sopheon) * The Big Pivot to Reinvent Product Management (Yana Welinder, Founder & CEO @ Kraftful) * Helping Superhero Startup Founders Stay Away from their Kryptonite (Richard Blundell, Founder @ Vencha & Co-author "The Go To Market Handbook for B2B SaaS Leaders") * Andy Walters' Hot Take - We’re Soon Going to be Living in an AI-Assistant-First World (Andy Walters, CEO @ Emerge Haus & Generative AI Expert) * Bjarte Rettedal's Hot Take - AI Models Should Be Under Public Ownership or Completely Transparent (Bjarte Rettedal, UX Designer) * Greg Prickril's Hot Take - AI is going to change everything for Product Managers (Greg Prickril, B2B Product Management Coach, Consultant & Trainer) * Debbie Levitt's Hot Take - Democratising our Work means AI is Going to Steal all our Jobs Sooner (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck")
Rina Alexin is the CEO of Productside, a leading product training and consulting company (formerly known as The 280 Group). Rina is passionate about furthering the craft of product management around the world.
Her hot take? Product managers complain about stakeholders, but they're just doing their jobs and we need to spend some of our energy on understanding them and properly collaborating rather than treating them as annoyances.
Find Rina on LinkedIn or check out Productside
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Related episodes you should like: May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport (May Wong, Product Operations Consultant & Coach) * Untrapping Product Teams and Getting Rid of Bullsht Management (David Pereira, Author "Untrapping Product Teams") * Dean Peters' Hot Take - There's More to be Said About the Instagram-ification of Product Management (Dean Peters, Principal Consultant & Trainer @ Productside) * John Cutler's Hot Take - The Instagram-ification of Product Management is Driving us Crazy (John Cutler, Product Educator & Author @ The Beautiful Mess) * Build Better Products at Scale with Product Operations (Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles, Product Consultants & Co-authors "Product Operations") * Knowing your Customers, Seeking Evidence and Sticking up for Continuous Discovery (Hope Gurion, Product Leader and Team Coach @ Fearless Product) * Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed") * Applying Product Management Principles to Life (Miloš Belčević, Author "Build Your Way")
Andy Walters is a long-time consultant who has recently focused his consulting work on supporting companies with GenAI adoption with his new firm, Emerge Haus.
His hot take? Within the next few years, we're going to be moving to an AI-assistant-first operating model, and we can't stop it. There are too many financial incentives, but it might actually be better for users too; as consumers, but also potentially for their private lives too.
Find Andy on LinkedIn or check out Emerge Haus
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Bjarte Rettedal is a photographer-turned looking to take his interest in behavioural economics and systems thinking and pursue a career in UX design.
His hot take? AI models should be under public ownership or at the very least fully transparent. We don't let people release supplements or medicines without extensive testing, so why are we OK with something as potentially high-impact as AI models?
Find Bjarte on LinkedIn or bjarterettedal.com
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Greg Prickril is a B2B Product Management coach, consultant and trainer who has gone all-in on AI and is bullish about the impact that he thinks it'll have on product management.
His hot take? AI is going to change everything about product management. It's going to mean fewer jobs are required to deliver products, but it also opens up opportunities for business-focused product managers to make a real impact in their jobs, and accelerate them in doing so.
Find Greg on LinkedIn, Prickril.com or https://www.coachpms.com/
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
A message from this episode's sponsor - LeadfeederThis episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
May Wong is a product operations consultant and coach who also runs ProductTO, an in-person product management meetup in Toronto.
Her hot take? Product management is a team sport, and too much product management literature focuses on what the product manager should do, not what the team should do.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
A message from this episode's sponsor - LeadfeederThis episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
David Pereira is a product leader, speaker and regular blogger who loves to contribute to the wider Agile and Product communities with insights from his own career, including some of the mistakes he's made and not just the successes. David was recently tempted into writing a book, the newly released "Untrapping Product Teams" where he provocatively rails against "bullshit management" and tries to inspire us all to affect change in our organisations (but step-by-step). We talked all about themes from the book, as well as what it meant to have an endorsement from Marty Cagan.
Episode highlights:1. When someone starts doing something differently and delivering value, people get curiousSometimes it can seem almost impossible to change things yourself, but you don't have to change it all at once. If you can start showing the impact of smaller changes that deliver value then you can get both interest and buy-in from stakeholders. This gives you permission to try more things.
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The more bullshit you handle the less value you createDavid coined the term "bullshit management" to represent the work you have to do in many low-performing product companies. Bullshit management is where you spend all your time working on the work around the work, prioritising requirements with no context and being actively prevented from delivering value to your users, and it has to stop.
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Collaborative flow trumps coordinative flowCoordinative flow is when you spend more time in meetings about the work and struggle to align people than you do actually doing the work. It's focused on outputs and gives you someone to blame when it goes wrong. Collaborative flow is when teams come together to work on problems... collaboratively and use what they know to uncover what they don't know.
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You don't need to die on every hillSometimes you have to hold your nose and do things in ways that you don't believe are effective, or actively destructive. This is part and parcel of the job and something you have to get used to. As long as you can find small ways to make an impact in some areas, you can give way in other areas. Rome wasn't built in a day.
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If you really want to make an impact, ask more questions than you give answersWe're all primed to look clever and give answers as quickly as we can but product people need to think deeper than that and ask good questions. Why do we really need that? What does success really look like? What don't we know?
Check out "Untrapping Product Teams""Untrapping Product Teams guides you to simplify what gets unintentionally complicated and equips you to overcome dangerous traps while steadily driving customer and business value. This isn't just another book about product management. It's a thought-provoking guide filled with simplicity, encouraging you to act today for a better tomorrow."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact DavidYou can catch up with David on LinkedIn or check out his website.
Related episodes you should like:* Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude) * Build High Growth Products by Following the Product Science Success Path (Holly Hester-Reilly, Founder @ H2R Product Science) * Pragmatic Digital Transformation in Traditional Industries (Dan Chapman, Director, Product Line Leader @ Merck) * Optimising Product Planning with the Quartz Open Framework (Steve Johnson, Product Coach) * Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant) * Surviving a Lack of Product Thinking & Riding the Product Maturity Curve (Nis Frome, VP Product @ Feedback Loop) * Is this Seriously Game Over for Scrum? (David Pereira, Editor @ Serious Scrum) * Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")
Dean Peters is a former opera singer turned product management leader, coach and educator who works with Productside to uplevel teams.
His hot take? That there's more to say about the Instagram-ification of product management, the root causes and contributory factors.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
A message from this episode's sponsor - JuneThis episode is sponsored by June. June is a user retention hub for early-stage B2B SaaS companies that enables early-stage B2B SaaS companies to understand and act on their product usage, dig into activation, churn and key feature usage. Check out June here.
Related episodes you should like:* Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude) * The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs) * Practice Makes Perfect: Embracing the Messy Reality of Product Management (Matt LeMay, Product Management Consultant & Author "Product Management in Practice") * John Cutler's Hot Take - The Instagram-ification of Product Management is Driving us Crazy (John Cutler, Product Educator & Author @ The Beautiful Mess) * Applying Product Management Principles to Life (Miloš Belčević, Author "Build Your Way") * Nils Davis's Hot Take - Product Managers Need to Tell Better Stories on their Resumes (Nils Davis, Resume Coach & Go-to-Market Consultant @ Confidence & Impact LLC) * Debbie Levitt's Hot Take - Democratising our Work means AI is Going to Steal all our Jobs Sooner (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck") * Build Better Products at Scale with Product Operations (Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles, Product Consultants & Co-authors "Product Operations")
Aakash Gupta is a product leader turned author and professional newsletter writer, with a huge following on LinkedIn and Twitter. He writes regularly on product management principles, and personal and career growth and recently put out an article about nailing the product leadership job search. We also recently collaborated on an article about fractional product leadership! In this interview, I spoke to Aakash about his journey into full-time content creation and some of the lessons he learned about the product leadership job search.
Episode highlights:1. The product leadership job market is slowly coming back to lifeIt's been tough out there, and loads of amazing people have been laid off and struggled to find new roles. Some might doubt they'll ever get another job again! But there are good and great jobs available if you know where to look.
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Many of the best jobs aren't advertised in public and relationshps are everythingThere's a "dark web" of networking and personal relationships, without which you might struggle to get introduced to some of the jobs. At the highest level, the majority of jobs are not posted publicly. Whether you like it or not, you need to play the game and build strategic relationships with boutique recruiters and especially investors.
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You need to prioritise the type of job you want and it's not all about moneyMost people are trying to optimise for something in their new job. Maybe it's a big pay packet. Maybe it's a mission they believe in. Maybe it's the stage of company, influence and impact. There's no wrong answer, but make sure you know what you're getting yourself into and what success looks like.
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Try to make your career look linear to land the role you wantMany of us have squiggly careers and we've bounced between industries or types of company. This is fine, but if you're looking to get a job in a particular niche then you need to optimise your career narrative to tell a story about why YOU are the person for that niche.
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Many leaders are still biased towards Big Tech employees, but you can beat the oddsSome founders or business leaders will always prioritise someone with a stellar name on their CV, and this can leave people who have worked for lesser-known companies feeling adrift. However, you can take a strategic view of your job search, outwork and outsmart your competition.
Contact AakashYou can catch up with Aakash on LinkedIn, or Twitter or check out his newsletter.
Related episodes you should like:* Connecting Product Management to Business Goals by Mastering your Product Strategy (Gabrielle Bufrem, Product Leadership Coach & Advisor) * Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary) * How to Build Products when the Founder IS the Product (Saagar Bains, Fractional Product Leader & Former Head of Product @ The Body Coach) * Landing That Perfect Role by Finding Your Inevitable Edge (Erika Klics, Job Search Strategist & Founder @ ErikaKlics.com) * Supporting the Next Generation of Female Product Managers with Women in Product UK (Namrata Sarmah, Founder @ Women in Product UK & CPO @ INTO) * Making our Product Teams Stronger through Building Communities of Practice (Petra Wille, Author "Strong Product People" and "Strong Product Communities") * Nils Davis's Hot Take - Product Managers Need to Tell Better Stories on Their Resumes (Nils Davis, Resume Coach & Go-to-Market Consultant @ Confidence & Impact LLC) * Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")
Nils Davis is a resume coach who wants product managers to realise they're AMAZING, and help others realise it too.
His hot take? That the majority of product managers are doing themselves a disservice by producing resumes that simply list a bunch of tasks that pretty much all product managers have done.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time at https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot
Visit Nils's site: https://perfectpmresume.com/
Nils on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilsdavis/
John Cutler is a systems overthinker, product educator and author of "The Beautiful Mess" newsletter.
His hot take? That the Instagram-ification of product management sets unrealistic standards, and is driving us all crazy.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Debbie Levitt is a UX and CX consultant, the author of a few books, including "Customers Know You Suck" and runs a thriving community of UX professionals.
Her hot take?
That if we are all fine doing each other's jobs (and maybe not doing them well) then AI can do all of our jobs today.
Also available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT5IBKsIE-E&ab_channel=OneKnightinProduct
Melissa Perri is the renowned author of "Escaping the Build Trap" and a well-known product consultant and educator. She has worked for a long time with Denise Tilles, another seasoned product leader, with whom she has been evangelising Product Operations to help scale product companies effectively. They recently collaborated on a book, coincidentally called "Product Operations", and we spoke all about the story behind the book and the themes within it.
Saeed Khan and I are planning a new course - please give us your feedback!The relationship between product management and sales teams is traditionally tricky, and a common complaint from B2B PMs. Saeed Khan and I are looking to help with this with an online course and we'd love your feedback on your relationship with sales. This will help shape the course and, if you want to take part when the course is ready, we'll give you a special discount.
Please fill in the survey here. Thanks!
Episode highlights:1. Product Operations is about helping product managers make faster, better-quality decisionsIt's important to dispel the myth of multi-armed product managers who can just do everything. There's too much for everyone to do! This creates barriers to doing great product management work and pulls product managers away from doing the real, value-add product management work that they're judged on.
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There are three pillars of product operations...The three pillars are ways to think about how to organise enablement. They are "Business & Data Insights", "Customer & Market Insights" and "Process and Practices". They are all the foundation of good product decision-making, and all companies will have a certain level of maturity already.
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... But you don't need to build all the pillars all at onceYou don't need to fix everything at once. If you already have good capabilities in one or more areas, fix the ones that you don't have good capabilities in! You don't need to boil the ocean, just find the biggest gaps and opportunities to improve, and start to work on them.
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Process shouldn't be seen as a dirty wordThere's such a thing as too much process but, even if you don't call it process or try to define it, all work involves a process. It's important to have people to oversee the process at scale, prevent duplication or rework, and make sure that process is right-sized rather than ever-expanding.
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The first step is being honest about your current stateThere are plenty of ways to go with product operations as you scale, but the most important thing is being really honest with yourself about what your most important limiting factors are, what your product managers are spending time on and what's going to work for you.
Check out "Product Operations""Many companies want to reap the benefits of economies of scale that comes with being a product-led company. As our businesses change shape to focus more on software, so do our ways of working. We need to make sure we’re breaking down these silos of information and capabilities that arise at scale. To react quickly and set great Product Strategies, leaders and team members alike need access to high-quality data and a process to implement their decisions."
Check it out on Amazon or the book website.
Check out "Escaping the Build Trap""To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. "
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Melissa & DeniseYou can catch up with Melissa at melissaperri.com, check out https://productinstitute.com or follow her on LinkedIn.
You can catch up with Denise at denisetilles.com or follow her on LinkedIn.
- Escaping the Build Trap with Product Operations and Strong CPOs (Melissa Perri, Product Management Leader, Educator & Author "Escaping the Build Trap")
- OKRs: The Gateway Drug to Agility & Good Product Management (Jeff Gothelf, Product Management Consultant & Co-author "Lean UX" )
- Achieving Product Excellence with the Product Operations Manifesto (Antonia Landi, Product Ops Consultant & Co-Author "Product Operations Manifesto")
- Adventures in Product Management (Dan Olsen, Author "The Lean Product Playbook")
- Going Global! When and How to Take your Product International (Chui Chui Tan, International Growth Adviser & Director @ Beyō Global)
- Your Product is a Joke - How to use Improv Comedy Principles in Product Management (Amogh Sarda, Co-founder @ Eesel)
- Leading & Evolving Product Teams Through Hyperscale (Brian Shen, Product Director @ ClickUp)
- Optimising Product Planning with the Quartz Open Framework (Steve Johnson, Product Coach)
Hope Gurion is a seasoned product coach and one of Marty Cagan's recommendations from his new book, "Transformed". Hope also works closely with Teresa Torres, teaching continuous discovery, as well as working directly with incoming product leaders to help them make an impact in their organisations. We spoke all about knowing your customers, gathering evidence, and whether continuous discovery is really a threat to user researchers.
Episode highlights:1. Product coaching is more than just being there to ask good questionsWhen working with incoming product leaders, potentially without a product background at all, it's important to have a coach who has product experience who can help you identify your weaknesses, assess the state of play and provide actionable advice. Ultimately, it's important to empower the coachee.
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It's really hard to make decisions if you have no idea who your customers areIt's important to define who your target customer is and what are their key attributes. This could be demographics, firmographics or whatever characteristics you need to know who you most need to learn from to calibrate your decisions as a product team. But, too many product teams end up resorting to proxies in other functions who "know the customers".
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Many leaders are overconfident, but evidence is everythingSome people are just naturally confident about everything and can react badly if their ideas are challenged. But, as product people, we absolutely need to look beyond innate confidence and work out what informed the perspective. Which customers are we basing it on? Can I speak to some of those customers? It's not about trashing people's ideas but moving forward with confidence.
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It's important to get comfortable with making bets and understanding the difference between one-way and two-way-door decisionsSometimes teams get stuck into cycles of trying to do "perfect research", possibly because they're afraid that they're only going to get one shot at it. This means that they end up not making any moves at all, and everyone ends up getting frustrated at the amount of time product teams take to do anything.
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Continuous discovery is about removing as many blind spots as possible and probably isn't responsible for mass user research lay-offsAll teams have an imperfect understanding of their product, the pain points associated with their product and their customers. Continuous discovery helps address this by removing blind spots but doesn't aim for perfection - simply evidence about how to make your next move. Is it contributing to user researcher lay-offs? It feels difficult to argue this when it feels like the majority of companies don't do any user research in the first place. User researchers and continuous discovery can co-exist.
Contact HopeYou can catch up with Hope at Fearless Product or follow her on LinkedIn.
Related episodes you should like:* Data-Informed Decision Making and the Three Cs of Product Management (Roger Snyder, VP of Products & Services @ 280 Group) * Adventures in Product Management (Dan Olsen, Author "The Lean Product Playbook") * Getting into the Habit of Continuous Discovery (Teresa Torres, Author "Continuous Discovery Habits") * Build High Growth Products by Following the Product Science Success Path (Holly Hester-Reilly, Founder @ H2R Product Science) * Selling Product Thinking by Influencing Companies at the Right Time (Anthony Marter, Product Coach) * Putting Customers at the Heart of your Product Decisions (Hubert Palan, Founder @ Productboard) * Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant) * Build What Matters with Vision-Led Product Management (Rajesh Nerlikar, Author "Build What Matters")
Marty Cagan is the founder and a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, a leading product consultancy that aims to get companies to work "the way that the best companies work". He is the author of two desk references for product managers: "Inspired", aimed at product teams, and "Empowered", aimed at product leaders. He has since come to realise that "the way the best companies work" is too vague a term, and also that many companies have no idea where to get started. He's now back with "Transformed", a book that aims to get companies to adopt the Product Operating Model.
A message from this episode's sponsor - New York Product ConferenceJoin hundreds of other product people in New York City on April 18th 2024 for the New York Product Conference! You'll learn from some of the best minds in product today — including Dennis Crowley (Founder of Foursquare), Sahil Lavingia (Founder of Gumroad), April Dunford (product positioning expert and bestselling author) and so many others through masterclass keynotes, interactive working sessions, small group discussions and more. Topics covered include Product Strategy, Product Leadership, AI for Product Managers, Customer Research, and more.
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Episode highlights:1. It was finally important to give the Product Operating Model a nameWhilst Marty doesn't like to unnecessarily label things, or have any sniff of "process" for the sake of process, he started to realise that just saying "the way the best companies work" was too vague and handwavy. However, the core principles of great product companies and product teams have not changed, and this isn't a framework.
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Marty and SVPG didn't invent any of this stuff, and you shouldn't listen to him (or anyone) uncriticallyThese days, it's fashionable to beat up product "thought leaders" and complain that they're being too dogmatic, idealistic, or unrealistic. But, SVPG didn't invent any of these principles, they just observed them in the best-performing product companies. It's still important to apply critical thinking and make sure they make sense to you and your organisation.
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Product managers and product leaders have more power and more responsibility than they realiseIt's not always easy to transform, and there are limits to how far you can go bottoms-up, but you can generally make progress one step at a time. There's an incredible amount of onus on product leaders to evangelise and champion this change and, if they can't (or won't) do it, they shouldn't be product leaders.
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Not everyone in an organisation will understand why it's transforming, or want to be transformedIt's easy to see this as something that just affects product teams, but the whole organisation needs to buy into the change. Reading bits of "Inspired" at them, or talking about the number of experiments you've done this week, is unlikely to sway them, You need to show business results and real impact and make them care about it on their terms.
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There are four key competencies for a successful transformation, and they need investing inThe competencies remain the same... Product Managers, Product Leaders, "proper" Product Designers (not just pixel pushers) and Tech Leads who care as much about what they're building as how they're building it. If you just expect to get results with a disengaged, outsourced engineering team, graphic designers and product owners, you're going to be disappointed.
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Sometimes you need help to know what good looks likeIt's easy for people like us to sit there and talk about the benefits of product transformation and how we should all definitely do it but, for some people, this is all alien. In cases like this, a good product coach can be the difference between success and failure. But, there are so many product coaches these days, so make sure you get a good one.
Check out "Transformed""The most common question after reading INSPIRED and EMPOWERED has been: "Yes, we want to work this way, but the way we work today is so different, and so deeply ingrained, is it even possible for a company like ours to transform to the product model?" TRANSFORMED was written to bridge the gap between where most companies are right now and where they need to be. The leaders of these companies know they must transform to compete in an era of rapidly changing enabling technology, but most of them have never operated this way before. "
Check it out on Amazon.
Check out "Empowered""Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products. The goal of EMPOWERED is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you’ll need to create just such an environment. "
Check it out on Amazon.
Check out "Inspired""How do today’s most successful tech companies―Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla―design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than most tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love―and that will work for your business. "
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact MartyYou can catch up with Marty at Silicon Valley Product Group or follow him on LinkedIn.
Related episodes you should like:* Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude) * The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs) * How to Build an Effective Product Organisation (Marty Cagan, Author "Empowered" & "Inspired") * Pragmatic Digital Transformation in Traditional Industries (Dan Chapman, Director, Product Line Leader @ Merck) * Optimising Product Planning with the Quartz Open Framework (Steve Johnson, Product Coach) * Surviving a Lack of Product Thinking & Riding the Product Maturity Curve (Nis Frome, VP Product @ Feedback Loop) * Is this Seriously Game Over for Scrum? (David Pereira, Editor @ Serious Scrum) * Transforming companies & instilling a product mindset (Dave Martin, Founder @ Right to Left)
Miloš Belčević is a product manager and author who believes that product management principles are powerful not only when managing products, but also when managing the ultimate product; your life itself. He has written a book on the subject, "Build Your Way: Applying Product Management to Life". We spoke about the book as well as some of the lessons inside.
Episode highlights:1. We can apply product management principles to lifeWe can apply product management principles to one's life, beyond just professional settings. This includes using prioritisation frameworks to manage personal goals and tasks, and considering whether there's a "North-Star metric" that can help guide personal growth and decision-making.
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Context switching can be hell at home as well as workWhether we're switching contexts between different roles in our careers or having to balance multiple responsibilities, we can apply product management strategies to help us prioritise our time and manage our mental bandwidth.
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We can define "Value" for our life as well as our productsThere's no magic formula for "value", but it's important to understand the deeper meaning of the concept of value, whether delivering value to customers or identifying what brings value to one's life.
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Our time is limited and we need to prioritise what's most important to usWe don't have to use prioritisation frameworks for everything, but applying product management prioritisation techniques can help us focus on what is most important. If we practice enough, we can get into the habit, and it even becomes somewhat intuitive to our life decisions.
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Product discovery techniques can foster better interactions and conversations in lifeWe can use our empathic and discovery mindset to help solicit genuine feedback and dig into people's motivations in conversations. This offers the tantalising prospect of being able to bridge ideological divides and improve the quality of our interactions with society as a whole.
Check out "Build Your Way""Perhaps you have heard about product management. Maybe you use it in your work. If that’s the case, chances are high that you know that product management is full of useful frameworks, principles, and tools that focus on prioritization and maximizing value, better planning, agile delivery, and more. But what if you want to use these tools in your personal life? How would you do that in a way that will make sure you will live a better, happier, and more fulfilled life? In this book, author Miloš Belčević will show you how."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact MilošYou can catch up with Miloš on LinkedIn or check out his website.
Related episodes you should like:* Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude) * Practice Makes Perfect: Embracing the Messy Reality of Product Management (Matt LeMay, Product Management Consultant & Author "Product Management in Practice") * The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Productization (Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author "Productize") * Achieving Product Excellence with the Product Operations Manifesto (Antonia Landi, Product Ops Consultant & Co-Author "Product Operations Manifesto") * Paying Off Your Organisation's Human Debt Through Agility & Psychological Safety (Duena Blomstrom, Founder & CEO @ People Not Tech) * Embracing Change to Innovate in Product Management (Greg Coticchia, CEO @ Sopheon) * Fearlessly Defeating the Four Horsemen of a Product-Friendly Culture (Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author "Productize" & "Fearless") * Pragmatic Digital Transformation in Traditional Industries (Dan Chapman, Director, Product Line Leader @ Merck)
Debbie Levitt is a long-time UX and CX consultant who wants us all to get better at putting our users at the centre of the conversation, rather than paying lip service. She's the author of a few books, including "Customers Know You Suck" and runs a thriving community of UX professionals. Some of the stories from that community have concerned her, alongside the general perceived decline of the strategic role of UX, and she recently came out all guns blazing against continuous discovery, PM-led research, and one particular author who champions it. We spoke about the role of UX and CX in organisations, what's happening to user researchers, and whether PMs are really to blame for it.
Episode highlights:1. User Experience and Customer Experience used to be the same thing, and they can be againIn these digital days, it seems like most people think UX people are just there in the corner to colour in people's ideas, but UX should be a strategic role that enables user and customer-focused decision-making and makes sure we always balance our business's needs with those of our users.
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We prize and prioritise speed over quality - we just have to get it doneWe've been moving fast and breaking things for long enough now to realise how often it doesn't work. User research feels unconscionably slow to some people, but it doesn't have to be slow, and doing good user research (whoever does it) is an investment in trying to get things right.
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No matter how much product managers feel they're disempowered, they're still the Golden Children of the companyBack in the old days, product managers were hiding in the corner with the UX people, as agilists and engineers rode through the company calling all the shots. Now the UX people are hiding with the engineers whilst the PM makes all of the decisions. There's a power imbalance, and it's not a true "trio".
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User researchers are getting laid off, some of the jobs are gone for good and, at least in some cases, this is because leaders think they can just hand the work off to PMsIt's not fair or reasonable to lay all of this at the doors of PM thought leaders championing certain approaches. There are plenty of UX thought leaders who champion them too. But, people are getting laid off and at least some of them are blaming PM-led product discovery as the root cause.
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We should be able to look at books and take what works from them, but apply critical thinking and ensure that we don't follow any message blindlyMost books have something useful in them, and all approaches can work in some contexts. Debbie has her approach, others have their approaches, and there's no one "right way". But, it's important to make sure that approaches can be challenged, expanded upon, and that the approaches and techniques are described clearly and without room for interpretation.
Check out "Customers Know You Suck""Customers Know You Suck is the how-to manual for customer-centric product-market fit. Its highly actionable models, maps, and processes empower everyone to improve the Customer Experience (CX). Learn how to investigate, diagnose, and act on what's blocking teams. Gather the evidence and data that better inform decisions, leading to increased satisfaction, conversion, and loyalty. Use our governance model for implementing and monitoring the progress, success, and failure of internal process changes and experiments."
Check it out on Amazon or pay what you want.
Check out how to use a Knowledge QuadrantDebbie is a fan of doing good discovery, naturally. Here's a video of an approach she recommends called the Knowledge Quadrant: Workshop: Discovery Phase - Knowledge Quadrant
Contact DebbieYou can catch up with Debbie on LinkedIn or check out Delta CX.
Related episodes you should like:* Using Solution Tests to Make Sure You're Building Products Users Want (Jim Morris, Founder @ Product Discovery Group) * Getting into the Habit of Continuous Discovery (Teresa Torres, Author "Continuous Discovery Habits") * We're All Responsible For Accessible Product Design (Holly Schroeder, Senior UX Researcher & Accessibility Advocate) * Making Sure You Make an Impact through User Research (Steve Portigal, User Research Consultant & Author "Interviewing Users") * Product Leadership Principles for Tumultuous Times (Giff Constable, Author "Talking with Humans" & "Testing with Humans") * How to Deploy Empathy to Truly Understand User Needs (Michele Hansen, Author "Deploy Empathy") * Chinese Startup Culture & Putting the Minimum into MVP (Carlos Lastres, Creative & Marketing Director @ Kaiyan Medical) * Building a Culture of Continuous Discovery (Cindy Alvarez, Author "Lean Customer Development")
Lloyed Lobo got his first understanding of the power of community when visiting his grandparents in the Mumbai slums, and watching people come together in his childhood during the Gulf War. He has since turned this into an entrepreneurial superpower and used community-building to catapult his bootstrapped startup into the big time. He's since written a book about all of this stuff called "From Grassroots to Greatness: 13 Rules to Build Iconic Brands with Community-Led Growth". We spoke about the book and many of the topics within.
Episode highlights:1. Community is a company strategy, not a marketing strategyIt's not enough to just sit there and layer "community" on top of your existing marketing and expect it to pay back instantly. It has to be part of your company's DNA, something that your customers and your employees can be inspired and motivated by. Attribution is hard, but the results will come.
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You need to show up for your community or they won't show up for youYou cannot take your community for granted. You need to provide them with constant, consistent value with no immediate expectation of reward. They will keep coming for the value, and you are engineering serendipity for future conversations.
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Don't be afraid to have the sales conversationsThat said, if you don't ask, you don't get. You cannot be afraid of trying to offer paid value to your community, even if it feels uncomfortable to ask. If you are providing value then people will be happy to talk to you. Not everyone will become a customer, but some will. Use the reciprocity bias to your advantage.
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There is power in finding your niche and sticking to itDon't try to go too wide chasing vanity metrics. You will get more value out of a smaller community of people who share your exact passions than out of a generic sea of people who couldn't care less. Make sure you identify your people, show up for them, and own your white space.
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Community can be as much of a moat as technology or industry expertiseThere are more communities and products to solve problems for communities than ever before but, if you have the right community, you can use it to your advantage. Having an engaged, passionate community can help prevent your company from becoming a commodity.
Check out "From Grassroots to Greatness""In a world where traditional marketing is losing its edge and products are struggling to stand out, a thriving community is your biggest asset. Recognizing that true success lies not in products or technologies, but in the power of people, author Lloyed Lobo explores the intricate art of harnessing the community's strength as your ultimate acquisition channel, brand differentiator, feedback source, retention lever, and catalyst for transformative change."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact LloyedYou can catch up with Lloyed on LinkedIn or Instagram.
Shyvee Shi is a Product Lead at LinkedIn, a community-builder, content creator and educator. She's been making waves through her online courses but she's now co-authored a book, "Reimagined: Building Products with Generative AI", which aims to help all of us survive and thrive in the new normal of AI-powered products. We talked about some of the themes from the book, and why it was important for her to write it.
Episode highlights:1. Now is the time for product managers to get into generative AIWhether you're experimenting with putting it in your own products or using it to turbocharge your product management duties, you need to check out generative AI if you want to stay ahead of the curve. It's not going to replace product managers any time soon, but it can help us dream bigger.
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If your competitors can use AI to serve your customers better than you, your business could disappear overnight75% of CEOs are terrified that generative AI will kill their business. It's like the Kodak story on steroids, and it's not even about tankers getting outmanoeuvred by speedboats anymore. Big companies are also getting in on the game and you need to have a response.
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PMs have a responsibility to concentrate on the problem, not the technologyIt's as important as ever for product managers to focus on solving real user problems, no matter what the tech. We can't just slap ChatGPT onto everything and call it a success. Generative AI can help us and our customers in new and interesting ways but we must concentrate on solving their real problems.
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It can be hard to craft a workable go-to-market plan for AI productsThis could be down to falling in love with the technology, struggles with pricing or quality, lack of explainability or poor understanding of your customers' most important jobs to be done. Make sure you're intentional about your go-to-market plan to avoid failure.
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It can be hard to create moats when using generative AI solutionsSo many of these solutions are built on the same back-end, and there are de facto default LLMs. In some cases, startups building on top of things like ChatGPT end up disappearing overnight because OpenAI has developed a new feature of its own. It is possible to create moats through proprietary data, excellent UX and good old-fashioned verticalisation. Make sure you create a moat!
Buy "Reimagined""Did you know that incorporating AI into products is now a pivotal strategy for businesses worldwide? According to a 2023 study from Accenture, a staggering 75% of C-suite executives agree that failure to integrate AI effectively in the next five years could lead to business obsolescence. "Reimagined: Building Products with Generative AI" is your essential guide in this transformative journey. It's not just about understanding AI and Generative AI technologies; it's about strategically harnessing them to drive innovation, team efficiency, and market success.
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact ShyveeYou can catch up with Shyvee on LinkedIn or check out Product Management Reimagined.
Becky Flint started her career at Paypal and helped build out their portfolio management and product operations functions before product ops was a thing. She's since moved through a variety of startups and larger companies before forming her own firm, Dragonboat, through which she hopes to provide tools to help companies manage product portfolios at scale.
Episode highlights:1. Even if you have one product, you might still have a portfolioPeople tend to think about a product portfolio, they think about a massive web of products, but even one-product companies may have multiple product managers working on different aspects of the product and these may well still need to be traded off against each other.
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It's not enough to make strategic decisions, you need to be able to explain themWe're always told to create visions, strategies and roadmaps, but you need to be able to lay these out for a variety of stakeholders and explain them in ways that resonate with them.
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As soon as you have product management, you have product operationsYou may not have a Product Ops team, but someone is doing the product ops work. When you have a small team, maybe you can handle the work but, eventually, you'll need a team to ensure the product teams deliver.
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All product operations professionals should be comfortable with portfolio managementGoing further, product ops professionals who aren't comfortable with managing a portfolio shouldn't be in the job. Product ops people aren't babysitters for the product management team, they're senior, strategic partners.
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ROI isn't enough to make good strategic decisions for your portfolioSometimes, you might not make big, strategic bets with unclear payoffs if you only use financial ROI metrics. You may also make bad resourcing decisions if you don't consider which teams are available when, and not taking account of bundles of value when making trade-offs.
Contact BeckyYou can connect with Becky on LinkedIn. You can also check out Dragonboat. Alongside their SaaS software, they also have a bunch of available resources.
Orly Zeewy is an experienced marketer who "makes the fuzzy clear". She's passionate about helping startup founders get their branding right, and enabling them to identify their own "zones of genius" where they win. She does this through her consultancy, Zeewy Brands, as well as her book, "Ready, Launch, Brand". We spoke all about the ins and outs of branding, and why startup founders need to rethink marketing.
A message from this episode's sponsorThis episode is sponsored by Succeeding in B2B Product Management, a cohort-based, live course that Saeed Khan and I are launching on Maven in January. If you're a B2B product manager struggling to make an impact, a B2B product leader looking to promote healthy product practices, or a B2B founder looking to get your teams to be true business partners, check the course out here. You can use discount code OKIP to get $100 off the price of admission.
Episode highlights:1. Branding is not just a fancy logo and a cool company nameThe true definition of a brand is that it is the sum of all experiences that customers have with an organisation over time. Brands don't live in the minds of the company, or its founders. They live in the minds of their customers.
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Marketing is not just a widget, it's a fundamental cost of running your business, and results take timeSome startup founders either don't bother with marketing at all, or they give up as soon as the first thing they try doesn't work. But, you need to start early and invest for the long term. There are so many brands competing for mindshare and you need to make sure that you remain part of that in an attention-poor market.
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Your company website is your front door, and you need to explain clearly why people should care about youIt can be pretty common for companies to either ignore their website entirely or try to cram as much information as possible on there and overwhelm potential customers. Your website is likely to be the first touchpoint that a potential customer has with your brand, and you need to clearly and concisely explain why they should care about you.
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Not everyone has done this work upfront, but it's important to meet people where they areYes, it's easier to intercept avoidable problems before they occur, but there are plenty of good conversations you can have whatever the situation within the company. It's never too late to try to make a difference, and you can find that the entire company will get energised and rally to the cause once you've put the work in to define what the cause really is.
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People, and organisations, have Zones of Genius and they should focus and stay in their laneIt can be really common for founders and solopreneurs to try to solve every problem for everyone because they're interested in everything and they think that it will increase their chances of success. But, if you can find the thing you're uniquely good at and focus your efforts there then you have a much higher chance of sticking in someone's mind and being their go-to solution for that specific problem.
Buy "Ready, Launch, Brand""You may be familiar with the Silicon Valley expression about the iterative approach to software development, "We’re learning to fly the plane while we’re building it." If so, think of a startup―with all its moving parts, phases, and personalities―as flying a plane, while you’re building it, booking passengers, marketing the airline, interviewing co-pilots, and serving coffee. In this book, Orly Zeewy navigates the turbulence and provides a flight plan so you know when you’ve landed in the right airport."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact OrlyYou can catch up with Orly on LinkedIn or visit Zeewy Brands.
Steve Portigal is an experienced user researcher and author of two books, "Interviewing Users" and "Doorbells Danger, and Dead Batteries". Steve is a passionate advocate for the value of user research, and ensuring that people can find out compelling insights from their users. He's recently re-released a 10th-anniversary edition of "Interviewing Users", and we spoke about some themes from the book and how to make an impact with user research.
Episode highlights:1. Some people are still wary of user research, or think they don't need it, but it remains as important as everIt can be tempting for founders to think they know exactly what they need, rely on feedback from customer-facing teams, or not speak to anyone until they've already built the thing they want to build. Feedback from sales teams and founders is an incredibly important vector, but should only be the start of the discussion never the end.
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Continuous discovery and point-in-time research both have a place in a researcher's armouryThere are methodological constraints to continuous research, alongside the difficulty of finding the time and buy-in to do it but, on the other hand, it can be incredibly impactful to have rapid research tightly coupled to the product team. On the other hand, well-planned up-front research can still help you to find truly disruptive insights for your company. Do both!
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We all have cognitive biases - we should accept that and be honest with ourselves about their effectsPeople look at the word "bias" and worry about the negative connotations, but "bias" just represents how our brains are wired. Cognitive biases will affect how we interview people, and we should do our best to counteract their effect and improve on getting better (even if we're not perfect).
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The best research has a tangible impact rather than being research for research's sakeIt can be a heavy burden to bear if all of your well-planned and well-executed research ends up having no effect on decision-making at all. It's important not to get downhearted, and work out ways to build actionable, accessible repositories to enable your stakeholders to make the best decisions possible.
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There are a lot of similarities between good user research and improvWe don't need to be able to create 45-minute plays off the cuff, and knowing when to stick to our interview plans and when to deviate from the script, enables us to get to the real generative insights that we need from our users and find out what we don't know we don't know.
Buy "Interviewing Users (2nd edition)""Interviewing people is a skill that most professionals who do research assume they already possess. But not everyone knows how to ask questions well. Expert researcher Steve Portigal updates his classic Interviewing Users to provide fresh guidance on interviewing techniques, as well as new content. This edition includes a new foreword by Jamika D. Burge and features two new chapters: one about analysis and synthesis and sharing research results, and another about ensuring that your user research efforts will have an impact on your organization. There are seven new short essays (we call them sidebars) from guest contributors. Plus, you’ll find updated examples, stories, and tips for leading interviews, and new sections about bias, remote research, ResearchOps, planning research, and research logistics. You’ll move from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about people."
My listeners can get 20% off with promo code KNIGHT on the Rosenfeld Media website. This code is valid until 21st December, 2023. Alternatively, check it out on Amazon.
Contact SteveYou can catch up with Steve on LinkedIn or visit Portigal.com.
Richard Blundell is a serial entrepreneur and startup advisor who helps B2B startups win by getting them uncomfortably narrow and solving critical problems. He also believes that startup founders are heroes, and recently published a book trying to help them avoid common mistakes and have the best chance of putting a dent in the universe. We discussed his approach, and what on Earth he's got against product managers.
A message from this episode's sponsor - SuperProductThis episode is sponsored by SuperProduct. Have you ever wished you could simplify competitive research, and reduce time commitment and effort but still get extraordinary insights? Well, have I got news for you! You can try SuperProduct's new course which teaches you how to unlock the potential of AI-powered insights about your competitors and about your market. This course demystifies AI and teaches you how to be the mega prompt maestro that will transform ChatGPT into your personal research assistant. Check the course out here, and make sure to use code KNIGHT to support this podcast.
Episode highlights:1. Your best chance to win in B2B is to get "uncomfortably narrow" and solve a visceral problemStartup founders often start off spraying and praying, hoping to get any traction at all and start to build their revenue. This is understandable, but generally a mistake. It's important to start off way more narrow than feels comfortable and have a really solid plan to get your next 25 customers. Everything else can follow.
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It's easy to get misaligned and lose sight of your core value propositionEven when organisations start off with a solid value proposition, this can change over time. But, in any case, one of the main problems with startups slowing down (or failing to scale up) is often not a lack of sales ability, but a lack of fundamental GTM narrative. You need to fix it upstream.
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Startup founders are heroes...Startup founders put everything on the line to bring a sometimes impossible-seeming vision to fruition. It's easy to criticise them when things are going wrong, but no one has invested more time and effort into their startup than them.
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... but even heroes have weaknessesIt's important for founders to be self-reflective and understand their own weak spots. In some cases, this is the first leadership position they've ever held. In other cases, they'll have glaring gaps based on their own past experience. It's OK to have gaps! But, it's important to be honest about the gaps and get the right people to help you.
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Your first hire at a B2B startup shouldn't be a Head of Sales (or a Product Manager!)It's tempting to get a seasoned seller into the business to get the numbers in but, actually, there's an even more crucial role that you need to hire first. Listen to the episode to find out who, but it's not a product manager - this can come later after you've got a foothold in the market and the founder can no longer scale.
Buy "The Go To Market Handbook for B2B SaaS Leaders""There are few people we admire more than the Founders and Leaders of software companies who have the courage, determination and, some might say, sheer madness to put their livelihoods and reputation on the line, to leave their own ‘dent in the universe’. It's a day to day, up at dawn, pride swallowing siege to lead such a business. And we know this for a fact because we’ve walked in your shoes many times. Over the last 25 years, we’ve been involved in the start-up, scale up and exit of several successful technology businesses, that between them have realized close to billion dollars of shareholder value. But along the way we've also had more than our fair share of disappointments and have the mental scars and bruising to prove it. We’ve made mistakes and fallen in what felt like bottomless pits. But fascinatingly enough, we learned as much from the ones that didn’t work, as we did from the successes. It’s these lessons which we thought we'd share in this book."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact RichardYou can catch up with Richard on LinkedIn or visit Vencha.
Petra Wille is a product leadership coach and the author of "Strong Product People" and "Strong Product Communities". Petra is passionate about helping product teams excel and found that some of the best companies she's worked with use "Communities of Practice" to support product manager growth. We spoke all about this, and how people can get started.
A message from this episode's sponsor - SuperProductThis episode is sponsored by SuperProduct. Have you ever wished you could simplify competitive research, reduce time commitment and effort but still get extraordinary insights? Well, have I got news for you! You can try SuperProduct's new course which teaches you how to unlock the potential of AI-powered insights about your competitors and about your market. This course demystifies AI and teaches you how to be the mega prompt maestro that will transform ChatGPT into your personal research assistant. Check the course out here, and make sure to use code KNIGHT to support this podcast.
Episode highlights:1. Product managers forming communities of practice leads to great outcomes.Organisations where product teams form bottoms-up communities of practice are more up to date in their knowledge and thinking, work more closely together and break down silos. Forming these communities makes better product work easier.
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No two communities of practice are the same (but they're all valuable)Sometimes, it's just a peer learning group. Sometimes, it's a book club. Sometimes it's just a bunch of people going to conferences together. Sometimes it's just a way to share updates with each other. The precise format of a community, and the rituals it observes, are less important than that it exists.
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You need to get a rhythm going earlier to build the muscle memory of a communityIt's easy to see community engagement as something that will atrophy over time, and this is possible, but it's relatively straightforward to build an early rhythm to bed in practices and build muscle memory to make sure that the community sticks.
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The best way to get started is to focus on human-to-human connections, not canvasses, for your minimum viable communityIt's important to focus your community on solving real problems that the team has, rather than the philosophical concept of "learning", which is valuable, but not tangible enough. Find things that matter, and get people together around those things.
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Even if you're in a small company, there are still communities there for you.You might think that communities of practice are just for bigger companies and, to some extent, they are. However, there are always communities out there that will help you; either communities of people with a specific interest or just general meetup communities where you can chat with peers.
Buy "Strong Product Communities""STRONG Product Communities is a comprehensive guide that empowers product people, product leaders, HR, and Learning & Development professionals to develop and nurture successful product Communities of Practice (CoP). The book offers valuable insights gathered from survey data, interviews with CoP leaders, and the author’s hands-on experience."
Check it out on Amazon.
Buy "Strong Product People""Are you a product leader looking for advice on how to be certain that every product manager on your team lives up to their full potential? Do you want to make sure your product people are competent, empowered, and inspired, and would you like to know how you can best help them on this journey? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then this book is for you!"
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact PetraYou can connect with Petra on LinkedIn. You can also check out Strong Product People, or Petra's coaching website.
April Dunford is a world-renowned expert in product positioning who wrote the bestselling "Obviously Awesome" to help us all nail our product positioning. She then realised that companies were having trouble translating this positioning into a sales pitch that worked in the field, so she's back now with "Sales Pitch", a step-by-step process to craft a winning pitch. We spoke about the story behind the book and some of the themes within it.
Episode highlights:1. All companies have a sales pitch, but most people don't seem to know where it came fromThere hasn't been a standard sales pitch approach since forever and, most of the time, it seems that companies just hand the same document down from sales rep to sales rep without ever really considering what it says, or even who owns it. But, there's a method to create one that wins.
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The sales pitch should be grounded in your positioningIt's really important to move beyond just a big list of features with some marketing slides at the front and back, and have a sales deck that tells a story about your differentiated value, your view on the market, and why you are uniquely positioned to solve the problems that market has.
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Your product demo should be done upfront, but not all features are equal so you don't need to demo them allYou need to organise your product demos around your differentiated value and take prospects on a journey rather than clicking through every single button and tab in the product. You need to show them why the features you have matter, not just that you have them.
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You need to call out your competitors because your customers are already thinking about themIt's natural to want to talk about yourself, and not mention your competitors at all. But, if you don't position yourself against your competitors then you allow your competitors to position themselves against you. Prospects want help navigating alternatives, and that means not just concentrating on yourself.
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There are always potential objections to your sales pitch, so get in front of these objectionsAgain, it's natural to try to avoid calling out perceived weaknesses in your product, but good salespeople already handle these in the field. It's worth getting ahead of these objections so you can answer them upfront because prospects aren't always going to mention them explicitly.
Buy "Sales Pitch""World-renowned product positioning and marketing expert April Dunford knows that standing out in a crowded market is the key to getting sales. In Sales Pitch, she shows entrepreneurs, salespeople, marketers, and business leaders how they can achieve success by building a narrative that clearly communicates how your product is different and better than anything else on the market. Using a simple step-by-step method and compelling case stories, the author of Obviously Awesome guides you through a solid sales pitch structure that helps customers make confident buying decisions, while positioning you to clearly win in the market."
Check it out on Amazon.
Buy "Obviously Awesome""You know your product is awesome — but does anybody else? Forget everything you thought you knew about positioning. Successfully connecting your product with consumers isn’t a matter of following trends, comparing yourself to the competition or trying to attract the widest customer base. So what is it? April Dunford, positioning guru and tech exec, will enlighten you."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact AprilYou can catch up with April on LinkedIn. You can also check her podcast, Positioning with April Dunford or her newsletter, also called Positioning with April Dunford.
Maja Voje is a growth strategy expert who has worked with some of the largest tech companies in the world. Through her consulting, she realised that there was a problem holding companies back from product/market fit. Unable to find a playbook to guide companies to the promised land, she decided to research and write one herself. We chatted about the book and some of the themes within it.
Episode highlights:1. 95% of startups will not survive, but you can work together to beat the oddsIt's not normally a bad product that's the problem. There are a zillion reasons for startup failure, but beating the odds is not a product management or a sales or marketing problem. We have to work cross-functionally, join forces and work together to align the company around success.
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Product/market fit is more than just delivering value, but being able to build a sustainable businessTraditional definitions of product/market fit focus on whether you can deliver value to a specific market segment, but it's important to bring other dimensions into play, such as the most effective business model and people's willingness to pay. You have to capture enough value to build a sustainable business.
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It's essential to pick a niche, define your ideal customers, and stick to the planIt's really easy for early startup founders to try to go wide and fix everyone's problems, but this is generally a mistake. It's important to maintain discipline, be strategic, and realise that not all opportunities are created equal. You don't have to make a sale at all costs.
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You're probably not charging enough for your solution, but your customers aren't going to price it for youFounders sometimes fall prey to product imposter syndrome, where they fail to extract fair value from their customers because they're not sure the product is good enough, or feel bad asking for money. We need money! But, don't expect your customers to just tell you a fair price. It's important to do decent pricing research.
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We can learn a lot from "special ops" thinkingBusiness science has matured over the last couple of hundred years, but there are timeless principles from military strategy that can help us succeed. Pitting small resources against larger competition, being nimble, responding to change and executing fast can help us succeed in a crowded marketplace.
Check out "Go-To-Market Strategist""In Growth and Marketing, we were taught how the “big tech” companies grew to their heights more than a decade ago. They had bigger budgets, teams, and global talent. Markets were less saturated. Customers were more excited about innovation. You need a different playbook for GTM. One that applies to bootstrap startups, clever leaders in innovative companies, and independent innovators. So I went on a journey. I devoted a year of my life to interviewing 54 experts from companies such as: Hubspot, Miro, Figma, Metabase, CXL, and many more to ask them to share their “go to market” advice that will most securely and successfully guide you to product-market fit."
Check out the book website.
Contact MajaYou can catch up with Maja on LinkedIn.
Eisha Armstrong is a company founder, digital transformation consultant and author of "Productize" and new book "Fearless". This new book goes deep on the cultural underpinnings of productisation, and how company leader can align their teams and quell their own fears.
Episode highlights:1. Many leaders are afraid of productisation...Leaders want the benefits of productisation, but are afraid to jump in because of the investment required, and whether the bets are going to pay off.
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... But their employees are afraid tooEmployees are afraid that they are going to lose their jobs, that their skills and knowledge will become less valuable, or that the client they have invested time in will reject the new model.
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It's important to sell the vision and the "why" behind productisationIt's no surprise that products need a vision, but it's even more important to explain the "why" of productisation, and to connect an aspirational vision to the hard business metrics and KPIs that resonate with a service-mindset organisation.
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The hallmarks of a successful services firm can kill a product-friendly cultureEisha talks about the four horsemen of product-friendly culture: Knowing, Perfectionism, Scarcity Mindset and Individual Heroics. Productisation changes the game and these traits can sink productisation efforts. The company needs to shift mindset and probably needs to bring in new expertise.
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Product leaders in service-mindset organisations have to be differentProduct leaders in transforming organisations are not the same as product leaders in tech-first product organisations. Technical chops are secondary, and they need to have much better stakeholder management and communication skills to succeed. They need to ensure there is no tissue rejection by an organisation that just doesn't understand.
Buy "Fearless""Transforming a B2B services business model to a more scalable, profitable, productized company can have many points of failure - but the biggest and most underserved is the cultural transformation required to support successful productization. The encore book from Eisha Armstrong and her team at Vecteris, Fearless tackles this frequent point of failure and dives deep on the change management required to build a Product-Friendly Culture."
Check it out on Amazon. You can also check out the book website
Buy "Productize""More and more traditional professional services firms are turning to "productization" as a strategy to grow, improve valuations, and to fend off new digital-first competitors. However, many of them will fail and waste a lot of money in the process. Productize first outlines the "Seven Deadly Productization Mistakes" made when pursuing a product strategy, then provides the blueprint for overcoming each of these missteps. It is designed to be a practical playbook for any leader of a professional services business who wants to successfully accelerate growth."
Check it out on Amazon. You can also check out the book website
Contact EishaYou can catch up with Eisha on LinkedIn.
Saagar Bains is a fractional product leader and product advisor who started out digitally transforming his family's wholesale business and launching its e-commerce site before moving into consulting and into startups. One of those startups was The Body Coach, started by celebrity fitness guru Joe Wicks, where Saagar had the job of translating their vision into scalable reality. For this episode, we travelled to Saagar's hometown of Birmingham for a LIVE interview and Q&A about the pros and cons of building for celebrity creators.
Episode highlights:1. Being an early entrepreneur can really help your product management gameProduct managers often get tied up in the craft of product management and the latest frameworks, but Saagar started out working for his family business and had to work out everything as he went. This gave him an incredible bias for action, to do things that don't scale and to get scrappy where needed. These are traits that many PMs should develop rather than getting precious about process.
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Product Management is all about the "Why"Saagar spent some time working for Deloitte Digital and, in many cases, building stuff without being told why it was being built. This left him feeling unsatisfied, and like he wasn't doing "Proper Product". Luckily, even though The Body Coach started building with an external agency, the "why" was so strong from the founders that Saagar could take over something that made sense.
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Creator-led businesses have a built-in audience, which means that "move fast and break things" doesn't workIf you have millions of users with a direct relationship with the brand upfront, you can't just throw anything out the door. There's an incredible amount of brand equity and trust that needs to be satisfied, and there is a higher quality bar. That said, you still have to pick your battles, and there's still good product prioritisation work to be done.
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All founders are going to come with feature requests, and smart PMs are going to do some of themWhen you have an incredibly well-respected founder who lives and breathes the product, you're going to get requests. Some of them will even make sense. But, product people who don't have evidence against the requests, or a better plan in general, are going to get overridden and they only have themselves to blame. That said, it's important not to rail against feature requests just because they're from a founder.
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Building proper, trusting relationships with the founders is incredibly importantWhen working with creators with a massive following, who have invested so much of themselves into a company, the worst thing you can do is just walk in expecting them to bend to the awesome power of product management. Saagar spent several hours walking and talking with the founders before even getting the job, to understand their motivations and forge a bond. This ultimately helped him be more successful.
Contact SaagarYou can connect with Saagar on LinkedIn.
Namrata (Nam) Sarmah is CPO at INTO University Partnerships and the founder of Women in Product UK, a community through which she hopes to build a pipeline of female product management talent and finally put to bed the excuses that hiring managers currently fall back on when challenged on their female talent acquisition. She's also passionate about making sure we get more product people into the C-suite, and will soon be launching the CPO Track community to support this. We chatted about all this, and much more.
Episode highlights:
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You don't need an MBA to get into product, but it's not unhelpful There's a lot of controversy about the merits (or lack of) of MBAs in product management. MBAs are not essential, but they can be helpful when trying to crack the C-suite as you've already spent a lot of time working on your business sense. There are other ways to get this though; the most important thing is to develop that business sense one way or another.
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Just because you're great a product management, doesn't mean you'll be a great CPO It's hard to land a Chief Product Officer job, and even harder to stay in there. You require a mix of skills, and just being the best at product management doesn't help. It requires a mix of business acumen, executive presence (sad, but true) and the ability to tell a story in terms that resonate with your leadership peers.
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Building a community is hard, but you can treat it like a product Community-building is not an easy skill to teach someone; it requires a certain mindset and certain instincts. There are different types of people in the world, and some of them are natural "connectors" who just know how to join the dots and get people together.
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Women in Product UK is its own thing, and its superpower is diversity There are various communities around the world that support product managers, or female product managers specifically, but a lot of them have quite a narrow focus on certain job levels or roles. Having top female CPOs available for free in a community is a superpower.
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The name of the game is pipeline building, and allies are welcome Some sad sacks will sit and grumble about having a "women in product" group rather than just a generic "people in product" group. but the numbers don't lie. Women are still underrepresented in senior positions, and it's easy for companies to blame "pipeline problems". So let's all build the pipeline, so they don't have an excuse anymore.
Contact Nam You can connect with Nam on LinkedIn or check out Women in Product UK, where you can interact with the community and get onto the WhatsApp group.
Duena Blomstrom is a renowned fintech thought leader who got tired of seeing the same problems in the workplace and decided to go out and try to solve them. Duena took on banking culture with "Emotional Banking" before moving onto wider organisational change with "People Before Tech". We spoke about some of the common problems faced within organisations, how to try to solve them, and some of the reasons why companies resist those solutions.
Episode highlights:
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Santa Claus is not going to come and "puke a generative culture on your enterprise" There are no magic bullets to organisational transformation, but it's also simpler than it sounds. You need to take a number of smaller, measurable steps that move the needle. And teams have a lot more power to affect change than they think - they don't need to await permission.
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We're not fixing it because we get in our own way We let the status quo persist because we don't challenge ourselves, and think this is just the way business works. There's too much fear in the workplace and it's holding us back.
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Impression Management is a big problem at work People are afraid of looking incompetent, intrusive or troublesome at work. This is natural, but it limits us in the workplace. Start noticing when you exhibit these behaviours, and they'll start to go away automatically. It's important to speak up.
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All companies have some level of Human Debt As with tech debt, all companies accrue Human Debt as they grow. Human Debt is the result of all the abandoned initiatives and missed opportunities to affect change. It adds up and the interest repayments can start to cripple you.
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You don't need to pay all the Human Debt off at once Some bad behaviours will eventually naturally expire. As a society, we've gotten better at standing up for what's right (although there's still plenty of work to do). But, ultimately, you should pay the most burdensome Human Debt off first.
Buy "People Before Tech"
"Built upon fascinating research and an international array of case studies, People Before Tech is an incisive examination of how organizations through their digital transformations become stranded with unoptimised teams and disenfranchised employees. Duena highlights that it is vital not just to implement technology, but also to integrate it into the existing organizational culture and structure, before providing practical guidance and advice on how business leaders and HR professionals can heighten efficiency and effectiveness of workplace teams through collaborative and innovative initiatives."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Duena You can connect with Duena on LinkedIn or on her website DuenaBlomstrom.com, where you can find links to all her various endeavours!
Jennifer Yang-Wong is a product leader who formerly worked at Uber, before moving into the rarified heights of Venture Capital. But, not as an investor but as the VP of Product for a tech-led VC firm. We spoke about why a VC firm needs a VP of Product as well as numerous reflections on the trouble that we can have when trying to apply product thinking and move beyond founder-led decision-making.
Episode highlights:
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There's no one way to do product management, and no one's doing it "right". There's no one way to do product management, and no one's doing it "right". It all depends on what you need for your stage of company, and whether you're sales-y, ops-y, or product-y in mindset.
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There's no "number" or formula you can apply to decide whether to blow up your roadmap. In a sales-led organisation, it's common for big deals to torpedo the best-laid plans. Your appetite to do this work will vary, but it's not as simple as saying "X% of revenue and we do it!" But, whatever the number is, it should be really, really high.
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It can be tricky to know when to bring on the first product hire and move away from founder-led product management One of the founders is generally the de facto "head of product", often with no specific product training. They do many of the same things that the product team would do, but not necessarily in the same way, and with less process. This can cause clashes when the first PM comes in.
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Getting a super process-oriented PM in as the first PM might exacerbate the issue You do need some rigour from the PM you bring in, otherwise, what's the point of bringing them in? But, if you bring someone in who is too dogmatic or has worked for much larger organisations, you may find a cultural mismatch and inevitable clash when everything they do seems to slow you down.
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In some companies, it might be the second "first product manager" that succeeds Founders may mis-hire if they don't have a strong understanding of what product managers bring to the table, or how they want to work. It's unpleasant to think of, but sometimes the first PM takes the hits, moves on and is replaced by a second PM who can start to make progress since the founders have a better idea of what they'll get the second time around.
Contact Jennifer You can connect with Jennifer on Twitter or on LinkedIn.
Gabrielle Bufrem is a product leader and product coach who comes highly recommended by Sir Marty Cagan himself. She's passionate about developing product managers and product leaders, as well as helping them be true strategic partners to the business. We spoke about product vision, what to do when it's not there, the importance of product principles and much more.
A quick message from Saeed Khan and me. My former podcast guest, Saeed Khan and I are thinking of putting together a B2B Product Management cohort course on Maven. Our goal is to help B2B PMs make peace with the differences between B2B product management and much of the classic product literature, and enable them to be true business partners rather than stuck in a remorseless feature factory. We're assessing interest right now, so if this sounds good, please fill in our course questionnaire. Thanks!
Episode highlights:
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A product strategy is the highest leverage artefact any product leader can have But it's also one of the hardest to do. It's serious, serious work, which is why so many product teams just end up with a list of tasks, or a "pizza strategy" (pepperoni! chicken! M&Ms!)
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A lot of problems stem from being people pleasers No one wants to say "no" and people can suffer from the fear of missing out. People can be afraid to take a stance. But, it's essential to narrow your focus to the absolute essentials if you want to make any progress at all.
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It's hard to push back on pre-agreed feature requests if you don't have a plan Product leaders need a deep understanding of their users and customers, but also of the wider business context. You need to be conscious of what the company (and the board) wants.
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Sometimes companies don't have strategies either It's easy to get dragged into a neverending feature list, prioritising whatever the next thing is. Product leaders need to work with wider leadership to identify broad goals, how they can get there & what the 3-5 year plan is.
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Product managers are there to represent the business UX designers are there to look after the users and the engineering team is there to look after the tech. It's absolutely essential for PMs to be trusted business partners if they want to make a big impact.
Contact Gabrielle You can connect with Gabi on Twitter or on LinkedIn. Or, check out her website.
Julie Starr is a renowned coach and mentor, and author of several books on the topics. We had a deep and meaningful chat about the differences between coaching and mentoring, what it takes to be a good coach or mentor, and the impact of AI on coaching.
Episode highlights:
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The expectations we have of leaders have changed We're slowly moving away from Taylorist, resource-focused management to a less-directive style of leadership. Not all companies are there yet, but even laggards are seeing what other organisations are doing and the benefits it brings.
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Coaching is a 1:1 relationship focused squarely on the person being coached Coaches facilitate conversations of inquiry and aim to support their clients to take action, evolve and, ultimately, empower them to be the change they want to see in themselves.
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Coaches do not need to be functional experts At the heart of coaching is the art of coaching, not reflecting your own biases and life story onto people. A good coach can use fundamental coaching skills to coach anyone, whatever their life situation or career niche.
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Mentoring is not the same as coaching, but it's also not binary It's less useful to look at the specific behaviours and more at the dynamics of a mentoring relationship; that of benevolence from and respect for a more senior practitioner who has seen your situation before.
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Not everything that counts can be measured It's traditionally hard to attribute specific metrics to coaching or mentoring relationships, but that doesn't mean the effect isn't there. It's not always easy, but we can use qualitative data to show the impact of our efforts.
Buy Julie's Books "Julie Starr’s books on coaching and mentoring are recommended reading on development programmes around the world."
Check out all three books at Starr Coaching, or wherever you get your books.
Check out Julie's free resources Julie has a huge amount of free resources at LearnStarr (free registration required). Make sure to check it out.
Contact Julie You can connect with Julie on LinkedIn. You can also check out the Starr Coaching website.
Daniel Stillman is a former industrial designer turned conversation designer, who wants to help leadership teams and entire organisations stop wasting their time having ineffective conversations. We spoke about the concept of Conversation Design, the Conversation OS Canvas, and the perils of "Sheep Dip" organisational transformations.
Episode highlights:
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Sheep-dip organisational transformation doesn't work You can't send everyone on a 1-hour course, not talk about it afterwards or have any kind of follow-up, yet somehow expect to sustain organisational change. Transformation takes sustained effort & you need to keep talking.
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All conversations are inherently designed, even the ones that aren't There's an implicit design in any conversation. You should use whatever works for you, but being aware of what isn't working allows you to re-design the conversations that don't work and get better results.
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Leadership is the ability to create the conditions for a transformational conversation If everyone's stuck, leaders can help people get unstuck by getting people to ask the right question to offer the right insight in service of what we want to create more of in the world.
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We all have a mental OS running on a mental CPU And, like all software, and all CPUs, there could be problems with clock speed, or bugs in the system that prevent us from getting to where we want to go. Thoughtfully designing conversations allows us to iron out the bugs.
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Active Listening is a great hack to help design conversations Getting away from the desire to respond within 200ms, not tuning people out because you're formulating your next thought & playing back people's words can really help change your conversations for the better.
Buy "Good Talk" "Life is built one conversation at a time. Learn which conversations matter, how to transform those conversations, and balance them all while leading change. Human beings are conversational animals. Every day we're in constant communication with ourselves, other people and the world around us, and while not all conversations may seem important, they all have the potential to transform our personal, professional and cultural lives for the better. This book explains how conversations work and offers practical advice on how to improve the quality of our exchanges."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Daniel You can catch up with Andres on LinkedIn, or visit his website or The Conversation Factory.
Deepa Goyal got excited when she saw her first API product and has been working in API products ever since. She's worked for companies like Twilio and Paypal and is now Product Strategy Lead for Postman. She was disappointed at the lack of PM-specific resources, so decided to solve this with her new book "API Analytics for Product Managers". We spoke about API product management in general, and what it takes to be successful with API products.
Episode highlights:
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APIs are technical but there's a user-centric way to explain them APIs at their heart are simply the way that different applications talk to each other. For example, Uber talking to Google Maps or talking to PayPal. They enable seamless integration of a product ecosystem.
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Yes, APIs need Product Managers (even internal APIs) It's important to have a customer-centric approach & strategy for APIs. You need to make sure that they're discoverable, useful & provide value. This is also true for internal APIs... internal users are your customers too!
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There are definitely differences when managing API products For example, you can't track people's user journeys as easily. You often don't have the same visibility. It can also take a long time to go from initial discovery to actually receiving value from your product.
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It's important to define API product value and measure it Sometimes value is obvious and sometimes it's not, but it's important to define what "value" means for your users (it's probably not just "number of API calls") and work out ways to measure that so you can optimise it.
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There are differences in API product management, but your basic job is the same You're still speaking to users, focusing on their use cases & delivering value. The way that you express this may be different but, ultimately, an API product manager is still a product manager!
Buy "API Analytics for Product Managers" "API Analytics for Product Managers takes you through the benefits of efficient researching, strategizing, marketing, and continuously measuring the effectiveness of your APIs to help grow both B2B and B2C SaaS companies. Once you've been introduced to the concept of an API as a product, this fast-paced guide will show you how to establish metrics for activation, retention, engagement, and usage of your API products, as well as metrics to measure the reach and effectiveness of documentation—an often-overlooked aspect of development."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Deepa You can connect with Deepa on Twitter or on LinkedIn.
Dave Farley is a consultant and renowned thought leader in the software development world, and a strong advocate for ensuring that our software is always releasable. He's co-authored a book and runs a popular YouTube channel, both called "Continuous Delivery". We spoke about what continuous delivery is, why it's important, the barriers to implementing it, and how product managers can help.
Episode highlights: 1. Continuous delivery is what the best software organisations in the world do It's unambiguous. It's backed by data. It's the best way to build quality products. Applying these techniques means your software is always releasable, and every change is safe
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But, this doesn't mean you need genius developers Any team can adopt continuous delivery. It's not a factor of 10x "rock star" developers, but empowered teams of developers working together, collaborating and talking to each other.
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You build quality software by going fast Continuous feedback based on small changes, constantly validated, ensures high-quality products. You don't want to go back & fix it later. You can't inspect quality into a system at the end of a development cycle. Build it in upfront.
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Just because you can release continuously doesn't mean you have to What you release to customers is a business decision. This isn't about throwing half-finished features at users but having software that you know works. You can use feature flags to manage availability.
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Many product managers need to check themselves We need to move away from PMs giving developers human-language representations of code and telling them to convert it for a computer. The best devs are problem solvers and should be involved in working out the best solution.
Buy "Continuous Delivery" "Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process.This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours―sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base."
Check it out on Amazon.
Check out Dave's course Dave has a course out that helps people get good at all the stuff we talked about in the podcast. If you're interested, check the course out here.
Dave also mentioned a talk by his co-author Jez Humble. I'm not 100% sure if this is the one, but it looks pretty good anyway. Check it out.
Contact Dave You can connect with Dave on Twitter. You can also check out the Continuous Delivery YouTube channel.
Yana Welinder is the CEO of Kraftful. We spoke a year ago on this podcast about her mission to help solve usability in IoT startups, but she's since gone all-in with a hard pivot to build an AI-powered product co-pilot. The company's growing like crazy and we caught up to talk about what's changed since our last interview.
Episode highlights:
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Pivoting was hard but the time (and tech) was right Yana was solving a problem she deeply cared about, but when ChatGPT hit primetime she realised she could solve an even more important problem. She dreaded sending the email to existing users, but everyone was super-positive.
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It's important to validate your pivot ahead of time Yana did some background research by stealthily positioning herself at conferences as the founder of a startup solving the new problem. People were super-keen to share feedback and this gave her confidence in the pivot.
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Kraftful will replace a lot of PM tasks, but not PMs There's still plenty of room for product managers in an AI-powered world. The best PMs will use smart technology to automate away necessary, but ultimately lower leverage tasks, and enable PMs to concentrate on strategy.
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There is a possibility of dependency on AI-powered tools, but that's OK Is there a danger that people forget how to do PM work without AI tools? Sure, but Yana likens the situation to using Google Maps. How many people know how to get where they're going without assistance?
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Hallucinations are going away soon There are well-known issues with inaccurate text coming out of LLMs, but the tech is developing fast. It's possible to mitigate the worst of the effects by including deep context & narrowing focus rather than using LLMs as a Swiss Army Knife.
Contact Yana You can catch up with Yana on Twitter or check out Kraftul at Kraftful.com.
Erika Klics is a former talent manager who worked for companies like Snap Inc and Zapier to help them build their teams. She started to see certain patterns in recruiting that made her realise that there was a bigger problem to solve on the candidate side and started her own consultancy to help goal-driven professionals achieve their career aims. We spoke about her work, and some general do's and don'ts of job hunting.
Episode highlights:
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Everyone has an Inevitable Edge Your Inevitable Edge is the thing that makes you unique. No one else brings it to the table. Everyone has a juxtaposition of skills & experiences that makes them unique. It's important to identify & leverage it to be successful when job hunting.
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Be intentional with your job search criteria Don't just make a list of literally every job that matches a search term & scroll through it one by one. You need to understand what company profiles are truly a fit for you and avoid spraying and praying.
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Get your story straight It's all about positioning - we should be good at this! Being able to tell your unique story is important, but make sure you pitch it at the right level, set appropriate context & don't go too deep on interesting, but ultimately irrelevant, stories.
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Companies don't hire people, humans do You need to make a human connection with everyone you meet during the interview process. Build empathy with them and work out what they care about, why they're asking the questions they're asking and listen between the lines.
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Don't "settle" for a job you don't want When times are hard, it's easy to cast your net out for unsuitable/too-junior jobs. You'll get interviews because they're curious, but you won't get hired. This will knock your confidence. If you do get the job, you'll probably hate it.
Contact Erika You can catch up with Erika on LinkedIn or visit her website, ErikaKlics.com.
Andres Glusman is the Cofounder and CEO of DoWhatWorks. Prior to DoWhatWorks he led product and growth at Meetup where he was a pioneer in the lean startup movement. He has been running tests online since the late 1990s and is passionate about human behaviour. We spoke about the power of split testing, when you can do it, and when you can't.
Episode highlights:1. Split tests are a great way to work out how to growOtherwise known as A/B tests, split testing involves systematically varying a user experience for different groups of users & then comparing the end result to see how those changes impacted behaviour for better (or worse).
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Four out of five split tests fail to move the needleThese are terrible odds, but the good news is that terrible odds aren't hard to make a little better. It's important to get as much signal from as many sources as possible upfront so you have the best chance of success.
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These signals can come from anywhereSplit-testing is a great way to learn, but it's not the only way to learn. Make sure you use a mixture of experiments, surveys, qualitative inputs, feedback and any other data source you can get your hands on. It's all signal.
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There's only so much juice you can squeeze from a lemonYou need to be careful that you're going overboard. It's possible to test too much & get caught in eternal loops. It comes down to fear of mistakes but, unless you're putting medicine in someone, you can make a mistake.
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Yes, B2B people can do split-tests tooYou don't have to have a mass-market B2C app to get good tests going. There's scope to experiment in B2B but you need to do your homework, get as much data as you can upfront & make sure you put your chips on the right part of the table.
Contact AndresYou can catch up with Andres on LinkedIn.
Georgiana (Gia) Laudi and Claire Suellentrop are both experienced SaaS product marketing leaders who spotted the same things again and again whilst trying to help companies grow. They decided it was time to join forces and persuade marketers around the world that the sales funnel is dead, and we need to try a different approach. They founded Forget the Funnel, a consultancy aiming to help people do just that, and have recently launched their new book of the same name.
A message from this episode's sponsor - My Mentor PathThis episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!
Episode highlights:1. The Funnel is no longer fit for purposeMarketers have been trying to cram leads into the top of the funnel for 100 years but it doesn't serve the needs of modern marketers in recurring revenue SaaS businesses. We need to consider the customer journey pre and post-acquisition
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Forgetting the Funnel is a company mindset shiftBusiness leaders can lose sight of the market & the product vision as companies evolve. They need to forget the funnel & empower their marketing teams to do the same & focus relentlessly on customers, not inward-facing metrics.
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You're going to need to pay off your Revenue DebtAs companies evolve, they can end up with a very fragmented set of customers that don't form a coherent ICP. To succeed with customer-led growth you need to work out who your best customers are and optimise for them.
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Companies often have remarkably similar marketing problemsHow these problems manifest themselves may be different, but there's generally some low-hanging fruit that can be picked straight away. Progress on harder problems can be stymied by unclear ownership or responsibility
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There's no point spending a dime on marketing until you've fixed your fundamentalsIf you don't focus your marketing on your best-fit customers and optimise everything to speak to them, you're just throwing your money away trying to scale marketing up. Fix the basics first!
Buy "Forget the Funnel""Your product is great. So why is marketing it so hard?
Many SaaS companies struggle with marketing. Teams try everything they can to drive more traffic, leads, and signups. Yet revenue growth remains... lumpy. Slow. Frustratingly inconsistent.
If this sounds familiar, the problem isn’t you or your ideas; it’s that you’re guessing at what resonates with your target customers. In Forget the Funnel, Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop share the Customer-Led Growth Framework they've developed to help companies of all sizes solve their product marketing struggles and hit ambitious targets. This framework helps you get inside your customers’ heads, map and measure your customers’ experience, and uncover which tactics will actually move the needle for your company."
Check it out on Amazon. You can also check out the book website
Contact Gia & ClaireYou can catch up with Gia and Claire on Twitter (Claire, Gia), LinkedIn (Claire, Gia) or visit their website, Forget the Funnel.
Greg Coticchia is the CEO of Sopheon, an innovation management platform aiming to help companies innovate at scale. Greg has been in product management since the 80s and seen it all, and also helped Carnegie Mellon University create the first degree programme in product management. He's passionate about all things innovation and believes that we all need to get comfortable with managing change. He also shared some insights from his many years in product management.
A message from this episode's sponsor - One Knight ConsultingThis episode is sponsored by One Knight Consulting. Yes, yes, that's me. As you probably know, I've moved into freelance coaching and consulting for B2B product companies. I want to help your company, your team and your... well, you, get better at product management. If you want to chat to me about what I can do for you, why not head over to book a call with me and we can discuss your needs and how I can help.
Episode highlights:1. You don't need a degree to be a product managerGreg worked with Carnegie Mellon University to create a degree in product management, but it's important to realise that any learning is the start of a journey... you need to get punched in the face by a real job a few times.
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Having big early successes is a double-edged swordIt's common for PMs to learn from failure, but it's possible to go too far the other way and treat early success as The One Way to future success. You need to remain humble and never stop learning & adapting.
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The hardest organisation to get to change is a successful organisation.It's easy to use Kodak or Blockbuster as cautionary tales but these were successful organisations making a boatload of money. They needed to embrace change, but it's not surprising that they didn't.
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The best way for big companies to innovate is to make small companiesBig companies are inherently resistant to change. If they want to stay ahead, they need to create or acquire small companies without baggage and leave them to it rather than try to make them fit in.
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Innovation is about more than just shiny new techIt's easy to get excited about new tech, but we should get equally excited about repositioning existing products or building new business models to serve novel segments. Everything should always be focused on the users!
Contact GregYou can catch up with Greg on LinkedIn.
You can try out Sopheon on sopheon.com
Antonia Landi is a freelance Product Operations consultant and coach who fell into Product Operations thanks to LinkedIn recommending a strange new job title to her, and thinking "that's me!". She's now a passionate advocate for the value that Product Operations can bring to organisations and has co-authored the Product Operations Manifesto to help frame it with product teams and company leadership.
A message from this episode's sponsor - One Knight ConsultingThis episode is sponsored by One Knight Consulting. Yes, yes, that's me. As you probably know, I've moved into freelance coaching and consulting for B2B product companies. I want to help your company, your team and your... well, you, get better at product management. If you want to chat to me about what I can do for you, why not head over to book a call with me and we can discuss your needs and how I can help.
Episode highlights:1. Product Ops is about achieving product excellence at an organisational levelIt's difficult to pin down as problems are different in every company. Maybe it's data analysis, organising processes or building communities of practice. You're there to remove blockers to being product-led.
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You might not need a Product Ops team... yetMany Product Ops tasks already existed before Product Ops. How much you need a dedicated team depends on how much pain are you willing to tolerate. What's slipping through the cracks? Product Ops helps you scale sustainably.
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Product Ops is not the revenge of project managers & "process people"There are some crossovers with agile coaching, project & programme management but we should also reclaim the word "process"… process isn’t always bad - it just needs to serve you, not the other way around.
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The Product Ops manifesto was necessary to give people something to rally behindThere’s so much ambiguity & a need to move past the "what is it" question. They came up with a document to help product teams to understand the parameters (and prerequisites) of the function.
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About those prerequisites...The most important is the ability to affect change - without this, Product Ops people just become process people or team assistants. On the other hand, these prerequisites are 100% valid for just generally being a good product company.
Check out the Product Operations Manifesto"Product Operations empowers product organizations to collectively, effectively and efficiently drive the most meaningful outcomes for customers"Check out the Product Operations Manifesto and feel free to add your name to the list!
Contact AntoniaYou can connect with Antonia on LinkedIn.
Leah Tharin is a product leader, content creator, advisor and startup founder. Leah is now reinventing weather forecasting with Jua and is a well-known advocate for product-led growth. We went deep into her content creation process, how to work out if product-led growth is for you, and some of the steps you might take to get started.
A message from this episode's sponsor - My Mentor PathThis episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!
Episode highlights:1. Product-Led Growth is all about "Show, don't Tell"It's not necessarily a free trial/freemium, but it's more important than ever to let people understand the value they're getting from your product rather than hiding behind (possibly auto-generated!) marketing content.
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Product-led growth does not replace sales-led growthPLG just addresses a different segment in a better way than sales-led. For bigger deals, you still need a sales team, but product-led sales mean getting better quality leads by demonstrating the value upfront.
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Product-led growth might not be for you... yetThere are some segments where PLG might not make sense. If people don't know they have the problem you solve, if they won't proactively search you out or recommend you or if your solution is super-innovative, maybe try PLG later.
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Ignore the "product" word - this is a company initiativeThe product management team doesn't own PLG. The whole organisation needs to align around what "success" looks like for a customer and optimise all incentives towards achieving that.
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You need to objectively measure team successPeople can't just rely on "product sense" to tell if they're being successful with PLG. Product organisations need to have good quantitative data & measure product satisfaction. Data should be tracked per team, not per user.
Contact LeahYou can connect with Leah on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or check out all of her lovely content on Leah’s ProducTea.
Ed Biden is a product leader and passionate educator who has recently set up Hustle Badger, a product management education resource centre. When he was the CPO at FutureLearn, he helped to prove a new business model and he did it... quickly. I spoke to Ed about some of the principles he lives by when trying to accelerate product initiatives and deliver value faster.
A message from this episode's sponsor - My Mentor PathThis episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!
Episode highlights:1. Executing fast means delivering more impactThe faster you're shipping, the more you're learning, and the faster you're going to understand what you should be doing. It's better to embrace inevitable uncertainty, get something out in the world and see how people react to it.
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"Fast" is relative - you need to be as fast as you needNot everyone needs to deploy 1,000 times a day. What fast means for you depends on your customers and their appetite for change, alongside internal factors that might impact it. Find the right fast for you.
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Speed is always about trade-offsYou can't just go faster by ordering people to work faster - it's not sustainable. You need to work out what levers you can pull, what shortcuts are acceptable, and what's in and out of scope. You need to be willing to trade to get speed.
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Radical transparency can help get away from "Go faster" execsCEOs and business leaders often complain about speed and wish everything could be faster. It's important to be transparent with them, let them know the trade-offs & give them a stake in the decision so they buy in.
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Watch where you spend your timeOften, teams spend a large proportion of their time on BAU and fighting fires. Keep track of this, because if you're spending 50% of your time not executing your strategy you're not going as fast as you can (and the results will reflect this).
Contact EdYou can connect with Ed on LinkedIn, or check out Hustle Badger.
About the EpisodeAnd now for something a little different. I recently purchased a ChatGPT pro license and got access to ChatGPT 4, the groundbreaking new model from OpenAI. Social media is on fire at the moment, with people talking about all the cool stuff it can do. So, I thought "who better to speak to about AI Product Management"? A few hours later, and here's the result; the full One Knight in Product experience, a wide-ranging discussion with some terrible jokes from both sides thrown in for good measure.
A message from this episode's sponsor - SkiplevelThis episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!
Episode highlights:1. It's natural to be concerned about AI taking over the worldWe've all seen the movies, the books and the horror stories. But there's also an incredible opportunity to change the world for the better. We need to be vigilant, and confront the concerns head-on.
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Product Managers can benefit from putting AI in their productsBut don't just go in blindly - you need to assess that adding AI capabilities to your product actually solves a real problem and isn't just cool tech. In short, you need to be a product manager!
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You don't need to be a data scientist to be an "AI Product Manager"Having technical skills and being capable of understanding AI on a high level is helpful, but only to help you have good conversations with your colleagues. As a PM, your job remains to manage the product!
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It can be hard to persuade traditional industries to use AI solutionsNot everyone is cutting edge and there can be barriers to adoption. There are multiple ways to prove the solution and integrate gradually to show the benefits and remove the fear of change.
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Explainability of AI is crucialAI is often seen as a black box, but there are ways to help explain what it's doing and justify its decisions. This is especially important when considering the impact of bias, and ensuring an ethical solution.
Check out ChatGPTYou can chat to ChatGPT on the ChatGPT website or visit the Open AI website.
Luke Hohmann is a startup founder, consultant, SAFe framework contributor and co-author of the upcoming book "Software Value Streams". Luke wants to help agile teams connect their own value delivery with profit, the value that the leadership team really cares about, and set up whole organisations for success. We chatted about some themes from the book, with a gentle detour into Scaled Agile territory for good measure.
A message from this episode's sponsor - SkiplevelThis episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!
Episode highlights:1. A software profit stream is the necessary evolution of a value streamAgile folk talk about value all the time but how does that map to company priorities? There are structures & systems we need to use to turn "value" into profit & meet the company’s financial goals.
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Most books about pricing & licensing are old school and written for boomers - few of them cover softwarePricing is not a number, it’s a system, and it's a team sport. Your software solution's pricing & packaging should evolve over the product lifecycle.
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Value is a set of relationships between nodes that impact each otherValue doesn’t occur in isolation; consider the system. if you’re building a solution to improve thing A in a positive way, but it negatively impacts thing B then the solution is intrinsically less valuable
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Customers don’t care about your profits...... but they do care about your ability to sustainably serve them a solution they need. But, beware! It’s possible to build too much quality and provide more than your customers are prepared to pay for.
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Product management is an infinite gameWe play games for leisure until they’re boring. At work, we serve our customers until it’s boring to the business. If we play the game well we don’t win the game, we simply win the right to play again.
Coming soon! Buy "Software Profit Streams""Profit is your key to survival. Without profit, you cannot maintain or grow your business. Without profit, you cannot serve your customers or provide benefits to your employees. Without profit, investors have no reason to invest. Without profit, the goals of the business are unattainable. In Software Profit Streams, serial entrepreneurs Jason Tanner and Luke Hohmann unveil the essential tools and processes for creating profitable software-enabled solutions that have long-term impact."
Book link coming soon!
Check out Luke's article on startup SAFeNot convinced by SAFe in startups? Luke wants you to think again. Check the article out here.
Contact LukeYou can catch up with Luke on his website. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn.
Bethan Vincent is an experienced marketer who has worked with a variety of firms in B2B SaaS and B2B Services and has now started marketing agency Open Velocity. Bethan believes in good competitor analysis and how we might get ahead of our competition by going out and finding out what's going on. We spoke about the joys of fractional marketing leadership, and some of the ways to get competitive analysis done.
A message from this episode's sponsor - SkiplevelThis episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!
Episode highlights:1. Competitor Analysis is a simple concept, but doing it is hardYour competitors are out there and, in many cases, there'll be interesting stuff on their websites but you need to use a variety of techniques to really get to the bottom of what they're doing.
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You need to know your own target market & positioning before evaluating othersIt may be Marketing 101, but it's important to understand the space you're playing in, the audience you're going after & who your direct & indirect competitors are before doing competitor research
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It's important to have a hypothesis you want to test for your competitorsThere are many tools and approaches you can use, but you need to know what question you're trying to answer. Just finding interesting "stuff" is... interesting, but maybe not particularly useful.
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Just because a competitor is doing something doesn't mean they're being rationalBe aware of what competitors are up to, but blindly copying them is not a good strategy. You need to be in charge of your own destiny, be a leader and do things others can't replicate.
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Product management should be considered a subset of marketing 🔥"Product" is one of the many "Ps" in marketing. Product managers should care about packaging, positioning, pricing, promotions and all the rest. It's not just about what you build or how you build it.
Contact BethanYou can catch up with Bethan on LinkedIn or Twitter as well as apparently TikTok if you're into that sort of thing. Make sure to check out Open Velocity too.
Eisha Armstrong is a company founder, digital transformation consultant and author of 2021's "Productize", a book that aims to help service-based companies move away from scaling via people and embrace repeatable product revenue. We spoke about some themes from the book, as well as the fear that stops companies from transforming.
A message from this episode's sponsor - SkiplevelThis episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!
Episode highlights:1. Digital transformation gets you away from "arms and legs"There's nothing wrong with being a service company, but there are very attractive reasons to productise. Growth, higher margins, higher exit value and getting away from having to add headcount.
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The three biggest barriers to transformation are fear, fear and fearIt's natural for leaders and employees to feel fear of the unknown or of change. But fear is the enemy of growth. Yes, things could go wrong, but think of what could go right!
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Transformation should be a full-time jobProductisation has to be done right... it can't be an afterthought. The company needs to devote people and financial support to the effort otherwise it will inevitably fail and you might as well not start.
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"The more narrow the niche is, the greater the riches"Service companies can make good money selling to all comers, but product companies necessarily need to niche down. The company likely doesn't have a strong history in ICPs & segmentation but it needs to develop those skills.
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Productisation is awesome, but life is in the greyPlenty of companies offer a product/services mix and there is nothing wrong with this. What matters is that you productise thoughtfully & disrupt yourself before getting disrupted by someone else. You need to want to change.
Buy "Productize""More and more traditional professional services firms are turning to "productization" as a strategy to grow, improve valuations, and to fend off new digital-first competitors. However, many of them will fail and waste a lot of money in the process. Productize first outlines the "Seven Deadly Productization Mistakes" made when pursuing a product strategy, then provides the blueprint for overcoming each of these missteps. It is designed to be a practical playbook for any leader of a professional services business who wants to successfully accelerate growth."
Check it out on Amazon. You can also check out the book website
Contact EishaYou can catch up with Eisha on LinkedIn.
Dani Grant is a former product manager turned VC who decided to go back to building products and setting up her own company, Jam. Jam aims to take the pain away from bug reporting, and to deliver Dani's dream of shipping awesome software fast. We spoke about the story behind her company, as well as some hints & tips from her time working with early-stage startups as a VC.
A message from this episode's sponsor - SkiplevelThis episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!
Episode highlights:Starting a company is a big adventureDani went from PM to VC but felt the call of entrepreneurship irresistible. She found a problem that she was passionate about solving and wanted to do something meaningful for herself, her users and her team.
Startups can be force multipliers for people making their own impact in the worldThe impact of a startup is felt not only by your users but your users' users. If you can save people time, effort, or both, then you can contribute to changing the world one company at a time.
There's an approach to getting your first funding roundAs a founder, you're in the business of delivering a great meeting & making it easy to shine. For early-stage companies, VCs care less about the detail than the team and the vision. They know the execution will change.
"Move fast and break things" is so 10 years agoFirst impressions count. If you're building productivity tools, you can't make people's lives harder. You need to ship something that works - moving fast and breaking things was a valid strategy only before people knew better
Every PM & founder's job is to support their teams moving fast & shipping awesome stuffDevs have a big role here, but the whole company needs to come together around quality, define enough detail up front, and keep the scope small to help deliver a quality product.
Contact DaniYou can catch up with Dani on LinkedIn or on Twitter
You can try out Jam on jam.dev
Here's the VC video that Dani recommended: How to Nail Your Startup Pitch Deck - Rebecca Kaden
Pooja Parthasarathy is a product leader who started out her career in the high-pressure, high-volume world of high-frequency trading. She took some time out with me to reflect on her unconventional career journey, what it taught her, and how to make an impact as a product leader.
A message from this episode's sponsor - My Mentor PathThis episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!
Episode highlights:High-frequency trading is as stressful as you'd imagine, but it has lessons for early-stage product managersWorking with traders teaches you to think on your feet in volatile environments, think three steps ahead & build a thick skin. These are all valuable traits for PMs.
We should all be comfortable asking basic questionsWorking in a variety of jobs has helped her get comfortable with first-principles thinking and asking even the most basic questions. It's important to model this behaviour for your team.
Be kind to yourself and the stories you tell yourselfPooja was hard on herself after her first child and wondered if she could make a success of work after going back. She learned to appreciate the job she was doing and be her own champion.
The job of a product person is to be an investor in good ideasA PM's job is not to have all the answers or all the best ideas, but to be the Socratic Police Officer and ask good questions to get those around you to bring their own insight to the table for you to tie together
The CEO & CPO relationship is the most important in the companyIt's important to create leverage with the CEO, by having the right motivations, setting clear expectations about who owns what for what time horizon, and being comfortable delegating to other leaders.
Contact PoojaYou can catch up with Pooja on LinkedIn, although she's about to have a baby so maybe wait a bit!
Uri Levine is a 2x 'Unicorn' Builder (Duocorn) who co-founded Waze and is a former investor and board member in Moovit. Uri recently published his book, "Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution". We talk about some of the themes from the book as well as some stories from his own career.
A message from this episode's sponsor - My Mentor PathThis episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part, but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!
Episode highlights:There are no right or wrong decisions, only the decision you make right nowUri is often asked if selling Waze was the right decision, but you can only make decisions based on the information you have. It's more important to make a decision than wait for the perfect decision.
Find a problem you care about, but you are a sample of oneYou should be passionate about the problem you're solving, but don't assume that anyone else cares as much as you do or wants to solve it the way you want to. You have to get out & speak to people who have the problem
If you're afraid to fail then, in reality, you already failedWhen you're building something no one has built before, you never know if it'll work. You need to experiment, fail fast and have multiple shots on goal. The faster you fail, the sooner you can have another shot.
Product/Market Fit does exist & it is measurableIf you're not creating value, people won't come back. Retention is the most important way to measure P/MF & make sure that the solution to your users' problem is actually valuable. Getting people to value quickly is essential.
B2B & B2C product management share the same goalsYou might have different customers who care about different features, but they all care about something. The metrics might differ, but the ultimate goal is to deliver value & solve a real pain for all these different people.
Buy "Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution""Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution offers mentorship in a book from one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and empowers you to build a successful business by identifying your consumers' biggest problems and disrupting the inefficient markets that currently serve them."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact UriYou can visit Uri at his website UriLevine.com or follow him on Twitter.
And now... for something completely different. The other day, I did an experimental webinar with my former podcast guest Adam Thomas where we talked about some audience-submitted questions about product strategy. I think it went pretty well and wanted to share the audio with a larger crowd. So here we are! Please do let me know if you like the format.
A message from this episode's sponsor - My Mentor PathThis episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring, and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part, but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!
The questions we answered:* What are the pillars of an effective product strategy? * How do you know if a strategy is working or not? * What do you do when there is no product strategy?
Check out Adam's previous interviewI interviewed Adam back in 2021 about Survival Metrics. Check the episode out here. You can catch up with Jeff at his website. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn.
Contact AdamYou can find Adam on Twitter. He's also got a Substack mailing list and his website is theadamthomas.com
About the EpisodeRonke Majekodunmi is a product leader and featured Product School speaker who is passionate about using the power of storytelling to help drive cross-functional alignment. We spoke about storytelling, as well as some stories from her own career.
A message from this episode's sponsor - My Mentor PathThis episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring, and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part, but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!
Episode highlights:You can't just walk into a new leadership job & trash the old team's workIt doesn't matter where you worked before - there's always context and a reason for old decisions. Take time to understand them. Oh, and make sure you leave a clean audit trail when you move on!
When looking at a new job, work out your non-negotiable questionsRonke has moved jobs for the wrong reason before and this has inspired her to make a list of questions she must have satisfactory answers to before moving. Create your own list and don't get buyer's regret.
Product leaders should be Chief Storytelling OfficersStorytelling is one of the best ways to drive cross-functional alignment and get everyone in the company on the same page. You should craft an inspirational story and ensure that everyone from top to bottom knows it.
Creating stories collaboratively drives alignmentDon't just go off into your ivory tower and write something yourself. Build shared ownership by getting the team to collaborate. This means you can start to let go, not need to be in every meeting, and empower the teams.
It's important to be in control of your own storyRonke has had some bad work experiences in the past and this has inspired her to "run her race her own way", be her authentic self and give back to the community. We can all make a positive difference to other people's lives.
Contact RonkeYou can catch up with Ronke at her website. You can also connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter .
About the EpisodeJeff Gothelf is a product coach, author, speaker and trainer who is currently trying to get companies to work with outcomes, not outputs. He's written two classic books: Sense & Respond, and Lean UX, as well as a variety of other books covering various aspects of product management and design thinking.
A message from this episode's sponsor - My Mentor PathThis episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring, and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part, but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!
Episode highlights:Lean, Agile & Design Thinking can get alongThese came from different places, but the philosophies that underlie all of these ideas are the same: understanding our customers, working in shorter cycles, making decisions based on evidence, and continuously improving.
Managing for outcomes is the hinge that everything else pivots fromThere are many principles of good product management, but moving away from output enables focus on the change in behaviour you want to see & have the humility to accept you don't have all the answers upfront
OKRs are the gateway drug to agility and good product managementOKRs are easy to explain, but difficult to implement. Used right, they can empower teams to make measurable impact towards an aspirational goal, without micromanagement or deciding on a fixed plan upfront.
OKRs are for teams, not individualsOKRs enable teams to focus on impact, changing customer behaviour in a way that matters to their business & knowing whether they've succeeded. Cramming individual task lists into the OKR format doesn't achieve anything.
Change is scary & might not work the first timeSome people start with OKRs by mistake or give it a quarter & then give up. Using OKRs well takes work. If it's not working, make sure you have open & honest retros to understand whether it's fixable & whether you can try again.
Buy "Lean UX""Lean UX is synonymous with modern product design and development. By combining human-centric design, agile ways of working, and a strong business sense, designers, product managers, developers, and scrum masters around the world are making Lean UX the leading approach for digital product teams today In the third edition of this award-winning book, authors Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden help you focus on the product experience rather than deliverables."
Check it out on Amazon.
Buy "Lean vs. Agile vs. Design Thinking""As companies evolve to adopt, integrate, and leverage software as the defining element of their success in the 21st century, a rash of processes and methodologies are vying for their product teams' attention. In the worst of cases, each discipline on these teams -- product management, design, and software engineering -- learns a different model. This short, tactical book reconciles the perceived differences in Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and Agile software development by focusing not on rituals and practices but on the values that underpin all three methods."
Check it out on Amazon.
Check out Jeff's coursesJeff is running some self-paced courses on OKRs, including in Spanish! Check them out here.
Contact JeffYou can catch up with Jeff on his website. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn.
About the EpisodeItamar Gilad is a product coach, consultant and regular content author who's worked at IBM, Microsoft and Google. Nowadays, he's trying to help companies get away from the feature factory and into the world of evidence-based product development with the GIST framework.
A message from this episode's sponsor - SkiplevelThis episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!
Episode highlights:Big Tech firms aren't exemplars of how to "do product"We look to these firms for guidance, but they all build products differently & have created processes that work for them. What they do have are principles. We should copy the principles but work the way that works for us.
Prioritisation frameworks have a place but aren't going to create your roadmapThe numbers are guesses but are useful to start conversations & make sure you're asking the right questions. It's important to revisit scores over time to see what's changing as you learn new things.
Confidence is a logarithmic scaleItamar uses the Confidence Meter to describe the different levels of confidence. This brings to life what you are describing when talking about confidence & shows it's not linear; the best evidence is substantially better than the weakest.
Refocusing on goals gets you away from rigid roadmapsItamar uses the GIST framework (Goals/Ideas/Steps/Tasks) to break down opportunities, prioritise for impact & get away from the feature factory. It's important not to kill ideas too quickly, and continuously revisit them.
Product management is about principlesThe principles are customer focus, evidence-guided decision-making, adaptive planning & empowering teams. These are the cornerstones of product management. Customer focus is still the most important & everything else can flow from there.
Contact ItamarYou can catch up with Itamar on his website, where you can sign up to his mailing list and get access to his tools. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Matt LeMay is a product management consultant, coach and author of "Product Management in Practice", a book that aims to demystify product management and give you a practical, tactical guide for every day of your career. The book's recently had a 2nd edition released, and we spoke about some of the themes from the book.
A message from this episode's sponsor - SkiplevelThis episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!
Episode highlights:1. You should read all the PM books, but question themBooks have to take a position, and they're always going to be simplified versions of reality. It's positive to disagree with what you find in these books, but you can learn something useful from just about any book.
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It doesn't matter how Agile you are, or what framework you useGetting into holy wars about frameworks is not constructive. Not everything works in all contexts, and if it doesn't work you're not a "bad" product manager. Concentrate on delivering value the best way you can.
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Product managers have a CORE set of skillsThere's no one standard job description for a product management role, but Matt likes to boil it down to CORE: Communication, Organisation, Research and Execution. Depending on the company, there might be additional important skills.
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PMs need to make peace with not always being the decision-makersPMs need to concentrate on enabling good decisions. PMs are not "CEOs of Product" & may not be able to influence senior stakeholders all the time. There may be reasons for decisions outside of their control
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PMs need to stop being defensiveIf you find yourself in a defensive posture, you're already behind. Often, the harder you try, the worse you can make things. Do what you can to affect change, but try to avoid fighting with your leadership & concentrate on helping your users.
Buy "Product Management in Practice""Updated for the era of remote and hybrid work, this book provides actionable answers to product management's most persistent and confounding questions, starting with: What exactly am I supposed to do all day?"
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact MattYou can connect with Matt on LinkedIn or visit his website.
Chui Chui Tan is an International Growth Adviser and Culturalisation Strategist who has worked with big brands like Spotify to ensure they have successful market expansions. I spoke to her about some important issues around internationalisation, global market expansion, and some of the pros & cons of different approaches.
A message of supportI recently found out that my former leadership coach has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Tracy helped me through some tough times, and helped me improve in various areas. I'm grateful to her to this day.
Tracy's friends are trying to raise funds so that she can enjoy some final experiences with her family, and leave behind fond memories for after she's gone. If you'd like to donate anything at all, please visit the link here.
Episode highlights:1. You should start thinking about international growth before you're ready for itYou don't need to overengineer from the start, but you do need to make sure you have flexible building blocks in place so that you're not starting from scratch when you do want to expand.
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It's not good enough to just translate text - you have to understand the cultural contextCountries aren't defined solely by their languages - they have different currencies, different date formats, and different norms - you can't just do "International Spanish" and be done.
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There's a framework to help you choose the best marketsYou can map potential market size & return on investment against efforts required & ease of entry to help you decide where to prioritise. You'll be working off imperfect information but it's important to think it through.
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There are two main ways to go into other markets and both have pros and consYou can sell to local companies with global offices counterparts or you can set up an organisation/partner in other countries. They both have pros and cons and it's important to be intentional.
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Going into unpromising markets is OK but start smallSometimes, big whale customers or globally-minded investors will heavily encourage you to get into a market you don't really want to go into. This is OK, but it's important to take an MVP approach rather than go all in.
Contact Chui ChuiYou can connect with Chui Chui on LinkedIn or visit Beyō Global's website.
Douglas Squirrel, or Squirrel to his friends, is a long-time tech and agile consultant who claims to have been fired from every CTO job he's ever had. He's here to try to get tech teams closer to "the business", promote constructive tension to make better decisions, and have effective conversations across the organisation. He's also the co-author of a practical playbook on the same topics, "Agile Conversations".
A message from this episode's sponsor - One Knight ConsultingThis episode is sponsored by One Knight Consulting. Spoiler alert, that’s me! I started One Knight Consulting because I have seen variations of the same problems plaguing product companies and I’ve seen them again and again. If you’re looking to get an independent diagnosis of your business with actionable next steps, trying to hire product people or coaching the ones you’ve already got, you can book a call with me. We can discuss your needs and how I can help.
Episode highlights:Tech teams need to get closer to "the business" and care about profitCompanies hire expensive engineers then get them into endless discussions about nothing, and lock them into backlogs. If engineers are given full business context, they can help to change the world.
Leaders need to get used to less control to get more productivtyTeams need to stop planning. It's less like a fire-and-forget rocket ride to a predetermined destination, and more like being on the Enterprise and responding to interesting signals from nearby planets.
We can increase trust with stakeholders with "Test Driven Development for People"You can structure conversations with sceptical stakeholders like a series of tests and follow a process to build trust outside of the technology organisation. There's a method and it works.
It's important for teams to be accountable, but not to be held accountable"Accountability" is often used as a stick to hit teams with by untrusting managers looking to maintain control. Teams can work with stakeholders to maintain buy-in and engagement.
Everyone can do something to improve their situationIt's no good complaining about your company or stakeholders, blaming them for everything & having a defeatist attitude. By having constructive conversations, everyone has a chance of affecting the change they want to see.
Buy "Agile Conversations""Agile Conversations brings a practical, step-by-step guide to using the human power of conversation to build effective, high-performing teams to achieve truly Agile results. Consultants Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick show readers how to utilize the Five Conversations to help teams build trust, alleviate fear, answer the “whys,” define commitments, and hold everyone accountable. These five conversations give teams everything they need to reach peak performance, and they are exactly what’s missing from too many teams today. "
Check it out on Amazon.
Join the Squirrel SquadronIf you want to join a free community of tech & non-tech execs who are all learning from each other, check out Squirrel Squadron.
Contact SquirrelYou can connect with Squirrel on LinkedIn or visit his website.
Saeed Khan is a product consultant, coach, speaker and founder who wants to give all of us product managers some tough love. In a long career, he's seen the same five dysfunctions across multiple product organisations and wants us to all be honest with ourselves so that we can have a chance to fix them.
I actually interviewed Saeed in one of my first podcast episodes. It has a certain "Simpsons Season 1" quality about it but, if you're curious, feel free to check it out!
A message from this episode's sponsor - One Knight ConsultingThis episode is sponsored by One Knight Consulting. Yes, yes, that's me. But listen up. I started One Knight Consulting because I have seen variations of the same problems plaguing growing startups, scale-ups and larger, digitally transforming companies again & again. These problems can cause friction between teams, slow product development, lacklustre sales, and ultimately lead to constrained growth. If you're scaling your product organisation, struggling with cross-team alignment or having trouble executing your product strategy to support your business goals, book a call with me and we can discuss your needs and how I can help.
Episode highlights:It's important to be honest about the state of product managementIt's not about being negative or blaming "bad product managers" for everything. But, there are repeated dysfunctions across a large number of companies and we can't fix them if we ignore them.
Product managers suffer from poor job definitions, which makes it hard to succeedBad job specs are a symptom of a deeper truth: Not many people outside product management really understand it, or what "cross-functional" working means at all. We should avoid being "glue".
There are lots of smart product managers out there but they don't all have the skills they needProduct management is the ultimate "school of hard knocks" trade & many people practising it speak only in the theoretical/struggle in different contexts. PMs need good coaching.
"Process" is too often seen as a dirty word. You don't need too much but you need someThere needs to be some level of rigour within PM teams to help set them up for success. Doing everything ad hoc gives you ad hoc results. Don't overegg it, but don't underegg it either.
Our objectives are often unclear, and we need to do our best to connect to the company's goalsWe need to be able to define leading measures of success and connect our efforts to actual business success. PMs need to have a far higher level of interest in business outcomes.
Product leadership is often weak & is needed to fix all of the dysfunctionsIt's better to have a former PM and coach them into a leader than to have a non-product businessperson brought in. Someone with good pattern recognition who can bring everything together is essential.
Check out the blog article "The 5 Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams"You can read the article that inspired this interview right here.
Contact SaeedYou can connect with Saeed on Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastodon or check out Transformation Labs.
About the EpisodeMy good friends Andrea Saez and David Martin recently put a whitepaper out called "Product-Market Fit is Dead", and we decided to have a chat about it. Our original plan was a Twitter Space with audience interaction but it turns out that Twitter Spaces is awful. Undeterred, we did an "as live" session, uncut and unedited, to get as much of the live feel as possible. Check it out!
Contact Dave & AndreaYou can reach out to Andrea on LinkedIn or on Twitter.
You can catch up with Dave on LinkedIn or Twitter
Find out more about Right to Left at their website: https://www.righttoleft.io. You can also grab the white paper "Product-Market Fit is Dead" and browse the rest of their free content.
About the EpisodeBob Moesta is the co-creator of the Jobs to be Done Framework, a now-ubiquitous methodology to identify "struggling moments" and understand the driving forces behind customer demand. He worked on this with the legendary Clayton Christensen to take it out the world and followed it up with books about demand-side sales and, now, how to use the principles of the greatest innovators to help you succeed as an entrepreneur.
A message from this episode's sponsor - One Knight ConsultingThis episode is sponsored by One Knight Consulting. Yes, yes, that's me. But listen up. I started One Knight Consulting because I have seen variations of the same problems plaguing growing startups, scale-ups and larger, digitally transforming companies again & again. These problems can cause friction between teams, slow product development, lacklustre sales, and ultimately lead to constrained growth. If you're scaling your product organisation, struggling with cross-team alignment or having trouble executing your product strategy to support your business goals, book a call with me and we can discuss your needs and how I can help. Episode highlights: 1. Bob is dyslexic, and Jobs to be Done was his hack to understand the world Bob has trouble reading and writing, and this forced him to admit what he didn't know and find ways to get customer insight that didn't involve reading reports. Jobs to be Done was the result. 2. Clayton Christensen helped him turn his hack into a framework Bob's hack became an indispensable framework to identify customer motivation, with applications through sales, product, design... even religion & HR! The importance of uncovering "struggling moments" is universal. 3. Bob is passionate about mentorship and paying it forward Bob has had great mentors throughout his life: Clayton Christensen, W. Edwards Deming, Willie Moore & Genichi Taguchi. They poured so much into him, all in different ways, & he feels obliged to pay forward what he learned 4. In many organisations, there's more energy spent arguing between functions than serving customers Product, marketing, sales & customer success need to stop shouting at each other and concentrate on helping their customers make progress. We're all on the same side! 5. All the best innovators in the world have a core set of skills The 5 bedrock skills of innovation are: Empathetic Perspective, Uncovering Demand, Causal Structures, Prototyping & Trade-offs. To have the best chance of success you must master them all or find people to help. Buy "Learning to Build""This journey of entrepreneurship and innovation shouldn’t be a solo trip. If you’re missing something, struggling to begin, or have reached a plateau, fellow entrepreneur and innovator Bob Moesta knows your next steps because he’s been there himself. Now, in Learning to Build, Bob helps you develop the five fundamental skills every successful innovator practices to be their best. He provides you with the resources you need to learn these skills, grow through experience, and adapt your mindset." Check it out on Amazon.
Buy "Demand-Side Sales""For a lot of us, selling feels icky. Our stomachs tighten at the thought of reciting features and benefits, or pressuring customers into purchasing. It's really not our fault. We weren't taught how to sell, plus we've been sold before, leaving us with a bitter taste. Here's the truth: sales does not have to feel icky for you or your customers. In fact, with the right approach, sales can be an empowering experience for all.." Check it out on Amazon.
Contact BobYou can connect with Bob on Twitter, LinkedIn or check out The Re-Wired Group.
About the episode
Milly Tamati is a former "Director of Miscellaneous" who travelled the world before settling in a tiny island off the coast of Scotland with 170 residents, a castle and a distillery. She's always been a generalist at heart and is now looking to support a global community of like-minded professionals with Generalist World.
A message from this episode's sponsor - One Knight Consulting
This episode is sponsored by One Knight Consulting. Yes, yes, that's me. But listen up. I started One Knight Consulting because I have seen variations of the same problems plaguing growing startups, scale-ups and larger, digitally transforming companies again and again. These problems can cause friction between teams, slow product development, lacklustre sales, and ultimately lead to constrained growth. If you're scaling your product organisation, struggling with cross-team alignment or having trouble executing your product strategy to support your business goals, book a call with me and we can discuss your needs and how I can help.
Episode highlights:
- Not everyone needs to be a specialist, you could be a generalist!
Do you not fit neatly in a box? Do you consider yourself a jack of all trades/someone who wears many hats? You might be a generalist & there are lots of generalists out there. Embrace it and find your people!
- The generalist sweet spot is in smaller companies & startups
All companies could benefit from good people, but startups especially need people to be the connectors, tie things together and solve whatever problems arise whatever the domain. Generalism is a superpower here.
- If you've got a product that makes people's eyes light up then you're onto something
Milly started Generalist World by speaking to a few people, but every single person's eyes lit up & they were all super-passionate. This is a perfect signal that you're doing something right!
- Applying a "Jobs to be Done" mentality to recruitment could be a step change in hiring practices
We can make hiring less transactional & more human by not just talking about job roles, but problems that you need to solve and the skills you need to solve them.
- Milly believes in communities but believes 9 out of 10 will fail
It's just so easy to create a community these days. Companies & brands are jumping on board, doing the bare basics & leaving a ghost town behind. Companies need to be strategic & intentional to be successful.
Contact Milly
You can connect with Milly on Twitter, LinkedIn or check out Generalist World.
Adrienne Barnes started out working to help people with their user personas but found that her work pointed to an even bigger problem - companies entering growth stalls and unable to recover. She is now here to tell us all how we might maintain our flightworthiness and get back onto the path of sustainable growth.
A message from this episode's sponsor - Product People This episode is sponsored by Product People. If you’re a company founder or product leader who needs to get a product management team up and running quickly or cover parental leave check out Product People. They’ve got a thriving community and 40 in-house product managers, product ops pros, and product leaders. They onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. Check out Product People to book a free intro chat and quote code OKIP to get a 5% discount.
Episode highlights:
Growth Stalls can happen to anyone and often happen after really strong growth Companies can be growing, growing, growing and then all of a sudden just stall. There are factors that influence this, but if they're not addressed then growth stalls can last for years or decades
There are some red flags that indicate growth stalls and leaders need to listen Too many leaders believe in themselves too much that they miss the signs of a growth stall & fail to address them. Status quo bias and ignoring dissenting opinions can impede efforts to fix it.
The earlier you catch a growth stall the better but it's never too late Identifying stalls early naturally helps, but if you catch it late then you can still turn it around as long as you're realistic about what "turning it around" means and adjust your expectations.
Growth comes from understanding your customers & too many companies don't If teams have different user personas defined, no one has user personas defined. There needs to be a concerted effort to understand your ideal customers and it should be a top-down, aligned effort.
Alignment is crucial for any of this stuff to work The top reasons for growth stalls are: Not understanding your customers, Not understanding your positioning, Knowledge gaps & misalignments between teams. You need everyone to know the same stuff & pull in the same direction!
Contact Adrienne You can connect with Adrienne on LinkedIn, Twitter or check her website, AdrienneNakohl.com.
Heidi Helfand is an engineering leader, consultant, coach, speaker and author who says that we need to "make the most of the time we have with people". Throughout her career, she's noted how team change is inevitable and wanted to help companies navigate it with her book "Dynamic Reteaming".
A message from this episode's sponsor - Product People This episode is sponsored by Product People. If you’re a company founder or product leader who needs to get a product management team up and running quickly or cover parental leave check out Product People. They’ve got a thriving community and 40 in-house product managers, product ops pros, and product leaders. They onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. Check out Product People to book a free intro chat and quote code OKIP to get a 5% discount.
Episode highlights:
Team change is inevitable but what's important is how you deal with it Even if you're going for long-lived mission-based teams, they're still going to change through attrition, company growth, lay-offs or mergers. There's a playbook to deal with this change.
Dynamic Reteaming helps you however you decide to set up your teams Books like Team Topologies tell you how to set up your teams to deliver value effectively. Dynamic Reteaming can work hand in hand with that approach and help you get there.
Team members don't always get to choose what happens Sometimes people & teams will get moved around & sometimes this change will come top-down. It's ideal for team members to have a say, but ultimately it's important for the leadership to communicate, communicate. communicate
Bottom-up reteaming can work but your mileage might vary Some companies allow people to decide what teams they work on, but your mileage may vary and, ultimately, in many companies, it's important to mix grassroots and executive input to get true success
Dynamic Reteaming offers a playbook for different types of team changes The patterns within Dynamic Reteaming include people-focused approaches to use before and after team changes. The most important principles are to be kind, thoughtful and to treat people with respect.
Buy "Dynamic Reteaming"
"Your team will change whether you like it or not. People will come and go. Your company might double in size or even be acquired. In this practical book, author Heidi Helfand shares techniques for reteaming effectively. Engineering leaders will learn how to catalyze team change to reduce the risk of attrition, learning and career stagnation, and the development of knowledge silos. Based on research into well-known software companies, the patterns in this book help CTOs and team managers effectively integrate new hires into an existing team, manage a team that has lost members, or deal with unexpected change"
Check it out on Amazon. You can also check out the book website
Contact Heidi You can connect with Heidi on LinkedIn.
About the Episode Mirela Mus is a product manager, product leader, mentor, coach, advisor and company founder who wanted to solve a problem that she kept seeing when she spoke to company leaders; the need to spin up product teams to cover hiring gaps and parental leave. She's doing this with her firm Product People.
A message from this episode's sponsor - Product People
This episode is sponsored by Product People. If you’re a company founder or product leader who needs to get a product management team up and running quickly or cover parental leave check out Product People. They’ve got a thriving community and 40 in-house product managers, product ops pros, and product leaders. They onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. Check out Product People to book a free intro chat and quote code OKIP to get a 5% discount.
Episode highlights:
It's important to support promising new product managers
Mirela is committed to bringing talent into product management with the Product People operating model which gives APMs real-world product experience whilst maintaining quality for clients
You don't have to start a SaaS startup to be an entrepreneur
Mirela wasn't excited by building a SaaS product to solve everyday problems, and she found lots of problems through her own consulting which showed her the real problem and why a product agency is needed
Companies can be pretty bad at onboarding in general
But it's not always the case that good onboarding = a good experience. There are plenty of examples of great onboarding into poor company culture and bad onboarding into a great culture. It's the culture that's important!
Onboarding for product managers is harder than for most roles
Product managers are at the centre of everything and the requirements of the role can be really ambiguous depending on the company. The product culture is often underdeveloped which can drag product managers down.
There's a playbook for this stuff and a structured approach that PMs can take
You need to come up with a plan. There are things you can ask for in advance, stakeholders to map and sensitive topics to uncover. These can help you work out where you need to focus to be successful.
Contact Mirela
You can check out Mirela's blog post, Blazing Fast Onboarding for Product Managers. You can connect with Mirela on LinkedIn.
Mackenzie Daisley is a former designer & design account executive who has decided that the design industry is totally fked. She's started her own company, Brieft, to un-fk it and she's not afraid to use expletives along the way (please note, there are many expletives in this episode!)
A message from this episode's sponsor - Product People This episode is sponsored by Product People. If you’re a company founder or product leader who needs to get a product management team up and running quickly or cover parental leave check out Product People. They’ve got a thriving community and 40 in-house product managers, product ops pros, and product leaders. They onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. Check out Product People to book a free intro chat and quote code OKIP to get a 5% discount.
Episode highlights: The Design Industry is F**cked In Australia, staff turnover in design agencies is around 30%, and she's seen similar patterns around the world. A big part of the problem is around communication & collaboration, both internally & externally, and she wanted to fix that
Swearing and Cursing in your Mission Statement attracts the right kind of people Mackenzie has had negative pushback from industry figures about her mission to "un-fck the design industry" but also a lot of positivity from innovators & disruptors who know exactly how fcked it is.
When you're super early it's all about staying close to customers & not being afraid to pivot Mackenzie has had feedback that has led her to pivot, or entirely rewrite parts of the application, and she's been able to get really strong signals of Product/Market Fit early.
You need persistence in the face of adversity Mackenzie went to a pitch event without knowing it was a pitch event, fluffed her first pitch, and got blanked by the judge. She regrouped, came back, and won the event. Don't give up!
You need to be honest, and sometimes vulnerable, to start a company Mackenzie had never started a company before and she has learned on the job. She's found it helpful to be a straight-shooter & direct, but there remains a pressure for women to act differently to men Contact Mackenzie You can connect with Mackenzie on Twitter, or check out Brieft.
Rachael Sacks is a passionate advocate for crypto and Web3 who found fame when she popped up on the cover of the New York Post under the headline "Mean Little Rich Girl". She's now trying to demystify Web3 for curious users and traditional companies trying to get into the space.
A message from this episode's sponsor - Product People This episode is sponsored by Product People. If you’re a company founder or product leader who needs to get a product management team up and running quickly or cover parental leave check out Product People. They’ve got a thriving community and 40 in-house product managers, product ops pros, and product leaders. They onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. Check out Product People to book a free intro chat and quote code OKIP to get a 5% discount.
Episode highlights:
Getting onto the cover of the NY Post was hell but taught her so much
Being misrepresented taught her how things can be taken out of context, how to get better at writing & connecting with people outside of her bubble. This has proven helpful when writing about crypto.
Web3 is the natural progression of where the web is going "If it ain't broke don't fix it" won't cut it. It is broken and it needs fixing. Web3 offers a chance of a future where everything is decentralised and you aren't owned by banks or corporations.
Web3 can be incomprehensible to newcomers & especially companies trying to get in Rachael's trying to use her writing & communication skills to make Web3 accessible. She wants to avoid companies hiring clueless consultants and help companies make a real impact.
VCs and institutional investors are sniffing around Web3 but they need to be authentic The same old Web2 investors have sensed a gold rush and are coming in to try to make money, but there's a strong sense of community and inauthentic people will quickly be sniffed out.
It's mass adoption or bust now There's a lot of work going on to bring a proper consumer-grade experience to Web3 apps, which has been lacking but is getting better. There is also work going on to make people feel secure and that they won't lose all their money to hacks.
Contact Rachael You can connect with Rachael on Twitter, or check out Narrativ3.
Diane Wiredu is the founder of Lion Words, a brand messaging strategy consultancy with which she aims to stop you from sounding like everybody else. She wants to make sure you have product/message fit and a strategy to save you from drowning in a "sea of sameness".
A message from this episode's sponsor - Product People This episode is sponsored by Product People. If you’re a company founder or product leader who needs to get a product management team up and running quickly or cover parental leave check out Product People. They’ve got a thriving community and 40 in-house product managers, product ops pros, and product leaders. They onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. Check out Product People to book a free intro chat and quote code OKIP to get a 5% discount.
Episode highlights: It's hard to see the label when you're stuck in the jar People within a company often can't see the wood for the trees. They know too much and don't understand how complex their messaging has become. Having an independent audit can help to understand what doesn't work.
Messaging is WHAT you say about your product, copywriting and brand voice is HOW you say it Messaging is more than just words. It's a strategy informed by company values, overall positioning & ideal customers. It helps people understand why they should care about your product
Successful messaging strategy looks different for each company but there are some things they have in common: Clarity - Everyone should know what you do consistently Ease - Don't try to say too much or confuse people Relevance - Resonates with your audience's needs
There's a framework to help with this stuff, but much of the value is intangible Diane has her ROAR (Research, Opportunity, Assembly, Review) framework, which of course has hard outputs. But so much of the benefit is the clarity & alignment you get through going through it.
Messaging strategy is a top-down effort and not just marketing fairy dust Messaging is based on some of the fundamentals of the company, including its mission, vision & strategy. It needs deep leadership involvement as well as a cross-functional group from around the company
Contact Diane You can connect with Diane on LinkedIn, or check out Lion Words.
Jacquelyn Guderley is passionate about product management and mental health, and has thrown herself into both with gusto. She's a product manager for UK energy firm OVO, as well as the co-founder of Product Mind and impending book author with the in-progress "My Sketchy Head".
Here are some highlights from the episode:
"The best paths are never linear. The stumble and fall isn't important; it's how you get back up" Jacs had a variety of roles before product management, a role she didn't know existed (even though she had been doing it). Her varied experiences helped to round her out as a PM.
A passion for mental health & product management combined with intense demand to create Product Mind Jacs was unsure whether her social media content was resonating, so asked her followers and got incredible interest from PMs looking for support with their wellbeing.
Product Management is tough, and it's also lonely Product management can be great, but it's also a tough role due to being at the centre of everything, with nowhere to hide & you're often an easy target for blame. PMs often lack people to tell them what's OK & what's not.
Idealised social media content is a double-edged sword There's a lot of boring, reductive, cookie-cutter content out there which feels almost philosophically anti-product management. But, on the other hand, the power and support of the PM community is amazing.
Bringing up mental health issues at work is never easy It's not easy to talk to your boss in all companies & often it's easier not to try. Companies can make it easier by taking an active interest in your well-being. Sharing your experiences can help others share theirs.
Check out Product Mind If you are interested in getting support from like-minded product people, check out Product Mind, or find them on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Contact Jacs You can connect with Jacs on Twitter, or check out My Sketchy Head.
Shaun Smith-Taylor is a self-described Product Geek and BBQ enthusiast who got so frustrated with the state of product management recruiting that he set up his own company to fix it. He's keen on AI, the metaverse and the possibilities of using them to bring technological advancement to recruitment and beyond.
Here are some highlights from the episode:
There's still a problem with the quality of product job specs Half the time, companies don't seem to know what to ask for. This means they confuse candidates and get the wrong people applying for the jobs. A mixture of technology & human consulting is needed to fix this.
But there's also a problem with product management CVs PMs talk about outcomes all the time but need to focus on outcomes in their CVs. Candidates stuff every single thing they've done into their CVs, with little connection to real results & often badly formatted or overlong.
Candidates are still paranoid about Applicant Tracking Systems It's common for people to blame the ATS for all of their problems, but ATS systems always involve humans and aren't using as much fancy AI as some might claim. They're not perfect, but nothing is.
The people the AI is trained on can be just as biased as the AI All people have unconscious biases, and some are downright prejudiced. We should always do what we can to limit the chance of bias, and doing so isn't a personal attack on the hiring manager.
There are metaverse applications for recruitment In a world of remote working & different working preferences in general, the metaverse may open up opportunities around in-person assessments as well as remote working. But we've got a long way to go before we get there.
A message from my sponsor - me! I'm currently looking at consulting opportunities. If you'd like to speak to me about how I can help you build great products, or the teams that build great products, check out One Knight Consulting and book a free, no-commitment call to chat about your needs.
Contact Shaun You can hit Shaun up on LinkedIn, or check out MyProductPath.
Brent Adamson is a former Harvard professor turned Wall Street Journal award-winning author and sales researcher. He co-authored "The Challenger Sale" and "The Challenger Customer" with my former guest Matt Dixon, and these days is challenging us to concentrate on making products easy to buy, not easy to sell.
Here are some of the highlights of our discussion:
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The Challenger Sale shook up the world of sales, but The Challenger Customer was the inevitable follow up They did further research after the first book and identified a new protagonist, the "Mobilizer", who can be your best advocate within the company (but not a champion!)
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It takes 5.4 people within an organisation to make a purchase decision & the number's rising It's getting more & more complicated selling into organisations, and the buying journey has become like spaghetti. Finding the "economic buyer" is no longer enough to land the sale.
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There's a difference between emerging demand and established demand If you're going after established demand and known solutions you're going to get dragged into a price-based bake-off. Challengers find unknown pains, challenge the status quo & break the frame
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Some customers don't even know how to buy any solution, let alone your solution Buyer journeys are complex & some customers can be surprised when things get held up. But you're not, you've seen it all before! Give them the info they need to help close the sale from their side.
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It's not good enough to just be insightful anymore, The smartness arms race ended in a draw Being really insightful is table stakes. You need to be able to help your customers frame their decision and give them confidence in the decisions they're making for their company.
.. And much more!
Check out Matt's episode I interviewed Brent's co-author and co-conspirator Matt Dixon about his work and how customer indecision is a critical problem for B2B sales. Check out the episode here.
Buy "The Challenger Sale"
"The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades."
Check it out on Amazon.
Buy "The Challenger Customer"
"In The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson overturned decades of conventional wisdom with a bold new approach to sales. Now they reveal something even more surprising: the highest-performing sales teams don't focus on friendly, attentive customers. Instead, they target challenger customers. Challenger customers are sceptical, less interested in meeting and ultimately indifferent as to who wins the deal. But they also have the credibility, persuasive skill and will to challenge the status quo that will get a deal to the finish line far more often than customers who are easier to connect with."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Brent You can hit Brent up on LinkedIn.
Matt Dixon is a Wall Street Journal award-winning author and renowned researcher in the world of sales and customer success. He co-authored "The Challenger Sale" in 2011 which turned the world of B2B sales on its head, and encouraged salespeople around the world to take control of the customer conversation. He's now back with "The JOLT Effect" which tells us that our biggest problem with closing sales isn't losing to a competitor but losing to no decision at all.
Here are some of the highlights of our discussion:
There was a big gap in data-based, factual research on sales and it needed filling There are great sales books out there, but many of them are based on opinion and "what worked for me". Matt and his team took an outsiders' data-based approach and uncovered the surprising truth
The Challenger Sale divided the sales community but resonated with founders Matt is not a salesman. This led some people to doubt his findings, but the data speaks for itself. The Challenger approach specifically resonated with startup founders who are natural challengers!
All our assumptions about what makes good salespeople are wrong Sales have traditionally been taught to be relationship builders but in today's world of information overload, it's not enough to have a cosy conversation. Buyers need to be challenged, debated & given insight
Up to 60% of Sales are lost not to a competitor, but to "no decision" & traditional approaches make it worse It's not enough to defeat the status quo. Buyers can be afraid to make a decision whatever the status quo. Traditional sales approaches make the problem worse.
Customers are stuck and we need to JOLT them into action There's a playbook to defeat customer indecision that helps to take risk off the table & make buyers understand they're making a great decision. Product teams are crucial partners in helping sales teams do this.
Buy "The JOLT Effect"
"In sales, the worst thing you can hear from a customer isn’t “no.” It’s “I need to think about it.” When this happens, deeply entrenched business advice says to double down on your efforts to sell a buyer on all the ways they might win by choosing you and your business. But this approach backfires dramatically. Why? Because it completely gets wrong the primary driver behind purchasing decision-making: once purchase intent is established, customers no longer care about succeeding. What they really care about is not failing."
Check it out on Amazon.
You can also check out the book website.
Buy "The Challenger Sale"
"The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades."
Check it out on Amazon.
Make sure you check out "The Challenger Customer" and "The Effortless Experience" too!
Contact Matt You can hit Matt up on LinkedIn.
John Cutler is a product evangelist for Amplitude, and a leading voice in the product management community. As a systems overthinker and "on second thoughts" leader, he's an anomaly in this world of quick-fire bubblegum takes. John's hypothesis is simple - product management is messy and he loves nothing more than thinking about it and drawing lots of complicated diagrams to explain it.
Here are some of John's weighty thoughts:
There's a lot of variety in product content out there and that's good John can get pretty in-depth, but there's plenty of room for targeted, optimised, "just do this" takes out there. As long as they're reducing the gatekeeping around product management not increasing it.
Working in the "ideal" product way isn't the be-all and end-all There are lots of great teams out there not working as per the books. There are also great Big Tech-style practitioners who can only thrive in certain environments and would flounder anywhere else.
We should all be thinking in systems Systems thinking is important for product managers trying to make sense of their product or organisation. Nothing is linear, everything is composed of self-reinforcing loops. Think you're a change agent? You're part of the system too!
Product people need to be able to translate their thinking Systems thinking or otherwise, product people can have complicated messages that could sound esoteric or theoretical to non-product folks. It's important to find a way to land your message with your target audience.
He coined the term "Feature Factory" as a joke and his thinking has evolved Sometimes you're going to have to build a feature & it might even be the best move! Work with your CEO, not against them, when they ask for a feature & make sure you know what game you're playing.
Surviving a feature factory is possible with this 5-step plan John has an actionable 5-step plan (containing 6 steps) which enables you to work out what you want, what your colleagues want, demonstrate the value of product practices and, if all else fails, when to leave.
Contact John You can hit John up on Twitter, or sign up to his mailing list The Beautiful Mess.
Roger Snyder is the VP of Products & Services at the 280 Group, a leading training & consultancy firm in Silicon Valley. He's passionate about product management and wants to help you get better at the craft and put some data into your decision making.
Here are some of Roger's insights:
Product management frameworks & methodologies are good starting points But you can't be a slave to them. Use these frameworks as a baseline to help you ask the right questions about your business, then use what you need for the situation you're in.
Training isn't going to make you an amazing PM on your own Even the best training can't do it all, but it can be an accelerant. Training, certificates & certifications all have their place as part of your journey but you need to get rear-ended a couple of times.
Don't be data-driven, be data-informed There's so much data out there that can help you make great decisions but don't just consume it blindly! You need to make sense of it to have the greatest impact, work out what metrics really matter & work out when "what matters" changes
More teams are data-informed than ever but there are still challenges Many teams are still unable to make data-informed decisions due to lack of access, lack of tooling or stakeholder gatekeeping. Learn to tell stories about why it's important and ensure you explain the WIFM.
Use data to inform your product vision It's important to set up a fact base for your product vision and populate it with the three Cs of product management: Company, Competitors and (of course!) Customers. You can then use all of that data to inform a compelling vision.
Listen to the episode for this and more!
Contact Roger You can reach out to Roger by email, or check out the 280 Group website.
Allen Holub is a software development and agile consultant who wants to help you build better software and build software better. He's also not shy when it comes to telling the world what he thinks about product development via Twitter.
Here are some of Allen's spicy takes:
Making true organisational change requires C-level buy-in It's easy to get hired by the engineering team to help them learn how to make sausages better but the better goal is to work out if you want to make sausages, and you need top-level buy in for this
There are too many people walking on eggshells on Twitter You should be able to share your version of the truth in an open, direct way. If people don't like it, they can listen to someone else! Context is important, but it's not ivory tower thinking to try to change a system.
Empowering people to be agile doesn't mean leaving them to it Removing organisational blockers and waterfall thinking is important, but you can't just leave them to it and not support them. They need support to become a learning organisation.
Scrum is, at best, mostly harmless, but only in good teams You don't need backlogs, you don't need scrum masters, you don't need Sprints. You don't need any of it. Scrum was just a way to make agile acceptable to bureaucratic micromanagers. But all frameworks fly against agile thinking.
Product managers do essential work that developers won't do if left to their own devices, but.. It's important that they're part of the development team, that they're not a silo, they aren't the boss or decision maker for the team & they aren't a replacement for the customer
JIRA is actively contributing to poor development behaviours We don't need big long complicated specs, we don't need backlogs, estimates, story points or velocity charts. We'd be better off with index cards stuck to a wall (or Miro!)
Listen to the episode for this and more!
Follow the progress of Allen's book: Allen is writing a book! Check out the progress of the book here.
Go to Allen's User Story workshop If you want to go to Allen's upcoming class on User Stories, check out the details here.
Contact Allen You can reach out to Allen on Twitter, or book a chat with him.
Claire Vo is a product & technology executive leader, startup founder and future Queen of TechTok, who believes that cynicism and a negative mindset is product and career-limiting, and that people need to stop asking permission to do their jobs.
Here are some of Claire's insights about her career and approach to work:
A worthy mission is attractive, but an exceptional team is important Claire moved to HealthTech because the opportunity was right. It's great to join a worthy company but you need a team you can work with, a problem you can contribute to & a company that needs your skills.
CPTOs can work well in the right context There are a lot of benefits of having clear, joined up leadership between tech & product but it has to work for your organisation & you need a strong leader that ultimately supports the business and not one or other of the functions.
Frameworks alone aren't going to build a great product Use frameworks as conversation starters and mechanisms to help you along but you still need to do the hard work of product management to actually make a difference in the world. Frameworks won't help you win on their own.
You can bring your whole self to the table & still be credible It's possible for leaders to be credible & professional and have a sense of humour. It's important to bring your full self to work & to social media as long as you are respectful to your colleagues and customers.
Optimism trumps cynicism every time Just because work can be hard doesn't mean you should have a negative mindset. It's important to be realistic & critical but mix this with a sense of optimism, "how might we" attitude and empower yourself as a product manager or leader.
There's still a lot to do to get proper inclusion at work There continues to be bias against women & mothers at work. Women have to live up to expectations that men don't. Claire beat the system by refusing to ask for permission to do her job, and you should too.
Listen to the episode for this and more!
Contact Claire You can reach out to Claire on Twitter, find her on LinkedIn, or most importantly on TikTok!
About the Episode Whatever her job, Yana Welinder has always had a passion for improving broken experiences. She did this as Product Lead at Wikimedia, she did this as Head of Product at If This Then That, and now she's here as CEO of her own IoT firm, Kraftful.
Here are some of Yana's insights on IoT & startups:
Usability in IoT is broken & someone needed to fix it Yana was Head of Product at IFTTT & they have an important mission - to make IoT devices interoperable. Yana wanted to solve an even greater pain - how to make them work well at all. She started a company to do this
The IoT space is full of passionate early adopters & moving to the mainstream is hard Early adopters have very technical needs & want more features. Mainstream users want good quality & ease of use. Early adopters are your biggest champions but you need a plan to scale past them
Fundraising for IoT was hard, even more so because she's a woman Many investors have been burned by hardware projects and people want to knock you down. Also, not everyone is Adam Neumann - underrepresented founders can barely raise off the back of successes, let alone failures.
It's important to have an eye on product misuse AirTags have been in the news for stalking, but Apple have at least made an effort to fix that. Not everyone has their resources, but it's important to at least keep an eye on digital rights groups and try to stay clean
The most important thing as a founder is to validate you have an actual problem Don't just throw yourself into something cool - make sure there's appetite for what you're building, go as lean as possible to start with and leverage No Code tools to help you get started quick
Listen to the episode for this and more!
Contact Yana You can reach out to Yana on Twitter.
An interview with Chris Mason. Chris is an executive recruitment consultant who started his agency Intelligent People over 20 years ago. Chris is passionate about diversity & inclusion in recruitment, as well as helping product leaders in general land their next job.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The state of the product hiring market today and how product management recruitment has changed over the last 20 years
- How product management has moved from IT to a strategic partner for product-led companies and when companies should hire a CPO
- Whether we're seeing more product practitioners getting a seat at the top table and how there are two main types of product leadership job
- Why you should be careful which job you wish for, and how to know when to stop trying to climb the career ladder
- Whether product job titles are getting more consistent and whether it's true that job titles don't matter
- Why women should consider not divulging their current salary as it can help to perpetuate gender biased salary and whether the gender pay gap is getting better or worse
- What hiring companies can do to make sure they're developing a diverse talent pipeline and the importance of hiring for "not fit" rather than culture fit
And much more!
Contact Chris You can find Chris at Intelligent People or check him out on LinkedIn.
An interview with Sarah Doody. Sarah is a former UX practitioner and leader who started out trying to help UX pros with their portfolios before realising there's an even bigger problem to solve; how to help designers & product managers optimise for success and give themselves the best chance of getting that next career move.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The origin story behind Career Strategy Lab, how they can help you get a new job, and whether it's just designers or everyone in the product trio
- That chicken & egg scenario when you can't get a job without experience, but you can't get experience without a job, and whether this is just something that affects PMs or hits designers too
- Whether UX job descriptions are any better than Product Management job descriptions and some of the reasons we have poor job specs and poor interviewing process
- How job specs are really just wish lists and the importance of actually reading them rather than just clicking "Quick Apply" to anything with a matching job title
- The importance of customising resumes, CVs and cover letters, why this sounds controversial, and how to make it scale
- Why it might be OK to interview for jobs that you don't actually want to get some practice, and the benefits of taking an MVP approach to your job application
- Whether ATS systems are really the gatekeeping problem that some people make them out to be, and the importance of making personal connections where you can
And much more!
A brief interruption from my sponsor - me! I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, you can buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway!
Contact Sarah You can find Sarah on her personal website or check out Career Strategy Lab. Sarah is also active on Twitter.
An interview with Russ Laraway. Russ was a Company Commander in the US Marines before entering Big Tech at Google, Twitter & Qualtrics. He also co-founded Radical Candor LLC with Kim Scott, and believes that anyone can be trained to be a good manager with the right approach. He wrote about this approach in his new book "When They Win, You Win".
We speak about a lot, including:
- Why the world needs doesn't need another person's opinion on what makes a good manager, and how he wants to move away from opinions and move to data driven, measurable results
- How the US Marines set the stage for him to be a good manager, what moving to Big Tech taught him about focusing on results, and how the military can teach Big Tech a thing or two about Commander's Intent
- Why it was important to simplify the mission to make managers better, because most people aren't getting better and some are getting worse because there's so much conflicting information out there
- Why companies are so bad at developing managers, and how his STAC (Select, Teach, Assess, Coach) approach might help get us away from the best Individual Contributor getting thrown into the pit with no support
- How everyone wants to do great work & be totally psyched whilst doing it, and why people's direct managers are ultimately the key to making that happen
- The big three of Direction, Coaching, Career, how they can help managers thrive and the importance of helping managers not just concentrating on the stuff they're best at
- Whether managers are born or bred, and whether introverts or extrovert make the best managers
And much more!
A brief interruption from my sponsor - me! I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, you can buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway!
Buy "When They Win, You Win" "Businesses everywhere are plagued by managers who seem to think that keeping their staff miserable is the best way to deliver profits. This is a failure of leadership that also hurts the bottom line; research has shown that maintaining a happy, engaged workforce consistently drives measurably better business results across the board."
Check the book out wherever you get your books, or check it out on Amazon or the book website.
Check out my interview with Kim Scott I spoke to Russ's former colleague Kim Scott last year on the podcast about her book "Just Work" - it was a fantastic conversation and you can check it out here.
Contact Russ You can find Russ on his website or check him out on LinkedIn or Twitter
About the Episode An interview with Martina Lauchengco. Martina is a product marketing guru who once worked on MS Office before a glittering career in a variety of tech companies led her into partnerships with SVPG and Costanoa Ventures. She's recently released her new book, "Loved" to try to help product managers & founders get good at product marketing.
We speak about a lot, including:
- Why she wanted to write a book to help early stage founders and product managers understand how to market their products to make sure they make a difference
- How most tech companies are getting their marketing wrong, what it looks like when they do, and what they should be doing instead
- The problems companies can have using traditional marketing approaches led by traditional market folks, and how any initial successes inevitably fade out
- Whether you need to go all in and drink the Product Marketing Kool Aid or can iterate your way to product marketing success
- Some of the traits of a good product marketer, how they are similar to product managers, whether you need specialised product marketers or it's just a mindset issue
- How soon you need product marketers and whether there's value in fractional roles helping you out when you're early
- Top tips for product managers who want to work effectively with their product marketing team, and treat them as equal partners in their product success
And much more!
A brief interruption from my sponsor - me! I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, you can buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway!
Buy "Loved" "The best products can still lose in the marketplace. Why? They are beaten by products with stronger product marketing. Good product marketing is the difference between “also-ran” products versus products that lead. And yet, product marketing is widely misunderstood. Although it includes segmenting customers, positioning your product, creating product collateral, and supporting sales teams, great product marketing achieves much more. It directs the best way to bring your product to market. It shapes what the world thinks about your product and category. It inspires others to tell your product’s story."
Check the book out wherever you get your books, or check it out on Amazon or the book website.
Contact Martina You can find Martina on her personal website. Also, if you bought a copy of her book, you can send your receipt to info@svpg.com for a free chat!
An interview with Étienne Garbugli. Étienne is the lead instructor and CEO of Lean B2B, and a three-time startup founder. He's the author of three books: "Find your Market", "Solving Product" and "Lean B2B". The latter book is out for a second edition, and we decided to talk all about it.
We speak about a lot, including:
- How the second edition has gone down, why there's a second edition at all and why this book matters to B2B entrepreneurs & product managers
- How the book can help both non-technical, subject matter expert startup founders as well as tech-first founders with little to no B2B experience
- The Lean B2B methodology, represented by its handy pyramid and key considerations at the various levels
- Vision: How to systematise your product vision, where to get started, and whether you need a Eureka moment
- Market: Working out who your target market is, the perils of going too wide, and how many people don't even really know what a market is
- Jury: Getting your buyers, approvers, users and even veto-ers together to ensure there's a good reception for your proposition
- Needs: The merits of good customer discovery and why we need to understand our buyers and sellers
- Offer: How to factor in risks, associated costs to your value proposition, and why it's important to separate the value from the specific solution
- Solution: How to get your MVP into the hands of early adopters, and whether all types of B2B customer are ready for MVPs
- What happens after the pyramid once you've validated your solution, and what product/market fit really means in a B2B sense
And much more!
A brief interruption from my sponsor - me! I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, you can buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway!
Buy "Lean B2B" "The second edition of Lean B2B is the result of years of research into B2B entrepreneurship. It builds off the unique Lean B2B Methodology, which has already helped thousands of entrepreneurs and innovators around the world build successful businesses. " Visit The Book Website for more info, and links to Étienne's other books.
Contact Étienne You can find Étienne on LinkedIn, Twitter or visit his website.
About the Episode An interview with Saielle DaSilva. Saielle is Director of User Experience at Cazoo, an online car marketplace. Saielle believes in "putting the soft back into software", is a well regarded conference speaker, and also came out as a transgender woman to her friends & colleagues a few months ago.
We speak about a lot, including:
- Her work at Cazoo, helping to transform a traditional industry for the good of users & the planet, and what "putting the soft into software" really means
- The start of her journey, how long she's known she's a woman and how no one chooses to be transgender for fun or because of peer pressure
- Her disappointment with celebrities that she used to admire or support, how transgender people are unfairly labelled by people with zero knowledge, and how everyone should be humble enough to do the work and learn to be better
- The transition roadmap - how she got ready, the step-by-step approach she took, how she was happy to find people were generally supportive and not as hateful as the mainstream media often portray
- The letter she wrote to her colleagues when she came out at work, the level of detail she went into, types of inappropriate questions transgender women get and her desire to avoid living "reality TV" transgender
- How troublesome the "Hugh Grant" style bumbling apology for misgendering your colleagues can be, and why you should just apologise and move on
- What we can all do, both through our company culture and our own actions to ensure we foster a diverse, welcoming workplace and help our transgender colleagues feel accepted & safe
And much more!
Donate to Saielle's fundraiser Saielle is undergoing further surgery to help with her transition. If you would like to donate, please check out Saielle's fundraiser.
Donate to gender diverse charities If you want to donate to charities that support gender diverse charities, check out Mermaids in the UK, or The Trevor Project in the US.
Contact Saielle You can reach out to Saielle on Twitter or visit her blog.
About the Episode An interview with Amogh Sarda. Amogh is a former Atlassian and Intercom product manager turned company founder with Eesel, a company that aims to take the pain away from managing your documents. He's also a keen improv comedian, and believes there are similarities between how you create an improv skit and how you make a winning product.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The story behind founding Eesel, how they're trying to make finding your own documents as easy as finding President Obama's shoe size, and whether they can save us from Slack thread hell
- The pros & cons of starting a company with a founder who lives 10 hours' time difference away, and how to make it work for you
- The jump from big structured product company to startup life, how you have to identify your ground truths as well as accept the layers of uncertainty that will evolve as you go and making sure you don't change everything all the time
- How you should bring nuance to product principles, what this means and why sometimes it's worth spending some time in the solution space and working back to the problems
- His love of improv comedy, how he got into it, and how it maps to product management practices more than you might think:
- The base reality - working out where you're at and the unarguable truths of your situation
- The game - the key insights or ways that you can affect the base reality
- The funny scene / a great product - executing and bringing it all home
- The importance of keeping it simple, not getting sidetracked or going after everything you could
And much more!
A brief interruption from my sponsor - me! I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, you can buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway!
Contact Amogh You can find Amogh on Twitter or check his blog, The Paperclip.
An interview with Darby Maloney. Darby is a product manager and an avid TikToker who made an innocuous video about product management for her non tech friends and was all of a sudden centre stage for tech bros across TikTok and Twitter, getting criticised for being a woman in tech, for being a woman in a pool, for being a product manager and just about everything else.
We talk about a lot, including:
- How she made the move into product management from customer support, got that tricky first product management job by putting extra hours in on top of her day job, and the importance of finding good mentors to help you along the way
- The story behind that video, why she was making a video about product management with a laptop in a swimming pool in the first place, and whether she stands behind her (and her colleague's) description of product management
- The three main types of criticism she got after the video went viral, how much of that was about her being a woman, how much was about her being a product manager and the crass double standards it exposed
- The effect of the abuse on her mental & emotional state, and how she started to worry about her job and the credibility that she had to work so hard for
- How young women in general have to work extra hard, in a way that young men don't tend to have to do, to prove that they're intelligent, reliable and good at their job
- How she tried to give due credit to engineers & designers for doing the "impressive" work and it why it was disappointing to be attacked in return
- The supportive comments that she got after the hate, how much this meant to her and how some people got in touch to admit wrongdoing and that they'd changed their minds
- Whether she's going to double down on tech videos in future, and if she does whether she'll do the next ones in a serious looking room with lots of books behind her
And much more!
A brief interruption from my sponsor - me!
I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway!
The infamous swimming pool video and the rebuttals Here's the original video that started it all off.
The swimming pool video
Darby also posted two follow up videos:
Rebuttal 1 Rebuttal 2
Contact Darby You can find Darby on TikTok or Instagram.
We're also trying to get her to spend more time on Twitter!
An interview with Daniel Elizalde. Daniel is a Product Advisor to ClimateTech product teams and long time IoT guru. He's also recently decided to tackle some of the problems B2B product managers have getting their ideas to market. He's tackling this with his own podcast as well as new book "The B2B Innovator's Map".
We speak about a lot, including:
- Why he decided to write his new book now, and how he tried to make it actionable and fresh with numerous real world examples from his own career and long experience consulting with B2B firms
- How the vast majority of B2B innovations fail, how his book aims to offer a solution to this and give a process to enable B2B product leaders to get from zero to their first ten customers (and who those ten customers should be)
- How his experience in Climate Tech has helped him come up with recommendations on how to frame seemingly esoteric B2B products in ways that resonate with those customers' real problems and drawing a line back to real world ROI
- The six stages of the B2B Innovators' Map (Strategic Alignment, Market Discovery, User Discovery, Solution Planning, Prototyping, Early Adopters), what they involve and when to double back
- The importance of cutting your losses with Early Adopters, and not succumbing to the temptation to do absolutely anything to keep a customer on board if you've proved it doesn't make sense for you in the wider context of your product
- The risks of coming to the end of the process with a niche product for a limited audience, and how to make sure that the things you're building are made generic for an entire market
- What comes after the B2B Innovator's Map and the importance of aligning next steps with your leadership team to take your learnings to the big time
And much more!
Buy "The B2B Innovator's Map" "Most new enterprise software products fail to generate a profit. They fail not because of technical challenges, lack of funding, or market conditions. Instead, new products fail because most companies build products that don’t satisfy a market need, so customers don’t buy them. The B2B Innovator’s Map is your practical guide to taming uncertainty and discovering opportunities to develop products your customers will be eager to buy." Visit The Book Website for more info.
Contact Daniel You can find Daniel on LinkedIn or DanielElizalde.com.
A message from our sponsor Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. Go to Skiplevel.co and use code OKIP75 to get $75 off the program by 15th June, 2022.
About this Episode An interview with Andy Budd. Andy is the founder of Clearleft, one of the UK's original design consultancies. He's now an in demand speaker, thought leader and advisor on the topics of design & entrepreneurship.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The story behind his departure from day-to-day operations at Clearleft, how he believes that startup founders have a shelf life as CEO, and the importance of bringing new blood into the company as you scale
- The problems with getting design practices changed in established companies and why he's focusing now on going back to basics with early stage startups and working with founders to instill good design practices from the beginning
- Why it's important to get design into the startup as early as possible to apply structure and rigour, but how many founders have done more product discovery than we give them credit for
- How early product managers in founder-run startups are often brought in as the equivalent of short order chefs and the folly of trying to turn McDonalds in to a Michelin starred restaurant
- The common situation when early founders being people into the company to help apply process, get frustrated when everything slows down but how it's fair enough for founders to feel this since it's ultimately their business on the line
- How most companies should probably do more research but how most product designers should be more pragmatic and realise that ultimately they can help to sustain the business with less-than-perfect designs
- The trouble that product & design people can have getting to the top table, the things they might need to do to get there and how product & design teams are playing chess while the rest of the leadership team are playing poker
And much more!
Contact Andy You can find Andy on Twitter or check out andybudd.com
A message from our sponsor Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. Go to Skiplevel.co and use code OKIP75 to get $75 off the program by 15th June, 2022.
About this Episode An interview with Nicole Reineke. Nicole is a strategist and author with 75 patents to her name. She wanted to help others unlock the innovator within them and wrote "Compassion Driven Innovation" with a cross-functional group of co-authors. The book aims to give business owners and product leaders a proven methodology to defeat the Innovator's Dilemma and get the best innovation results.
We speak about a lot, including:
- Some of the early reception for her book, how people have started to adopt it and use in within their organisations, and how she wrote it very cross-functionally with 2 co-authors from different fields
- Why she needed to "write the book she needed to read" after having been granted 75 patents and realising that there was a method to drive true innovation
- How she started off researching a number of companies to work out the four core root causes of innovation failure: Exclusivity, Missing the most pressing challenges, Overestimated value and Unsupported moon shots
- How this book tackles some of the gaps left behind by the classic Innovator's Dilemma and offers innovators a way to solve it
- The tale behind the compassion driven innovation methodology, how can it help mitigate the 4 different types of innovation failure, and the 4 stages of the compassion driven innovation process: Include, Discover, Enlighten & Activate.
- The importance of transparency and openness, using artifacts to ensure everyone knows why decisions are being made, and having political nous to make sure you get buy in and nip dissent in the bud
- Why it's essential to be able to pivot based on new information or data throughout the innovation cycle, not falling in love with your ideas and the perils of discovery theatre
And much more!
Buy Compassion Driven Innovation "This book is for pathfinders— product, services, business, and nonprofit managers searching for ways to reach beyond the artificial barriers that constrain innovation and make “work” harder. Inspired by real life trailblazers and their own experiences, the authors decode the secrets of achieving breakthrough success at both organizational and interpersonal levels. Learn to use their methodology with the help of checklists and detailed examples that will transform your thinking and skills."
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Nicole You can find Nicole on Twitter or LinkedIn
A message from our sponsor Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. Go to Skiplevel.co and use code OKIP75 to get $75 off the program in the next 30 days.
About this Episode An interview with Radhika Dutt. Radhika is a product leader, consultant & author of "Radical Product Thinking". This is actually the third time I've spoken to Radhika about some of the themes from her book, and product vision in general and on this episode we go deep on vision vs survival.
We speak about a lot, including:
- How the book's going international these days into various markets, how it's going down there and whether she has plan for world domination
- Why she's not making the mistake of some product companies and avoiding getting seduced by expanding market share or increasing revenue by going to international markets unprepared
- Why revenue can never be your North Star or part of your vision at all, and how product companies need to learn to prioritise vision against survival
- The concept of vision debt where you just build stuff to survive, how much vision debt is healthy and how you're always going to have to pay it back
- The importance of storytelling when trying to sell the benefits of a vision-led approach and a lesson from the different strategic approaches Marvel & DC took with their films
- The idea of an ethical line in the sand which product people don't want to cross but how easy it is to accidentally cross it, not with one big mistake but many small ones
- Why you should examine your personal vision and survival metrics, make sure you stay true to yourself and take an ethical stand where you can
And much more!
Buy Radical Product Thinking "Iteration rules product development, but it isn't enough to produce dramatic results. This book champions Radical Product Thinking, a systematic methodology for building visionary, game-changing products."
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Listen to Radhika's other episodes We covered some of the broader themes from Radhika's book in our first episode Episode 82 - Curing Product Diseases with a Radical Product Vision or our second episode Episode 92 - Digital Pollution & The Product Hippocratic Oath.
Contact Radhika You can find Radhika on Twitter or LinkedIn
A message from our sponsor Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. Go to Skiplevel.co and use code OKIP75 to get $75 off the program in the next 30 days.
About this Episode An interview with James Mayes. James is the co-founder and former CEO of Mind the Product, one of the world's leading product communities. James came on to talk about the recent acquisition of Mind the Product by Pendo, his new role as Product Evangelist for Pendo, and some of the themes he's talking about on his travels.
We talk about a lot, including:
- Why the Mind the Product team decided to sell themselves to Pendo in the first place, why they did it now and whether they've maintained editorial independence post-acquisition
- Whether there was any concern that they might be doubling up or treading on each others' toes with the two sets of product conferences, podcasts and online communities
- His new role as a Product Evangelist, what that means for Mind the Product and for Pendo, and whether he's an evangelist for product management as a whole or for Pendo's solutions
- Whether he's the Pendo answer to John Cutler, the prospect of an arms race of content creation and whether James could beat John in an arm wrestle
- Whether there's a growing need for product advocacy to help product people be successful & some of the similarities with developer relations teams
- His continuing desire to support the growth of product teams and product processes but also the fundamental craft of product management
- Some of the thoughts on his mind right now about scaling product teams through technology & the missed opportunities of many attempted digital transformations
And much more!
Contact James You can email James at james@mindtheproduct.com or connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
A message from our sponsor Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. Go to Skiplevel.co and use code OKIP75 to get $75 off the program in the next 30 days.
About this Episode An interview with Tessa Kriesel & Wesley Faulkner. Tessa & Wesley are passionate advocates for the craft of Developer Relations (DevRel), building communities and supporting users of products aimed at developers.
We talk about a lot, including:
- What DevRel is, what they love about it and how there's not one boring DevRel person in the world
- Their journeys into DevRel and whether there's a standard career path for people trying to get into the trade
- The types of companies that need DevRel teams and how the concept of "developer-first" and "developer plus" products informs when you need to spin up a DevRel team
- Where DevRel sits within the organisation, the other functions it intersects with and whether it's really just a part of marketing
- Why it matters that business leaders understand the true value of DevRel rather than seeing them as one team to do just about anything that comes up
- Whether we need DevRel at all when the vast majority of PMs claim to be technical enough to talk to developers anyway
- The ways that DevRel and Product teams can work together, some of the things that DevRel teams need from PMs & what they can give back in return
And much more!
Contact Tessa or Wesley (or both!) If you want to catch up with Tessa, you can reach out to her on Twitter, on Polywork, at TessaKriesel.com or check out Devocate
If you want to catch up with Wesley, you can reach out to him on Twitter, on Polywork or check out his podcast Community Pulse.
A message about mentoring I'm passionate about mentoring & think it is a high leverage activity for product managers as they develop in their careers. I mentored 76 people in Q1 2022 but have realised I don't scale so am working with a buddy to match mentors & mentees. Sign up here to be a mentor, mentee or both!
About this Episode An interview with Jim Morris. Jim's a product discovery & experimentation coach who wants teams to stop wasting their time with discovery if they're not going to do anything with it. He's currently running Product Discovery Group out in Silicon Valley.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The goals of Product Discovery Group, the problems he helps to solve, how he got started as a product discovery coach and that time he hung out with Jeff Bezos
- How many companies see funding as the ultimate validation of their idea but forget to talk to their customers and check if the idea is actually viable for the business
- Why we need to remember that product discovery is not just there as an artificial stage gate to delay decision making and should always serve the overall business goals
- How there are bad product companies with good product managers and good product companies with bad product managers, and how Silicon Valley startups are in the same boat as the rest of us when it comes to good product discovery practices
- How we can bed product discovery in with leadership, how to persuade them that there's a different way to lead, and how to skill up product teams that have never done product discovery before
- The concept of a Solution Test, the importance of presenting multiple solutions, why you have to get interactive rather than just show stuff, and why you should never concentrate on usability first
- How to apply structure to your discovery data collection to make it easier to extract insights from the data and turn them into action
And much more!
Contact Jim You can reach out to Jim on Twitter, on LinkedIn or check out Product Discovery Group.
A message about mentoring I'm passionate about mentoring & think it is a high leverage activity for product managers as they develop in their careers. I mentored 76 people in Q1 2022 but have realised I don't scale so am working with a buddy to match mentors & mentees. Sign up here to be a mentor, mentee or both!
About this Episode An interview with Sophia Höfling. Sophia is a former Head of Product at Babbel and now co-founder and Head of Product at Saiga, a Berlin-based productivity startup where they're aiming to save people from life admin. Sophia's passionate about life-centred design and collaborative product discovery.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The mission behind Saiga and how they have started with a Wizard of Oz product as they try to work out the most important problems to solve
- The tricky transition from established product companies to new startup foundership and having to do everything yourself
- The concept of life-centred design and why we can't just listen to users but have to consider the holistic impact of our products on all stakeholders
- What to do when your customers don't care about the ethical merits of your product but you want to do the right thing anyway
- The importance of collaborative, rather than cooperative, product discovery and how to include people from outside the classic product trio in your discovery journey
- Whether doing all this discovery slows you down, whether that's OK and the importance of timeboxing discovery efforts to avoid getting caught in an infinite loop
- How to get buy-in for product discovery from sceptical leadership and convince them of the benefits of a good discovery flywheel
And much more!
Sophia's on Medium Check out Sophia's articles on Medium, including
It’s time we move to life-centered product development
The importance of collaboration in product discovery (and how to get it right)
Contact Sophia If you want to catch up with Sophia, you can reach out to her on LinkedIn.
An interview with Anna Maste. Anna is a software developer turned company co-founder who set up Boondockers Welcome with her mum. Having never owned an RV or had any dealings with the community, Anna engaged with said community via her mum's influencer status and ended up scaling the business and exiting. She's now back with her second company and going for it again in another industry.
We talk about a lot, including:
- Explaining what the heck a "boondocker" is to this Brit, the problems they where having that were worth solving, and how they created a mix of Airbnb and Tinder to solve it
- Whether starting a company with your mum is the ultimate Mom Test and the pros and cons of working with close family members
- How she had no experience with the RV community, but used her RV influencer mum's experience to understand the needs that the community had and how they might solve them
- Some of the challenges of creating a digital platform for people that are by definition "off grid" and how the platform grew over time as mobile technology improved
- Whether playing the long game and working to build community relationships would have been possible if they'd been forced down the growth at all costs VC route
- How their successful exit came about, how they had to pick a company that they could trust to carry on their good name, and whether the community felt it was a betrayal or sell out
- How she's started a new company to solve a problem she had in her first company, and how she's going about engaging with a brand new community for the second time
And much more!
Contact Anna If you want to catch up with Anna, you can reach out to her on Twitter or check out Subscribe Sense.
An interview with Dan Chapman. Dan is a British export to the US where he's busy building internal products to help make smart scientists more successful. Dan's strong on product principles but flexible on the details as he tries to transfer book talk into action for one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
We talk about a lot, including:
- His work with Merck, how there are actually two Mercks and a summary of the differences between them and why they diverged
- The challenges & opportunities of working in product management when your end users are hardcore scientists, and whether this is the one time you actually do need to be an industry expert to be an effective product manager
- Whether situations like the Theranos scandal loom large over the medical research industry, and how "move fast & break things" doesn't work when people's lives are on the line
- That tricky balancing act where you're trying to be agile and move fast whilst working for a company (and an industry) that values process, predictability & compliance
- Whether working for a big multinational means he's defaulted to having to use SAFe and why legacy waterfall companies are attracted to such frameworks
- Whether being an introvert in product management is a barrier or a superpower, and how to survive all the meetings & presentations when your natural tendency is not to want to be in the room
- Why idealistic product principles only get you so far, how to work out which ones matter, which don't, and why waterfall might actually be the better option sometimes (🤢)
And much more!
Contact Dan If you want to catch up with Dan, you can reach out to him on LinkedIn or on Twitter.
An interview with David Dylan Thomas. David is a product designer and self-taught expert in cognitive bias. He's now consulting with companies to help them make ethical product design decisions and is the author of "Design for Cognitive Bias", a book that aims to help us all understand the implicit biases that underpin our decision making when we design products.
We talk about a lot, including:
- How he got into writing and consulting about cognitive biases in the first place, whether you need to go back to college to learn about this stuff and whether it's intimidating having your work reviewed by academic experts
- Why we have cognitive biases, how our brains are constantly lying to us, and how we'd struggle to cope with having to make a trillion decisions a day without them
- The importance of taking complicated scientific concepts back to a human level and making sure you can explain things like you would to a five-year-old
- How cognitive biases can manifest themselves when we're designing products, the most common biases that we might come across, and why the framing bias is by far the most dangerous bias of all
- Why it's sometimes important to insert speed bumps into our products rather than continuously trying to optimise for speedy decision making
- Some of the ways to interrupt cognitive biases in product design, including the red team / blue team approach and the Black Mirror test
- The importance of participatory design and giving the people most affected by bias the power to decide when something that affects them is actually ready to go
And much more!
Buy "Design For Cognitive Bias" "We humans are messy, illogical creatures who like to imagine we’re in control—but we blithely let our biases lead us astray. In Design for Cognitive Bias, David Dylan Thomas lays bare the irrational forces that shape our everyday decisions and, inevitably, inform the experiences we craft. " Visit the book website or check it out on Goodreads.
Contact David If you want to catch up with David, you can reach out to him at https://www.daviddylanthomas.com
An interview with Moustapha Seck. Moustapha is a seasoned product professional and entrepreneur who cut his teeth in Canada before being inspired to go back to Africa to use his product management skills to build solutions for the poorest Africans. He's doing this with his new startup, Fluid, which aims to help derisk financial inclusion for marginalised communities.
We speak about a lot, including:
- How he started out in engineering and moved into product management after finding that he got more joy out of working with & designing solutions for his users
- The core elements of product management, how they're not complicated individually but difficult to execute consistently, and how mentors can help you understand what's OK and what's not
- His journey from Canada to Africa to Canada to Africa and how the classic book Zero to One inspired him to tackle meaningful problems for Africa's poorest communities
- How Africa has a lot of opportunities to fix things as so many basic things don't work, how he identified the key problem to solve and the research he had to do to validate his idea
- The importance of leaving technology out of it when dealing with marginalised communities & how you have to do way more listening than talking in order to build trust
- His desire for entrepreneurs and investors to look across Africa, not just concentrate on the biggest markets and how to pick the right markets to enter into there
- Why it's important to enlist power users to build advocacy and help you co-create solutions in traditional industries that are not used to trying out new solutions
- The need to keep your power users close, but not too close as you try to work out how to build for the wider market and prepare to scale the business
And much more!
Check out Saeed Khan's episode Moustapha called out some mentors that have shaped his product management career, including my good friend & previous podcast guest Saeed Khan.
Check out Check out Saeed's episode here!
Check out Fluid If you're interested in Moustapha's company or the mission behind it, you can check out fluidfinance.co.
Contact Moustapha You can find Moustapha on LinkedIn.
An interview with Holly Schroeder. Holly is a Senior UX Researcher and passionate accessibility advocate who wants us all to get better at including everyone in our product design choices. She's also a recent contributor to a new UX book, 97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know.
We speak about a lot, including:
- Her life as a UX researcher, the tension between business needs & user needs and the need to be pragmatic when finding a balance between the two
- Her passion for making sure that we design our products with accessibility in mind, and how come we're still in a situation where people aren't thinking about accessibility as a matter of course
- How only 3% of websites have been verified as accessible by the accessibility organisation WebAIM, and how we would feel if only 3% of buildings had ramps or 3% of pavements had dropped kerbs or curb cuts
- Some of the worst offenders when talking about (lack of) accessible design, how people are failing to get even the simple things right, how it's not just about screen readers, and how accessibility overlays are just putting lipstick on a pig
- Why we shouldn't be surprised that people aren't learning about accessibility when coding courses & boot camps don't even mention accessibility in passing
- Whether it's fair enough for startups to make the choice to "go fast and break things" and ignore accessibility, why we might consider slowing things down, and whether this is all the fault of tiresome tech bros
- The importance of including people with disabilities in user testing, but how accessibility is everyone's problem and how we shouldn't just rely on disabled people to do our homework for us
And much more!
Buy "97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know" "Tap into the wisdom of experts to learn what every UX practitioner needs to know. With 97 short and extremely useful articles, you'll discover new approaches to old problems, pick up road-tested best practices, and hone your skills through sound advice."
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Check out Holly's extensive library of a11y resources Holly has collated, and continues to maintain, an excellent list of accessibility resources. Check it out!
Contact Holly You can find Holly on Twitter.
An interview with Matt Arbesfeld. Matt is a Thiel Fellow and founder of LogRocket, a platfom that helps you understand problems affecting your users, so that you can get back to building great software & great products. Matt is passionate about using data to drive product decisions & helping to align all of the parts of the product trio around what's important for the product.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The mission behind LogRocket, how they started out building a tool for developers before realising that product managers were coming and using it too
- How he went from a tech internships into company foundership, how this wasn't his first rodeo and how he's known his cofounder since he was 1 month old
- Whether they had trouble taking a developer-focused tool, abstracting just the right level of data for non-developer users, and why good UX isn't just for B2C apps
- How they validated the need for the product management use case and whether they tried to build everything with the same team or split everything by value stream
- The importance of being able to have data to monitor your product feature launches and the types of decisions you can quickly make if you have that data available
- How having one source of truth on your product can help to align all parts of the product trio and allow you to make good product decisions
- The story behind Thiel Fellowships and whether they help or hinder the tendency for tech firms to hire out of the same exclusive circles
And much more!
Check out LogRocket If you like the sound of LogRocket and want to check it out, try the LogRocket website?
Contact Matt You can reach out to Matt on Twitter or LinkedIn.
An interview with Princess Akari. Princess is a product manager at Brass where she's helping to disrupt the Nigerian banking industry. She's also passionate about supporting local product managers & standing up for the very value of product management via her community PeopleInProduct, the "Alcoholics Anonymous of Product Management".
We talk about a lot, including:
- Her day job as a product manager building mobile applications for a disruptive fintech, and how they're taking on the banking industry in Nigeria
- Why someone who starts out with a degree in civil engineering and a job as a structural engineer subsequently moves into product management
- Her journey into product management, how it was difficult to get community support to ease the transition and how this gave her the idea to start up her own community
- The mission behind PeopleInProduct and how they aim to be a warm, inclusive community where people can share their issues & doubts but also celebrate their successes
- The problem with many Nigerian product companies not really understanding the value of product management, and how that manifests itself in the financial packages and the respect they're given
- How she feels that there's a need product managers to be more explicit about the value they're creating for the company & standing up for themselves
- How everything's always worse for women, how they're discouraged from coding or design and forced into "easy" product management jobs, and then struggle to get their voices heard once they're in there
And much more!
Check out PeopleInProduct If you like the sound of PeopleInProduct and want to join in, or maybe use it as inspiration to set up your local version, why not check out PeopleInProduct?
Contact Princess You can reach out to Princess on Twitter, LinkedIn. She also writes on Medium.
About the Episode An interview with Dan Olsen. Dan's a product consultant, text adventure & interactive fiction fanatic and author of 2015's "The Lean Product Playbook", a book that aimed to help people innovate faster with minimum viable products and rapid customer feedback.
We talk about a lot, and try to get as many tenuous 80s gaming references in as possible:
- Whether "The Lean Product Playbook", published in 2015, still holds up and how a new generation of product managers are finding it for the first time, and why it wasn't published as a Choose Your Own Adventure book
- Given that software is eating the world, whether it's good software and good product companies doing the eating, or whether there's a dastardly bad product Pac-Man on the loose
- How his passion for interactive fiction & text adventures was good practice for getting deep into the problem space, and whether product managers even belong there
- The need to develop a common vocabulary with users, being able to use the right words and ask the right questions to get the results you need from discovery and prototyping
- The key attributes you need on your Character Sheet to be a good product manager, and how a wide dynamic range of abilities can help you succeed in your quest
- What to do to battle HIPPOs when they come crashing through the door trying to derail your roadmaps and why it all stems from starting the quarter at 120% capacity and having no protection from incoming Asteroids
- The types of tasks that product managers should carry in their limited inventory, and why they need to advocate for the value of hiring other disciplines and not just fill in gaps
And much more!
Buy The Lean Product Playbook "The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice.."
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Dan If you want to catch up with Dan, you can reach him on Twitter or his website dan-olsen.com.
An interview with Richard Awe. Richard is a Senior Business Analyst with the European Central Bank who got bored writing all those requirements documents & user stories, and decided to build a tool to help him do that at scale. He's now here with Requstory, a platform that aims to help people write user stories fast.
- A day in the life of a business analyst at the European Central Bank, the sorts of projects he's working on, and whether banks can ever be truly agile
- How he moved from training as a scientist and wannabe process engineer to business analyst because he loved being close to the users & engineers
- What a business analyst actually does and how similar it is or isn't to being a product manager or product owner on an agile team
- How working on a big project & having to write loads of user stories led him to build a no-code tool to help him do that quicker.. and how interest from friends & colleagues made him decide to make it ready for primetime
- How he's managing the user feedback and trying to keep focused on delivering real value rather than any niche feature that comes up
- Some of the characteristics of a good or bad user story and how the ultimate point is always to be something that starts off a discussion
- When user stories might not work for you, the different types of stories you can use, what some of the alternatives might be & whether they're really just interchangeable
And much more!
Contact Richard You can reach out to Richard on Twitter or check out Requstory.
An interview with Melissa Perri. Melissa is a product leader, educator, board member, consultant, coach and also the author of one of the best books on product management, "Escaping the Build Trap". These days she's an evangelist for the role of product operations and setting up CPOs for success in the executive suite.
We talk about a lot, including:
- Revisiting Escaping the Build Trap, what the build trap is, why people find themselves there and why they struggle to get out
- How her thinking has evolved since the book, and why she believes that product operations is a critical lever for scaling organisations
- What product operations is, how it enables you to scale, and the three pillars of product ops transformation that companies tend to go through
- Whether it's fair to label product operations as the revenge of process people or whether that's a total misrepresentation
- Why we should always be looking to optimise how we're working, not just sticking to what has worked in the past because it worked in the past
- The need for strong CPOs so that product teams have a seat at the top table, why this is essential for product led companies and at what stage you need them
- What the CPO role actually involves, what product people need to do to get good at it, and the tendency for product people to lack the confidence for the top table
And much more!
Buy Escaping the Build Trap "To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. " Check it out on Amazon, or on Goodreads.
You can also check out book website.
Melissa's new book "Product Operations" Melissa is writing a new book on product operations with her friend & colleague Denise Tilles. Check out the progress on ProductOperations.com.
Contact Melissa You can reach out to Melissa on Twitter or check out MelissaPerri.com.
An interview with Katerina Suchkova. Katerina is a product leadership coach with Ahead of Product. She's passionate about helping people up the product management career ladder, and helping them work out how to be their real selves.
We talk about a lot, including:
- Her journey into coaching and how much joy it gives her to watch people getting better at what they do and elevating their confidence at work
- The product management career ladder, the transition points along the way and whether the ladder actually exists in most companies
- Whether the lack of real definition or understanding of the value of product management is actively blocking the existence of such a ladder
- The importance of taking a step back and understanding what your own motivations are, being what you want to be not what you think people think you should be
- How to manage the transition into product leadership, identifying your strengths & weaknesses and how to handle the conversation with your manager
- The importance of widening your perspective to make sure people see your potential for leadership rather than just seeing you as a good individual contributor
- The things you need to let go of to be a good leader, what you need to forget and let go of if you want to enable your teams to be the most effective they can be
And much more!
Contact Katerina You can reach out to Katerina on LinkedIn or check out Ahead of Product.
An interview with Holly Hester-Reilly. Holly is the founder of H2R Product Science, a consultancy that aims to help companies large & small build high growth products by following a scientific approach to product development.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The mission behind H2R Product Science, her belief that there's a science to building products and the types of problems she can help to solve
- How she got a gig as Head of Product & Engineering at YourBase, whether she thinks CPTOs are a positive trend and whether there are disadvantages to having combined tech & product leadership
- The five step Product Science success path, what those steps looks like and how not all companies start at the first step
- The timescale for impact from the Product Science process, how it's not a quick fix, and whether it fits with all companies' timescale expectations
- The need for strong product leadership to take up the baton when she moves on, and how Holly jumped the product leadership leadership chasm herself
- How life isn't like the books & whether product managers should just get on with it or try their best to drive transformative change through the companies they work for
- Using the "Built / Learned / Planning" product demo format to help build a ripple effect through the whole company and bed in the concept of a learning organisation
And much more!
Holly's book recommendation Holly's all about product discovery, but she hasn't written a book yet! I asked her to recommend a book on product discovery that was not Teresa Torres's book Continuous Discovery Habits. Holly recommends that book but also Lean UX. She also promises to write her own book one day.
Contact Holly You can reach out to Holly on Twitter or check out H2R Product Science.
An interview with Derek Osgood. Derek is a former Playstation product manager who turned to product marketing and realised that there was a big problem keeping aligned with product management around go-to-market launches. He's now started Ignition, a go-to-market platform aiming to help solve this problem and get teams releasing products more effectively.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The mission behind his conpany Ignition and how they're trying to solve the problems many product marketing teams have getting products out to market
- How he chose the features for the MVP of his product, how he realised that this limited feature set wouldn't do the trick and why he had to go wide to cover a variety of smaller pain points to really win in the market
- Why he advocates white glove treatment and eschewing product led growth for early products in order to get good early customer feedback, but how you should still follow PLG principles to ensure you have a compelling user experience
- Why we still need go-to-market plans even when we're living in an agile world, and how product marketing is necessarily more waterfall
- Why it's so important to get product marketing up front to the beginning of the product development process so they know what's coming and why, and aren't just thrown a grenade at the last minute
- The impact that a lack of launch planning can have on a release, how people can end up spending too much or too little time on the wrong things, and the importance of having a coherent launch process
- What a perfect product launch plan looks like and why it involves the product marketing teams doing their own research to optimise their messaging, not just rewriting other people's product specs in a different style
And much more!
Contact Derek You can reach out to Derek on LinkedIn or check out his company Ignition.
An interview with Merina Khanom. Merina is a Product Manager at BBC iPlayer, which she boldly names as the inspiration for Netflix, and a passionate advocate for increasing diversity & inclusion within product companies as well as the wider product community.
We talk about a lot, including:
- Her work for BBC iPlayer, how she took her passion for mobile solutions into product management, and whether mobile product management is easier or harder than other types of product management
- How her CV doesn't look like anyone else's, how she took a non-linear path in product management, and the challenges of getting past recruitment filters when you have a different-sounding name
- How she felt when she found out she was the only hijab-wearing Muslim woman in the history of BBC iPlayer, and why it's reductive and lazy to blame that on a pipeline problem
- The problems with breaking into tech when you have no role models that look like you, and the problems you can have getting taken seriously if people have never seen someone that looks like you working in the role
- How the killing of George Floyd affected her personally & gave her the energy to speak up & take a stand for racial equality at work, and some of the challenges marginalised people can have opening up when they've been bullied into submission
- Some of the initiatives she helped kick off at work, and how she tried to work with product conferences & communities to challenge the lack of diversity on their rosters
- Why a lack of diversity & inclusion is everyone's responsibility, not just something for marginalised people to sort out or advocate for alone
And much more!
Contact Merina You can reach out to Merina on LinkedIn.
An interview with Crystal Parker. Crystal is a Product Manager at Spear Education and an entry-level career coach. She's using her personal experience of getting into product management to help others do the same through her coaching, where she aims to map out a strategy and work out their golden path to that first product management role.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The mission behind Spear Education, what it's like building an analytics platform for dentists and how she built up her dental domain knowledge
- How she got into product management in the first place, why it's the perfect job for her and how she got past the interview process given that she had zero product management experience
- How she upped her product management game once she got in, how she managed to "finesse the rest", and the resources she used to build her product management skills
- Her passion for mentoring others & how it led her to start coaching those following her and help get people from non-traditional backgrounds into tech careers where they belong
- How she gets strategic with the people she's coaching to map out their path to success and how that's informing a new e-book which will allow the wider world to follow the Crystal Parker approach (™?)
- The sorts of things you shouldn't really waste your time on when trying to get that first product management role, and where to best focus your efforts instead
- Some of the gateway positions you could consider to get into a product company, get close to the product management team & eventually transfer into the role you're after
And much more!
Contact Crystal You can reach out to Crystal on Twitter or check out her website crystalaparker.com.
An interview with David Bland. David is a Lean consultant who aims to help you make good business decisions by testing your business ideas and making sure they're worth pursuing. He's doing this through his day job as founder of Precoil, and also as the co-author of "Testing Business Ideas", a desk reference with 44 different experimental techniques you can use to do the same.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The story behind "Testing Business Ideas", the idea behind the visual design, and how it's part of a box set that will make you the ultimate businessperson
- Whether there's anything he would have change from his book based on his work since, and whether there are any new techniques that people should be considering
- Some of the preconditions you need to have in your organisation to enable an experimentation culture, and whether this can work at all stages of a company
- How to tackle the reluctance to experiment with customers, either because they're seen as too important or because the company leadership think they already know what they want
- The importance of ethical experiments, and making sure you're working with customers & not on them or against them
- How assumption mapping can help land the idea of risk of desirability, feasibility, viability risks and how this framing can help pierce leaders' reality distortion fields
- The importance of balancing discovery & delivery and ensuring that discovery & validation is part of the work, not an optional extra
And much more!
Buy "Testing Business Ideas" "7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder’s global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas."
Check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact David If you want to catch up with David, you can reach him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
You can also check out his work at Precoil.
An interview with Dan Balcauski. Dan is a pricing & packaging consultant who is aiming to demystify the world of high-volume SaaS pricing and support this via his own consultancy, Product Tranquility.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The mission behind Product Tranquility, the problems they solve and some of the ways they can help you get your product packaging & pricing strategy right
- The pros & cons of the three main pricing models; cost plus, competition based pricing and value based pricing
- Why it can be dangerous to "herd", where everyone is following everyone else's pricing models but no one's done the research to see if that pricing's right
- Some of the early warning signals of bad pricing that you can look out for before you go bankrupt
- The 4-step plan a company should go through to identify its target market, the value the product brings, the competitive alternatives & the pricing model that can support it
- The importance of keeping packaging simple so that customers can understand what they're going to get & salespeople are able to sell it effectively
- Why freemium pricing is "almost always a bad idea" - some of the downsides of this approach and what you can do instead
And much more!
Contact Dan You can reach out to Dan on LinkedIn or check out his pricing blog on Product Tranquility.
An interview with Richie Lokay. Richie is the VP of Product Design & Services at Wunderkind, a "one-to-one performance marketing engine". Richie is passionate about the field of performance design and driving for a world where user experience meets customer experience.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The mission behind Wunderkind, how they're balancing white glove services with products & tools to enable them to scale
- The importance of mixing big picture strategy with an understanding of how the sausages are made, and knowing when to hand over to people with more suitable skills
- The importance of having a good working dynamic between product, design & engineering teams, with each contributing their own unique skills to the mix
- Why you need to get designers up the front of the funnel and make them true partners, and how to weigh up strategic decision making with actually having time to do the design
- Whether it's possible for designers & developers to work well together in an agile, iterative fashion
- The importance of good design systems as enablers for scale and how they can enable the big picture work
- The concept of pioneers, settlers & town planners, what kind of mix you need in your team and who thrive in which environment
And much more!
Contact Richie You can reach out to Richie via email of all places richie@wunderkind.co. He's social media averse!
An interview with Hanne Ockert-Axelsson. Hanne is a Senior Product Manager at accuRx, a UK-based Healthtech company revolutionising the world of General Practioners (GPs) in the UK National Health Service (NHS). Hanne formerly worked at various NGOs and health-focused organisations before seeking out digital product management to make a measurable impact quickly.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The mission behind accuRx, how their solution got into the hands of 98% of GP practices in the UK, and how healthcare providers deserve great products like the rest of us
- How she got her first product job without any experience, and used her passion for healthcare to become the first product hire at accuRx
- The resources she used to level up her game once she'd got that first job, and the one key book she'd recommend to other people making the move
- Her passion for high performing teams, what that means to her and some of the ways she tries to help build a performant culture
- The difference between Big Tech product management & other companies and why it's important to get in the trenches with your team
- Why you shouldn't fix what ain't broke when moving into a new team, to avoid demoralising people and losing their buy in to fix the real problems
- How to be a good team leader, the importance of identifying your leadership style, being your authentic self but the being best version of yourself where required
And much more!
Contact Hanne You can find Hanne at Twitter, LinkedIn or check out her writing on Medium.
An interview with Jonathon Hensley. Jonathon is a digital transformation consultant who has seen the problems of misalignment up close and wanted to help companies avoid it. He's the recent author of "Alignment", a book that aims to show how companies need to drive for alignment through the business to avoid internal sabotage costly product failure.
We speak about a lot, including:
- How misalignment within companies represents a billion dollar problem and how this spurred him to write the book to help avoid that
- His definition of alignment, why it's not as simple as people think it is, and how he structures it into four pillars
- Some of the early warning signs of misalignment in a company, and why it all starts from having a measurable product strategy
- What happens when companies are misaligned, how toxic it can be to innovation, and how it can impact team morale
- How some companies seem permanently misaligned and whether it's even possible for misaligned companies to succeed
- The importance of aligning incentives & breaking out of solos, avoiding cognitive dissonance & aligning on a common language
- Why leaders need to be honest, open to new input, self-reflective and humble and why the HIPPO can't be the loudest voice driving a decision
And much more!
Buy "Alignment" " Alignment is the one thing you’ll find at the heart of every successful relationship, team, and organization in the world. When developed and leveraged, alignment can create the foundation for unparalleled product success."
Visit Amazon for more info.
Contact Jonathon You can find Jonathon at Emerge or LinkedIn.
An interview with Wolfgang Bremer. Wolfgang is the Head of Design at Elli, an electric vehicle company that is part of the Volkswagen group. Wolfgang wants to help make people's lives simpler through design, build true cross-functional relationships and is passionate about getting designers a seat at the table and making them valued business partners.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The mission behind Elli and some of the considerations & challenges of creating physical products where you actually have to make things
- Why he tends to bounce from big company to small company and vice versa, the pros & cons of each type of company and whether, given Volkswagen own Elli, he's in a small company or a big company right now
- Some key considerations you need to think about when hiring designers depending on the size of your company and what you might optimise for
- The problems that silo thinking can bring, where you have designers, product and engineering throwing grenades backwards and forwards over the fence
- Why it's so important for designers to be true business partners and some of the problems it can cause when they're not
- Whether it's important to have a CXO representing the design team at the top table, or whether it really matters who the team reports through
- Some of the hallmarks of bad managers, how even small things can make a difference, and some principles to live by when trying to build effective teams
And much more!
Contact Wolfgang You can join Wolfgang's 20K followers (and counting) on Twitter or visit bremer.co.
An interview with Phyllis Njoroge. Phyllis is a product manager, cognitive scientist and now author of "From Fraud to Freedom". Phyllis wants us all to know that imposter syndrome is something that can be tackled, and wrote a book to help us examine how to tackle an issue that affects many product managers due to the ambiguity of our roles.
We speak about a lot, including:
- Her book, from Fraud to Freedom, and how it digs into what Imposter Syndrome actually is and whether everyone has it
- Her journey into product management, and whether going into an industry she had no experience in made her imposter syndrome worse
- The problems of getting into self-reinforcing negative feedback loops and the ways you might intervene to stop you sabotaging yourself
- How imposter syndrome isn't just in your head but can be imposed on marginalised groups by a society that gives every impression that you don't belong there
- How imposter syndrome isn't something that goes away with seniority or perceived success, and how these might even make it worse
- Whether her background in cognitive sciences informed the book, and how she used that background to examine the cognitive biases that reinforce imposter syndrome
- Whether product managers are more prone to imposter syndrome due to the vague, ambiguous nature of many product management roles
And much more!
Buy From Fraud to Freedom "From Fraud to Freedom is a book about how we all play a part in contributing to or calming impostor syndrome. It’s a solution-oriented book that discusses methods for individuals, mentors, managers, and friends to manage their own impostor syndrome and helps others in the process too. Even though an estimated 70% of people experience impostor syndrome, the guidance in this book is not one-size-fits-all but filled with a range of intrapersonal and interpersonal methods to achieve your best self." Visit The Book Website for more info.
Contact Phyllis You can find Phyllis on LinkedIn or Twitter.
An interview with Ebenezer Ikonne. Eb is an experienced product leader and social scientist who wanted to contribute to the product leadership community. To support this goal, he's recently published a book, "Becoming a Leader in Product Development" which aims to help us all take a long, hard look at our leadership practices and make us the best leaders we can be.
We speak about a lot, including:
- How most leaders are winging it, with teams that are successful in spite of the leader in question, and how effective teams can hide ineffective managers
- The chain of leadership mediocrity; how people are left to work out leadership on their own, with their only role models being people that were left to work it out on their own
- Why the world needed another leadership book and how he sees it as the healthy alternative to "microwave thought leadership" & meaningless leadership memes
- Whether we need "assigned leaders" these days in this lean & agile world and whether it's really true that "everyone's a leader"
- What good leadership looks like, and why it should be more than whether the job got done but how the job got done
- The often discussed, poorly understood concept of servant leadership, what it really means, why it's important and whether it can be taken too far
- Why it's so important to take care of yourself as a product leader, how leadership is hard and how you can't be a good leader if you don't take care of yourself
And much more!
Buy Becoming A Leader in Product Development "It is becoming increasingly challenging for product development leaders to effectively lead as workplace demands continue to increase. The rate of change in technology, society, and business places immense pressure on leaders to ensure their groups move in the direction of their goals. What might have worked in the past no longer works."
Visit Amazon or Goodreads for more info.
Check out "Joy at Work" Eb has a YouTube channel! Check it out Joy at Work.
Contact Eb You can find Eb on LinkedIn or Twitter.
An interview with Irene Yu. Irene is a former software developer for up-and-coming everything store Amazon, where she found herself mentoring non-technical product managers to help them get better at tech. Inspired by her success, she left to found Skiplevel, a technical training startup aimed at teach actually useful tech skills to product managers & non tech founders.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The mission behind Skiplevel and how she's trying to provide a good and easy place to learn useful technical knowledge for non-engineering tech workers
- What being technical means, why being technical is helpful, and the importance of giving PMs and founders confidence to have constructive conversations with engineering
- The target audience for Skiplevel and whether it's suitable for the wider business or focused relentlessly on PMs and founders
- Why learning to code is not the best way to learn technical skills and how learning a broad set of technical concepts is superior
- The four pillars of technical knowledge that Skiplevel teaches and how they contribute to helping people go wide not deep
- Whether product managers even need to be technical, whether coding interviews are appropriate, and why companies use them
- The potential risks of people knowing enough to contribute but not enough to make decisions, but then trying to make them anyway
And much more!
Check out Skiplevel If you want to get better at tech & go beyond learning how to code toy apps for the sake of it, why not check out Skiplevel.co?
Contact Irene You can reach out to Irene on Twitter.
An interview with Brian Shen. Brian is Product Director and head of Product Ops at ClickUp, an all-in-one productivity platform that you've definitely seen an advertisement for recently. ClickUp are taking aim at JIRA and other productivity platforms and aim to "save you one day a week". The company is on a hypergrowth path and Brian is trying to ensure the team remains effective along the way.
We talk about a lot, including:
- What ClickUp does, how it's different from other productivity tools, and how they can "save you one day a week"
- How they can avoid becoming the next JIRA, and how they aim to keep UX at the centre & develop a fully integrated solution
- How they use Product Ops at ClickUp and whether it's fair to label Product Ops as merely "process people" or whether they're strategic enabler for the business
- How using ClickUp within the product team helps them to build a tool that helps product people build products using ClickUp
- Some of the challenges of running a product team during hypergrowth & some of the things they've had to change along the way
- The problems with "unintentional communication", why you have to vary your message for your audience and the importance of telling a coherent story
- How to prepare for a live talk to thousands of people at your company conferences and how stretch experiences like this help you become a better leader
And much more!
Check out ClickUp If ClickUp sounds good to you, and you want to see if you can save one day a week, why not check out ClickUp.com?
Contact Brian You can reach out to Brian on LinkedIn.
An interview with Sigurd Seteklev. Sigurd is the co-founder of Y Combinator backed Kitemaker, a startup that is trying to enable true cross-team collaboration and empowered product development teams. He is keen to ensure that people have the ability to step beyond JIRA, and boldy claims to be the tool that "people who want to work like Marty Cagan says" should use.
- The story behind Kitemaker, the problems they're trying to solve, and why you need to step beyond bug trackers
- Why it's critical to empower cross-team collaboration and getting everyone into the same tool so they don't have to log in everywhere
- How they're hoping to use Kitemaker to help drive home "proper" product practices but how it's not possible to solve it with software alone
- Whether he's trying to force people to work in a very specific way or whether they believe in flexibility in the process
- The problem with dogmatically following product processes & going through the motions & the importance of cultural change
- How good product development teams all look different, whilst not good teams look similar, and some of the hallmarks of good teams
- How you might try to change a company that isn't working the way you want to work, and the importance of matching type of company to your interests
And much more!
Check out Kitemaker If Kitemaker sounds good to you, why not check out Kitemaker.co and see what the fuss is about?
Contact Sigurd You can reach out to Sigurd on LinkedIn or Twitter.
An interview with Brendan McAdams. Brendan is a long time Enterprise SaaS salesman and author of "Sales Craft", a book he hopes will help salespeople and even tech founders get better at selling their products. Brendan is keen to stand up for the sales team, the value they add to customer relationships, and work out how we can make sure sales & product teams can work together more effectively.
We speak about a lot, including:
- His book Sales Craft and how he wanted to write a very practical book to help to take the mystery out of sales
- The tension between sales & product management, some of the ways the sales team can bridge the gap, and why sales is a team sport
- Why it's important for salespeople to avoid Columbo "One More Thing" features and how they have to be prepared to walk away from a deal
- The problems with salespeople being prepared to go out, promise anything the client asks for and dumping a bag of manure on the product team's desk
- Why sales is like poker, having to play the hand you've been dealt, and how empowering it can be to say to no to a request you can't serve
- How sales discovery intersects with product discovery, the importance of getting product people into the field, and whether salespeople have a wide enough view of the market
- What Product-Led Growth means to him as a salesperson, and whether he thinks it's applicable to all stages of a product
And much more!
Buy Sales Craft "Sales Craft isn't like most sales books. It isn't proposing a new sales process or a system to 10X your income. Instead, it offers up a series of simple but thought-provoking tips and ideas about how to enhance your sales effectiveness."
Visit Amazon or Goodreads for more info.
Contact Brendan You can find Brendan on BrendanMcAdams.com or Twitter
Trigger warning: Please be aware that this episode contains references to domestic abuse
An interview with Eva PenzeyMoog. Eva is a designer and former volunteer rape crisis counselor, who wants to encourage us all to consider the harm that we may be inadvertently causing through our product design decisions. She's the author of new book "Design for Safety" as well as the founder of the Inclusive Safety Project.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The core message of her new book, Design for Safety, and some of the surprising feedback she has gotten so far
- Whether there has been any negative feedback for the book from people who don't want to admit that there is any problem at all
- How difficult it was to research the book, the importance of validating survivors of abuse and ensuring they can share on their terms
- Some of the most common low-hanging fruit that people should look at in their products to start making them safer for users
- Whether responsibility for the harm caused by products belongs to the teams building them or the company leaders reaping the rewards
- How product teams can do a safety audit and start to bake safety into their ongoing product design processes
- How to help product design teams get into the habit of sensitively interviewing the right people to understand the safety implications of their products
- Whether there's any hope for big tech firms to self-regulate or whether governmental regulation is the only way
And much more!
Buy Design for Safety "'How will our product hurt people?' As web workers, we don’t often ask this question—but we should. Too often, we design for idealized circumstances, even though our users bring a range of complicated personal dynamics to every interaction. When we fail to explicitly design for vulnerable users, we unintentionally prioritize their abusers. Eva PenzeyMoog explains how even the most well-intentioned design can be weaponized for interpersonal harm. Through poignant, all-too-common examples, Eva demonstrates how to identify a design’s potential for abuse, how to avoid and mitigate the damage, and how to bake safety into every step of the design process. We can’t build good digital products unless we recognize that our users’ safety, and lives, are at stake." Visit the book website for more info.
If you need further resources on safety If you want to learn more about some of the issues raised in this episode or in the book, Eva has curated a list of resources for designing for safety & related topics.
Contact Eva You can find Eva at The Inclusive Safety Project or Twitter
An interview with Ian Peterman. Ian is the CEO at Peterman Design Firm, where he aims to help design more sustainable & ethical products. He's also trying to bring this thinking to the world with his podcast and new book, both called Conscious Design. He's also created the Peterman Method, aiming to put a process around the principles and ensure we leave legacies we can be proud of.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The goals behind Peterman Design Firm, the problems they solve & why they lean towards physical products
- How being a very ethically focused company impacts the types of clients they attract and whether they have to turn anyone down
- The importance of enabling companies to take baby steps rather than limiting your impact by only focusing on companies that want to go all in
- Why he & his wife decided to write the Conscious Design book, and how their different professional backgrounds contributed to the thinking inside it
- What Conscious Design is, and how the four pillars of Conscious Design enable us to assess the environmental & social impact of our products
- The Peterman Method that he created and how it enables Conscious Design by putting a process on top of the pillars
- Why it's important for companies to be conscious of the legacy the they create for their product, their brand and the impact they have on the world
And much more!
Buy Conscious Design "If you are building products and brands with regeneration and sustainability in mind, we appreciate you! We hope this book will give you some ideas on how to implement Conscious Design by using the Peterman Method with your own project." Visit the book website for more info.
Listen to the Conscious Design podcast If you have any time after listening to all of my episodes, why not try out Conscious Design Podcast and find out more about Ian's work?
Contact Ian You can find Ian on Peterman Design Firm or LinkedIn
An interview with Radhika Dutt. Radhika is a product leader, consultant & author of "Radical Product Thinking". I spoke to Radhika a couple of months ago about some of the core themes of her book but we wanted to deep dive into some of her themes around digital pollution, product ethics, and how to take responsibility for the changes our products bring to the world.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The reception for Radical Product Thinking, what people are taking from the book, and how it's resonated with people around the world
- How polarising it was to include a section on digital ethics in the book, and how a Silicon Valley heavyweight refused to write a foreward because of it
- The types of digital pollution, how they manifest themselves, what to look for in your own products and how it's not just about Big Tech
- How the free market "prisoners' dilemma" means that companies prioritise profit over all else and some of the ways we might persuade people to move to more ethical jobs
- Whether it's ok for tech companies to paint themselves as dumb pipes with no responsibility for the effects of their platforms
- Whether there's any hope to get companies to do the right thing, or whether the only answer is aggressive regulation to get companies to take this seriously
- The importance of the Product Hippocratic Oath and how we as product people need to take responsibility for the effects of our products
And much more!
Buy Radical Product Thinking
"Iteration rules product development, but it isn't enough to produce dramatic results. This book champions Radical Product Thinking, a systematic methodology for building visionary, game-changing products."
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Listen to Radhika's last episode We covered some of the broader themes from Radhika's book in our first episode Episode 82 - Curing Product Diseases with a Radical Product Vision.
Contact Radhika You can find Radhika on Twitter or LinkedIn
An interview with Gabriele Musella. Gabriele is the CEO of Coinrule, a YCombinator backed startup that aims to democratise crypto trading and enable people to set up their own automations to manage their investments for them. He's also created the DDDT framework to drive product decision-making and bring design thinking to the crypto space.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The idea behind Coinrule, the rise of automated crypto trading and whether automated trading is as high pressure as it looks in the movies
- Why being unregulated was a great way to build a trading startup and what the future might look like for crypto regulation
- Whether Coinrule is actually using blockchain technology itself, and whether this would have any benefit for them as a company
- How much of a crypto-fundamentalist he is, how he sees the space developing, and how blockchain energy usage chimes with his eco awareness
- His experience with YCombinator, what he got out of the process apart from money, and how he learned to "prioritise like hell"
- How Coinrule build products, the DDDT process he created and how it allows the company to Discover, Define, Design and Test products
- How they talk to at least 100 users a month and built a culture of user research, and what it's like doing user research with such a passionate community
- His mentorship work with Google Launchpad and how he's aiming to help early stage startups understand how to do UX better
And much more!
Contact Gabriele You can contact Gabriele on Twitter or coinrule.com.
An interview with Daniel Cooper. Daniel is an automation nerd and founder of Lolly Co, a company that aims to help founders of growing companies unlock growth through automation and enabling them to focus human effort on things that humans are best at. He's also the author of the upcoming book "Upgrade" that aims to bring these techniques to the world.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The story behind Lolly Co, the problems they solve, and why process optimisation & automation is crucial for a scaling business
- The similarities between their consultative work and good product discovery. The importance of focusing on the goal, not the technology
- The importance of getting in early, working with founders, and enabling them to break through their growth ceiling to scale
- Why it's important to have processes, but not too much process, to make sure you can operate effectively
- The reason that he's doing this via consultancy rather than building a self-serve SaaS platform
- How the No Code craze has affected his work, whether his clients still need him or are actually prepared to build everything themselves
- His new book "Upgrade", coming out imminently, which aims to take some of the principles from his work to the masses
And much more!
Check out Upgrade "Like me, if you run a business then one thing is for sure - you're spinning a lot of plates. But, what if I could show you how to automate them and scale the number you can spin? Together let's put your business under the microscope and explore the strategies and techniques traditionally reserved for Silicon Valley and apply them to your business." Visit the book website.
Contact Daniel You can contact Daniel on Twitter or check out his company at Lolly Co.
An interview with Anthony Marter. Anthony is a product & delivery consultant who is passionate about helping New Zealand companies build products more effectively by intercepting them at the right time to deliver change. He's taken his passion for the local product community into Product Aotearoa, a community aiming to support product practices across New Zealand.
We speak about a lot, including:
- How he aims to use his consulting to "help influence companies on how they do product management at the right moment" and make sure the New Zealand product community are supported
- How Product Aotearoa got started, the mission behind it, and why it's important for the organisation to make some noise globally to attract speakers
- The current state of Māori and Pasifika inclusion within the New Zealand tech scene, the lack of product role models in these communities, and how he's trying to help bridge the gap
- The lack of product management leadership at the exec table in New Zealand, and how this has driven the trend for CPOs without product management backgrounds
- The problem with management-led feature definition, and how many New Zealand companies are just have product owners managing backlogs in feature factories, with no say on strategy
- Some of the ways he uses his consulting to try to sell the benefits of being product-led to sceptical company leaders to drive change
- The importance of product discovery and ensuring that companies stay ahead of the curve by taking HIPPOs along for the ride
- The problems with sales-led product development & services mindset, and how to drive change by using data to connect outcomes with non-product execs
And much more!
Contact Anthony You can contact Anthony on Twitter or LinkedIn.
An interview with Anna Curzon. Anna is the Chief Product Officer at Xero, with long experience in business strategy & digital transformation. She's also a member of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Business Advisory Council, appointed by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Anna is passionate about creating a good working culture, and driving for diverse teams and working practices to support that goal.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The origin story of Xero, how it came from the founder having a problem he couldn't solve, and how he started a company to solve it
- How they had to fire themselves as Xero users as they scaled out of their own target market, and how they stay in touch with customers
- How she moved from her career in banking into disruptive tech and how she was always "the freak in the phone book"
- The parallels between her original passion for anthropology & understanding humans has translated into her day-to-day work
- How she developed a passion for product management & how she approached her move into a CPO job without any direct product management experience
- Whether she had any pushback when taking over a team of product managers, and the approaches she's taken to be seen as just one of the team
- The importance of diversity on the teams and why people should be able to bring their true selves to work
- How they've managed to keep the Xero culture going and nurture it through massive scaling and acquisitions
And much more!
Contact Anna You can contact Anna on Twitter or LinkedIn.
An interview with Peter Johnston & Matt Breuer. Peter is the founder & CEO of new professional social network Polywork. Matt joined as Product Director and employee #9. They talk about the vision for Polywork, the pain points it was designed to overcome, the way they're building it as a team, and how to avoid HIPPO syndrome.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The motivations behind Polywork, how it differs from other professional networking sites, and how they aim to "go beyond the job title"
- The personal pain points and collaboration issues that started the idea of Polywork and how it's more than just a reaction to LinkedIn
- How the dynamics work between a senior product professional & a vision-driven founder in an early stage startup and the importance of disagreeing but committing as a team
- How to manage upwards as a product leader, and tackle HIPPO disagreements by doing the product management work to validate your arguments
- The discovery work they did up front to turn the initial vision into a tangible product and the importance of thinking about the fundamental job to be done
- Whether they are worried about being a lockdown flash in the pan and suffering a collapse in user numbers post-pandemic
- The importance of maintaining focus for startups, not trying to chase every opportunity that looks good and how Peter learned this the hard way at a previous startup
And much more!
Check out Polywork If you don't have a Polywork account already you can sign up using this VIP link and check it out.
Contact Matt & Peter You can contact Matt at Polywork and Peter either on Polywork or Twitter.
An interview with Steve Johnson. Steve is a product coach who has trained thousands of product teams across dozens of countries across 15 years. He's co-founder of Product Growth Leaders, a consortium of product consultancies & also co-author of the Quartz Open Framework which aims to help you build products your customers will love.
We speak about a lot, including:
- How his consultancy got started, the problems he solves & how he aims to get people working on real products that resonate with their business, not toy examples
- Why he decided to help create Product Growth Leaders to solve the problems he can't, by creating a consortium of product consultancies that can get the job done
- Whether the proliferation of product owners as glorified business analysts is a positive trend, and the challenges of having at least three specific jobs that are all called product manager
- The problem with Purple Squirrel product manager job descriptions with impossible requirements and how there aren't many unicorn product managers around
- How he was once trained in SAFe by Dean Leffingwell, the creator of the framework, and whether SAFe is the solution to any of the problems in dysfunctional companies
- Why it's all about agility not agile, but the trouble of trying to sell this message to people who have never seen agile done right
- The origins of the Quartz Open Framework and how it enables you to take an idea through planning and into market, and why it was important to release it for free under Creative Commons
- Some of the issues with working with Sales, and why it's not good enough to put all the blame on them when we could do better to support them
Check out Steve's music Steve's a published musician! Check his work out on Spotify.
Contact Steve You can find Steve on Twitter or LinkedIn. His consultancy website is https://www.under10consulting.com/.
An interview with George Nurijanian. George is a former pricing analyst turned product manager, currently working as a Product Owner for design systems at New Zealand unicorn Xero. He's also now working to help demystify the world of resources we have available to us as product managers with his new side project prodmgmt.world.
We speak about a lot, including:
- What Xero does as a company, and his work as a platform product owner working on a design system to enable coherent interfaces throughout a rapidly scaling company
- Whether working as a product owner on a design system means he needs to be a designer or a UX pro, or whether it's very similar to external product management
- The story behind prodmgmt.world and how he's trying to help product managers, marketers & indie hackers find the best product management frameworks in one place
- Whether he's just trying to be the Wikipedia of other people's product resources or whether he's aiming to create his own content for the community
- Whether he needs to curate it constantly, and his plans for a community aspect to help understand how people are using the frameworks to succeed
- His experience getting to #2 on Product Hunt and the effect this had on user numbers and buzz around the tool
- Some of the characteristics of product management culture in New Zealand, some of the differences from classic thinking, and some approaches that can be used to overcome legacy thinking
And much more!
Visit prodmgmt.world This site is a collection of techniques to empower entrepreneurial minds. Map your product challenge to the solution.
Before: "I have no clue how to test if my idea is valuable."
After: "I've got a full arsenal of techniques and frameworks."
You can check out George's new side project at prodmgmt.world
Contact George You can find George on Twitter or LinkedIn. His personal website is https://nurijanian.com/.
An interview with Rich Mironov. Rich is a smoke jumper CPO who gets thrown behind the fire to help solve some of the hardest problems in product management - trying to fix organisations to help them make products properly. He's worked with 175 companies and has experienced it all, and also distilled this into his Product Bytes blog & book "The Art of Product Management".
We speak about a lot, including:
- What a "smoke jumper" CPO is and the types of problems he solves when he goes into the mind boggling number of companies he has worked with
- The difficulty that teams sometimes have landing a message with leadership & why they often need to hear the same message from a consultant
- The mistakes some companies make by prioritising domain expertise over product management, and how this leads to bad product behaviour & biases
- The importance of understanding other teams' motivations, and using your PM skills to work out what they actually need
- How agile was written by software guys, doesn't mention customers at all, and why we don't need PMs who aren't embarrassed about not speaking to customers
- The differences between B2B and B2C product thinking and some of the classic product advice doesn't translate to the world of B2B
- The importance of taking your product thinking discussions to the right level & not trying to persuade front line people
- The importance of building coalitions as a product leader to make sure you're not just seen as an outlier where good ideas go to die
And much more!
Buy The Art of Product Management "The Art of Product Management takes us inside the head of a product management thought leader. With color and humor, Rich Mironov gives us a taste of Silicon Valley's tireless pursuit of great technology and its creation of new products. He provides strategic advice to product managers and tech professionals about start-ups, big organizations, how to think like a customer, and what things should cost. He also reminds us to love our products and our teams." Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Rich You can find Rich on Twitter or LinkedIn. You can also check out Rich Mironov's Product Bytes here.
An interview with Jas Shah. Jas is a product consultant who works with fintech firms to help them out where their product teams are maybe lacking, or don't have the time to do the job. Jas predictably believes in outsourcing product management tasks to consultants, but not all of them, and only if it helps bring the team along and develop their skills.
We speak about a lot, including:
- What problems he solves with his consultancy, the types of companies he consults for, and why he prefers startups to big banks
- Whether fintech is all disruption and sea change or whether there's value in making incremental change
- The difficulty of selling disruptive change to the mass market, why you have to take it in stages and meet people where they are not where you want them to be
- The time he felt compelled to leave a product management job because of lack of support for his product, and how long he stuck it out
- The concept of servitising product management, what that means in practice and what types of task can be servitised
- The importance of taking the teams along for the journey so they can be self-sufficient after you leave
- The product management cliché he dislikes the most, and advice for people trying to take their first steps into product management
And much more!
Contact Jas You can find Jas on Twitter or LinkedIn. You can also check out his consultancy Bitsul.
An interview with Radhika Dutt. Radhika is a product leader, consultant & author of "Radical Product Thinking" who has decided it is time to step away from building products incrementally & flying by the seat of your pants. Instead, she advocated creating a radical product vision, aligning the company around it and defining where you want to go and not how fast you get there.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The story of the book, some of the early feedback she's received and how rewarding it is to see it landing with non-product people and product people alike
- How she set out to create a book that mixed vision with practicality, and bringing a truly global perspective rather than just another Silicon Valley tech bro book
- How seeing the same problems again & again led her to create a free framework to help solve them, and how this spurred the need for a book
- The audience for her book, the vision she had in mind, and how she wants people not to just prioritise the speed of their car but also where they're driving to
- Whether she has a problem with the Lean Startup (!), whether her book replaces it or is a compliment to it, and why you only really get a few pivots
- The importance of going beyond the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, creating a detailed vision up front and aligning your team around it
- The list of "product diseases", whether a radical product vision cures them all, and some examples of how they can afflict a business
- How to make sure everyone, including leadership, is behind the vision; the tools you can use to drive this, and the concept of vision debt
- The product hippocratic oath - how we as a product professionals need to ensure we do no harm and actively work to create better change in the world
And much more!
Buy Radical Product Thinking "Iteration rules product development, but it isn't enough to produce dramatic results. This book champions Radical Product Thinking, a systematic methodology for building visionary, game-changing products."
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Radhika You can find Radhika on Twitter or LinkedIn
An interview with Adam Thomas. Adam is a passionate product leader & product coach who wants to help you drive organisational alignment. By day he's Lead Product Manager for a recruiting platform, and by night he's the hero that Gotham needs with product consultancy Approaching One.
We speak about a lot, including:
- His work with Approaching One and how he's trying to help product managers & product leaders get better
- How he started out as a mainframe programmer, and ended up falling into product management when a mentor realised how unhappy he was
- The story of his two startups, whether they succeeded or failed, and some of the lessons he learned from the experience
- His journey from individual contributor to leadership, the resources he used and how he mixed mentorship with repeated mistakes to get good
- The importance of driving organisational alignment, the types of negative & positive feedback you can get due to misalignment
- Why alignment is the product manager's job, how you should never assume anything, and have to do the work
- Some of the warning signs of misalignment, techniques you can use to get back on track and why you should trust but verify
- The importance of having a compelling story around your product that you can align your team around
- Survival Metrics - what they are & how you can use them to decide whether to pivot, double down or give up on an initiative
And much more!
More on Survival Metrics Why not visit the website to find out more about Survival Metrics?
Contact Adam You can find Adam on Twitter. He's also got a Substack mailing list and his website is theadamthomas.com
An interview with Giff Constable. Giff is an entrepreneur and product leader who was most recently CPO at Meetup during the WeWork acquisition & divestment. He's also the author of "Talking to Humans" & "Testing with Humans" - books that aim to help teams make good product decisions.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The origin story for "Talking to Humans", why he wrote it back in 2014, whether he'd change anything now, and whether other books on discovery are riding his coattails
- Why he felt compelled to write a follow up, "Testing with Humans" and why good experimentation is essential to solution validation
- How his books made it into the worldwide education system and whether it was just as simple as him putting cartoons in them
- What life was like during his time at Meetup, a company going through a tumultuous period being acquired (and later divested) by WeWork
- Some of the challenges when two business cultures collide, and the mistakes he made taking over a dysfunctional team
- Why you shouldn't go in all guns blazing on day one, no matter what dysfunction you see, and why you need to validate the team first
- The importance of being transparent, open & honest during testing times, without being so open that you drag everyone down with you
- The tricky path to product leadership and how prospective leaders need mentoring, coaching and guidance to succeed
And much more!
Buy Talking to Humans "Talking to Humans is a practical guide to the qualitative side of customer development, an indispensable skill for vetting and improving any new startup or innovation. This book will teach you how to structure and run effective customer interviews, find candidates, and turn learnings into action."
Check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Buy Testing with Humans "Testing with Humans, the sequel to bestseller Talking to Humans, teaches entrepreneurs, innovation teams, and product teams how to run effective experiments. An experiment is a test designed to help you answer the questions "Should we do this?" or "Am I right about this?" If you are open to learning, the insights from your experiments will help you refine your creation and improve your odds of success."
Check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Giff You can contact Giff on Twitter or LinkedIn. He also has a blog at GiffConstable.com.
An interview with Natalie Furness. Natalie is a marketing consultant and company founder. Initially frustrated by not being a coder, she embraced the thriving No-Code community and realised that she could solve customer problems and build solutions anyway. Now she's started Minimum Viable Stack as an umbrella firm for a growing number of No-Code products.
We speak about a lot, including:
- How she got started in marketing, where her entrepreneurial streak came from, and whether it's easier to market your own products or products by other people
- Her constant need to invent new things & how she balances this with focusing on what can truly make an impact
- The origin story behind Minimum Viable Stack and how she met her co-founder on Twitter (and who has the most followers)
- How her time marketing blockchain products gave her experience with disruptive tech and ensuring the message was focused on the users not the tech
- How she thought you needed to be able to code to build a tech business, and how a chance introduction to the No-Code community on Twitter made her realise this was not true
- The passion for automating repetitive tasks that led her to create two No-Code SaaS solutions, UXFramed and ScopeDone
- Whether you need to explore the entire universe of No-Code tools & whether she has settled on her own minimum viable stack
- Any barriers with No-Code solutions, and how working in No-Code has actually helped her learn to code
- Advice on how to get into building No-Code solutions yourself, and the importance of validating that you're solving real user problems
And much more!
Contact Natalie You can contact Natalie on Twitter or LinkedIn (although for the latter, please say that you've come from OKIP podcast otherwise she might not accept you!). You can check out her work at Minimum Viable Stack.
An interview with Michele Hansen. Michele is the founder of Geocodio, a startup she founded without taking external funding. She is also the author of "Deploy Empathy", a book that aims to help product teams & founders to get better at user research & get the insights they need.
We speak about a lot, including:
- Why now was the time for a new book on customer interviewing skills, how it's different to other books on discovery
- How the book has gone down, some of the feedback that she's gotten so far, and how she knew it had done the job she wanted it to
- How to introduce customer research into companies which aren't currently up for it & sell the idea to leadership
- Whether the techniques in the book constitute manipulation and whether she's worried they could be used for evil
- Whether the book teaches you to be truly empathetic or is a guide to fake it till you make it, and whether this matters
- How you don't need users to have empathy with you, and have to channel your inner rubber duck to make sure they open up to you
- The importance of validating not just hypotheses but also validating your users by resisting the urge to correct their mistakes
- Why you shouldn't use customer discovery interviews to try to sneak in sales or directly try to stop people churning
And much more!
Buy Deploy Empathy "Deploy Empathy will help you learn the skill of talking to your customers—learning to truly listen to them—so that you can pull out their hidden needs, desires, and processes. Empathy is a skill that anyone can learn. Armed with the tactics you’ll learn in this book and the toolbox of scripts and phrases, you'll be able to sell more of your existing product, build the right features that will delight your customers, and stop churn in its tracks." Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Michele You can contact Michele on Twitter or check out deployempathy.com.
An interview with Carlos Lastres. Carlos is the Creative & Marketing Director at Kaiyan Medical, a Chinese company creating light therapy products. Carlos is obviously an advocate for light therapy but also an engineer turned designer who is loving life in China.
We talk about a lot, including:
- Light therapy - what the heck is it? Does it really work?
- How he became a convert to light therapy by chance when working on a design brief for Kaiyan Medical and why he decided to stay
- Some of the differences and similarities between creating digital products & hardware products
- How 3D printing makes all the difference when trying to get an MVP out of a hardware product
- How his frustration with badly designed software applications as a developer led him to pursue a career in product design
- How he went from an MBA and software development background to developing the design hard skills he needed
- How Chinese startups build products and how is it so different from how Western countries do it
- Whether Chinese users appreciate the constant flow of limited MVPs or whether it limits the ability to truly learn
- How he got involved with TEDx, how it went, and why you shouldn't follow your dreams
And much more!
Contact Carlos You can reach out to Carlos on LinkedIn or LastresCarlos.com.
You can check out Kaiyan Medical on KaiyanMedical.com.
An interview with Peter Knudson & Braxton Bragg. Peter & Braxton are co-authors of new book "Product Sense", with which they hope to help the next generation of product managers discover their product superpower and land that next big product management role.
We speak about a lot, including:
- Their shared history as product managers in the gaming industry, why Peter stayed in it and why Braxton spread his wings
- How the book has been received, how they took an iterative approach to book writing, and why they decided to write a book together in the first place
- How the book is different to some of the other classic "get a product job" books and whether it's a compliment or a replacement
- The importance of bringing your authentic self to product manager interviews, and whether it's ever OK to fake it till you make it
- How they define product sense, whether everyone already has it, and whether people who don't have it can be taught it
- The concept of a product manager superpower, being T-shaped, and using your expertise and passion to stand out from the crowd
- Why they created the Compass Framework, why it's needed and how it helps give a structured response to interview questions
- Whether you need an MBA to be a product manager, whether it's totally unnecessary, and how in either case it can be very tricky to get into product
And much more!
Buy Product Sense "Product Sense is a comprehensive and accessible, guidebook for what it means to solve problems as product manager, and ace complicated PM interviews."
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Peter & Braxton You can contact Peter or Braxton on LinkedIn.
An interview with Rand Fishkin. Rand was the founder and CEO of SEO firm Moz. He documented the highs & lows of VC-backed entrepreneurship in his 2018 book "Lost and Founder", in which he detailed lessons learned, fought back against tech clichés, and pondered how he'd do it differently next time. Now it's next time and he's back with new firm SparkToro, looking to build truly sustainable businesses and a more caring, responsible capitalism.
We speak about a lot, including:
- His new startup SparkToro, what it does, how it's different to his previous firm and how it's going these days
- Whether calling out thought leaders in his book led to any trouble, and why it's ok to make philosophical enemies
- How he pushes back against the inevitable retort that, rather than hustle culture being a problem, maybe he's just not that good at it
- The fallacy of meritocracy and how it's impossible for privileged founders (and the people that back them) to understand that opportunity is not distributed equally
- How the VC industry is furthering inequality, blinded by survivorship bias, and why it's so important to give underserved groups a hand up
- How the "growth at all costs" VC culture is forcing founders to make bad product decisions to make the numbers look good, and ignoring the real lifetime value of a user
- The surprising way that SparkToro handles cancellations proactively, and why churning a few extra % is better than having unhappy, locked in customers
- The problems with MVP culture, how people have taken the Lean Startup too far, and why great products are rarely minimally viable
- How founders and product leaders should truly put the customer first, not be blinded by their own egos and defending a possibly meaningless strategic roadmap at all costs
And much more!
Buy Lost and Founder "Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: a young, brilliant entrepreneur has an cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions and becomes the envy of the technology world. This is not that story." Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Rand You can contact Rand on Twitter or check out sparktoro.com.
An interview with Paul Meinshausen. Paul is the co-founder of Aampe, a startup that uses automated, rapid learning to personalise notifications and drive customer engagement. Paul started out in academia before doing a tour in Afghanistan and using data where the stakes couldn't be higher. He then went on to found and invest in multiple startups.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The mission behind Aampe, the problems they're trying to solve, and the importance of sticking to solving those problems and not getting bogged down building stuff that's already a commodity
- Whether the company is at product/market fit stage or whether product/market fit is even a thing as far as they're concerned
- How we need to step away from mobile notifications being a marketing channel, rather a proactive UI and entry point to apps
- The impact of Big Tech privacy controls on mobile technology, the impact on engagement, and whether it's a threat or an opportunity
- The journey from academia to multiple entrepreneur, and whether it's unfair to label data scientists as primarily academic with no business sense
- Some of the ways data scientists can build those business muscles and make sure they are solving real problems in a meaningful way
- How a tour in Afghanistan shook Paul out of his academic mindset and made him realise that this stuff needs to work in the real world
- Why it's critically important not to just have data, but to know where it comes from and truly understand how it's feeding your models and algorithms
- The impact of bad data on your business and how you need to be hypervigilant to make sure you're not caught napping
Check out Aampe If you want to find out more about Paul's company, check out aampe.com.
Contact Paul You can catch up with Paul on LinkedIn or Twitter.
An interview with Ramli John. Ramli is the Managing Director of ProductLed, the Robin to Wes Bush's Batman, and the author of "Product-Led Onboarding", a book that aims to shine a light on getting users to value sooner and ensuring you retain them long term.
We speak about a lot, including:
- The mission behind ProductLed, and how the pandemic has really focused people's minds on ensuring their tools are seen as valuable
- What the Managing Director of ProductLed does, and whether he's really the Robin to Wes Bush's Batman
- How Ramli went from studying mathematics & being an analyst for a massive FMCG company into marketing & product-led growth, and why it excites him so much
- Why we needed a new book dedicated to Product-Led onboarding given that it was covered in Wes's book originally, and what publishers said when they pitched it
- Why he put his personal email address in the front and back of the book for queries, and how much spam he's received since he did that
- The importance of first impressions when it comes to product onboarding, and ensuring quick time to value to drive retention
- Who owns product-led onboarding, whether it matters, and the importance of true cross-functional teams
- Why product-led onboarding is more about free trials and guides, and more to do with an obsessive focus on user success, and why you need to define what that "success" really is
- The EUREKA framework the book proposes to help you establish your onboarding team, understand, refine and analyse (and whether he came up with it in the bath)
- How time to value can actually be too short and some of the things you can do about this
- Whether product-led growth is truly anything new, or just a buzzword to sell attractive yellow books
And much more!
Buy Product-Led Onboarding "Just like dating, your company's growth depends on first impressions. If their first date with your product is anything but silky-smooth, you risk losing out to the competition. Add to that a few, unfairly poor reviews and you’ll be more than just stuck. In this book, you’ll learn the simple 6-step strategy used by giants like Mixpanel, Ubisoft, and Outsystems that will get you more loyal clients in a fraction of the time."
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Ramli You can contact Ramli on Twitter, LinkedIn or productled.com.
More from ProductLed If you want to hear Wes Bush's interview on this very podcast, why not check out Wes Bush's interview on this very podcast?
An interview with Abisoye Falabi. Abisoye is a passionate technologist, community builder and educator who is currently Senior Product Manager at TradeDepot, a Nigerian commerce and fintech platform.
We talk about a lot, including:
- His work with TradeDepot, the problems they solve and their plans to go pan-African
- Some of the challenges of moving across borders into new territories and how this affects scaling
- How he started out in tech and moved to product management after seeing how developers were disconnected from customers & stakeholders
- His various roles spanning tech & product, and whether he agrees that having a CPTO is good or not
- Why it's important for Africans to make software solutions for Africans, and how they have to be 100x better than established solutions
- Some of the challenges in building products for the African market, and how they might be addressed
- Some of the common mistakes VC firms make when investing in African tech, and some of the opportunities they are missing
- His passion for education, how he teaches to learn, and some of his work with community building and working on courses for Pluralsight
And much more!
Contact Abisoye You can reach out to Abisoye on LinkedIn or Twitter.
An interview with Teresa Torres. Teresa is a product discovery coach who works with a variety of organisations to help bed in good product discovery practices. Her coaching experience led her to write a book on the same topic, which she hopes will inspire product teams around the world to build fast feedback loops and defeat stakeholder bias.
We talk about a lot, including:
- Why she decided to write Continuous Discovery Habits, and the feedback she's received so far
- What the concept of continuous discovery means in practical terms, and why it's important to stay on top of shifting customer needs
- The target audience for the book, and whether it's for product leaders or the sceptical exec team
- How ideological battles are not going to win the war for product discovery, and the importance of showing and not telling
- How her history in human-centred design, and disappointment at working practices in the real world, ignited her passion for discovery
- How cognitive biases can lead to bad product decisions, but how this isn't just down to stakeholders but also affects product teams themselves
- The importance of stakeholder management, addressing their own gaps, and using story mapping to uncover those gaps and assumptions
- Why you should follow through with an impact analysis when you're inevitably overruled, and uncover their (or your) gaps in understanding
- How continuous discovery can work with any type of addressable market, and how few people is too few
- The ideal frequency of customer contact, and why the longer you leave it, the more risky your decisions
- The critical importance of getting engineers into discovery early and using their knowledge & experience to get to the right solution
And much more!
Buy Continuous Discovery Habits "In this book, you'll learn a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that will help you answer each of these questions, giving you the confidence to act while also preparing you to be wrong. You'll learn to balance action with doubt so that you can get started without being blindsided by what you don't get right. "
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Teresa You can find out more about Teresa's coaching & education efforts on producttalk.org.
If you want to catch up with Teresa, you can Twitter or on LinkedIn.
An interview with John Zilch. John is Director of Product Management at Upland, adjunct professor at Providence College and founder of Launch Day, a new startup that's aiming to take the pain out of launching new products to market.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The pros & cons of working as a platform product manager and integrating various product lines & features into a new platform
- When it's appropriate to replatform and when not, and whether a platform product manager gets a lot of customer contact
- John's journey into product management from a computer science background and how, like everyone, he kind of fell into it, and how analysts get more love than PMs
- How his dissatisfaction with the way software gets launched led him and a former colleague to build their own platform to make it better
- Why he's started teaching at Providence College, how teaching is the best way to learn, and how academia is a fertile ground for hiring the best talent
- What he thought of Marty Cagan's recent takedown of MBAs, why he's tired of everyone being against them, and what they're good for
- Why there's a problem with experimentation culture and why it shouldn't be a replacement for good customer discovery
- How's it's OK to do things that don't scale as long as you have a plan to make sure that it can scale in the future
- The problem with people concentrating on "Agile" as a method of delivery rather than a way to get close to customers
And much more!
Contact John You can check out the Launch Day website or connect with John on LinkedIn or Twitter.
An interview with Hubert Palan. Hubert is the founder and CEO of Productboard, a company that aims to put the customer at the heart of the product development process and help companies across the globe build truly excellent products.
We talk about a lot, including:
- What Productboard does, how it differs from other platforms & how it tries to bring customers to the heart of product development
- How his studies & early product career made him realise how difficult it was to have evidence-based discussions with stakeholders, and how this led him to create Productboard
- How he still maintains strong ties to the Czech Republic, and how Productboard took advantage of being a big fish in a small pond there
- What it was like studying under Steve Blank, the inspiration for the Lean Startup, and some of the lessons Hubert learned there
- Whether his MBA helped him become an effective product manager or whether he had a lot to learn after graduating
- Some of his problems with Marty Cagan's recent article about MBAs, and why he thinks Marty got it wrong
- Some of the mistakes that product teams are making when making product development decisions, and how companies need to build up their product muscles
- How some founders stumble into product/market fit and why the Lean Startup is partly to blame
- Why founders are overrated, and how to step away from thinking you know it all & letting the company run without your input
- How to try to build a diverse & inclusive company, and some of the challenges that Productboard have faced
And much more!
Contact Hubert You can check out the Productboard website or connect with Hubert on LinkedIn or Twitter.
An interview with Chris Hull. Chris is a former 7th grade social studies teacher who grew dissatisfied with the tools he had to do his job and decided to create some of his own. He's now the CPO and founder of Otus, an all-in-one learning management, assessment and data system.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The vision behind Otus and how a global pandemic has made everyone interested in online learning in a pandemic
- How someone goes from teaching into building a company, some of the ways he's learned to do it and some of the mistakes he's made
- The different types of stakeholders he has to deal with across education, and how he balances the needs of all of them
- The pros & cons of interviewing kids for UX interviews, and how they're both the best and worst people to ask for feedback
- Whether there are any challenges selling into schools, and whether they're as stuck in the past as they appear
- Bringing agile principles to learning and importance of empiricism and constant learning
- How he's set up the teams to deliver value across his product lines and how the film Ratatouille inspired his ideation process
- The importance of setting a vision then stepping back & ensuring the teams have autonomy
- How teaching kids has primed him for the stresses & strains of foundership & leadership, and whether kids are harder work than adults
- Whether he's instinctive or data driven, how to step away from your biases, and when it makes sense to go with your gut
- The importance of focus, picking your bets and how "priority" has been, and should remain, singular
And much more!
Contact Chris If you want to catch up with Chris, you can reach him on LinkedIn, Twitter or check out his company Otus
An interview with Korbinian Spann. Korbinian started out doing a PhD in Semitic Languages before working in retail and realising he had no way to collate customer feedback. This led him to start building his own solution not once but three times, eventually leading to his own startup and taking data-driven product development to the world.
We talk about a lot, including:
- How he started out as an intrapreneur with a problem, how he solved it, and how it sparked an idea for his own startup
- How had to rebuild the same product 3 times, and the importance of forgetting everything and starting from scratch where needed
- How he's always had a problem solving mind and product management perspective even though he's not a product manager
- His passion for data-driven product development and how he's attempting to shift the paradigm
- Some of the challenges in landing data-science backed products with traditional companies that seek certainty
- Why customer centricity has to be data driven, and why we shouldn't just rely on gut feel to make decisions
- Whether AI / ML is just good for pitch decks and whether riding the hype is a good thing or not
- The importance of using the right tech, not just the latest greatest thing, and steering clear of buzzwords
- How data annotation is the dirty secret of AI backed startups, and how much human effort there really is
- The importance of ethics and data privacy in AI and how his company are trying to stay on the right side of history
And much more!
Contact Korbinian If you want to catch up with Korbinian, you can reach him on LinkedIn or check out his company Insaas.ai
An interview with Henry Latham. Henry started out studying Spanish & Portuguese before having an epiphany and moving into foundership and product management. Disappointed with the applicability of some of the education materials out there, and reeling from being fired by a dysfunctional product company, he decided to double down and build an education programme to really help people move the needle and build products effectively.
We talk about a lot, including:
- How dissatisfaction with all the standard product content out there drove him to start Prod MBA, and how it differs from other more established product schools
- Details of the Prod MBA approach and how they get you from defining a vision and building a releasable product in 8 weeks
- How to land product thinking with people that aren't necessarily from a product background and have a more traditional view of business
- How to sell the concept of business risk to traditional stakeholders and get comfortable with risk yourself
- How getting fired from a product job opened his eyes and led him to inspire better product managers in the future
- The importance of getting out of negative thought patterns & not accepting your fate but actually working to make it better
- How to help people to move the needle in dysfunctional companies and making your own moves to demonstrate the value of product thinking
- Why he wrote his two books "Why Your Startup is Failing" and "Product Leadership Starts With You", some of the key themes, and how they'll help you be a better founder & build better products
- Some of the problems he has with agile frameworks, specifically Scrum, what his alternative is and whether it's Scrum Inc's job to fix it
And much more!
Check out Prod MBA If you like the sound of Henry's product training programme, check out the Prod MBA website for more details.
Buy Henry's books Henry has two books:
"You want your product to succeed. Yet considering nearly 90% of products fail, how can you ensure that you are part of the 10% that actually succeed?"
Check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
"Despite what many aspiring product leaders may think, being an effective product leader is not about using the right frameworks, the right methodologies or delivering features quickly. Instead, it's about something entirely different: Building a strong foundation for product success that starts with you."
Check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Henry If you want to catch up with Henry, you can reach him on LinkedIn.
An interview with Emily Tate. Emily is the Managing Director of Mind the Product, the world's leading product management community. Emily started out in marketing, before moving into product management at an aviation company and then onto Mind the Product via a serendipitous sequence of events. She's passionate about product and claims to be able to talk about it all day long!
We talk about a lot, including:
- What the Managing Director of Mind the Product is up to these days and some of the exciting plans as we get out of the pandemic
- How she got started in marketing, then product, then marketing, then product, and what made her settle into product management in the end
- The challenges of being product manager for a technical product, and whether you need to be technical to be a product manager
- Whether it's fair for employers to expect product managers to have deep subject matter expertise or whether being a good product manager is enough
- Whether there's a right way to "do product", the different types of product manager, and the importance of not judging yourself on your weakest skills
- The futility of trying to hire unicorn product managers, and making sure you hire the right product managers for the right products
- Whether the wealth of aspirational content out there is setting too high a bar for product managers
- What to do when you're working for a company that doesn't do product management well, and how to sell yourself into the next company when you know you weren't doing everything by the book
- Some of the warning signs & red flags you should watch out for when applying for a product management job
- The pros and cons of with fortune cookie influencer advice, and making peace with the intentions behind it
And much more!
Get more from Mind the Product If you want to hear more about the Mind the Product origin story, check out this episode with Janna Bastow, co-founder of Mind the Product and CEO of ProdPad.
Contact Emily If you want to catch up with Emily, you can reach her on LinkedIn or Twitter.
An interview with Layo Ogunbanwo. Layo is the VP of Product Strategy for Piggyvest, a Nigerian fintech and also the founder of the Practical Product community, where she's aiming to demystify product management principles and adapt them to Africa's unique environment. Layo launched Practical Product with a groundbreaking report "The State of Product Management in Africa".
We talk about a lot, including:
- Her work with Piggyvest in Nigeria, trying to bring financial services to Africans and the company's plans to develop across Africa
- What a VP of Product Strategy does and how / if it differs from other product management roles
- How her experience across sales & marketing led to a product management career, and how it helped her work cross-functionally
- Why she thought it was important to put together the State of PM in Africa report and ambitions for the future
- Whether there is any kind of pan-African solidarity amongst product managers or whether all countries are competing against each other
- How the report went down with its audience, what the take up and initial feedback has been like
- Some of the surprising findings from the report, and why they were surprising
- Some of the unique challenges of working in product management in Africa, and their root causes
- The gender balance in Africa, and Layo's work to champion equality for women across the continent
- Her hopes for African product managers for the upcoming year, and the desire for an African Silicon Valley
And much more!
Get The State of Product Management in Africa Report "The report is a collection of data that sets a benchmark and brings to life the trends driving product management in Africa. More than 200 product management professionals shared their insights and experiences with us." Get the report here: State of Product Management in Africa Report.
Contact Layo If you want to catch up with Layo, you can reach her on LinkedIn, Twitter. You can also visit Practical Product on their website practicalproduct.co
An interview with Rajesh Nerlikar. Rajesh has had a long career in a variety of product companies, and put all of his learnings to practice when he took over Prodify, a product consultancy that helps startups, scale ups and growth companies to embed product thinking and team building. He's also the co-author of the 2020 book "Build What Matters" which aims to help people come together a long term product strategy to 10x customer outcomes.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The problems with getting companies to understand product management and the different ways companies try to get there
- How not all startup founders know how to operate in a classic product-led way, but how not all of them need to
- How he went from an intern at a CPG company to VP of Product at a ride sharing startup, and what his experience in CPG taught him about user interviews
- How he got into entrepreneurship and startups, where that passion came from, and some of the mistakes he's made along the way
- The importance of not thinking you're the customer even if you used to be, and making sure you speak to a wide variety
- Some of the differences in mindset needed to hire product managers, and how he supports teams that don't know what to look for
- What led him to join up with his former boss to write "Build What Matters" and some of the challenges of writing in tandem
- How you can't just build products for the customers you have now but need to concentrate on the customers you'll have next
- The importance of driving for a multi-year vision and balancing innovation, iteration & operation across your product portfolio
- The Vision-Led Product Management Framework from the book, what it helps you do and some of the successes it's driven
And much more!
Buy Build What Matters "Rapid iteration, A/B testing, and growth hacking—these buzzwords have everyone’s attention in product management today. But while they dominate the current discussion, something even more significant has been lost in their limelight: long-term value creation for the customer."
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Rajesh If you want to catch up with Rajesh, you can reach him on LinkedIn, Twitter. You can also visit his website prodify.group
An interview with Rhiana Matthew. Rhiana is a Senior Product Manager at Publicis Sapient, a product consultancy that aims to help other companies build products better and set their teams up for success. She works in omnichannel retail product management, and saw her product strategy crumble to dust in the "new normal" of COVID-19.
We talk about a lot, including:
- Her work with Publicis Sapient, what they do and how she looks to enable companies to get better at product management
- Some of the things she's working on at the moment, what omnichannel retail solutions are, and what she's selling
- How she got into product management and what gave her the spark, and how making an impact on real customers ticked all her boxes
- The pros and cons of working for a consultancy and being "In and out" vs working directly for a product company
- How the news of lockdown impacted her team and whether they took it in their stride or panicked
- The approaches the product team took to work out where to play and get 120+ ideas down to 11
- The spectre of timeline-based, hard deadline deliverables and whether it's possible to get away from this in retail
- How operating under wartime conditions opened her eyes to the art of the possible, and how she thinks this will impact her approach in the future
- Her passion for supporting mental health and some of the ways she learned to cope through the chaos
- Her passion for using tech for good, and some of the ways she tries to contribute to making the world a better place
And much more!
The podcast is on Product Hunt! This episode release coincides with the podcast hitting Product Hunt, the leading community where people rate new products and ideas. Would appreciate your support and feedback!
If you want more from Publicis Sapient I spoke to Rhiana's colleague Jack Stevens a few months back. Jack spoke frankly of some of the mental health challenges of working under lockdown.
Contact Rhiana If you want to catch up with Rhiana, you can reach her on LinkedIn or Rhiana's Medium page
An interview with Julia Shalet. Julia is a product consultant who hates the idea of wasted effort and wants to make sure that we all spend our time building things that matter. To support this goal, she wrote "The Really Good Idea Test", an already award-winning practical playbook to help put your ideas to the test.
We talk about a lot, including:
- Why she decided to write the Really Good Idea Test and some surprising early feedback from a young reviewer
- How the book came together from her years of teaching and refining her message and approach
- The importance of practical learning, and not just reading stuff out of a book
- How the book's 7 steps help you validate your hypothesis and whether these steps are linear
- How to sell the concept of product discovery and evidence-based decision making to possibly sceptical leadership
- The importance of assessing your company's risk appetite, and how much evidence you need to proceed with confidence
- How to avoid survivorship bias and step away from the cliche of the inspired founder who does it all from their gut
- How to remove bias in hypothesis creation and to avoid reinforcing those biases with leading questions
- The importance of getting buy in up front to ensure that your Really Good Idea is in line with strategy
- How to handle side quests and rabbit holes when you find something unexpected that might be a better idea than your original idea
And much more!
Buy The Really Good Idea Test "Got an idea? Want an easy way to test, refine and validate your idea? Wondering whether it's worth investing your time, energy and money? Trying to work out your next step? Put it to The Really Good Idea Test!"
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Julia If you want to catch up with Julia, you can reach her on LinkedIn or her website productdoctor.co.uk
An interview with Christina Wodtke. Christina is the award-winning author of a variety of seminal books, including "The Team That Managed Itself" and "Radical Focus". Christina is passionate about creating empowered, high-performing organisations and helping them to focus on their most important strategic goals using OKRs (Objectives & Key Results).
We talk about a lot, including:
- How "Radical Focus" came about in the first place, and why now is the time for the Second Edition
- How her book differs from "Measure What Matters", whether John Doerr is riding on her coat tails and whether they talk at parties
- How she set out to write a practical OKR playbook rather than a theoretical document, and why she felt the need to put tons and tons of examples in the second edition
- The circumstances that led her to realise that OKRs were the way forward and why she became so passionate about teaching them
- Why you shouldn't use OKRs to manage everything but use them as a strategic tool to focus on what's most important, and deciding what not to do
- Why companies shouldn't just jump straight to OKRs without having some of the prerequisites and a culture to support them
- The importance of empowered teams, letting go of micromanagement and thinking that your job is to tell people what to do
- Why setting a good OKR review cadence is often more important than agonising over setting perfect OKRs
- How the concept of a fixed mindset applies not to just people but companies too, and how companies have to be comfortable with failure
- Where you shouldn't use OKRs, the types of team or companies where it just doesn't make sense, and why OKRs aren't just rebadged task lists
And much more!
Buy Radical Focus (2nd Edition) "The award-winning author of The Team That Managed Itself and Pencil Me In returns with a new and expanded edition of her landmark book on OKRs. Struggling to adopt Objectives and Key Results? Radical Focus teaches you everything you need."
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Christina If you want to catch up with Christina, you can reach her on Twitter or her website wodtke.com.
An interview with Udhaya Kumar Padmanabhan. Udhaya is Global Strategic Design Director at Designit, a global design firm working in all areas of design. Udhaya is a passionate advocate for good design principles, demystifying design practices and applying form to the formless.
We talk about a lot, including:
- His work with Designit, and how the design community is flourishing in Bangalore (the Silicon Valley of India)
- How he started out as a computer scientist & mathematician but somehow ended up in design and not data science
- The difference between product management, product design and UX design and where it all sits in a good product company
- Whether you need specific domain experience to be a product designer or whether any designer can get into product design
- The importance of up front collaboration with UX & product design and ensuring you're not just throwing stuff over the wall
- How easy it is to rescue bad design that you've inherited, when you need to start again, and what to do if you can't
- The importance of stepping back and hearing people out and not just preaching at people, and how design is about being in the relationship business
- The importance of "giving form to the formless" and applying good design principles outside of traditional user interfaces
Contact Udhaya If you want to catch up with Udhaya, you can reach him on LinkedIn.
An interview with Rekha Venkatakrishnan. Rekha is a Senior Manager in Group Product Management for Walmart Global Tech, supporting Walmart offices around the world in building great product experiences. She's also a passionate advocate for advancing women in data, tech & product and a chapter lead for Women in Product in San Francisco.
We speak about a lot, including:
- What it's like working in product for a giant like Walmart, in a global, distributed product team
- Whether an organisation like Walmart can be truly agile or whether it's stuck in the past
- How a move from Walmart to Oracle went wrong and why she ended up back at Walmart
- How she started as an engineer in India before starting to query the "What" and the "Why" naturally moved her towards product management
- Some of the challenges of going from an engineering mindset to product mindset, and getting away from trying to specify the "How"
- How she prioritised practical, hands on experience and hadn't even heard of places like Product School
- How her passion for communication & education led her to ironically become a trainer for Product School
- Her work with Women in Product and the initiatives she's working on to help support women in the product community
- Why it's important to be able to make mistakes as long as you learn from them
And much more!
Contact Rekha You can contact Rekha on LinkedIn.
An interview with Stephanie Tanzar, Director of Product Management at Pendo. Stephanie talks about her passion for product management and product analytics, the new Product Engagement Score metric and some great advice for becoming more data-driven.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The differences between stages of companies, how she's lived them all and what she prefers now
- Whether being in a hypergrowth company with a massive user base makes it easier to say no
- What it's like being a product manager at a company that serves a user base of product managers
- How a passion for human / computer interaction nearly led to a PhD but instead sparked a passion for product management
- Why data is important and the role of gut feel in product management decisions
- What the Product Engagement Score is, what it tells you, and whether it's actually useful or just something to get people to use Pendo
- Whether Pendo are putting their money where their mouth is and using the score to drive their own decisions
- Examples of good decisions that have been made so far using Product Engagement Score as a basis
- Whether NPS's time is up or whether it's valuable alongside data such as the Product Engagement Score
- Why you don't have to be perfect to be data-driven, and that just taking it one step at a time is still valuable
- The different lagging and leading indicators that can be used to drive product decisions
About the Product Engagement Score Stephanie wants you to start using the PES to measure your product engagement. Find out more about that on the Product Engagement Score website.
Contact Stephanie If you want to catch up with Stephanie, you can reach her on LinkedIn or go and sign up for Pendo.
PS - If you want check whether Stephanie's answers match up with our previous Pendo guest, check out Christine Itwaru.
An interview with David Pereira. David is Head of Product Management at Virtual Identity, a product development agency. He's also a prolific author and educator, and contributing editor to Serious Scrum.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The fun and games when working for a company transitioning from a project to product-led mindset
- The importance of meeting in the middle and making iterative progress, not aiming for perfection on day one
- How he got his first job as a product owner completely by mistake whilst studying on an English immersion course
- How he developed his product skills on the job through making multiple mistakes and iterating
- The debate between Product Owner and Product Manager as job titles, and the trend for Product Owners to be hired as order takers in feature factories
- How he got into writing over 100 articles and becoming a contributing editor to Serious Scrum on Medium
- What he means by "The Game Being Over" for Scrum and some of the problems with the framework
- Some of the issues he sees with SAFe as a successor for Scrum, and how it's really waterfall in disguise
- The importance of a solid growth mindset and not going stale, and some of the ways he tries to keep ahead of the crowd
Contact David If you want to catch up with David, you can reach him on LinkedIn, Twitter or read his work on Medium.
An interview with Samuel Ogunkoya. Samuel is a product management intern at ProducteevTech, a product development agency. Samuel started his career as a physiotherapist before deciding to focus on a different type of user pain, and shares some of his learnings from his journey so far.
We talk about a lot, including:
- How he serendipitously landed his first product management job
- What made him decide to switch from physiotherapy into product management in the first place
- How his passion for people and his broad interest in technology has affected both parts of his career
- Whether his interest in product management was useful in his physiotherapy career, and how he treated his services as a product
- How his experience with patients and patients' families helped him develop empathy that he now takes forward to his users & stakeholders
- How he developed a strong dislike for micromanagement from past experience, and how he pushes against this in his product management career
- The resources he used to skill up in product management, and how he prefers hands on sessions to book training
- How he explained product management to his friends and family and how they reacted when he told them about the change
- Advice for others following him into product management
Contact Samuel You can find Samuel on Twitter, LinkedIn or Samuel's website.
An interview with Wes Bush. Wes is the founder of ProductLed, a company aiming to teach the world how to build products that sell themselves. He's also the author of the book "Product-Led Growth".
We speak about a lot, including:
- How a career in B2B SaaS working in demand generation started to make him suspect that there was another way to generate demand
- How his passion for simplifying led him to start simplifying product onboarding to allows users to get to value sooner
- The problems of moving from sales-led to product-led when you haven't spent any time on your product's UX
- The problems of enterprise "whale hunting" leading to products that are overcomplicated and difficult to use
- How a desire to get to the heart of the problem, and teach his clients, led to writing a leading book on product-led growth
- Whether salespeople should feel threatened by product-led growth, or whether it's an opportunity for them
- How product-led growth affects the marketing team and whether it's the end of traditional marketing
- Whether some companies are just not ready to become product-led, and some of the reasons it doesn't make sense to be so
- How companies know when it's time to transition from sales-led to product-led, and the first steps to take
- Whether there are some types of companies that actually want to be sold to and would resist product-led approaches
And much more!
Buy Product-Led Growth "Discover the fundamentals of Product-Led Growth and how you can turn your product into a growth engine, widen your funnel, and dominate your market while cutting your customer acquisition costs."
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Wes You can contact Wes on Twitter, LinkedIn or productled.com.
An interview with Stephanie Leue. Stephanie is a product leadership coach, and became CPO of MindEx since our interview. Previously she worked in a variety of roles after starting out at PayPal after being coached by Marty Cagan.
We talk about a lot, including:
- Her leadership coaching, being an invisible companion and sparring partner
- How she tries to set people up to not need her services, rather than continuously coaching them forever
- Her passion for hypergrowth startups, and the difference between a startup and an unsuccessful small company
- How a workshop with Marty Cagan left her realising that she had been a product manager all along
- How PayPal was a launchpad for her career, and some surprising information about their waterfall practices when she joined
- The challenges in transforming companies from waterfall to an agile product organisation
- How product managers might not be able to change the entire organisation but that their mindset is still key to drive transformation
- Whether lack of product thinking is the preserve of big companies alone, or if small startups can show the same behaviours
- The importance of making conscious decisions about the type of company you are - marketing-led, sales-led or product-led
- How she's not always been a good boss, thought she used to be terrible, and how she's using that to teach others to be better
- The impact of holding back too long and not making timely decisions
And much more!
Contact Stephanie You can reach out to Stephanie on LinkedIn or Twitter.
An interview with Kim Scott, author of "Radical Candor" and "Just Work". Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. Earlier in her career Kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow.
We speak about a lot, including:
- How she's already getting feedback on the book, not just complements, but people taking action based on it
- Whether she's got any negative feedback from the types of people who complain about political correctness
- How she knew she was onto something when her dad's friends had a lightbulb moment discussing the book
- How she felt revisiting painful experiences from her past, and whether this was a positive or negative experience for her
- Whether strategic swearing in books is a positive or negative when trying to land a message
- How she got feedback from a black female executive that being radically candid doesn't work for everyone, and how this spurred her to write her new book
- Whether she felt she was an imperfect messenger for the themes in this book given that she is herself privileged
- How we all used biased language, how words matter and why it's important that we all work on it
- How to point out people's biased, prejudiced and bullying behaviour without getting their defences up and shutting you down
- How to be an upstander not a bystander, and building this into the culture of your company
- What to do when the problems in your company are systemic, from the CEO downwards, and the importance of checks and balances
Buy Kim's books "We―all of us―consistently exclude, underestimate, and underutilize huge numbers of people in the workforce even as we include, overestimate, and promote others, often beyond their level of competence. Not only is this immoral and unjust, it's bad for business. Just Work is the solution." Just Work
"Radical Candor is about caring personally and challenging directly, about soliciting criticism to improve your leadership and also providing guidance that helps others grow. It focuses on praise but doesn't shy away from criticism ― to help you love your work and the people you work with." Radical Candor
Get in touch with Kim You can check out Kim's work on the Just Work website, or follow her on Twitter.
An interview with Polina Marchenko. Polina is a self-described geekette, product leader and multiple startup founder. Polina saw the dark side of startup life in Berlin, suffering burnout due to the intense hustle culture. She has since moved to the US, and is now focusing her efforts on her new startup whilst ensuring that she does it in a sustainable manner.
We talk about a lot, including:
- How she developed a passion for entrepreneurship from an early age and through higher education
- What it was like being a junior PM at a startup and whether it helped her build her hard skills
- Her struggles with hustle culture, unrealistic expectations and inevitable burn out
- How she used the lessons from her first startup to make sure she didn't make the same mistakes again
- How she accidentally moved to Silicon Valley and ended up in a hacker house with 14 other hustling entrepreneurs
- The problems with hustle culture and why she's actively trying to get her friends to step out of it
- How a passion for community building and desire to connect led her to create 3 new startups in a pandemic
- How she used her past startup experience to decide it was time to park a couple of startup ideas and concentrate on one
- How she's helping people unleash their potential, fight imposter syndrome, and how important this is to her values
Try SIDE PRJCT "Resumes are overrated, show me what you've built"
Check out the SIDE PRJCT website.
Contact Polina You can reach out to Polina on LinkedIn.
About the Episode An interview with Nacho Bassino. Nacho is CPO for Best Day Travel Group and the author of new book "Product Direction", which is a practical playbook for product strategy. Nacho is a passionate supporter of the Latin American product community, and host of a Spanish-language product podcast.
We speak about a lot, including:
- How writing a book is a great way to really learn about the topic you're writing about
- Transitioning from project-led to product-led, how to do it at scale and manage complicated dependencies without SAFe
- What it's like interviewing holidaymakers, and how you can always get a captive focus group when you need one
- Gathering insights to help define product strategy, reducing them and synthesising them into the iniatives that matter
- The importance for product teams of building for the future and not concentrating on short term thinking
- Important principles for building an effective roadmap to support the product vision
- Driving alignment with multiple stakeholders and avoiding an information gap
- How to avoid OKRs becoming just a big "to do" list via peer review and collaboration
- The importance of investing in and providing local language content for the Latin American product community
Buy Nacho's Book Nacho's book, "Product Direction" is available in all the usual places. Check it out!
Product Direction website.
Conversaciones de Producto If you speak Spanish, why not try Nacho's podcast Conversaciones de Producto.
Contact Nacho You can reach out to Nacho on LinkedIn or Twitter.
An interview with Nis Frome. Nis is the co-founder and VP of Product at Feedback Loop, an agile research platform. Nis took over as VP of Product after wearing many other hats. He's also a mentor and podcaster, with a keen interest in sharing with the community and helping to inspire other product managers with thought leadership.
We talk about a lot, including:
- What made him go into entrepreneurship straight out of college
- Why he took over the product function and whether it was a classic case of executive swoop in
- How real world product management can differ so much from what's in the books
- How to avoid getting depressed if everything's not like the books on day one
- How to land the message about good product management practices with execs who haven't read said books
- Whether a product manager on the ground can fix a poorly performing organisation on their own
- The importance of connecting the dots and understanding how a product manager's decisions drive outcomes
- How different people and teams in a company can be on different parts of the product maturity curve and whether this matters
- Effectively segmenting your customers and working out how to prioritise when their needs are different
And much more!
Listen to Nis's podcast It's ok, we can have an open relationship. Check out Nis's podcast This is Product Management.
Contact Nis You can reach out to Nis on LinkedIn or Twitter.
About the Episode An interview with Gibson Biddle. Gib is the former VP of Product Management at Netflix, and former CPO of Chegg. Nowadays, he's a coach and teacher who gave 140 talks over the last year. He's also recently started a mailing list, "Ask Gib" where he answers some of the top voted questions every week.
We understandably speak about a lot, including:
- His new newsletter "Ask Gib", and why you should subscribe to it
- Whether he's gotten any difficult questions he couldn't answer
- How he manages to do 140 events and how he optimises the format
- How to make an impact in your first 90 days as a product leader
- The importance of moving quickly to make an impact, and striking whilst the iron is hot
- What to do if you aren't passionate about the company you work for, and when to leave
- How to handle M&A as part of your product strategy & why not to worry about the valuation
- The pros & cons of using different frameworks to teach product leadership practices
- Treating yourself as a product, and experimenting with your career choices to help build your intuition and business maturity
- The importance of taking risks, both for mature businesses as well as in your career
- Whether Gib could have saved Blockbuster, why he thinks they ultimately failed, and how the Innovator's Dilemma loomed large
And much more!
Sign up to Ask Gib Gib answers the most upvoted questions once a week on his newsletter, Ask Gib. Sign up here and never be bereft of content again.
Please rate Gib's interview Gib loves NPS and uses it to optimise his content and make sure he can continue to improve it and excite his audience.
Please take a second to rate his interview!
Contact Gib You can contact Gib on Twitter, LinkedIn or gibsonbiddle.com.
An interview with Nichole DeMeré. Nichole is CMO at Reeview, a new eCommerce video review platform, as well as Taggg, a calendar scheduling solution. Nichole is a passionate growth marketer, consultant, community builder and mentor.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The story behind Reeview, how they're looking to revolutionise eCommerce, and some of the early traction they're getting
- Why Nichole prefers working with early stage start ups and getting in on the ground floor, and thriving in chaos
- The difference between growth hacking techniques & general marketing, and which strategies & tactics to use
- How businesses seeking growth need to get ready to experiment and test their most important hypotheses
- The importance of having both qualitative and quantitative data, and their preference for having conversations with people
- Why it's important to focus your growth strategy and not try to hit too many channels at once
- Whether Nichole is up with all the new trends in tech or their own worst nightmare when it comes to marketing
- The importance of mentorship and paying it forward and their advice for the next generation of SaaS marketers
- How someone starts out in a one horse town and takes over the world of B2B Marketing
More about Reeview You can find out about Reeview on Reeview's website or Reeview @ Product Hunt.
Contact Nichole You can find Nichole everywhere. A few places included Product Hunt, LinkedIn, Twitter or their own website nicholeelizabethdemere.com
An interview with Paul Ortchanian. Paul worked for many years in Silicon Valley before moving back to Montreal. He got bored of working for a services firm there and decided to take his SV experience into his own startup, Bain Public, aiming to foster Product Hygiene in Canadian firms and beyond.
We talk about a lot, including:
- How a lack of product thinking in Montreal and experience in Silicon Valley led him to create a consultancy to fix it
- How his great experience in Silicon Valley and imbibing the product culture there was an advantage
- The challenge of "Moses syndrome" from CEOs who think they're the second coming because they have secured funding
- The trouble with traditional startup mentors not coming from digital backgrounds
- How and why they invented the SOAP methodology to help Product Managers understand what they should be working on and when
- Some of the troubles that mixed mode product / service companies have
- How to arm yourself against short term thinking and sales-led feature development
- The importance of using data to justify your product decisions
- The importance of being able to handle rejection and people saying no
- How to take control of the discussion with sales & marketing and not just blame them
And much more!
Bain Public If you want to find out more about Paul's company, you can check out the Bain Public website and find out more about the SOAP methodology.
Contact Paul You can connect with Paul on LinkedIn.
An interview with Emily Reid. Emily is a Product Manager for FCT, a Canadian insurance company, as well as consulting for AgeRate, a healthtech startup. Emily is passionate about demystifying data and is leading FCT's charge towards being a data-driven, API-enabled company.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The most important question - is it "this data" or "these data"?
- The pros & cons of working for a big, established firm and the imperative to move to a more agile mindset
- Why she moved from banking into product management, and the misogynistic attitudes she was trying to get away from
- How she skilled up in product management hard skills, as well as data science fundamentals
- The importance of embracing not being the smartest person in the room
- How a background in biotech at uni helped her really explain complicated concepts
- The importance of picking good product metrics & why you need stats knowledge to be an effective PM
- How data science isn't the be all and end all, how to factor failure into the process, and why we might see a new breed of data science specialist product managers
- Why unsolicited internet advice is never welcome and people should just stop
- How she has been judged and patronised as a young, up and coming, blonde woman in technology
And much more!
An interview with Moshe Mikanovsky. Moshe is a Senior Product Manager for Procom, a Canadian-based recruitment company, as well as a blogger and budding podcaster.
We speak about a lot, including:
- His journey from developing software for the Israel Defence Force to Product Management, how agile the army was, and what it taught him
- The difference in working cultures between Israel, the USA and Canada, and how he has navigated them
- His side hustle as a product consultant for a "social media for content creators"
- His passion for transforming companies, and bringing in agile processes & practices
- What do do when Agile transformation doesn't work and how to keep it relevant
- The importance of building his personal brand, and his plans for a new podcast focused on "Products for Product Managers"
- His plans to pay it forward by writing blogs, appearing on webinars, and sharing his expertise with others
And much more!
An interview with April Dunford. April is a Positioning Consultant and author of 2019's "Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It".
We speak about a lot, including:
- The origin of "Obviously Awesome", why she self published and how publishers don't like "doing" books
- How taking over a failing product and repositioning made it a success, and showed her the power of good positioning for the exact same product
- How conferences and publishers reacted in horror at the concept of positioning content, and how it's swung back into fashion these days
- The shocking story of what happened when she asked a real author for advice and what they said about her book
- The problem with "fill in the blanks" positioning statements and why they won't help, and might harm
- The importance of positioning against your actual competition and not just your direct competitors
- Why Product Market Fit doesn't exist, isn't operationally useful, and is a VC pipe dream
- The importance of creating a market point of view story to help land your positioning and drive alignment across the organisation
- How you can use the POV story to help people buy your offering over that of your competitors
And much more!
An interview with Yoav Farbey. Yoav is a Senior Product Manager at PARK NOW, an international company aiming to find you parking spaces and ensure you don't have to fumble around for spare change when you get one. Yoav has travelled from Computer Science to foundership, Product Analyst, Product Consultant and now leading teams and pushing design thinking.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The age old battle about whether "Product Owner" should be a job title of its own, and how it differs from being Product Management
- Starting his own startup because engineering wasn't for him, how it went and why he called it quits
- Getting into Product Analytics as a first step, how it helped him be better Product Manager
- What it was like working for a consultancy, and how he managed to keep engaged when the client relationship is so transitory
- Using design sprints in the wild, getting engagement and how to get buy in and demonstrate their value
- What to do when you can't get a design sprint going, and how to use the best aspects in shorter sessions
- How to help large corporations make products effectively and communicate efficiently
- How SAFe isn't all that bad really (the humanity!)
And much more!
An interview with Petra Wille. Petra is a Product Leadership Coach and author of the new book "Strong Product People - A Complete Guide to Developing Great Product Managers".
We speak about a lot, including:
- How a desire to affect change at scale moved her away from individual coaching to coaching Product Leaders
- How she happened upon Product Management by being the best communicator on the development team
- How a desire for a practical Product Leadership playbook led her to write her own
- The importance of setting expectations and making incremental progress and not always aiming for perfect
- The challenges of selling good Product thinking to senior management and some approaches to do it
- The challenge of getting good management experience and becoming a good people manager without focused coaching
- Some of the challenges facing women Product Leaders and if it's getting better or worse
- Whether it's necessary to have a background in development to be an effective PM, or if it's even desirable
- When to stick at a Product job and try to make it better, and when it's time to leave
- The importance of making time for people development amongst all of the urgent day-to-day work
And much more!
An interview with Büşra Coşkuner. Büşra is a Product Consultant & Coach who works with organisations and individuals to embed Product Management principles.
We speak about a lot, including:
- Practical Product Management - you can't learn all of the frameworks
- How her experience in Berlin helped but also hindered her move to a different working culture in Switzerland
- The challenge of the acronym "MVP" and how no two people think it means the same thing
- Companies where leaders don't have product thinking or worse still think they have product thinking
- The importance of demonstrating product thinking not just talking about it and being idealistic
- How important No Code solutions are for the Product community and what they unlock for busy Product teams
- The challenges of being a woman in tech and seeing things in retrospect, and her trepidation of being a working mum
And much more!
An interview with Candice Poon. Candice is a Program Manager at Microsoft (which is really a Product Manager at any other company) working on Microsoft Edge. Candice recently caused a stir on Twitter when she tweeted about her experience being prevented from signing up to Clubhouse because of her name.
We speak about a lot, including:
- What it's like working for Microsoft and ensuring Internet Explorer stays in its coffin
- Whether being called a Program Manager is confusing and whether she still gets invited to Product Manager parties
- How she felt being blocked from signing up to Clubhouse and whether it's happened before
- How Clubhouse responded and whether the response was satisfactory
- Some of the reasons why people have blind spots when developing products and what we should do to fix them
- How Microsoft are promoting diversity & what's left to do
- The importance of mixing tech and non-tech skills to further diversify your experience
And much more!
Kate is a consultant who advises organisations how to build Product teams and practices. She is also the author of "Hiring Product Managers: Using Product EQ to go beyond culture and skills", a book that aims to help hire effective Product leaders in the first place, or develop Product leaders that are struggling to make an impact.
We talk about a lot, including:
- How her experience hiring Product leaders helped her write a book about it, and how hard it was to keep it succinct
- How hot shot VPs / Heads of Product can fail if they rely too much on technical skills, and how as an industry we focus too much on hiring for them
- How long to stick with Product leaders before having that difficult conversation about their next move
- How new leaders often aren't set up for success through lack of coaching, and just left to get on with it
- The importance of a shared understanding of what the job role entails, and not just copying and pasting job descriptions from Google
- The problem with "Cultural Fit" and how you need different puzzle pieces and not a stack of the same
- How neurodiversity fits into a high EQ world and how to adapt hiring processes to cater for different ways of thinking
- What progress we've made with advancing women in Product Management, and what hasn't changed at all
And much more!
An interview with Deepti Tadala. Deepti is a Technical Product Manager with Synacor, a technology firm based in upstate New York, and a former management consultant with Deloitte. She's also a Founding 200 Member at Product School, former Content Lead for Products by Women, and a member of Toastmasters International.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The difference between Technical Product Managers and non-Technical Product Managers
- The importance, even as a TPM, of having close contact with customers and considering the market
- How working as a Management Consultant for Deloitte prepared her for Product Management, and how it didn't
- The troubles of getting that first Product Management job when racing against the immigration clock
- Learning to be a Product Manager and the importance of walking the walk
- Her passion for education and using her story to inspire others and pay it forward
- The importance of learning public speaking skills even if you don't want to speak publicly
- The importance of having a platform for women to share experiences and support each other
- Her power morning schedule and what it helps her to achieve
An interview with Cindy Alvarez. Cindy is Director of Customer Research at GitHub, the world's leading software development platform. Cindy has long experience in customer research with GitHub, Yammer, Microsoft and Kissmetrics. She also wrote the leading book on customer research, 2014's Lean Customer Development which aims to guide teams to build products their customers need.
We speak about a lot, including:
- What it's like doing customer research with the world's largest community of software engineers
- The importance of testing your customer interview questions and working out what does and doesn't work
- The importance of empathy, keeping down-to-earth and being someone customers feel comfortable talking to
- Whether a Bachelor's in Psychology helps her to play mind games with her subjects (mwahahaha)
- Why she wrote the book, how she did it, and whether she's going to write another one
- How to answer some of the common objections to customer interviews, and how ensure you can build a culture of speaking with customers directly
- How to optimise for Continuous Discovery and ensure you get a flow of customer feedback and learning
And much more!
An interview with Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia. Carlos is the Founder and CEO of Product School, the global leader in product management training with a community of over one million product professionals. Product School instructors are real-world Product Leaders working at top companies including Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber, and Amazon.
We talk about a lot, including:
- How a lack of Product training resources when he started led him to start a Product Management training start up
- How he fills his days at CEO of the largest Product Management learning community
- How he ensures that, as the leading Product Management learning community, he isn't seen as all size, no quality
- His passion for lifelong learning and giving away as much free content as possible
- What led him to write The Product Book with Josh Anon and what he expected to achieve from it
- How MBAs are great but they don't really prepare people to execute as Product Managers
- His and Product School's commitment to inclusion & diversity on their team, their instructors and their attendees
And much more!
An interview with Melanie McKay. Melanie is the Head of Consumer Product at Rightmove, the UK's #1 property marketplace. She has worked in a number of Product Management roles, and took an interesting move into secondary school teaching in the middle. Since coming back to Product she's gone from strength to strength, including an appearance at Product School's ProductCon.
We talk about a lot, including:
- How Product works at the biggest property marketplace in the UK and whether you get loads of weird requests you get when your TAM is pretty much the entire UK population
- How she got into Product by mistake, and what she did to get good at it with no good information to lead her
- Whether it is in fact harder for new PMs now because there is too much competing information for them
- How her passion for education got her into teaching, how it was teaching computing to kids, and why she came back
- What her experience of teaching taught her that she can use in her Product Management career
- Getting involved with ProductCon and the importance of going outside of your comfort zone
- Her well-received take on the classic PM Venn diagram, and how it's gone down with the PM community
And much more!
James is a Delivery Manager for Discovery Inc., a VOD entertainment platform. James is a passionate advocate for using story points for just about everything, and using data to inform delivery decisions. We speak about a few topics, including:
- How to bring delivery together across multiple technical streams for a big media company
- The interplay between Delivery and Product and the importance of a good Product Manager
- How to get Product, Delivery & Engineering to work harmoniously
- How story points can save the world and how to use them properly
- Whether Scrum is any good and some of the ways to make it work for your business
- The tricky balance between Product Delivery and fixing tech debt
- How to use the data you already have to help inform future delivery decisions
- How to use data to sell your message to the leadership team
- How running a band and running Product Delivery are pretty similar
And much more!
An interview with Marty Cagan.
Marty is a renowned Product Management thought leader. He has had an illustrious career at Netscape, eBay, his own original startup (acquired by IBM) and then founding the Silicon Valley Product Group consultancy. He has worked with hundreds of companies to help them build products right. He's also a widely read blogger, and author of a best-selling book on how to build products; "Inspired - How to Create Tech Products Customers Love". Now he's back with co-author and SVPG partner Chris Jones, with "Empowered - Oridinary People, Extraordinary Products" which aims to do for organisations what Inspired did for teams.
I could have spoken to Marty for hours, but here are the highlights:
- How come Marty started SVPG after working for some of the best tech companies
- How he got good at Product, and the role of luck in that journey
- Why he started blogging and how that helped him get his thoughts in order for his books
- How he's such a Product Guy that he evens writes his books iteratively
- How come the 2nd edition of Inspired was basically a total rewrite, and whether the 1st edition has anything useful in it
- Some of the challenges that companies face when trying to be truly Product-led
- What to do when your company really doesn't get Product
- How to persuade the leadership team that maybe this stuff actually does work
- Why he is so passionate about inclusion & diversity in tech, and how he's trying to help
And much more!
An interview with Christine Itwaru. Christine is Senior Director of Product Operations at Pendo. Christine is a problem-solving, Product-obsessed New Yorker who has swapped the Big Apple for the City of Oaks as Senior Director of Product Operations for Pendo. We talk about the fundamentals of Product Ops, how it works at Pendo, the types of people you need, what they can do for you, and when you need them.
We talk about a lot:
- How she traded the Big Apple for the City of Oaks, moving to Raleigh, North Carolina to work with Pendo
- The exciting challenges and opportunities of working for a hypergrowth SaaS company
- What Product Operations is and how it can help a company as it scales, and how Christine made it happen
- The core skills and mindset needed to work in Product Operations
- The difference between being data-driven & data-informed, or whether there's any difference at all
- The importance of cross-functional communication for Product Ops, and Product teams in general
- Some of the challenges being a woman in tech and how she's trying to help solve them
And much more!
An interview with Jackie Bavaro. Jackie started her Product Management career as a Program Manager at Microsoft, before joining Google's Associate Product Manager programme and then getting hired as the first Product Manager at Asana. Back in 2013, she collaborated with Gayle McDowell to write the best-selling book "Cracking the PM Interview", which inspired a generation of Product Managers to get their first jobs. Jackie and Gayle are back with "Cracking the PM Career" which explains how to get good at it once you're in.
Understandably, we cover a lot, including:
- How Jackie got into Product in the first place, and why Microsoft calls Product Managers Program Managers
- The pros and cons of working for Google versus a new startup
- How she met and decided to collaborate with Gayle McDowell and how they write together
- How the FAANG companies reacted to her giving away all their secrets
- Excellent advice on how to make an impact in your new PM job
- How to avoid the dreaded Feature Factory, build a strategy and sell it
- Why it's important to look outside your Product bubble for inspiration
And much more!
An interview with Heather James. Heather is the Founder of The Product-Led Alliance, providing a community, events and materials fora community of passionate product professionals, obsessed with Product-Led Growth. We talk about...
- What the Product-Led Alliance is and what it offers
- Why Heather is so passionate about Product-Led Growth and some of the challenges in getting there
- How she defines Product-Led Growth and how it differs from the dictionary definition
- What made her start the Product-Led Alliance when she did
- How a community with so much free content pays the bills
- How they had to pivot because of COVID-19
- What makes her most proud of the Product-Led Alliance so far
- Future ambitions to take over the world
- Shock horror ... a rival podcast! mumble grumble
And much more!
An interview with Jack Stevens. Jack is Senior Product Manager for Publicis Sapient, a product consultancy that helps large companies with their digital transformation. Aside from his day job working on a secret project that he can't tell us about, Jack was also featured in a BBC article last summer "Stress, burnout and redundancy: Tough times in IT". I spoke to Jack about a few things:
- His work with Publicis Sapient and how they work really hard to be a flat, open company at scale
- How SAFe and other scaled agile approaches (probably) can't work
- How he got onto the BBC article in the first place, and how the reaction has been
- How hustle culture is toxic, mainly a lie, and we just see the survivors who probably succeeded partially through luck
- How it's OK for some people to just be OK and not everyone has to change the world to be successful
- How his employer reacted after seeing the article, and the support they gave him
- How personal hardship has driven his ambitions to work in financial services to ensure people have the right tools to make good financial decisions
And much more!
An interview with Abby Hehemann. Abby is Senior Product Marketing Manager for GetResponse, a full stack marketing platform. She's passionate about Product Management and Product-Led Growth, and using data to monitor and inform Product Marketing decisions. Abby is also a features speaker with Product-Led Growth Hub.
- The role of Product Marketing and importance of getting close to the Product team
- Pirate metrics (AARRR!) and how you can use them to monitor the health of your funnel
- The concept of Product-Led Growth and how companies can take their first steps to being Product-Led
- The importance of communication and collaboration between functions
- How she got involved with Product-Led Growth hub and their future collaboration plans
- Whether Product Marketing should report to the VP of Marketing or the VP of Product
- Most importantly, whether you can get get good nachos in Poland
And much more!
An interview with Ana Kresina. Ana is a self-described vagabond, a Canadian living in Australia, passionate Product Manager at Redbubble, a leading online art marketplace. We speak about the following and more:
- Ana's journey into Product Management from Marketing via UX
- The importance of guidance and mentorship at the early stages of a PM career
- The importance of getting shots on goal early
- Some of the systemic problems with returning to work after maternity leave
- How we're pretty far from having acceptable diversity in tech & product, but at least the conversations have started
An interview with Harpal Singh. Harpal is an award-winning product consultant and interim CPO with long experience working with a variety of startups and helping them set up effective product teams and achieving Product/Market Fit. We talk about his journey and specifically:
- The benefits of being a consultant and how it's helped him to be a better leader
- His passion for Product/Market Fit and why he wrote a playbook on it
- His ambitions for the book and how it's helped him challenge his assumptions
- What Product/Market Fit really means, why it's not just about MVPs, and the concept of a "Hair On Fire" problem
- The importance of Marketing when finding Product/Market Fit and not being led solely by technology
- The variability of the Product Manager role between companies & the importance of a career plan
- The perils of poor LinkedIn content
An interview with Dave Martin. Dave is a product leader with a strong history of transforming companies into effective product-focused organisations. Most recently, he's co-founder of consultancy Right to Left, where he takes some of his past learnings and pays them forward to the next generation of product-hungry companies.
We speak about a lot, including:
- How he works with early to mid stage companies to transform them
- The Product Management Health Check
- How Product Managers must not be seen as mere requirements gatherers
- The difference between different types of Product Manager, even within successful organisations
- The challenges of moving from product management into product leadership
- The importance of evidence in decision making
An interview with Janna Bastow. Janna is co-founder of ProdPad and Mind the Product, and inventor of the Now/Next/Later roadmap. We talk about a few things:
- How ProdPad started as an idea to solve a problem for Janna in her Product Management job and became a company serving thousands of Product Managers
- How date-based roadmaps are the devil and how to tackle management wanting false security
- The perils of building features for clients, falling into the trap of being an agency instead of a product company, and never getting the chance to solve big problems
- How Mind the Product started out and how they've pivoted to run successful events even in the middle of a pandemic (and how she misses a good flat white)
- Janna's recent ADHD diagnosis, what that meant to her, how she's managing it, and some of the advantages and disadvantages the condition brings to Product Management
An interview with Andrea Saez. Andrea works in Product Growth & Education for ProdPad. She's a lifelong learner, educator and advocate, looking to help Product Managers make good decisions. We talk about her journey into Product Management, why certifications aren't all that they cracked up to be and how Human Psychology helps make good product decisions. We talk about:
- How Andrea got into Product Management after being the first person to ask her boss "why?"
- Why Customer Support staff are ideally placed to become Product Managers
- How Andrea stays motivated during all of her social media product management advocacy, and how she loves Mondays
- Why date-based roadmaps are the devil and why management want them because of Previous Product Trauma
- How Product need to take more responsibility when Sales make a commitment
- Why certifications aren't really worth much without follow on experience
And much more!
An interview with Marc Abraham. Marc is the Head of Product - Engagement for ASOS.com, author of two books on Product Management and co-curator with Mind the Product. I originally picked up Marc's first book, My Product Management Toolkit as I was looking for a good primer for people transferring into my Product team from elsewhere in the business. I found the book a great primer and guide to product management. I was excited to see his new book come out, which covers a lot more around the psychology of Product.
I spoke to Marc about his journey into Product Management, his new book 'Managing Product = Managing Tension', and some great advice about navigating a career in Product. Marc also gives some excellent advice for Product Leaders (or aspiring Product Leaders) and ways that they can create psychological safety for their teams. As a keen boxer, Marc is also a massive advocate for using exercise to help work out some of the tensions of product management.
Further show notes here: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/s1e21
An interview with Busayomi Omotosho, Product Manager at Softcom. Busayomi speaks to me about Softcom's mission to connect consumers to businesses across Africa, her past working in LegalTech, how you need to apply efficient processes to Product Management, the importance of work / life balance and much more.
Catch up with Busayomi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omotosho-busayomi-1ab461b0/ or Twitter: https://twitter.com/Buu_buu10
An interview with Victoria Tkatch, Senior Product Manager at Sonos. Victoria is an ambitious, driven professional, operating at a million miles an hour, and she's definitely going to be your boss one day. We talk about her journey to Sonos via her own nutrition startup, her plans for the future and how she manages to keep 3 side hustles going.
You can catch up with Victoria on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriatkatch/ or on her YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCym4-hlfCs0M1iitZ9xSDWw
UPDATE: She is also soliciting feedback for her new idea, a book for PMs! https://techforpms.online/ - so that's 4 side hustles
An interview with Mark Yamashita, Technical Product Director at Sensibill, a fintech company that means you never have to worry about expense forms again. Mark moved into Product Management from working on supercomputers and compilers, via an MBA. We talk about how technical PMs should keep away from solutioneering, how education & mentoring are so important for PMs, as well as why "Singin' in the Rain" is basically the Lean Startup. Catch up with Mark here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-yamashita/
An interview with Elina Sokolovska, Product Manager at Flux, an exciting fintech startup working with some big retailers via their API. Elina talks about how she loves integrations and API Product Management, as well as her addiction to startup culture, and how mountain climbing has taught her strength in the face of adversity.
Catch up with Elina on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elina-sokolovska-17560b32/ or https://twitter.com/ElinaSokolovska
An interview with Mark Graham, Lead Product Manager at Sharktower, working with some smart data scientists to revolutionise project management software. We talk about the importance of communication in Product Management, how Product Management is similar to Football Management, and much more.
Catch up with Mark here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iammarkgraham/
An interview with Matt Wilkinson, founder of Zenquiries, an early stage startup focusing on helpdesk integrations with Shopify. Matt talks about his journey from an Economics degree into company foundership via a career in mobile development, and why he's currently "eating glass & staring into the abyss".
Catch up with Matt here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/7d26fc3818e66c496b9c5b2e87dc2171/ - you can find out more about Zenquiries here: https://www.zenquiries.com/
An interview with Mac Maistrelli, engineering leader with a strong background in education with the Council of Europe - passionate about creating high-performing teams, ensuring psychological safety, and creating a learning environment and getting the best out of his team.
Catch up with Mac here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/macmaistrelli/
An interview with Nidhi Wadmark, Product Manager with PayPal, Women in Product Chapter lead and Global Awareness Lead for Thrive, PayPal's neurodiversity and disability awareness Employee Group. Nidhi is passionate about amplifying the voice of women in tech and product as well as ensuring diversity across the board to ensure we make better product decisions.
Catch up with Nidhi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nidhiwadmark/ or Twitter https://twitter.com/nidhiwadmark
An interview with Priyanka Naik, Growth Product Manager with Advarisk and Women in Finance Top 100. Priyanka is a fearless advocate of speaking up, marketing yourself, and supporter of gender and neuro diversity. She talks about some of the challenges she's faced in a male-dominated working culture, and some of the approaches she's taken to stand out.
Catch up with Priyanka on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/priyankanaik042/ or Twitter: https://twitter.com/priyankanaik042
An interview with Anna Lieberman, an aspiring Product Manager already on her first side hustle. Anna is passionate about taking her first steps into Product, documenting her journey and benefitting from strong mentorship from other strong Women in Product.
Catch up with Anna on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annajlieberman/ or at her blog: https://www.annajlieberman.com/
Find out more about the charity we mention at https://www.whiteswan.org.uk
An interview with Maanas Bukkuri, a passionate educator who started out in Engineering & QA before getting a taste for Product Management. Maanas has started teaching up-and-coming PMs via Product School and shares some of his thoughts about product management, continuously learning, and paying it forward to the next generation of Product Managers.
Catch up with Maanas on Medium https://medium.com/@msbukkuri or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/msbukkuri/