Product Momentum Podcast

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In our current environment of rapidly changing customer needs and expectations, evolving technologies, and unpredictable market swings, the best ideas rarely come from a single leader. Instead, as attendees of the 2026 ITX Product + Design Conference learned, they emerge when product teams collaborate, challenge assumptions, and adapt together.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Rachel Kohman, Ed.D. joined Sean and Dan for an in-person chat, discussing why adaptive leadership helps organizations solve today’s toughest product and technology problems. Rachel, Assistant Dean of Entrepreneurship Education at Missouri S&T, draws from her experience developing future engineers, entrepreneurs, and leaders, to offer practical guidance for creating teams where everyone contributes to better decisions.

Here’s what we learned:

Leadership Is Everyone’s Responsibility

Adaptive leadership challenges the long-held assumption that the person with authority has all the answers. Today’s problems are too complex for any one individual to solve alone, Rachel says. Product managers, UX designers, engineers, and researchers each bring their own unique perspectives to deliver desired outcomes. Not surprisingly, she adds, organizational performance improves when leadership becomes a shared responsibility.

“And that’s what’s so interesting with adaptive leadership; it actually starts to change the narrative. “It’s like, ‘wait a second, the challenges we’re facing are too complex to have a single right solution.’”

For product teams, the adaptive leadership mindset creates an environment where product team members contribute new ideas because they see opportunities – not because they’ve been directed to.

Psychological Safety Drives Better Decision Making

Echoing the sentiments of episode 78 guest Dr. Timothy Clark, Rachel says that too many good ideas remain trapped in hallway discussions or private chat messages, mostly because team members are hesitant to challenge authority. Psychological safety, what Dr. Clark refers to as the great enabler, requires people in positions of authority to model and reward everyday acts of vulnerability. Beginning with respectful communication (as opposed to public confrontation), team members should present their concerns early on with an eye toward improving the product instead of proving someone wrong.

“It’s that curiosity,” Rachel continues, “it’s asking those questions of others and being willing to not have all the answers yourself.”

This approach is not without risk, but its benefits are every bit as real: teams surface issues sooner, discovery improves, and teams emerge with better decisions before costly mistakes reach customers.

Take a Step Back To See the Whole System

Adaptive leadership also requires “stepping away” from daily execution, Rachel says. She describes the practice as “going to the balcony” – intentionally creating distance to recognize broader patterns instead of reacting only to immediate tasks.

Teams who cannot see a world beyond the sprint work, feature requests, tech debt, and deadlines fail to observe market trends, learn from adjacent teams, and become aware of changes across the organization.

“If you don’t take the opportunity to take a step back and pause the noise, you’re losing out on an opportunity to perceive the world around you.”

Leadership Is Every Team Member’s Responsibility

Adaptive leadership is not just another management framework; it’s a practical way of helping organizations respond to uncertainty. Grounded in psychological safety, product teams become more resilient when people feel comfortable sharing new ideas, questioning assumptions, and learning together.

Rachel Kohman, in her own words:

[03:35] Changing the narrative of leader as ‘only the person in authority.’ The term leader has actually been the noun synonymous with the person in the top spots, right? And so what’s interesting with adaptive leadership is that it actually starts to kind of change that narrative and say, ‘wait a second, the challenges we’re facing do not have like a single right solution.’
[04:38] Not for the risk-averse. It is a little bit risky for everyone; we’re asking people who are in a position of authority to become comfortable with ideas coming from others, and they actually need to be willing to listen. At the same time though, the people who aren’t in the position of authority have to be willing to step up and not just say, ‘I’ll do whatever the boss says.’
[09:53] Adaptive leadership can reduce our volume of work. I do think that as we start to integrate it into our work, it becomes part of that culture of everybody is bringing their perspective and their expertise; it actually eases up on the amount of work that you have to do.
[11:20] Entrepreneurship requires curiosity. I love when different schools of thought come together. So I don’t have to be an ardent follower of only one thing. So with entrepreneurship there’s also this idea of ‘where’s your curiosity?’ And with leadership I think it’s the same way. It’s that curiosity, it’s asking those questions of other people and being willing to not have all the answers yourself.
[17:29] The adaptability of adaptive leadership. I have found ways to utilize it all across my life. I practice this in my home, in my work, with my friends, which I think is really cool. Yeah, my next book is actually how being a parent helps you be a better leader, not the other way around. It’s amazing!
[18:13] The view from the balcony. Sometimes we need to step back a bit, away from the busy-ness and noise of the day-to-day tasks. For illustration: if you’ve ever seen a marching band, like on a football field, but you’re actually down on the field at the same level as the band. It can look just really busy and there’s a lot happening. But when you move way up to the top of the stands, suddenly you’re seeing what is evolving in these beautiful intricate movements. Gives you a whole different like vantage point, right?

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Product teams often struggle to deliver meaningful outcomes. Why? Because they confuse activity with progress. Understanding that challenge is the focus of our chat with David Pereira, recorded in person at the 2026 ITX Product + Design Conference, in Rochester, NY.

David is a product management coach, speaker, and author of Untrapping Product Teams: Simplify the Complexity of Creating Digital Products. He has spent that past 17 years helping organizations create more value by eliminating busy work. In his conference workshop and keynote, David drew from his work with product teams around the world, explaining how eliminating unnecessary work, validating assumptions early, and staying close to customers enable teams to make better decisions and build products that solve real problems.

Eliminate Busy Work to Create More Value

Many organizations unintentionally create systems that reward activity instead of outcomes, David argues. Excessive meetings, backlog maintenance, and decision making based on conjecture rather than evidence consume valuable time without moving products forward.

Rather than accepting these practices as status quo, David believes that product leaders should ask whether these activities contribute to customer or business value. Set clear boundaries around focus time and make every meeting earn its place on the calendar, he adds.

“Bullshit management is an art,” Davids says. “It’s the art of doing things that create no value, but drain everyone’s energy.”

Build To Learn: Testing Assumptions Before Crafting Solutions

David’s central message in his day 1 conference workshop is that successful product teams learn before they build. Teams naturally become attached to their ideas, making it easy to seek evidence that confirms existing beliefs instead of challenging them. By identifying assumptions, prioritizing the most critical risks, and defining success criteria before running experiments, teams can quickly separate fact from opinion. AI can accelerate experiment design, but only when it supports disciplined learning – not when it replaces critical thinking.

“You will build to learn, because you’ll learn from reality,” David continues. “If you don’t do that, you’re gonna make something that only works in fantasy.”

Customer Reality Should Drive Every Product Decision

In a return to timeless product principles, David reinforces the mantra that decisions should be grounded in real customer behavior rather than internal assumptions. Using examples drawn from his own work, David reveals customer friction that internal discussions had completely overlooked. For product managers and UX professionals alike, direct observation remains among the most effective ways to uncover opportunities that analytics and meetings often miss.

“You need to go and check the users’ reality,” David says. “Because if you limit your discovery to the clinical environment of your cozy office, you’ll quickly learn that that is not how users work. You need to get out there to truly understand their reality.”

[03:29] Bullshit management is the art of doing things that create no value, but drain your energy. The more bullshit you do, the less value you create.
[04:47] [As a product manager,] your job is to simplify what others complicate. So many times we have meanings because it’s the default way of collaborating. So we need to step back and say, what on earth am I trying to achieve?
[05:51] We all need time for focus. So I block my morning; nobody can reach out to me in the morning because it’s the time I’m going to do deep work. As for meetings, they need to have a few things: what is the objective? What is the context? And what is agenda? If the meeting invitation can’t answer those questions, I immediately reject.
[09:56] In order to test our assumptions, we need to understand the following: If my assumption is proven false, is my idea still valid? If yes, you can ignore this assumption because your idea will still survive. But if the assumption is proven false, my idea is worthless and I start looking at things differently.
[17:05] When [AI-driven] execution becomes cheap, where do you put your energy? Your energy goes to thinking, decision making. But thinking and decision making should be a collaborative exercise, not a siloed one.
[20:49] What is NIHITO? NIHITO is ‘nothing important happens in the office.’ It’s an important lesson about how teams and organizations make product decisions. We need to get out of the office and into our users’ environment if we are ever to understand their reality.

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For the past 5 years, the ITX Product + Design Conference stands at the top of the company’s calendar. In this Topics in Product Series (TiPS) episode, Product Momentum co-host Sean Murray called the 2-day conference event “my favorite two working days of the year,” complete with workshops, keynotes, spotlight sessions, and live podcast recordings.

Sean (Director of Product Management) is joined by ITX colleagues Shannon Baird (Lead UX Designer), Kyle Psaty (VP of Business Development), and Dan Sharp (Product Manager, Product Momentum co-host). With conference excitement still fresh on their minds and drawing from their experiences across product management, UX design, and business development, the panel explored the conference’s most relevant takeaways.

As you’ll see and hear, one theme emerged: the boundaries that once separated the roles of Product and UX are rapidly fading. As AI changes how teams work, their success depends less on tools and more on the collaborative problem solving that grows from a deeper understanding of our products’ users.

Here’s a look at what they learned:

AI Amplifies Existing Product Practices

Not surprisingly, Conference speakers discussed artificial intelligence and its impacts – but not as the primary topic. Instead, they focused on ways AI can be used to strengthen good product thinking, not to replace it. David Pereira, author of Untrapping Product Teams, explained that AI is most valuable when it enhances sound discovery, user research, and decision-making. Teams that already practice strong product fundamentals will benefit the most, he added.

“AI accelerates what you are already doing,” David says.

Leadership Is Something You Do, Not Someone You Are

Leadership emerged as another major theme during the Day 1 workshops. In a Product track session guided by Rachel Kohman, attendees explored how leadership happens through everyday actions. Rather than being defined by job title or authority, leadership is revealed at all levels of the organization by speaking up, creating space for others, and helping teams navigate difficult problems.

As Dan points out, “It’s really easy to think about leadership as a thing that happens when ‘somebody’s in charge.’ But that’s not always the case. Leading is a verb that you do, not an overall overarching principle. I think there’s a lot of power in that.”

Product and UX Deliver Stronger Results Together

Our TiPS panelists believe that the Conference’s most actionable takeaway is the growing convergence of Product and UX. Even though AI is enabling professionals to work across traditional role boundaries, a focus on shared customer and business outcomes are bringing the disciplines even closer together.

“In past years,” Kyle shares, “guests like Jesse James Garrett, Jared Spool, and Rich Mironov really celebrated our conference because it brings together product and design. Historically, the impetus has been to actively bring those departments together. Now, those roles are converging in this kind of natural way; the game board is tilting us all together toward unified problem solving and shared solutioning.”

[04:11] The ITX Product + Design Conference is my favorite two working days of the year! — Sean Murray, Director of Product Management, ITX.
[13:28] I’m now building my own AI design expertise, and it’s important to stop for a beat and make sure I’m asking the right questions as I design these tools. — Shannon Baird, Lead UX Designer, ITX.
[18:51] One thing is clear: the work we’re doing – designers, engineers, product managers – is figuring out what brings value. It’s adaptive problem solving, right? — Dan Sharp, Product Manager, ITX.
[19:50] The Product and Design roles are converging in this natural, authentic way that is tilting us all toward unified problem solving and shared solutioning. — Kyle Psaty, VP of Business Development, ITX.
[21:05] That’s why this Product + UX Conference was killer for me. With AI technology becoming readily available, we’re seeing designers coding their own prototypes and product owners designing their own solutions. Our roles are more closely aligned and offering more opportunities to cross-collaborate. — Shannon Baird, Lead UX Designer, ITX.
[22:33] I think we’ve lost a little bit of the in-person career development. And we wouldn’t have been able to make the observations that we were making about the blending of these worlds. There’s so much value for both distinct role sets; the opportunity to be there in person and the opportunity to talk with other people is really unique these days. — Sean Murray, Director of Product Development, ITX.

*Sean Murray. Sean is the Director of Product Management at ITX. His expertise lies in aligning teams with product goals, business objectives, and user value, all while creating a fun and collaborative environment where everyone can thrive.*

*Dan Sharp. Dan is a Product Manager at ITX focusing on enterprise level clients and technology solutions. He enjoys shaping product strategy and turning a strategy into valuable solutions.*

*Kyle Psaty. Kyle is ITX’s VP of Business Development. In this role, Kyle is the executive sponsor of the annual ITX Product + Design Conference.*

*Shannon Baird. Shannon is a Lead UX Designer at ITX. She thrives on solving challenging problems with a user-centered design process, taking problems through research, ideation, prototyping, and testing design phases.*

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Product leaders often measure success in terms of retention, revenue, and growth. In this episode of Product Momentum, Nesrine Changuel explains that the most successful products achieve those outcomes by creating meaningful emotional connections with users. Nesrine’s experience includes leadership roles at Skype, Spotify, Google Meet, and Google Chrome. But these days, she is perhaps best known for her book, Product Delight.

Nesrine will explore these and other topics at the ITX Product + Design Conference, June 24-25 in Rochester NY. On conference Day 1, she will conduct a workshop that delves into her Product Delight framework, guiding attendees on how to design products that users will not only use – but will come to love, remember, and recommend to others.

During this conversation, Nesrine discusses what she has learned from product teams since the book’s release and explains why delight is not simply a design tactic, but a business strategy that transcends industries.

Product Delight Extends Beyond Design

One of Nesrine’s biggest discoveries during her global book tour was the widespread misunderstanding of what product delight actually means. Many practitioners associate delight with visual design, animations, or clever interface surprises. This view is too narrow, she says. Nesrine defines delight as the overall feeling users experience while interacting with a product.

“Product delight is the entire experience,” she adds. “It’s actually the feeling that the user enjoys while using the product.” It extends well beyond aesthetics to focus on creating experiences that improve how users feel while accomplishing their goals.

Emotional Connection Creates Measurable Outcomes

Among Nesrine’s key challenges was helping product and business leaders recognize the fact that user emotions directly influence business performance. Emotional design has long been familiar to designers and marketers, but many product organizations still prioritize operational metrics above customer sentiment.

Nesrine was able to connect the dots between delight and business performance by demonstrating that “the delight itself can actually double retention, referral and revenues.” By framing emotional connection through the lens of retention, referrals, and revenue growth, she demonstrated that delight is not a soft concept. Rather, it is a practical approach that can strengthen both customer loyalty and business results.

Adding Delight to Your AI Product – Emphasize the Human Aspect

On conference day 2 – Keynote Day – attendees will be treated to brand new content from Nesrine: how to add delight into your AI product.

“I’ve been very quiet about AI over the last couple of months,” Nesrine shared. “I’ve always believed in the humanization of product and the human aspect, but now the product is the conversation. So how can we add delight in these kinds of experiences? That’s something new that I’m going to be talking about” at the ITX Product + Design Conference. As product teams continue navigating AI-driven technological change, core product principles remain unchanged: products that make people feel understood, respected, and supported are more likely to earn user trust, loyalty, advocacy – along with long-term success.

[04:25] How writing a book is like a box of chocolates. When I was writing the book, there were some uncertainties about how it would be perceived….kind of like eating a chocolate egg, you have no idea what’s inside.
[05:33] Emotional connection is a universal topic that spans industries. When the book came out, I received a lot of feedback that actually related to the topic and the framework — even from completely diverse industries.
[12:21] The ITX Product + Design Conference, June 24-25. I’m really excited to be in Rochester, NY for this event to come. It’s always a pleasure to teach the Product Delight method. It’s going to be special because I want to make it as actionable as I can; I want to make sure that I inspire people.
[13:54] Nesrine’s day 2 keynote to include brand new content. I’m going to talk for the very first time about something I have not spoken about before — how to add delight and the human aspect into your AI product.
[15:56] Just because it’s harder for mature, well-established companies to integrate delight into their products doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try. Please don’t ignore delight; rather, to remain established and successful, you need to add those elements of delight in your product anyway.
[17:58] Even busy PMs should make time for delight. Even when I was a “regular” PM sitting on a backlog on fire with so many conflicting priorities, I tried not to let that stop us from trying to incorporate any element of delight into our roadmap.

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Mike Belsito has spent years at the center of the product management community. As the founder of Product Collective, a leader at Mind the Product, and now Head of Product Evangelism at Pendo, Mike has built a career around learning from product professionals and sharing those insights with the broader industry.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Mike joins Sean and Dan for a discussion that is absolutely top of mind for today’s product leaders today: while artificial intelligence is transforming how products are built, timeless skills such as curiosity, judgment, and taste remain essential. In fact, he argues, these capabilities will become even more valuable as technology accelerates the pace of product development.

Navigating AI Through Human-Centered Product Skills

In doing research for a new book, Mike engaged many product leaders who had experienced previous periods of technological disruption – e.g., the rise of the internet, telecommunications, and mobile computing. Now dealing with AI-driven opportunities and uncertainties, many leaders point to the same enduring qualities that helped them and their teams adapt during earlier transitions.

Rather than focusing solely on new technologies, they emphasized the importance of human-centered skills that guide decision-making and product strategy. “It’s kind of relying on the same timeless characteristics that we’ve always thought were important,” Mike says. “And even today, we still think are important, which are things like curiosity, judgment, taste.”

Balancing Output and Outcomes

Our conversation with Mike also explored a growing tension within product organizations – a theme also covered in recent Product Momentum episodes. As AI enables teams to create more content, code, and functionality faster than ever before, Mike cautions against using increased output” as a measure of success.

Product teams have spent years shifting their focus from user satisfaction to delivery metrics to business outcomes, Mike continues. “That mindset remains critical, even as AI changes workflows. But how do we make sure that it’s not just about the output – that we’re actually building the right things?” For product managers, designers, and engineers, the challenge is ensuring that speed does not come at the expense of delivering business value.

Curiosity as a Practiced Skill

Among Mike’s more surprising research discoveries was how often leaders highlighted curiosity as a skill that can be developed intentionally. Rather than viewing curiosity as an innate personality trait, many described it as a practice that strengthens through deliberate effort. It’s an insight that brings important implications for today’s product teams.

Learning, questioning assumptions, and seeking new perspectives become competitive advantages in times like these when the technology landscape evolves so quickly, Mike adds. “I wasn’t thinking of curiosity as a practice or as a muscle to be flexed.”

As AI continues to reshape product development, Mike offers a practical perspective for product leaders. Technology will continue to evolve, he says, but the ability to ask thoughtful questions, exercise sound judgment, and focus on meaningful outcomes remains fundamental. Those timeless capabilities may ultimately determine which teams are best equipped to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven future.

[03:45[ What is product evangelism? Being Pendo’s Head of Product Evangelism is a new role for me, one that I’ve just stepped into weeks ago. Pendo has a unique point of view on how it helps product people, and it does that through its software, and now it’s all kind of software.
[06:25] Mike’s new book project — the origin story. I wasn’t planning on ever writing a book again. The publisher [Wiley] reached out kind of out of the blue and told me ‘we think you have a pretty unique point of view.’
[09:41] What’s exciting you right now? What’s keeping you up at night? Essential questions Mike poses to every product leader he speaks with, in every conversation.
[14:44] Rewarding outcomes over outputs. Many product folks came up in a world where we all celebrated outputs. Like, how much did we deliver this week? But then it came to a point where we said, ‘hey, it actually shouldn’t be about outputs…it should be about outcomes. And it’s even beyond outcomes for your customers — it’s about outcomes for businesses too.
[17:29] Creating the right thing > Creating for creating’s sake. We have to remember that it’s not just about creating for creating sake, it’s like making sure we’re creating the right thing.
[20:47] Curiosity, taste, and judgment. We used to believe that these were innate personality traits. But lately, as I have conducted research for my upcoming book, I am learning from other product leaders that these are muscles that can be strengthened, and they are muscles we must flex regularly.

Want to hear more from Mike Belsito? Be sure to join us as he emcees the 2026 ITX Product + Design Conference, June 24 & 25 in Rochester, NY – for the fifth consecutive year!

“I’m honored to return as emcee for the fifth year in a row. This event continues to stand out because of the incredible community it brings together and the energy in the room each time we gather. I’m proud to be part of something that keeps growing in impact and connection.” – Mike Belsito

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Prerna Singh helps organizations build better products and stronger communities. As the founder of Scrappy to Scale Advisors and the former VP of Product and Design at Meetup, she has guided startups and mission-driven organizations through rapid change, customer discovery, and product strategy.

In today’s episode, Prerna explains why human connection and disciplined product thinking matter more than ever during the AI boom. While AI may accelerate product work, she says, successful teams avoid the must stay grounded in curiosity, customer insight, and authentic community building.

Sense of Community Addresses the ‘Isolation Problem’

What started as a casual gathering for fractional product leaders, Prerna’s Product Breakfasts quickly evolved into a broader support system for people navigating uncertainty and AI-driven change and the professional isolation that often comes with it. Many product professionals, she says, now feel overwhelmed by the pace of technological advancement and the pressure to keep pace.

“I don’t think there’s any catching up,” Prerna adds. “‘Catching up’ implies that there’s an end goal to this. And there isn’t. So that’s where I think Breakfast is the evolution of people coming together to share what they know and helping reduce that anxiety that isn’t just a knowledge gap. It’s also an isolation problem.”

First Principles, Supported by Human Interaction

Product professionals need environments where they can safely discuss their own vulnerabilities. The ability to openly admit uncertainty about AI and its impact, to exchange ideas, and learn together is the hallmark of authentic, in-person interaction.

“The IRL connection isn’t going anywhere,” Prerna continues. “We need that human-to-human interaction to have an outlet for where those vulnerabilities are gonna go. Otherwise, they’re just contained within us and we’re just spiraling in our own heads.”

Avoiding the Trap Starts with Better Discovery

Prerna’s extensive background in user research informs her belief in the importance of first principles in product management. AI tools, she says, make it deceptively easy to jump directly into solutioning without fully understanding the customer’s needs and the business’ problems. In her fractional product manager role, Prerna listens “for the thing that clients return to when they stop performing.”

“‘We need AI’ is a common mantra,” she says. “But what’s interesting for me is the kernel of truth that frames that statement. And it’s not what they want. It’s what they can’t circle back to – like there’s a hidden customer insight that we’ve maybe navigated around.”

Lean into Discovery, Prerna concludes. Product teams must remain disciplined about validating assumptions, conducting research, and identifying the real customer need before building anything. “Avoid the trap of jumping into solutioning.”

[05:26] Origin story of the Product Leaders Breakfast. The original concept for Product Breakfast started from a place where it came out this concept of isolation. In the last 2-3 years, we’ve heard so much about AI and the way that it’s affecting our jobs.
[09:36] Don’t feel like you need to ‘catch up’ to AI’s impact. I don’t think there’s any catching up. Catching up implies that there’s like an end goal to this — and, well, there isn’t.
[12:00] The IRL Connection Remains Essential. This is precisely why the IRL connection isn’t going anywhere. We need the human-to-human interaction to have an outlet for sharing vulnerabilities; otherwise, they’re just contained within us and then we’re just spiraling in our own heads.
[18:28] What it means to be a ‘fractional product leader’. The fractional product leader brings in a wealth of experience and is able to quickly understand the organization’s problems, the culture, the team and embed themselves as a force multiplier to help that organization achieve its goals.
[26:43] AI’s support of user research and first principles. When we approach these challenges with a level of curiosity, we avoid using the first answer as the final answer. We need to dig beyond the surface level truth with user research. And this is actually where AI has been super-helpful because it’s allowing me to ingest lots of different signals to cut through the noise and figure out what that right signal is.
[28:09] Spend time in the problem space. I think the trap is jumping into solutioning. This is another first principles thing where I think, again as humans, we have this tendency to want to jump right into solution as soon as we see a problem without spending time interrogating the problem.

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Adam Creeger is the CTO of Slate and creator of iLoom (pronounced “il-LOOM”). His leadership experience at Meta, Greenhouse, and Frame.io not only informs Slate’s transformation into an AI-native organization, but also shapes the way AI influences product strategy, engineering workflows, and operational models.

Throughout his conversation with Sean and Dan, Adam argues that becoming AI native is not about layering AI features onto existing products. Instead, it requires companies to rethink how software is designed, built, and operated – from the ground up. His perspective offers a practical framework for product leaders navigating AI-driven transformation.

Here’s what else we learned:

‘AI Native’ Requires Organizational Reinvention

AI native organizations are willing to rethink every layer of their business, Adam says. Rather than adding AI features superficially, AI native organizations redesign workflows, team structures, and customer experiences around AI capabilities. He emphasized that AI transformation changes not only products, but also how people contribute inside organizations.

“To be AI native requires this deep exercise in re-imagination and not just imagination,” Adam continues. “In an AI native company – from the day-to-day operations to the ‘who does what’ – the roles and the owners of things are going to look very different.”

AI is expanding participation across teams, enabling designers, support teams, and non-engineers to contribute directly to product delivery. That shift signals a major change for modern software organizations.

AI and the Future of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Our conversation then turned to an exploration of how AI is already changing the traditional software development lifecycle. Years ago, Agile development emerged because humans had historically struggled to fully reason through complex systems before implementation.

“I’ve realized that Agile was really a mitigation of a few things, mostly that we humans are limited in our abilities to reason through abstract concepts,” Adam says. “So when we thought about a software project, we didn’t have the ability to see around corners and understand the problems we’d face – until it was real, until you really started playing with it.

Turns out that many of those challenges are very solvable by AI, allowing us to go much deeper into the problem space without ever writing a line of code. In addition, AI-assisted planning allows teams to revisit some waterfall-style thinking, but with dramatically faster iteration and validation cycles.

Product Managers’ New Role: Communicate Context

Importantly, AI is actually elevating the role of product managers, Adam offers. Rather than acting primarily as tactical decision-makers, product leaders can (and should) focus on providing context that enables teams to make informed decisions independently.

“More than ever, the product manager has become a role about providing context,” he adds. “PMs should be elevated to a much more strategic role, understanding the long-term vision and helping to translate that to engineers.”

Adam also feels that PMs should be using AI to communicate ideas about the product vision much more effectively. That evolution creates a faster and more collaborative product environment. Teams can evaluate real implementations earlier, gather customer feedback sooner, and align around outcomes instead of specifications alone.

[05:54] What it means to be ‘AI native’. Conceptually, it’s same as digital native from when the internet was born many years ago. In the abstract sense, I see AI native being about the folks and the companies that are either just starting in the age of AI where everything they do is shaped by the existence of AI and their ability to use AI.
[15:08] Is waterfall making a comeback? Oh man, this is one of my favorite topics. Growing up in the industry, waterfall was always like the evil thing. But with AI-assisted coding or agentic coding, you can go really deep, create a much bigger scope, and deliver it much more quickly…and it resembles more of a waterfall mentality.
[21:51] The PM’s primary role: providing context. The product manager more than ever has become a role about providing context. The most powerful thing PMs can do in an organization is provide context to other people.
[25:49] Exploring Adam’s iloom tool, and how it can help. Hear a quick story from Adam about how he used his iloom tool to create — and demo — a new product feature during a call with his customer success team.
[28:47] Swarms. What are they, and how do they work? A swarm is a number of AI agents working together in a very collaborative way with the potential of real-time communication between them.
[35:03] Avoiding ‘AI slop’ to defend and elevate a brand’s quality bar. Slate is creating a tool that makes it very difficult to create AI slop. This is a valuable proposition to brands that care deeply about what gets produced in their name.

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Welcome to TiPS – the Topics in Product Series – a new podcast format powered by ITX and the team at Product Momentum. The TiPS mission is to engage the same important product space issues that you confront every day – but this time through the experiences of ITX product managers, UX researchers and designers, engineers, security analysts, and the rest of the team.

In this inaugural TiPS episode, Dan Sharp is joined by Sean Murray and Andrew Knoblauch to reflect on a recent Product Leaders Breakfast, hosted by Prerna Singh. Together, they draw on insights from event attendees to discuss how AI is being applied inside real organizations.

The central theme was clear: successful AI adoption depends less on hype and more on first principles and core product skills that drive disciplined product thinking, incremental progress, and strong decision-making.

Here’s what we learned:

Top-Down ‘Do AI’ Directive Is the Wrong Reason for Integrating AI

The integration of AI into software development is no longer the proverbial “hammer in search of a nail.” The days of doing AI for AI’s sake are behind us. Today’s product leaders focus on making incremental improvements tied to bona fide business problems.

As Sean points out, our response to the ‘do AI’ directive should be: “’Where do you want to see improvement? What outcomes are you looking for?’ I think back to our conversation with Teresa Torres, about applying best practices in the initiation and discovery phases of the SDLC so that when we actually get into building something, it’s gonna have some sort of relevant business value.” It’s a more grounded approach that reflects a broader industry need to align AI efforts with tangible outcomes..

Building Stakeholder Trust Through Incremental Change

Trust emerged as a critical factor in AI adoption, but not only in the technical sense. Instead, as attendees discussed, trust is built gradually through careful implementation and organizational alignment. Andrew explains that product teams build trust not by tackling the biggest, riskiest challenge – but by prioritizing low- to medium-risk opportunities while involving stakeholders early, especially those in Legal and Compliance.

“This idea of building trust among others in your organization.” Andrew continues. “We do this every day with our clients and with our own teammates. We learn about people’s concerns, what they care about.” The conversation reinforces the idea that AI should be introduced as a collaborator within workflows, not as a replacement for human judgment.

Decision Quality as the True Differentiator

One of the key threads weaving through our conversation was a return to foundational product principles – specifically, the importance of decision-making. While AI fluency is valuable, it does not replace the need for strong judgment and clear thinking. Teams that succeed will be those that consistently make informed, high-quality decisions, Sean says. “The biggest differentiator moving forward is gonna be decision quality…your ability to consistently make good decisions.” In this context, AI becomes an enabler, not the driver, of product success.

The conversation at the Product Leaders Breakfast (hosted by Prerna Singh) reinforces a familiar but essential message for all product leaders. AI does not replace core product skills; it amplifies them. Teams that stay focused on problem definition, stakeholder alignment, and disciplined execution will be best positioned to realize its full potential.

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John Haggerty brings more than 25 years of product leadership experience at companies like Datasite, Prodege, and Highway.ai. As co-founder and CEO of BiasHawk, John leverages his expertise in product management, behavioral psychology, and AI to develop an AI-powered platform that acts like a behavioral clinical psychologist to diagnose cognitive bias and heuristics in other AI models.

In this episode of Product Momentum, John joins Sean and Dan to explore how AI is reshaping product work while also introducing new risks. John’s message is clear: as AI accelerates execution, product leaders must confront the invisible risks that come with AI and double down on critical thinking, context, and judgment to deliver quality decisionmaking.

AI as an Accelerator, Not a Replacement

AI is dramatically compressing the time required to execute product work. Tasks that once took months can now be completed in hours. As we discover every day, speed does not eliminate the need for thoughtful product management. John argues that it merely shifts where product managers can and should focus their energy.

“As AI expedites the execution process,” John says, “it also allows us to automate the areas of our work where we really need to be involved in cognitive thinking, reasoning, and creativity.”

The Hidden Risk: Bias in AI Decision-Making

Large language models inherit the same cognitive biases found in human thinking, John adds. These biases influence not just outputs, but the reasoning behind decisions we make.

“It’s not what the decision is or what the output is, it’s more about how the AI model arrived at it.” This distinction is critical for product teams. Without understanding how AI arrives at conclusions, teams risk introducing flawed logic into their products, especially in high-stakes areas like hiring, healthcare, and financial management.

Monitoring AI: A New Responsibility for Product Teams

To address these challenges, John launched BiasHawk – an AI platform designed to monitor and evaluate AI systems for cognitive bias. The goal is not just testing outputs, but continuously assessing decision quality over time.

“We all understand that these systems are designed to evolve. They’re designed to change. They’re designed to drift. But who’s monitoring that to make sure that decision quality stays where it’s supposed to be.” As AI continues to evolve, the role of the product manager becomes even more critical — not less so. Execution may be faster, but judgment, context, and ethical responsibility remain firmly within our human domain.

John Haggerty, in his own words:

[06:50] AI is compressing execution time, allowing us to automate some of the tasks that we do as product professionals: cognitive thinking, reasoning, creativity.
[10:22] There’re lots of really good AI tools out there right now, but what there isn’t out there is anything that tests the fairness of our decisionmaking.
[16:04] Great. You’ve used AI to improve productivity by 20%. But what happens when that breaks? What if there’s bias and heuristics in these LLMs. Who’s catching that?
[17:55] Critical AI systems have the same blind spots, the same bad habits, that we as humans have. And why not? They’re built off of the flawed content we created.
[21:41] I don’t think a LLM could ever get depressed. But we have standard behavioral assessments that we could administer to an LLM — to find out where it falls with these biases and with the decision-making process it’s using.
[27:40] As humans, we’re make mistakes. Because AIs are built on what we know, those same mistakes are being repeated. Now we have AI learning from AI, and those mistakes are being amplified.
[30:59] The ‘why’ will always need to come from a human. At the end of it all, that’s what Product is.

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Margie Agin is a seasoned go-to-market advisor for B2B technology scale-ups. She brings deep expertise across digital marketing, IT, and cybersecurity. As Founder and Chief Strategist of Centerboard Marketing as well as a former leader at companies like Cisco and Blackboard, she has built a career translating complex technical products into effective market strategies. In this episode (which marks her second visit to Product Momentum), Margie’s message is clear: go-to-market (GTM) is not a one-time event or a siloed function – it is an ongoing, cross-functional system that must connect product teams and broader business goals.

GTM: A Shared, Continuous Responsibility

It’s time to redefine go-to-market as a shared, continuous responsibility across teams, Margie says. Product managers in particular often feel disconnected because their fellow stakeholders in the organization misunderstand go-to-market as either a launch event or solely a sales function. Margie reframes GTM as “a coordinated cross-functional engine that spans product, marketing, sales, customer success, and even finance.” It’s a perspective that challenges product teams to actively engage in downstream outcomes and collaborate beyond traditional boundaries.

Business Context Drives Product Contribution

Fundamental to making this critical connection between product team and business outcomes is embracing the product’s fit within the broader business and portfolio strategy. Margie reiterates a message shared by recent guests that product managers need to look beyond their individual product scope and consider how their work contributes to company-wide goals like growth, positioning, and revenue. “Think about your product within the context of the business and how it fits into the whole portfolio,” Margie urges.

Know Your Targets: Clarity of Audience and Signals Improves Outcomes

Rather than trying to boil the ocean by targeting broad customer segments, teams should focus on specific attributes and behaviors that indicate a strong fit. Defining a precise ideal customer profile and identifying meaningful signals of readiness bring a level of clarity to your message that enables more effective messaging, prioritization, and sales efficiency. “It [your target] can’t just be like, everybody that has money,” Margie says. “It has to be somebody with a defined problem and defined attributes – beyond just industry or size of company.” For product leaders, this reinforces the need to deeply understand customer context and bring that insight into go-to-market planning.

In the Age of AI, a Strong Point of View Still Matters

Finally, even as AI accelerates execution, it does not – indeed, can not – replace the original thinking and nuanced messaging. Teams must still define what makes their product unique and why it matters. AI can enhance delivery, Margie adds, but it cannot generate true insight or perspective. “The difficult part is always what the difficult part has always been, which is figuring out what you have to contribute to the conversation that is unique.”

Margie Agin, in her own words:

[04:23] When I think of go-to-market, I think one of the most important aspects is that it is connected across different teams.

[08:22] Go-to-market is all about connecting the strategy to the execution to make sure everyone is on point with the strategy.

[08:53] Product teams need to think about how their product fits into the context of the organization’s whole portfolio.

[11:30] As a company matures, its go-to-market strategy lands in one of three buckets: problem-market fit, product-market fit, and platform-market fit.

[19:29] We can’t try to boil the ocean and sell to everybody, right? Target customers can’t be ‘everybody who has money.’ Customers have to have a defined problem and some defined attributes, beyond just industry or size of company.

[23:58] That type of deep, nuanced thinking…that human work…I don’t think at this point, is something that is solved by AI.

[26:40] AI can execute a lot of work on your behalf, but only you know what ultimately you want the result to be.

Andrew Knoblauch leads Sales, Partnerships, and Acquisitions at ITX. He believes the best technology partnerships start with genuine relationships, and that understanding a business deeply is what turns a software engagement into lasting value. Andrew connects organizations with technologists and product leaders while remaining invested in delivering strong business outcomes.

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Product Momentum welcomes Rich Mironov back to the pod to help us drill down to the bottom line – literally. Rich is a Silicon Valley veteran and longtime product management advisor. He’s spent decades helping C-suite executives and product leaders connect their work to business outcomes. In this episode, Rich reinforces a single, powerful theme: product managers must translate their ideas into clear financial impact. It’s not enough to build great features – success comes from telling compelling “money stories” that resonate with executives and drive decisions.

Here’s what we learned:

Why Product Leaders Must Speak the Language of Money

Rich makes no bones about the yawning communication gap between product teams and executives. Product managers focus on features, processes, and operating models – while executives focus on revenue and outcomes. As he explains, “Any sentence that comes out of the mouth of a product leader that doesn’t have a currency symbol in it is one that the rest of the executive team can’t hear and doesn’t care about.”

As he reframes the role of product leadership, Rich explains that it’s not just about building the right thing – it’s about articulating how that thing makes money.

The Power of Simple, Structured “Money Stories”

At the core of Rich’s approach lies simplicity. He advocates for building “money stories” using just three numbers – two we know, one we estimate – to quantify potential impact. “A money story has no more than three numbers in it…two of the numbers you know, and one of them you’re going to reach into the air and make up or estimate.”

This framework isn’t about precision, Rich explains. It’s about enabling better conversations. By introducing even rough estimates, product leaders can engage sales, marketing, and executives in meaningful dialogue. The goal is to create alignment around opportunity size and business value, and shift the focus from abstract ideas to tangible outcomes.

From Features to Impact: Driving Better Product Decisions

On the pod, we’ve been talking a lot lately about “impact.” Rich’s approach, covered concisely in his recent book Money Stories, also highlights a critical shift in mindset: product managers must own the financial performance of their products. Without that, they risk being sidelined from strategic decisions. “If you can’t vaguely explain how the thing you do makes money, you’re just a cog in the process.”

This means knowing basics about your product – core metrics like units sold, pricing, and revenue – and using them to guide decisions. It also means prioritizing revenue-generating opportunities over less impactful work and being cautious with cost-saving narratives that may have real human consequences.

Bottom line: product leaders who connect their work to measurable outcomes are the ones who influence strategy, secure investment, and drive meaningful results.

Rich Mironov, in his own words:

[06:07] “Any sentence that comes out of the mouth of a CPO that doesn’t have a currency symbol in it is one that the rest of the executive team doesn’t care about.”
[06:48] “A money story has no more than three numbers in it… two of the numbers you know, and one of them you’re going to reach into the air and make up.”
[11:01] “It’s not important whether we get it accurate. It’s important that we build some consensus.”
[11:40] “If you can’t vaguely explain how the thing you do makes money, you’re just a cog in the process.”
[12:09] “PMs should socialize their plans with peers; say something like, ‘I know this is wrong, but let me walk you through my logic…’ and then sit back and listen.”
[24:18] “One thing I always recommend when socializing ideas: Bring a bucket of humility with you.”
[29:29] “AI is real. It’s gotten investments like we’ve never seen. But it’s all going to come crashing down soon. There’s no way to avoid it. There’s nowhere to hide.”

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In this episode of Product Momentum, we’re joined by Bansi Mehta, founder and CEO of Koru UX Design, an enterprise healthcare UX agency supporting some of the US’s largest healthcare technology companies. We discussed the busy intersection of artificial intelligence, product management, and UX Design. Bansi’s Sense – Shape – Steer framework helps guide UX design teams as they integrate AI into their products – and avoid the trap of AI’s drive toward mediocrity that limits individual creativity and expertise.

Here’s what we learned:

Avoiding the Trap: AI Solutions’ Race to Mediocrity

AI’s ability to rapidly generate hi-fi prototypes and voluminous content brings great benefit, but also significant risk. The risk manifests in mediocrity – i.e., solutions that drive to the mean. This sense of “good enough” stifles designer creativity and diminishes the quality – the Delight – of the final product.

“The speed of AI makes it easier than ever to churn screens,” Bansi says. “But it’s designed to deliver to that average mean that allows us to say, ‘that works, that makes sense.’ And that’s really the trap….these days, there’s less patience in the industry for discovery and research.”

Introducing the Sense – Shape – Steer Framework

To combat this new reality, Bansi developed the Sense – Shape – Steer framework to help teams navigate the complexity of building AI-powered products.

Sense. Understanding the Problem/Opportunity.“Sense is where you’re really creating that sense of what is worth solving,” Bansi explains. “It’s the intersection of what the user needs, what insights we have in terms of their challenges, and the opportunities that are present. But we mustn’t stop there. We then look to see what AI can do for us. And where we see the intersection, that’s the sweet spot.”
Shape. Designing the AI-Enhanced User Experience.We emerge from the Sense step with rich insights into our user’s desired experience, Bansi continues. “And as we approach Shape, we do so with an emphasis on the kind of UX challenge that we are trying to solve – from the user’s perspective. Using a storyboard, we proceed frame by frame to define the user’s journey, the problem that we are trying to accomplish.”
Steer. Implementing, Evaluating, and Iterating.The Steer step comes once you have built something and you launched, Bansi says. “This is where we define and clearly articulate our AI eval criteria that we’ve said are critical for product success,” Bansi adds. “I’ve seen products make it or break it depending on whether they got their AI evals right. It’s one thing to hypothesize that your solution will work. But it’s a completely different thing when you actually try to build sophisticated agentic AI layers where there’s multiple configurations and prompts.”

Broader Insights, Future Outlook

The conversation underscores the notion that while AI accelerates development and content generation, it also requires subject matter experts in UX and Product to demonstrate greater vigilance than ever to maintain quality and relevance. The Sense – Shape – Steer framework calls on product teams to think first about user needs before considering whether and how to integrate AI.

Our episode with Bansi Mehta feels like the capstone conversation to recent episodes with Nesrine Changuel, Teresa Torres, and Oji Udezue, where we examined bringing Delight to the user experience, re-engaging Discovery in the development process, and adjusting to the Speed of today’s AI-driven development.

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Keith Lucas is a startup advisor, author, and leader who specializes in building high-impact teams. In this episode with Product Momentum, Keith delivers a master class on leadership, team building, culture, values, and motivation. Our conversation is especially relevant in the context of transitioning from a technical individual contributor to product team leader in high-tech organizations.

Here’s what we learned:

IC to Team Lead: Navigating the Mindset Shift

The transition from hands-on IC to leader of a highly technical team requires a mindset shift from “me to we.” The transition requires an adjustment of priorities from solely outcomes-based to team health, inspiration, and mental well-being.

“A simple trick I use, when I wake up every day my first thoughts are, is the team on a good path? Are they unblocked? Are they inspired and mentally healthy? Are they all in a good place to have impact? Knowing those things helps reduce friction on the team and increases the odds of our success.”

Two ‘New Leader Archetypes’ – Overcoming Team Dysfunction

Keith discusses two types of leaders who struggle in their new roles. The first is the hands-on leader who has fallen into the oxymoronic trap of trying to “micromanage at scale.” The other is the visionary talent-oriented leader whose eagerness to succeed leads to the team’s being focused on too many things. The hands-on person is just trying to get stuff done by being effective, efficient, Keith says, while the talent person is committed to autonomy and building a team that scales.

The goal is to put both of those value sets together. For the hands-on leader, that means creating regular touch points with your team. For the talent-oriented leader, it’s about closing loops while showing the team how to go from vision to delivering real outcomes. “In both cases,” Keith adds, “use a regular cadence for when you get together to talk about progress, challenges, and course correction.” This approach creates the right kind of trust — a trust in the system that you have opportunities to contribute in a healthy way.

Value-Based Culture: The Foundation of Decisionmaking

Keith thinks about culture as “the team’s operating system.” And the foundation of that operating system is the team’s values — i.e., their standards of behavior.

“The team’s values are really the foundation of the operating system,” Keith says. “If the system is to be reinforced, then decisions about who gets hired, promoted, and retained must be informed by those values.” If that’s not happening, Keith adds, you end up with a culture that may be codified, but never truly realized.

Here’s some more key takeaways:

04:58 – Moving from chief IC to chief team builder
07:32 – Micromanaging at scale is an oxymoron
13:08 – Values: embrace them, socialize them, apply them
18:07 – Vision Doc: The anti-job description
20:21 – Start with Goals; Structure will follow

As the author of Impact: How to Inspire, Align, and Amplify Innovative Teams, Keith Lucas distills years of experience at the intersection of data, storytelling, and strategy into a practical framework that helps leaders move from player/coach to true team builder while avoiding common scaling pitfalls like diminishing impact, productivity loss, culture dilution, and disempowerment.

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The Product Momentum team first met Oji Udezue following his keynote at INDUSTRY 2025. And we just knew we had to have him on the pod. Oji is a highly skilled product leader whose CV includes companies like Calendly, Atlassian, and Microsoft. In addition, he co-authored (with wife, Ezinne Udezue) Building Rocket Ships, Product Management for High-Growth Companies a manual for product leaders, product managers, and executives who want to build faster, better, and more profitably (raise your hand if that describes you!).

In this episode, we begin broadly by discussing the evolving role of product management in the era of AI. We then pivot quickly, drilling into some of the new challenges that require today’s product leaders to:

Readjust to the accelerated pace of product development in today’s AI-empowered world (the three-speed problem),
Re-emphasize product management’s core principles that remain constant, and
Reconsider what counts as essential skills for today’s product manager.

AI’s Impact and the Three-Speed Problem

Companies do three things to build great technology products, Oji says: customer science, construction/development, and go-to-market. Each step on this cycle moves at its own pace. Before AI, engineering speed was the process bottleneck. But with AI-driven automation, construction has become much faster, creating new challenges in synchronizing these three phases.

“We’re all going to spend a lot of time balancing that equation,” Oji adds, “finding the practices, the team structure, the team ratios, the new AI tools that help us keep this thing fast but then speed up customer science and GTM.“

Essential Skills for Today’s ‘Renaissance PM’

The AI transformation calls on product managers to add new arrows to their quiver of skills – e.g., curiosity, humility, agency among them. In the same way we transitioned from a pre-internet to internet environment, Oji adds, AI “requires brand new thinking.”

But the old skills still apply: “These are worth bringing up because a lot of PMs don’t have them: communication, creativity, the ability to ship, and leadership – being the kind of person people want to follow – all of that has to do with judgment. The role is evolving into that of a “renaissance PM” who blends traditional skills with new AI-related capabilities.

Evolution of the PM Role

Has the PM role evolved so much that the skills required to perform it are now preeminent to the role itself? Is that where AI is taking us?

“I’ve always thought the skills…the mindset…was way more important,” Oji offers. “The title just gives us a way to put it in a box. The title is nothing without the skills. That’s why I wrote the book. Because I want more people to have the skillsets” required to succeed in this new world order.

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For the past 20 years, Teresa Torres has championed the cause of product discovery. We’ve made progress, she says, but there are plenty of companies and teams out there who don’t know much about their customers – and still think they have all the answers. Is AI exacerbating the problem?

In this episode, Teresa returns to Product Momentum taking us on a rollercoaster ride that begins in a pre-ChatGPT world full of hopeful optimism in which product leaders were (slowly, steadily) recognizing the value good Discovery brings – but then spirals through phases of grief as AI-powered Delivery seems to have reclaimed our attention.

As you’ll hear, Teresa remains bullish on AI. But she’s also concerned that AI is pulling us in the wrong direction, making it easier and faster to build and, thus, putting even more emphasis on Delivery. Ever the optimist, Teresa believes that product builders can use the same technology that created today’s predicament to help us course-correct, refocusing our attention on high-quality Discovery practices.

Here’s a few of our key takeaways:

AI Might Be Helping Us Build the Wrong Thing

In our earlier episode with Teresa (58 / Innovate with Product Discovery, published shortly before the release her Continuous Discovery Habits, a must read for anyone in the software space), Teresa talked about how the product community under-emphasized Discovery and over-emphasized Delivery. It was a time highlighted by a gnawing anxiety that we were building the wrong stuff. Since then, the trend was moving back toward a focus on Discovery, Teresa says, until AI changed the trajectory again.

“AI is making it easier and faster to build software,” Teresa says. “But as we do, we’re once again putting even more emphasis on Delivery and forgetting to ask whether we’re building the right thing?”

AI’s Double-Edged Sword: Broad Participation vs. Product Coherence

Teams across the organization are now contributing to software development – a positive trend that Teresa calls awesome.

“We want to empower product teams and draw people closer to the customer to impact the product in positive ways,” Teresa says. “But it’s equally terrifying: who’s creating product coherence, and how do we make sure [each team] is serving the market and not their own specific needs?”

The Opportunity Solution Tree: A Structure Of Discovery That Doesn’t Change

With the Opportunity Solution Tree, Teresa provides teams with “a simple underlying structure that gives us a mental representation” of the interaction between what success looks like (outcome), our customers and their needs (opportunity space), and impact on our customers and our business.

“Do I think that’s ever gonna change?,” Teresa asks. “I don’t. We’re always gonna have to create value for our business. We’re always going to have to create value for our customers. Hopefully, we are doing one thing to accomplish both – not doing competing things.”

As AI enables more people to be makers, teams and organizations will learn new skills and allow everyone who wants, to contribute while still delivering a coherent product that serves their users.

“I actually think that’s gonna be net positive in the long run,” Teresa concludes.

You can catch even more of Teresa’s insights by checking out her podcast, Just Now Possible, which releases new episodes every Thursday. And, beginning this month (Jan. 2026), Teresa and Product Talk are launching a new course called, Business Fundamentals.

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Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

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Phil Hornby is an experienced product leader, coach, and technologist whose mission is to help product leaders think clearly, make strong decisions, and take powerful action that drives high-impact outcomes. He’s a regular speaker at product events and is co-host of the “Talking Roadmaps” YouTube channel and podcast.

If Phil were asked to distill product management down to its core, he’d tell us, “We’re paid to have an opinion.” Not simply putting a ‘licked finger to the wind,’ but trusting your experience and intuition to make high-quality decisions. Ah, and also to remember: there’s a difference between a high-quality decision and the “right” decision. There’s no way to guarantee that we make the right decision, Phil says, but there’re plenty of ways we can improve our odds.

Here’s what we learned:

Empowerment Is ‘Making Decisions that Stick’

At its most fundamental level, doing Product is decision making, Phil says. “That that’s like the whole heart of it. When we use the term empowered to describe product teams, we talk about their ability to make decisions that stick. If you can’t make a decision stick, then you’re not empowered. It’s really boiled down to this: empowerment is at the heart of all product work.

Trust = Character + Competence

Trust is an essential component in any relationship. Perhaps even more so in the often high-stakes world of product management. Phil’s hypothesis is that high-quality decision making cannot occur in its absence.

“Trust comes down to two core components,” he says, “character and competence. You want others to look at you and say, ‘That’s someone I can trust.’ That’s the character…. Then there’s competence: ‘Do I think you can make it? Have you got the skills to make that high-quality decision? And those two things combine to provide trust.

‘We’re Paid to Have an Opinion’ – Evidence-informed Decisionmaking

Phil talks about being evidence informed versus data driven, because “data can tell you anything. As product managers,” he adds, “I can massage the data to show whatever the heck I want it to do.

“We absolutely need to bring data into our decision-making process,” Phil continues. “Data is a form of quantitative evidence, but then we need the anecdotes and other feedback to complete the equation. But we’re humans, we also have intuition. And, dare I say it, we are paid to have an opinion – to understand our markets, to bring that tacit knowledge, which some people call product sense, and apply it to the context of the situation we’re in.”

Catch the entire episode with Phil Hornby and learn even more about:

His 6-step process for raising the odds of making a high-quality decision.
How product roadmaps reflect your team’s decision tree of what to do and when.
Why strong opinions are valuable, as long as we’re open to the opinions of others.

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Michelle Parsons is a dynamic product leader who has led high-growth teams at Kayak, Spotify, Netflix, Hinge, and Lex. Her passion for building community and embracing new challenges has recently brought her to a leadership role in a new startup that helps people reconnect to themselves and one another.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Michelle joins Sean and Dan to talk about “making bets” – not just the seductive big bets that promise game-changing innovation – but also the smaller bets and quick hits that also play important roles in delivering value, validating assumptions, and mitigating risk.

Here’s what we learned:

The Balanced Portfolio Framework

At the heart of Michelle’s thinking is the notion of the Balanced Portfolio Framework – an idea she developed while leading product for kids’ content at Netflix. Under this framework, your roadmap is divided into three buckets – big bets, smaller bets, and quick hits – that help you pursue transformational innovation while delivering consistent value.

As you’ll hear, connecting the dots between them helps to ensure that product work is driven by the value delivered to users and your business.

Big bets start with user insights and clear hypotheses

Big bets are the bold, strategic moves that are super-impactful, but also come with a great deal of uncertainty. They start with user insights and clear hypotheses that address the following questions: What need are we trying to solve? Why does it matter to our users? What metric will this move – and why does that metric matter for business impact?

“These are the things that everyone wants to work on,” Michelle adds. “But they’re never just ‘cool ideas.’ They’re the big innovative features that bring your strategy to life. But they come with a ton of unknowns. Super impactful, but really, really risky.”

Small bets preserve resources and de-risk the big bet

Think of small bets as the “meat and potatoes” of your roadmap – incremental improvements like polishing UX, refining workflows, or optimizing metrics.

Here’s what Michelle says: “The small bets are really about the optimizations and enhancements, the things that consistently create incremental impact for your users. Not only do they touch on macro metrics like retention, engagement, and delight, but they also help to de-risk the big bets.”

Quick hits are the targeted work that accelerate learning

We’re all familiar with those small, fast, low-cost experiments or enhancements. These are the low-hanging fruit that support rapid learning.

“A quick hit is a learning task,” Michelle adds – “not to be confused with a quick win.” Certainly, they can also be quick wins, but “quick hits are really this body of work, discreetly tied a hypothesis or a data point that you want to prove out further.”

Use storytelling to align stakeholders around ‘why’

Michelle emphasizes that roadmap planning is not just an exercise in listing features, but a storytelling exercise. Because many stakeholders – executives, founders, investors –don’t live in the product trenches. To get buy-in, you need to clearly articulate: What problem we’re solving, for whom, why it matters, and how this work moves the needle.

Be sure to watch/listen to our entire conversation with Michelle, so that you can catch her thoughts about:

How her team at Netflix utilized the Balanced Portfolio Framework.
The role AI can play in balancing bets that deliver user benefit and business value.
Michelle’s new start-up plans for building connections and community.

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Axel Sooriah explores the many challenges product managers face -- and explains how simple Discovery activities can help to resolve them.

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Shensi Ding is the CEO and co-founder of Merge, a unified API platform that helps companies connect existing apps and systems with AI. Integrating AI offers many benefits: enhancing performance, automating tasks, and improving decision-making. But as Shensi points out, it’s not without looming challenges. Product leaders often wonder, Are my data and systems compatible with these new tools? Is my product team well-versed in AI technology? Can my organization’s data governance framework mitigate exposure to risk? Shensi joined co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to provide her insights in what Sean referred to as “a firehose of information and an AI integration master class.”

Here’s what we learned:

What Does High-Quality Data Look Like?

High-quality data for AI integrations means ensuring all data is accurately synced, is normalized into consistent models across platforms, and accounts for potential edge cases. This is essential for reliable AI functionality and avoiding errors that stem from inconsistent or outdated information sources.

“There’s a lot of things that can go wrong with the AI integration if you haven’t synced all your data,” Shensi explains. “You also want to make sure that it’s normalized properly. When you’re integrating with multiple platforms in a category, you need to have some kind of canonical data model that you end up normalizing it into. And that’s very difficult to do.”

Integrating AI: Challenges and Roadblocks

Many API providers have limitations, including outdated documentation and lack of real-time update notifications. These situations often require full data synchronization (over and over again), which leads to performance issues.

Product managers need to be able to adapt to these limitations, Shensi explains. “Unfortunately,” she adds, “for each platform it becomes a little bit different, and you have to be a but hacky for how you solve it” and come up with creative, manual solutions to maintain data accuracy for AI use cases.

Skills Development for Effective AI Integrations

The simplest, most effective way to get comfortable with AI is to just dive in, Shensi says.

“I just think the best way is just like testing it out and doing it yourself. Dive deep, actually understand how an integration might be built.” She suggests starting with hands-on testing using tools like Postman to authenticate and then explore API endpoints. Teams should experiment, set up sandboxes, add sample data, and perform load testing to build fluency with integrations and account for real-world edge cases as part of their learning process.

Trends and Expectations for Widespread AI Adoption

We may already be beyond the point of consumer acceptance of AI’s role in building software – these days, they expect it. Products that lack AI integration may be seen as outdated. As AI becomes normalized, both users and businesses anticipate AI-driven insights and automation as standard product features rather than optional add-ons.

“I think everyone expects it now. And if it doesn’t, it’s kind of weird.”

Catch the entire episode for Shensi’s thoughts on these important topics:

The difference between a typical product owner and the technical product owner?
Why product leaders should become comfortable with AI tools and how to use them.
The new product recently launched by Merge that enables agents to safely make calls to third-party enterprise tools.

Our conversation with Shensi Ding is the third of five episodes the team recorded at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference. We’ll publish the final two in-person episodes over the next few weeks, including chats with Axel Sooriah (Atlassian) and Michelle Parsons (Lex). Great insights from outstanding product leaders!

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With so many tools at our disposal, why do product people continue to struggle with effective communication? Email after email, meeting after meeting, teams replay the same conversations and plow the same ground, re-litigating the decisions they agreed to weeks before — wasting time, money, and energy in the process.

The “information asymmetry” that exists within organizations is the problem that Sahil Jain is trying to solve. Sahil is co-founder & CEO of Samepage.ai, where he’s building an AI-powered remedy for product managers — whose job is all about communication and the influence that each message carries with it.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Sahil addresses the importance of communication in product management, offering techniques to improve this core skill and explaining why the ability to communicate across roles is essential for product managers.

Here’s what we learned:

The Essence of Good Communication

It isn’t enough for messages to be sent and received to constitute good communication; the message has to be understood. And achieving understanding is not just the task of the receiver; the sender shares this responsibility equally.

“Within the learning sciences, there’s a great area to look at with respect to the ingestion, retention, and recall of information,” Sahil says. “It’s important to remember that there’s only so much that team members can process cognitively. So we need to break things up into reasonable chunks. And team members can help close the communication loop by restating the message they received as a way of acknowledging that they understand what I’m saying.”

Communicating Across Functional Roles

In Product Momentum episode 28, Rich Mironov described the product manager as “the person nobody works for and who, it often seems, works for everybody else.” That’s why it’s crucial for PdMs to understand others’ context and goals, where influence is key. For example, Sahil adds, when communicating with Sales teams, their primary concerns are around money and deals and increasing deal velocity.

“So if you goal is to influence the actions of others in a particular way,” Sahil adds, “it’s important that you understand what the goal of their role is and to speak to them in terms that resonate with them. That’s what drives their receptiveness of your message.”

The Power of Storytelling

To emphasize the role storytelling plays in product management, Sahil presents research data that says “telling stories is 22 times more memorable than just facts or information alone.

“When we hear a good, well-told story, we start relating it to our own experience,” Sahil says. So when we become the storyteller, we’re getting the listener to almost experience it with us, not just receive the information. It’s very powerful.”

Our conversation with Sahil Jain is the second of five that the team recorded at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference. We’ll publish the additional in-person episodes over the next several weeks, including chats with Axel Sooriah (Atlassian), Shensi Ding (Merge), and Michelle Parsons (Lex). Great insights from outstanding product leaders!

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John Cutler is Head of Product at Dotwork – a startup dedicated to transforming how teams collaborate and manage product development. He is also a prolific writer, including his wildly popular newsletter, The Beautiful Mess. John’s prior roles include supporting product teams at Toast as Senior Director, Product Enablement and Product Evangelist and Coach at Amplitude.

In today’s episode of Product Momentum, John joins Sean and Dan for an in-person conversation recorded at INDUSTRY, The Product Conference back in September. We caught up with John in between his day 2 keynote and re-entry into “startup survival mode.” During our chat, John reflects on organizational realities and ways of working, the notion of product people as game designers, and how that mindset highlights the importance of fun and dynamism in the workplace.

Here’s what we learned:

Organizational Realities and Ways of Working

A deep chasm lies between the way organizations communicate their ways of working and their actual practices, John says, highlighting the multiple realities that coexist within companies.

“I think in any socio-technical system, you tend to see different frames and perspectives,” he adds. “Companies are not rational places. I’ve been doing a lot of research [in this space], and I’ve learned that pirate ships, despite their reputation, are way more organized than your average company. And actually way more democratic too.

“View process and your ways of working as extensions of what you do for your customers,” he continues. It’s a perspective that encourages empathy and a customer-centric approach even in internal ways of working.

The Concept of Product People as Game Designers

During his keynote, John introduced the notion that product managers and their teams are essentially “game designers” responsible for creating engaging, dynamic experiences.

“I like the game design idea because everyone can relate to playing an amazing game and being in the zone with friends,” he offers. “When you experience a great restaurant, that’s service design. Enjoy an amazing vacation? That’s experience design. Ultimately, it’s not super-complex; people can relate.”

Applying this mindset to product development and team dynamics can make work more enjoyable and effective.

Importance of Fun and Engagement at Work

During the conversation, Sean suggests that “roughly 90% of the people you work with – if they could make the same salary doing something else – would actually do that something else.” The statement highlights the critical role of having fun and being engaged in your work that often makes the difference. John goes on to distinguish genuine engagement and dynamic work environments from the many superficial initiatives he often sees.

“I’m trying to decouple the sort of ‘corporate engagement industry’ from occasions where people find themselves ‘in the zone,’ a state of flow that goes beyond fun into a sort of dynamism in their environment.

Our conversation with John Cutler is the first of five that the team recorded at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, on September 9-10. We’ll publish the additional in-person episodes over the next several weeks, including chats with Sahil Jain, Axel Sooriah, Shensi Ding, and Michelle Parsons. Great insights from outstanding product leaders!

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Nesrine Changuel is a product coach, advisor, and speaker with more than a decade of senior-level product experience at Google, Spotify, and Microsoft. Soon she will add “author” to her long list of accomplishments with the publication of Product Delight: How to Make Your Product Stand Out with Emotional Connection (September 23, 2025).

In this episode of Product Momentum, Nesrine guides us through her Product Delight Model. In the process, she reminds us that while strong functionality creates an initial sense of trust and reliability, it is our products’ thoughtful human touches that extend beyond trust to build a strong emotional connection.

Here’s what else we learned:

Delight Combines Function and Emotion

To Nesrine, building delightful product means creating technical solutions that address a user’s functional and emotional needs. Product managers are well accustomed to building products that solve a functional problem, she says. But that’s usually not enough.

“What I’m advocating for is making sure that your tech product is of course functioning well,” Nesrine adds, “that it’s solving for functional needs. But we must also try to include users’ emotional needs into your solutions.” This combination of needs fulfillment makes an emotional connection that secures the bond between product and user.

The Three Pillars of Delight

To achieve product delight, our products must solve existing user challenges, exceed user expectations, and anticipate unspoken needs.

“First,” Nesrine continues, “we need to make sure that whatever we’re building is solving for something that the user is needing. Next, we cannot be content with just meeting user needs; these days, that’s not enough. We need to exceed them. And third, we need to develop the ability to [see around corners], anticipating future needs.

Humanizing AI Interactions

Understanding a user’s motivations for using a product is essential to providing product delight. Though the study of demographic and behavioral segmentation fills in some of the blanks, motivational segmentation helps us tailor products to users’ emotional drivers.

“I think we’re in a much more demanding time for product delight, especially with AI,” Nesrine adds. “AI will certainly improve our product’s functionality. But we should not fall into a world where all products feel like robots. We need to get this human touch, and humanization is extremely important for creating the emotional connection” that drives delight.

At INDUSTRY on September 9-10, the Product Momentum team recorded five in-person episodes that we’ll drip out over the next several weeks. Don’t miss upcoming conversations with John Cutler, Sahil Jain, Axel Sooriah, Shensi Ding, and Michelle Parsons. Great insights from outstanding product leaders!

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In this episode of Product Momentum, content strategist Brian Piper joins Dan Sharp and guest co-host Tim Snedden to describe the power of AI in content strategy—revealing how these tools act as creative partners, not just digital workhorses. What’s at stake isn’t just automation or efficiency, but a fundamental shift in how product managers, writers, and organizations approach content creation, measurement, and change management.

Here’s what we talked about:

Supporting intentional, data-driven content

Brian opens with a simple but powerful truth: a great content strategy doesn’t depend on luck or volume. Successful teams align their efforts with business goals and audience needs—avoiding wasted cycles and maximizing their return on effort.

“No more random acts of content,” he stated. “If every piece of content you create does not have a specific end goal or a specific audience you’re trying to connect with, you’re wasting your time…. Real content strategy is much more intentional, much more data inspired, and much more focused on helping you reach specific goals.”

Change management: the human side of AI

Adopting AI isn’t just about adding a new tool to your tech stack. Those of us trying to figure out how best to integrate AI into our workflows need to understand that it’s not just another technology adoption project.

“This is really change management,” Brian adds, underscoring the need for a thoughtful process – one that brings everyone along for the ride and seeks buy-in from all the right people, including ICs, leadership, IT, and legal.

The data behind great decisions

Throughout the conversation, Brian returns to the theme of responsible data practice. Safeguarding personal information is paramount, but public and low-risk data – e.g., content-related performance metrics – can unlock valuable insights. AI excels at finding hidden gaps and guiding content teams to lead audiences deeper into the brand journey.

“Now we can feed that information into AI,” Brian continues. “And it can look through all of those keywords, finding correlations, anomalies, and clusters of content topics where we already have search dominance. AI is great at gap analysis, as well. Humans are great at seeing what’s in front of us, but not so great at seeing what’s missing.

The Product Momentum team travels to Cleveland Sept. 9-10, where we will be recording in-person episodes with John Cutler, Michelle Parsons, Shensi Ding, Sahil Jain, and Axel Sooriah. Be sure to stop by the The Podcast Zone to say hi! Special thanks to our friends at Mind the Product and INDUSTRY for their hospitality!

*Tim Snedden* is a content strategist at ITX who’s responsible for delivering crystal-clear information to users right when they need it. He spoke at the 2024 Flower City AI conference on the efficacy of large language models for accelerating content creation and leads AI initiatives at ITX.

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If you could hire an employee who never gets tired, never loses focus, and instantly adapts to your workflow, would you do it? In the latest episode of Product Momentum, Lena Sesardic leans on her experience as a tech product manager and business-savvy entrepreneur to explore this tempting proposition through the lens of custom GPTs – specialized generative AI bots now reshaping how product teams operate.

The episode isn’t a technical tutorial on how to build custom GPTs – though Lena does walk us through her 6-step framework. It’s more a conversation – peppered with easy-to-understand examples – that help us think in new ways about the nature of our work.

Here’s what we talked about:

Supporting creative and strategic bandwidth

Lena describes custom GPTs as “little AI employees” that can take loads of work off your plate. By delegating tasks like writing user stories or analyzing estimates, product managers can free themselves to focus on higher-order work: roadmapping, stakeholder management, and creative problem-solving.

We can train custom GPTs to be our “collaborative thought partners,” Lena adds, “sort of a second brain that can then free up our bandwidth for more creativity, more user connection, and more talking with your actual users or stakeholders.”

Demystifying misconceptions

Lena dispels concerns about the level of technical sophistication required to build custom GPTs.

“A lot of PMs I know think [custom GPTs] are very technical,” she adds. “I used to think I had to be able to code to create a custom GPT. But the more I worked with them, I realized, ‘oh my gosh, I can totally build these and take a bunch work off my plate.'”

Lena’s 6-step framework for building a custom GPT

Start a conversation with ChatGPT (Lena recommends a Plus subscription) to help you build your custom GPT.

Cast the role. Decide the expertise you need from your custom GPT.
Develop the system instructions. Add context; define the input-transformation-output formula to generate the results you want.
Map out the workflow. Be clear about your desired outputs. And remember, as with any AI tool, iteration is key.
Add intelligence. Upload additional frameworks and other documents to guide your GPT.
Install the brain. Copy-paste the system instructions from your ChatGPT conversation into your custom GPT.
Put your GPT to work. Feed it real world data. Test it. Return to the conversation and describe what you’re seeing. Find out how to tweak it until you’re satisfied.

Lena’s is a message that resonates: by embracing custom GPTs, product managers can amplify not just their operational efficiency, but their capacity for meaningful innovation.

The Product Momentum team will be heading to Cleveland for INDUSTRY on Sept. 9-10, recording live, in-person episodes with several conference keynote speakers. Be sure to stop by Product Momentum’s Podcast Zone to say hi!

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If you were the CEO of the company where you work, would you fund the work your team is doing? In the early pages of Matt LeMay’s latest book, Impact-first Product Teams, readers confront this existential question. And it hits pretty close to home: am I worthy of my company’s investment?

As he explains to Dan Sharp and guest co-host Nathan Shapiro, the book is organized not around frameworks, but around the questions and challenges posed by product teams who want to be able to answer ‘Yes.’

In this episode of Product Momentum, recorded live before delivering the closing keynote at ITX’s Product + Design Conference, Matt urges product teams and individual contributors to tie their daily efforts to the company’s desired business outcomes. He also encourages product leaders to be clear about their expectations: “It’s okay to demand concise, clear answers about how they’re cutting through irrelevant distractions to focus on what truly matters,” Matt says.

Here’s what we talked about:

Supporting the business model. Product teams and ICs need to be able to draw a direct line between their work and how the business makes money.

“The business is model is intrinsically customer centric,” Matt says. “It’s how we exchange value. To understand the business model, we need to understand our customers. If we don’t understand them, we can’t succeed at implementing our business model.”

Avoiding OKR overload. OKRs, like everything else, are best when used in moderation.

“The ‘by the books’ optimal number of objectives is five,” Matt explains, “with three to five key results. If you have many more than that. you’re not actually measuring anything. I’m sorry. If you have 25 things that matter, then nothing matters.”

Cultural hurdles to impact. Team members who claim their company isn’t doing product “the right way” create unnecessary obstacles to a strong organizational culture. As do product leaders who leave to their teams the task of making sense of every new strategy that’s dropped at their doorstep.

“It pains me to hear people say that because I believe each and every one of us has the opportunity to do meaningful work that makes our organizations better,” Matt explains, adding, “and I think we should ban executive off-sites …. If [leaders] can’t figure out what’s needed within the context of the people doing their day-to-day work…and if your instinct is to close yourself off from the people who will apply your strategy, then you probably don’t really know how strategy works. I will never budge on that.”

Be sure to catch our entire episode with Matt LeMay, where he discusses:

How to ‘manage up’ with clear value.
Using data to estimate impact and validate hypotheses.
Measuring impact of platform teams.

Nathan Shapiro, special guest co-host for this episode, is the Head of Product Management for the combined Paychex and Paycor where he leads a diverse team responsible for shaping industry-leading Human Capital Management platforms. Earlier this year, Nathan was named an HR Executive 2025, Top 100 HR Tech Influencer, and 2025 Forbes Technology Council member.

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Ioana Teleanu is an AI product design expert and consultant who shaped the experience of Miro AI as their Lead Product Designer. She is currently the creator and instructor of AI for Designers, one of the most successful courses launched on Interaction Design Foundation.

Moments before sitting down for this episode of Product Momentum – recorded live at ITX’s 2025 Product + Design Conference – Ioana delivered a keynote in which she invited attendees to reflect on the evolving relationship between AI and UX design. Our discussion explores the realities and myths surrounding AI’s impact on jobs, the challenges teams face in adopting AI tools, ethical considerations in deploying AI, and practical advice for integrating AI into design workflows.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

AI and the Future of Design Roles

Ioana puts to rest concerns about AI replacing product managers and designers, rejecting as “clickbait” the many recent headlines that provoke anxiety and stress in the industry.

“AI is transforming our roles, but they’re not going away,” she says. Referring to a study by the World Economic Forum, Ioana believes that “AI will end up creating more jobs than it replaces. There’s going to be more jobs thanks to AI, and one of the professions that was marked as growing is UX design.”

Addressing Challenges in AI Literacy and Adoption

Design teams face loads of challenges these days that postpone adoption and integration of AI into their workflows – many of which are rooted in decisionmaking at the organizational level.

As leaders, Ioana advises, we need to give our teams permission to play around with these tools. “Our teams are in a very odd place right now; there’s a great deal of expectation, but not a lot of support.” Company leadership needs to provide the resources – e.g., time, context, and financial support – to create the structured environments their teams need for AI learning and experimentation. “The cost of breaking things by experimenting with AI is far lower than the cost of not experimenting at all,” she concludes.

Ethics and AI’s Missing Moral Compass

Ioana reflects on society’s gradual relaxation of privacy boundaries, noting that people frequently share intimate information with AI systems that they keep even from their loved ones.

“AI doesn’t understand consequences,” she says. “It doesn’t have a moral compass. As designers, that means the responsibility is even higher on our side to protect our users and to keep their data safe.”

Final Thoughts

Contribute to the public disambiguity. AI technology is infant technology. We’re all trying to find the answers. If you do something interesting, talk about it.
Context (in prompt writing) Is Key. Train AI tools on specific design systems or product aesthetics to improve consistency and reliability.
Synthetic users. They may never replace real users, but they might help UX researchers get a quick sense of something before we test with real users.
The (Blurring) Line between Product + Design. Catch Ioana’s real-life example of a product manager (trained in Design) who initiated company-wide Figma training for product managers.

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Usha Iyer is Hivebrite’s Chief Customer and Growth Officer, leading the community engagement platform’s go-to-market customer success and revenue strategy. On June 26, her opening presentation kicked off Keynote Day at ITX’s Product + Design Conference. Right after she exited the stage, Usha joined Sean Murray and Dan Sharp for this episode of Product Momentum, recorded in front of a live conference audience.

Our conversation with Usha follows the customer journey, meeting at the intersection of product management, business growth, and customer success. And it covers key themes like connecting product work to business outcomes, the Bow Tie Model for customer journey alignment, and AI’s role in optimizing business processes. At the close of the conversation, Usha offers practical advice for product teams on engagement and roadmap management.

Here’s what we learned:

Product’s Connection with Business Impact

SaaS product teams need to focus on the outcomes of product work that drive real business impact. Even small, seemingly minor changes to your product can significantly affect engagement and business metrics.

“Oftentimes, you’ll find as a product person that the smallest, most inconsequential feature that you develop actually has the biggest impact,” Usha says. “The least amount of effort sometimes gives you the biggest satisfaction…. So it’s important to connect the dots and go from what you’re doing day to day, the output to the outcomes.”

Aligning with Go-To-Market Stakeholders

To deepen (even expand) business acumen, Usha recommends that product teams collaborate with their counterparts in the go-to-market organization.

“Learn to align with your marketing team, your sales teams, your customer success teams,” she advises. “Ask to join discovery calls with prospects, or do a ride-along with a sales rep to gain direct market insights.” Engagement fosters empathy, strengthens business alignment, and deepens understanding of customer needs and industry dynamics.

The Bow Tie Model

Usha introduces the Bow Tie Model as a framework that coordinates product, marketing, sales, and customer success around shared business goals. In addition, she emphasizes leadership alignment on key metrics like GRR, NRR, and ARR to create feedback loops that enhance the customer journey and drive sustainable growth.

“It boils down to leadership at the go-to-market level and the product level,” she adds. “We’re all working toward company success, so if we can internalize that and build it into the culture of the organization – including your product and engineering activities – it becomes a flywheel.”

Growth Drivers in SaaS Companies

As Usha points out, SaaS companies’ main growth drivers are retention, expansion, and new business; but then she introduces a fourth: efficiency.

“Investors are getting a lot more stringent about where they put their money,” she continues. “Whereas top line metrics drive revenue metrics, which drive your presence in the market, efficiency drives your residence in the market.”

AI-Assisted Organizational Buy-in

To gain organizational buy-in for adopting frameworks like the Bow Tie, Usha suggests leveraging AI to connect diverse data sources – such as sales conversations, marketing signals, and product usage – to generate actionable insights. AI tools accelerate the process by automating tasks like generating QBRs and providing sales teams with tailored pitches.

“The answer lies in being able to take your product metrics and align it to the company metrics,” Usha says. “That’s really where it starts. That’s how we drive change management. And AI can play a big part: you can take any metric and connect the dots with another metric pretty easily with AI.”

Unable to attend ITX’s 2025 Product + Design Conference? Explore the highlights.

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Sophia Prater is CEO of Rewired UX and the creator of the Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) Certification. In this episode of Product Momentum, Sophia joins Sean Murray and guest co-host Jon Daiello to discuss OOUX and the many ways it can help product teams deliver better design, more efficiently than ever. As Sophia explains, “OOUX is like the backbone of the design process that allows all these other disciplines to hang on to.” And the ORCA process – that is, Objects, Relationships, CTAs, and Attributes – is the ‘how’ of the OOUX philosophy.

Jon, a Senior UX Manager at Paychex, shares Sophia’s enthusiasm for integrating OOUX principles into his team’s design practice. Together, they explored how OOUX is reshaping the design landscape and empowering product teams to deliver exceptional user experiences.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

Breaking Down Functional Silos with OOUX
OOUX provides a structured approach to design that breaks down functional silos by focusing on the objects and relationships that users interact with. OOUX encourages cross-functional collaboration by creating a shared language among the trio of product, engineering, and UX.

“Object-oriented UX is gonna help designers communicate with our developers and PMs. And it’s actually going to help us internally as a team. If we don’t understand internally what the objects are, if we don’t have a shared language on what the things are, then how are we gonna make it clear to our users?”

ORCA: Boosting Process Efficiency Through Understanding
One of the standout benefits of OOUX is its ability to boost process efficiency. Not only does OOUX promote that reusability of shared artifacts, but it helps product teams save time and resources by building only those things that users need and want – and by not buildingthe things users do not need or want.

“The ORCA process is a tool for understanding,” Sophia explains. “Understanding the scope and making sure it’s really clear. Understanding the mental model, the data structure, and all the constraints – technical and otherwise. ORCA allows us to truly become systems thinkers,” she adds. “That’s what the world needs. We want to be creating real solutions that solve real problems. Our system lies within a system of systems. So we need people thinking in systems. And that is what the ORCA process gives you.”

Slowing Down to Go Fast – with Less Waste
When product teams dedicate time early in the process to define objects, relationships, and processes, Sophia says, they not only reduce the risk of costly errors later in the cycle. They also quickly discover “all the stuff they don’t need to do.

“OOUX helps you get everything on the table, with everyone looking at all the puzzle pieces collaboratively,” Sophia says. “When we do that, we realize we don’t even need half of this stuff — the stuff that’s just gonna drag us down. When we got rid of that, we realize we can go so much faster.”

Jon Daiello is a Senior UX Manager at Paychex, leading design teams across Platform, Design Systems, and UX Strategy. He’s passionate about building strong designers, sharing insights on his website and other platforms.

ITX’s Product + Design Conference is just around the corner, on June 25-26. Get your tickets here, on our P+D Conference landing page!

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If you’ve spent any time navigating the intricate world of product management, you’re likely familiar with the constant balancing act the role requires. Heather Inocencio is the founder and CEO of The Product Consult, a team of product managers helping companies innovate and scale. In this episode of Product Momentum, Heather joins Sean and special guest co-host Sheila Herbert to share her recipe for how fractional product management works – and where it works best.

When fractional PMs join a new organization, approach the opportunity with curiosity, Heather advises. Use that curiosity as a conduit for building trust with your new stakeholders. That way – echoing the words of Bruce McCarthy in episode 156 of Product Momentum and in a recent blog post with Sean Flaherty – you can fairly represent each stakeholder’s needs and motivations.

Here’s what else you’ll learn:

A Balanced Approach: Customer Obsession + Business Value

Find the right balance between being customer obsessed (as described by Christian Marek in episode 162) and delivering value to the business. Meeting user needs is paramount, Heather says, but product managers are also responsible for delivering on the broader business strategy.

“Product people are constantly being pushed that they must be ‘customer obsessed.’ And I couldn’t agree more,” Heather explains. “But we have to tie that obsession back to the work we’re doing: the features we’re delivering and the platforms we’re expanding. Then we have to explain how those user behaviors are tying back to adding real business value.”

Understanding Fractional Product Management

By providing organizations with product management expertise – without the commitment of a full-time/long-time hire – the fractional approach helps both startups and small- to mid-sized businesses that need senior-level product leadership but may lack the resources or consistent demand to justify a permanent position.

“At The Product Consult, we embed with clients either full-time or fractionally,” Heathers adds. “And we do hands-on product management work, whether it’s me or someone on my team. To the client, it feels like we’re part of their team. It’s a great way for a company to add skills to the team that they don’t have.”

Trust: The Key Ingredient in a Recipe for Product Success

A thread woven throughout the conversation was Heather’s take on building trust across stakeholder groups. Trust is no longer a “nice-to-have” in product management; it’s fundamental to the success of any relationship. She shared her recipe for success – the key ingredient of which is trust – which starts with product managers building connections that transcend superficial collaboration.

“The one difference in product management versus other roles at a company is that we touch every aspect of the business,” Heather points out. “Trust enables teams to navigate tough conversations, align on priorities, and execute with clarity.”

Sheila Herbert is VP, Product at Butler / Till, headquartered in Rochester, NY. Sheila’s expertise and passion for people-first product leadership add a dynamic layer to our discussion.

ITX’s Product + Design Conference is returning to Rochester, NY on June 25-26. Get your tickets here, on our P+D Conference landing page!

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Luke Stiles is a product advisor and consultant who helps build products and grow companies, focusing on widespread adoption of Generative AI. On June 25, he will facilitate a workshop at ITX’s 2-day Product + Design Conference (June 25-26).

In this episode of Product Momentum, Luke joins Sean and Dan to talk about topics ranging from GenAI’s impact on product management and the need for domain expertise to the value of prototyping and NBA superstar Steph Curry. He concludes the conversation with a hopeful declaration regarding the enduring essence of human creativity in collaboration: AI will enhance, rather than replace, the value of humanity.

And if you’re looking for some solid book recommendations to fill out your summer reading list, Luke offers some terrific options!

Here’s what else you’ll learn:

Accelerating time to value
Get up to speed on the current narrative surrounding generative AI and its implications for product management. What Luke sees most often is AI’s ability to take somebody with deep domain expertise and allows them to really optimize.

“The product manager is responsible for gluing a lot of things together,” he adds. “And when you get into that T-shape mode, there’s an opportunity to require fewer inputs from people along the way. AI offers a huge opportunity to reduce the number of handoffs so that we can just accelerate what you’re doing as product managers with these tools.”

Prototyping with AI
AI tools are already helping product teams to bring better and more fully-baked ideas to the design process, no doubt helping us move faster to critical decision points. But at the same time, Luke explains, we run the risk making the same mistakes we’ve always made with prototypes, saying, “well, that looks like we’re done.” And the answer is, ‘probably not.’

Prototypes are not finished products; they still need to be sold, he adds. Stakeholders still need to understand their value.

‘The Value of Humanity Will Go Up’
Our chat with Luke concludes with a discussion on the AI’s role in helping us cross functional boundaries, to understand different rules sets, and – perhaps most urgently – to grasp AI’s impact on the future of human creativity and collaboration within the product development process.

“Human desire is infinite,” Luke assures us. “And humans desire being with other humans.” AI will not change that. “The value of humanity will go up. And I believe that deeply.”

Want to hear more from Luke Stiles? Register now for ITX’s Product + Design Conference, which returns to Rochester, June 25-26. See the complete list of workshop facilitators and keynote speakers on our P+D Conference landing page!

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Vitaly Friedman is an author, the UX Lead with the European Parliament, and editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine. On June 25, he will facilitate a workshop at ITX’s 2-day Product + Design Conference. In this episode of Product Momentum, Vitaly joins Sean and Dan to share his insights about tackling the unique challenges of UX design in enterprise-level environments.

Tune in to hear the following:

It’s OK to be a disruptor of legacy systems in enterprise organizations

“Legacy is like that ‘magical box’ that we’re afraid to touch,” Vitaly says. “No one really knows how it works, and the people who set it up decades ago are now gone and left with no proper documentation.”

But it’s OK to be a disruptor of legacy systems and the political hierarchies that created them as long as you show the value you can bring and approach your task with a risk management mindset. “Start with smaller projects; ask users and stakeholders to review your unfinished work; and always remember that your ‘disruption’ affects a lot of people who need that tool quite literally to do their work.”

Start small, build trust, and focus your vocabulary on the language of your stakeholders.

As part of your research, ask stakeholders to show you their product and to walk you through it. Listen carefully to the words they use to describe it – and how frequently those same words are used.

Says Vitaly: “You can get a better understanding of what’s important just by listening to how they talk about it and how much the features or workflows or ways of working mean to them as well.”

For humans, with humans, by humans.

Designing software is a people business, so Vitaly encourages UX professionals to “observe the relationships between stakeholders” so that you can learn about the people inside the organization who believe in and want to support UX initiatives. “There’s a good chance some UX projects benefited them and helped them be successful,” Vitaly adds.

When you find the people who deeply believe in UX, tell them the story about the project you’re working on. “Once you make them aware, they will move mountains for you and support your efforts,” he says.

Product + Design Workshop: How can UX designers welcome AI into their environment?

In his workshop at the ITX Product + Design Conference, Vitaly will introduce to attendees some of his recent experimental work.

“We designers expect a lot from AI, and we believe there’s a lot of things AI can do to help us build great products,” Vitaly says. “But the reality is that AI is really weird. We’re accustomed to software being rather predictable and reliable: if you click on a button, you get the result you’re expecting. But sometimes – like 10-15% of the time – AI can be unreliable.”

In the workshop, Vitaly will discuss “those little things” that are important to us designers – and make them better with assistance from AI.

ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Check out the complete list of workshop facilitators and keynote speakers on our P+D Conference landing page!

Today’s episode was produced by Peter Sullivan. It was edited by Javier Miranda Nieto, with help from Ivan Chaparro. Contains original music by Zach Kane. Special thanks to Megan Lawson.

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Christian Marek is Vice President of Product Management at Productboard. He has applied his years of experience in technology and finance while leading product management efforts at Facebook, Google, and Docusign. In this episode, Christian joins co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to explore how AI tools are revolutionizing product management by enhancing customer obsession and meeting user needs effectively. Here’s what we cover:

What does it mean to be “customer obsessed”?

And how do I know if I am? Customer obsession is more important than ever before, Christian says. He shares three critical questions to help you determine whether your organization can call itself, “customer obsessed.”

How AI supports Product Managers

Many PMs see AI as a tool that drives efficiency, helps teams go faster, and reduces waste. And it does. But when properly integrated into your workflows, AI tools also enhance decision-making by streamlining your team’s collection of customer insights. Product managers can leverage AI to quickly analyze customer interactions and feedback, allowing them to identify key problems and prioritize features based on data-driven insights.

Next-level Product Management

The role of product managers is evolving with AI, enabling them to focus more on strategy and vision rather than just feature specifications. “PMs who embrace AI,” Christian says, :will be able to scale themselves significantly and to think more about their organization’s vision, business strategy, and high-level execution.” Product managers are quickly adapting to this growing level of influence and enhancing their contribution to team and organizational success.

Obstacles to AI Adoption

Companies often face hurdles in adopting AI – sometimes due to internal resistance and the need for cultural shifts regarding data sharing and privacy. Ask yourself: is my company, and my company’s data, prepared to take advantage of AI’s capabilities?

ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Be sure to check out the complete list of workshop facilitators and keynote speakers on our P+D Conference landing page!

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Cassidy Fein is currently leading growth for Autopatch within Windows Servicing and Delivery at Microsoft. Based in NYC, she has over 10 years of experience driving product innovation, scaling teams, and delivering customer-centric solutions. Throughout her career, she’s demonstrated a passion for empowering the next generation of product leaders, especially through her teaching with Mind the Product.

In this episode, Cassidy sits down with Product Momentum co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to take a closer look at product strategy – and its execution. Using Nvidia as an example, Cassidy describes how the chip maker applied three core tenets of strategy, as outlined by Richard Rumelt in his book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, to become one of the world’s most valuable companies. They are:

First, declare your hypothesis that gets at the root cause of the problem. Next, apply a guiding policy – your overall approach to solving it. Finally, execute a coherent action that not only makes sense to your team, but also aligns with everything your team is driving toward.

Here’s what else you’ll learn from Cassidy:

What Good Strategy Looks Like

Cassidy explores the characteristics of good and bad strategy, and explains how knowing the difference can empower teams. There’re a couple ways to look at this, she says.

“First, a good strategy should be easy to understand,” Cassidy adds. “You shouldn’t have to have a deep, complex understanding of your space and the technology within it to be able to explain it to someone else. A good strategy is also actionable; it includes all the things you and your team are doing to ladder up to fulfill that strategy.”

Creating a Local Strategy

When the overarching company strategy is unclear, teams should work to create their own local strategy.

“I try to empower folks to understand how, by creating a local strategy, they can make their teams understand what it is that they’re trying to accomplish. As long as you’re able to protect your local area, protect your space, and make sure that that it’s cogent,” Cassidy explains, “you’re likely to have better success.”

The Consultant’s Mindset

When product managers adopt a consultative mindset – i.e., understanding their market, competition, and how their products generate revenue – it helps in making strategic decisions that align with business objectives.

“Thinking like a consultant, especially for product managers in a junior position, means being up to date on the competitive analysis of similar products in the market, of your pricing and packaging, and how your sales team is incentivized.”

Usability vs. Business Value

Cassidy addresses the tension between usability and business needs, making clear it’s not an either-or question. A successful product, she says, should meet customer needs while also driving revenue for the business.

“The question of which is more important is a bit of a fallacy,” Cassidy explains. “I don’t think we get to choose between the two. If we’re going after a successful product, we need to find the right balance between the two.”

Continuous Learning and Improvement

Our conversation concludes with Cassidy’s recommendation for resources that product managers can utilize that will enhance their strategic thinking and storytelling skills.

ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Be sure to stay up to date with all the latest updates on Keynote Day agenda and speakers. Learn more here!

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Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

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Sarah Doody, CEO of Career Strategy Lab, sat down with Product Momentum co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to offer advice to UX designers out there who are frustrated by the volatility in today’s job market. Treat your career like a product you’re designing, Sarah says, and focus on the essential skills you need in a turbulent job market. This is what you’ll learn:

Job Searchers.

Think of your career as a Product. Sarah offers 3 pro tips:

Think about how you’re designing your career? Marketing your career? Selling your career? Cut out the noise. Maintain a balance between collecting information and acting on it.
Vet the people who offer career advice. Ask for evidence that shows their advice actually works.
Expand your search beyond big tech. These days, every company is a “tech company,” so look to industries like Finance, Healthcare, Education, and Travel for opportunities.
Focus on the timeless skills that will remain useful for years to come – e.g., communication skills, business acumen, relationship-building vs. software-specific skills that will continue to change.

Hiring managers.

Refine job descriptions to focus less on “kitchen sink” responsibilities and more on the day-to-day.
Consider applicants who may have gaps, but whom you can train to fill that skill set.

Product managers.

Include your UX Researcher in the conversation, starting on Day 1. There’s a growing recognition that UX research enhances the user experience and reduces rework.
Engage with Users. Maintain a consistent pulse on user feedback through community engagement and research cadences to inform product development.

ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Our first 3 keynote speakers have been announced! Learn more here!

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In this episode, AgilityInsights’ Trisha Hall joins Paul Gebel for a first-ever joint podcast for Product Momentum — here, with Trisha’s Illuminating Insights. Trisha leads the enterprise solutions and government contracting team at AgilityInsights, and Paul is a VP of Delivery at ITX as well as long-time host of Product Momentum. In this inspiring conversation between friends and colleagues, Paul and Trisha explore the deep connection between organizational agility and the delivery of business value. They also discuss the role AI can play to generate user insights that help product teams convert strategy to desired outcomes.

AgilityInsights’ Rebrand + Platform Evolution
As Trisha explains, AgilityInsights (formerly known as AgilityHealth) recently went through a rebrand that included an extensive evolution of their platform and managed services AgilityInsights is better positioned to help business leaders gain insights into the value their teams are delivering. “We can’t continue to create these spinning tornadoes of work inside of our information technology organizations,” Trisha adds. “We’re focused on how we can use the data we gather to deliver value to our client organizations.”

Not surprisingly, AI has found a role to play here.

Leveraging Data to Facilitate Conversation
Armed with more than 12 million data points in their team health radar alone, AgilityInsights is working with AI tools – embedded directly into their platform – harvesting this customer feedback to help business leaders understand where they need to lean in and which obstacles need to be removed so that their teams can continue to excel.

Importantly, a human remains in the decisionmaking loop. “It’s really about having that conversation with leaders about what is most valuable – not whose project is most important. Those are two very different things.”

ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Interested in learning who will be keynoting? Find out here!

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Tami Reiss, also known as The Product Leader Coach, brings together the strategy, process, and mindset tools we need to perform our roles as product leaders with the ability to think and communicate like an executive. A coach is able to see the whole field, and they’re watching us, their player, from an outsider’s perspective. “Beyond that,” Tami says, “a coach is a great sounding board; the higher we go in our careers, the less we can turn to our bosses for advice. They’ve either never done our specific job, or we don’t want them to think we don’t know how to do it.” A coach can also help product leaders avoid these critical mistakes:

Lacking a Clear Vision.

“One of the biggest mistakes made by product leaders is failing to ensure there is a clearly defined vision,” Tami explains. Vision – that “story of the future” we’re trying to create in the world – helps people internalize what the world will look like because of the things we are building.”

Insufficient Understanding of Finance.

“The biggest jump product leaders have to make is understanding how to translate customer value into business value,” Tami says. Product leaders who lack financial acumen may face challenges in managing budgets, justifying investments, and driving profitable growth.

Overlooking Inorganic Growth.

“Product people spend their entire careers finding problems, building solutions, and launching products that solve those problems,” Tami offers. But they overlook the fact that sometimes you’re not going to be the person to build the solution.” Inorganic growth means you might have to find a partner; you might have to acquire the solution; or you might be acquired. Inorganic growth is about business growth, Tami concludes. It’s not about product growth.

Prefer the video experience? Check out the Product Momentum YouTube channel to catch our conversation with Tami Reiss and all our recent guests!

Save the date! ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Find out more!

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Katie Dove is an applied behavioral scientist and managing director of Irrational Labs, a product design and behavior change lab. She and her team help companies like Airbnb, Microsoft, and Uber answer the question, Why do our customers behave like they do? and then help them design creative solutions that work. We caught up with Katie for an in-person chat at INDUSTRY; in our conversation, we discussed:

Human Value in Products.

Katie unpacked the notion of amplifying user value – human value, to be more precise – stressing the importance of understanding user behavior and needs, rather than just focusing on economic value.

“When I talk about human value,” Katie explains, “I’m actually talking about what’s created for the user in the moment of using a product or an experience online. And so I contrast this a little bit with economic value. When you do that in product,” she adds, “people will come back more, they’ll be more loyal, and they’ll increase their engagement.”

The Power of Feeling Known.

It’s crucial for users to feel recognized and known by product builders. In fact, during her talk, Katie pointed to research that says it’s more important that the consumer feels known than it is for the consumer to know us. As product leaders, we can boost our users’ sense of feeling known through personalized experiences and interactions that build trust, loyalty, and engagement.

Companies like Duolingo are successful because “one of the very first things they do is get to know you,” Katies adds. They go from knowing nothing about their user to knowing a lot by guiding them through their onboarding quiz, which asks about the user’s preferences and increases their expectation that things will be tailored to their needs.”

Balancing Personalization and Privacy.

How do we balance our desire to personalize offerings with our users’ desire for privacy? One way, Katie explains, is by being transparent about data usage and actually asking users questions to ensure they feel comfortable with how their data is being used.

“By asking questions, you’re doing two things,” Katie says. “You’re giving people the opportunity to have some agency in the process, and you’re making it explicit what you’re collecting and why.”

Katie also points to Irrational Labs’ Three B model of behavior change. It involves

Conducting a Behavioral audit, which maps out all the steps required to get to that key behavior
Exploring the user’s psychological Barriers to performing that behavior, and
Increasing the Benefits of taking the desired action.

Be sure to catch the entire episode to learn more from Katie Dove about using behavioral science and psychology to help your team drive user value.

Save the date! ITX’s Product + Design Conference returns to Rochester, June 25-26. Find out more!

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Bruce McCarthy is a renowned product leader at Product Culture, the organization he founded in 2018. He’s also the author of two books: Aligned (2024) and Product Roadmaps Relaunched (2018). Bruce sat down with the Product Momentum team for an in-person chat on the heels of his INDUSTRY Global keynote; our conversation focused on –

Treating stakeholders as cutomers,
Understanding/prioritizing stakeholder needs, and
Bruce’s Stakeholder Canvas, a tool that helps product leaders with stakeholder alignment and prioritization challenges

The bottom line is this: stakeholders are not just peripheral figures in the product development ecosystem, but are central customers whose needs must be meticulously considered in the product manager’s decision-making process.

Stakeholders as Customers
One of the refreshing perspectives Bruce brought to the conversation was the idea of viewing stakeholders as customers. As he explained, “A stakeholder is anybody in your organization whose help and support you need in order for your product…to be successful. [I]t has to be marketed and sold and supported. It has to be financed.”

Think of stakeholders as your extended team who have a stake in the success of your product. In that respect, he adds, “Stakeholders are actually your customers too.”

The Toughest Job in Product: Prioritizing Stakeholder Needs
Product managers learn quickly that they can’t balance stakeholder needs perfectly, ever. “It’s always an art,” Bruce explains. “It’s always a work in progress. It’s always saying ‘no’ to some things in order to say ‘yes’ to other things.”

And that’s why it’s the hardest job in Product. The success of your product hinges on the identification and prioritization of competing stakeholder incentives. To be successful, product managers need to recognize the diversity of interests and influences that various stakeholders bring to the table.

The Stakeholder Canvas
Using the company org chart is one way to help prioritize stakeholder needs, but sometimes (often?), Bruce explains, it can be misleading. It doesn’t always indicate who has the decisionmaker’s ear. You might think it’s the CEO or Head of Product…only to find out for this project, it’s actually the CFO or the Head of Engineering. “The question then becomes, ‘what do you use instead?’”

As Bruce explains, “We developed the stakeholder canvas to help you map out your stakeholders, make a list of who they are, and capture all the information that you have about them: what they care about and what they need from you – which is just as important as what you need from them.”
“The stakeholder canvas helps you bring clarity to stakeholder alignment and make prioritization more manageable,” Bruce concluded.

Be sure to catch the whole conversation with Bruce McCarthy to learn about all the other tools he applied to this challenge, including the DiSC® framework and the DACI and RACI decisionmaking tools.

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Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty

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There was a time not long ago when a handful of Product Momentum guests (Rich Mironov and Marty Cagan to name just two) lamented the absence of any formalized university program dedicated solely to product managers. Lament no more, thanks to Brad Eiben and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, where Brad is Executive Director of the Master of Science Program in Product Management. Launched in 2018, the program is a one-year experience that blends coursework in leadership and business strategy with such technical practices as UX design, development, and Agile methodology.

Our conversation with Brad actually began the night before we hit ‘record,’ following an action-packed day of conference keynotes at INDUSTRY Global back in September. In this episode, Sean and Sean reconnect with Brad as he explains how he applied the same product management principles he learned as a mechanical engineer at Toyota to his current role in Education.

“There are a lot of business degrees, and a lot of tech degrees,” Brad offers. “But none really bring that third element, which is the design thinking and practical application. So that’s what we strive to create – a truly hands-on program. I always describe the program itself as being a training program, not an academic program.”

In its own way, the program treats education as a proof of concept. Just as it is in real life, product management is a team sport, Brad says.

“In its ideal form, product management is a journey,” Brad says. “A student here is not a lone wolf; they’re part of the pack. When they approach product management correctly – working as collaborators, not as adversaries – and combine their skills to support one another, the effect is ten times more powerful.”

Be sure to catch the entire episode with Brad, where he explains why “the program is my product” — a marketplace in which the university is creating value for students, credentializing their work, and boosting their careers. And no doubt accelerating the maturation of product management as a profession.

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Dan Chuparkoff is a seasoned innovation leader with experience at Google, Atlassian, and McKinsey. The Product Momentum team caught up with him right after his keynote at INDUSTRY Global and talked about how product teams can get beyond the theoretical hype of AI and start zooming in on its immediate potential.

His message was clear: while AI has the capacity to deliver transformative possibilities, product teams need to balance their long-term ambition for AI with a dose of everyday practicality.

“It’s easy to think about the future-forward-looking thing when you talk about something new, like AI,” Dan says. “Maybe AGI [artificial general intelligence] works at some point in the future. Maybe it’s super helpful. But it’s not useful right now.”

Separating Hype from Practical Application

How do we separate the hype from the real-world application? Dan urges teams to embrace useful AI tools now rather than waiting for theoretical advances like artificial general intelligence (AGI).

You can’t go back to your office and use AGI to solve real problems, he adds, “but you can get hands-on now by using notetaking AI tools or translation AI tools to help overcome some everyday challenges. So here’s what I suggest: Create two buckets, one for what you can use next week and one for what might come years down the line.”

As an Umbrella Term, AI Has Leaks

One of Dan’s key points is that we should stop lumping everything under the AI umbrella. When we do that, he explains, we’re actually doing AI a disservice, obscuring its specific, actionable uses.

“Sometimes AI means machine learning from like 28 years ago, and sometimes it means a chatbot on your website. If you’re talking about machine learning a chatbot on your website, say that.” We all want to say we’re working with AI, “but that sort of hyperbole, that umbrella term, is going to confuse folks.” So, be as specific as you can as quickly as you can, he adds.

Think of AI As a Tool for ‘Accelerating Collaboration’

Dan pointed to studies showing that knowledge workers spend 68% of their time sharing information – not producing anything, but sharing it. 68%. So if we want AI tools to drive productivity, quality, and efficiency, they may be best suited (for now, at least) to reduce this resource commitment.

“If you make that even 1% better,” he said, “it’s like hiring four more people for your team.” When we automate product management-related tasks like analyzing customer feedback or summarizing meetings, our teams can focus on higher-value work. In other words, focus on the premium that your teams can offer when they’re freed from the burden of busy work that drives little value – and that AI can easily handle. “The real efficiency will come from people collaborating faster.”

If you prefer the video podcast experience, you can catch our conversation with Dan Chuparkoff on the Product Momentum YouTube channel!

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The Product Momentum team continues the series of conversations that we recorded at INDUSTRY Global; in today’s episode, Bukky Adebayo and Rye Castillo join Sean and Sean to talk about the challenges and opportunities that come with building products for technical audiences. Bukky is Chief of Staff, Digital Customer Experience at Autodesk, and Rye is a Design Lead at Render (a self-described “curious generalist.”).

The discussion revolves around challenges in product design, particularly in technical environments (where users are often tech-savvy developers), and emphasizes the importance of collaboration and empathy in the development process.

“The overarching theme of our talk is ‘collaboration,’” Rye says, “with special emphasis on including your engineers as part of the team and not people you have to fight against. In engineering-heavy organizations, sometimes it feels like you’re fighting an ‘us versus them’ uphill battle.”

This kind of environment reflects one of the challenges teams face, especially in larger organizations. Silos bubble up, and developers tend to retreat and narrow their focus on product specs. This hinders creativity and innovation. But good things happen when teams collaborate. Bukky suggests having developers sit in on usability tests and in conversations with customers; as much as developers want to be right, they want even more to be heard – to feel like they’re part of the solution.

Be sure to catch the entire episode with Bukky and Rye to learn about some of the tactics they’ve used to encourage collaboration, tear down functional silos, and build powerful products for their technical audiences.

In his blog, Maximizing Developer Value: The Intersection of Tech and Business Domains, ITX Senior Solutions Architect John Roets offers the following advice to his fellow developers:

“If you fail to see beyond technical skill as what makes developers and teams valuable, you’ve got it wrong. Developer and organizational attitudes, structures, and operational models continue to (mistakenly) reinforce the idea that developers are mere ‘order takers,’ fungible assets to be moved around from domain to domain where the work is.”

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In this episode of Product Momentum, we share our conversation with Matt LeMay, who had just delivered a keynote at INDUSTRY Global, entitled The Business is Your Business.

About Matt LeMay

Matt LeMay is an internationally recognized product leader, consultant, and author. His titles include Agile for Everybody, Product Management in Practice, and the soon-to-be-released Impact-First Product Teams. Today’s episode marks Matt’s second visit with Product Momentum; his first was in episode 113, Embracing Human Complexity in Product Management (June 2023).

High-Impact Work Is Hard…

For product managers and their teams, Matt explains, doing the high-impact work is super-hard. When dealing with the things that lie at the core of the product, he adds, “you have to coordinate; you have to have the tough conversations. Sometimes, you need to redo, or completely undo, work that’s been done by another team. That often draws lots of attention from people in the organization that product teams rarely hear from.”

…But Low-Impact Work Can Be Dangerous

It’s almost always easier to do the low-impact work, Matt says. Add a feature here, a new button there. It’s the sort of work that helps us feel good about ourselves, like we’re making progress. But the buzz is usually short-lived. Eventually, the absence of high-impact output catches up with product teams – usually, Matt adds, after the CFO takes a closer look at a spreadsheet.

Danger lurks when there’s a disconnect between company goals and product team goals, Matt explains. “When teams don’t know how their work is affecting the commercial realities of the business, they tend to reprioritize efforts to low-impact work.”

Product Teams Can Control Their Situation

Regardless of who’s responsible for the disconnect, product managers and teams can take control of the situation to give themselves a fighting chance.

“Even if no one’s asking us to, we can take ownership by saying, ‘here’s why and how the work we’re doing is going to help the business achieve those goals,’” Matt advises. “If we can proactively take control of that conversation, we put ourselves in a much stronger position with company leadership. On the other hand, if all we do is walk in and say, ‘tell us what success looks like,’ we might not get the answer we’re looking for.”

During our conversation with Matt, he mentions two important books on product management, respectively authored by earlier guests of Product Momentum: Evidence Guided, by Itamar Gilad, and Radical Focus, by Christina Wodtke. Be sure to catch our conversations with Itamar and Christina:

Episode 143, ‘Useful Models’ That Boost Product Launch Success, with Itamar Gilad.

Episode 18, Simple Steps To Achieve High Performance, with Christina Wodtke.

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Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

Product Management in Practice: A Real-World Guide to the Key Connective Role of the 21st Century

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If you’re a product manager who’s making the transition from individual contributor (IC) to people manager, you not only need to be nailing your job, Melika Hope advises. “You have to be showing up as a leader.” Opportunities for practicing leadership aren’t confined to managerial roles, she adds. ICs can exhibit leader-like traits every day by taking on a challenging strategic task, coming up with a creative solution, and solving complex problems that impact the business.

Melika Hope is Director of Product Management at Spotify; after delivering her keynote and INDUSTRY Global, she sat down with Sean Flaherty and Sean Murray for a lively discussion about what it takes to make the transition from individual contributor to people manager. Turns out there’s plenty to consider.

Showcasing Leadership Abilities

Melika advised ICs not to wait for formal opportunities to present themselves before showcasing their leadership abilities. Instead, she adds, “ICs should look for ways to contribute meaningfully to their teams and organizations. Solve problems proactively to demonstrate your value and potential for higher roles.”

Melika uses impactful anecdotes to encourage organizations to consider new career paths for individual contributors who excel in their roles but may not wish to manage people. “I find more folks actually aren’t as interested in becoming [people] managers anymore,” she says.

Taking Control of Your Future

What’s more, with widespread layoffs making it difficult for ICs to find new opportunities, “there’s a sense that if I am an IC, I have control over the work that I’m doing and the results I’m delivering. People are feeling more comfortable with that.”

Are we witnessing a culture shift beginning to take hold? The notion that leadership is better defined by actions and impact rather than titles. Be sure to catch the entire episode with Melika Hope, recorded live at INDUSTRY Global.

Looking for related content? Check out Product Momentum’s episode 90 with Liz Li: Amid the Great Resignation, It’s Time to Productize Your Career

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We didn’t realize it when we started recording this episode with Bob Moesta. But the moment our conversation ended, we knew his would serve as Product Momentum’s milestone 150th podcast! And what better topic to explore – and who better to explore it with – than a product manager’s job to be done with the champion of JTBD theory. As Bob explains, people don’t buy products at random; we hire them to solve specific problems or fulfill specific needs. Understanding the user’s struggling moments is our primary job to be done.

Product Momentum co-hosts Sean Flaherty and Sean Murray caught up with Bob live and in person at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference. In their lively conversation, Bob touched on three main themes, each embracing our users’ struggling moments as the key to a product manager’s success.

Understanding User Context – The Path to Better Products

As product managers, we have to grow to appreciate the context surrounding our end users’ struggling moments. When users realize “the anxieties or habits that prevent them from making changes easily,” product managers are enabled to actually see better ways to develop the products that fulfill users’ needs.”

Focus on Cause, Not Probability

Sales and Marketing often rely on probability-based approaches, Bob adds, “because they don’t fully understand customer behavior.” As product managers, though, we are better positioned to identify the causes behind a customer’s need for a product; when we do that, our teams can focus on helping them make real progress, rather than just pushing unnecessary features that fail to address their specific challenges.

Customer Choice Is Based on Elimination, Not Selection

Customers won’t even notice a product unless they are already frustrated, Bob explains. So we should be targeting these precise moments of frustration to effectively capture their attention. Then, as they evaluate the range of possible product solutions, customers eliminate the ones they know won’t meet their needs. The process is reminiscent of the standardized tests of our school-age years; oftentimes, we didn’t choose the best answer as much as we eliminated the ones we knew to be wrong.

Be sure to catch the entire episode with Bob Moesta; as you do, be on the lookout for his list of 5 skills that every successful product team should possess.

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Shikha Kapoor’s journey to Silicon Valley began in a small town in India, where she had only limited access to technology. She didn’t have access to the internet – or even to a computer. Now she’s a trailblazer in AI product management at Meta. Shikha credits a passion for learning, staying hungry, and maintaining a healthy curiosity as pillars in “a student mindset” that has served as her North star. Shikha currently serves as Meta’s Head of Product, Gen AI for Recommendations. Before then, she was a Product Leader AI for Consumer Productivity, at Google Assistant.

In this episode of Product Momentum, she joins hosts Sean Flaherty and Sean Murray to discuss how she became a leading light in the rapidly evolving field of AI – specifically, embracing firsthand the connection between business needs and technology solutions and using that mindset to break from convention to foster creativity and innovation.

“Early in my career, I always looked for a role that connected the dots from business problems to technology solutions,” Shikha says. “And when I came across product management, it was clear to me that PMs are at the intersection of engineering, business, and design. They get to participate from end to end in solving user needs, anticipating market trends, and building the solutions we must deploy to get there.”

Now, as Meta’s Head of Product, Gen AI for Recommendations, Shikha Kapoor applies this product management mindset to balance long-term vision with agile execution. Her team often works in six-month planning cycles to develop big-picture AI-driven tools and then works backward from that distant horizon to maintain nimble and adaptable to emerging technologies and market shifts.

Shikha highlights emerging trends in AI across various industries, such as legal and healthcare. She points out the potential for automation to drive dramatic increases in productivity and business value. As AI continues to disrupt traditional workflows, she says, product managers must remain open-minded and proactive in adapting to these changes.

Catch the entire conversation with Shikha Kapoor to gain insights into the strategies she employs to stay ahead of the AI curve, including the importance of grounding your assumptions and embracing a culture of experimentation. Shikha also shares valuable advice for new and seasoned product managers alike on how to leverage AI to enhance user experiences and drive innovation.

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The success rate of new software products varies, depending on the criteria we used to define success. But a common statistic is unflattering: about 70% of new software releases fails to meet their initial expectations or goals. In this episode of Product Momentum – and in his new book, LAUNCH Code – James Whitman explains this phenomenon, describes the factors that contribute to such high failure rates, and presents research-based remedies we can deploy to reverse the trend.

Too often in product development, we become so focused on heads-down requirements building that the act of launching the product feels like an afterthought. And to many, it’s become a lost art. James says that success requires a companywide, comprehensive plan for managing internal handoffs and bringing clients deeply into product development and launch.

The development-to-sale process offers “many rakes to step on,” James says. And even the most well-intended teams make mistakes, often manifested in these critical areas:

Client Listening. We tend to sample only our most favored clients; we limit discovery efforts to a specific segment of our market; and too often we wrongly assume that internal team members possess the domain knowledge to speak on behalf of the client.

James underscores the critical role of continuous client listening and says that that every sales interaction is an opportunity for market research. “Maintaining a dialogue with clients both before and after the market launch is crucial for refining the product and addressing client needs effectively.”

The Product-to-Sales Handoff. Software launches start with innovation and product design, followed by value-added activities within the product function, James says. But then there’s this completely separate activity that happens over here in Sales. The gap between those functions is where many products fail to launch.

The best organizations integrate these activities into a holistic approach where sales and product teams work closely together rather than operating in silos.

The Sales Cabinet. There’s a solid collective understanding that we should listen to our clients and that we should work collaboratively with our colleagues. But why don’t these things happen in the real world?

James introduces the concept of a “sales cabinet,” a group of trusted senior sales representatives who provide early feedback on product ideas and help profile new offerings.

Be sure to catch the entire episode with James Whitman to deepen your understanding of the LAUNCH process: Listen, Assess, Unify, Navigate, Control, and Hone.

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What percentage of your software product launches have been successful? If you answered, “about 50%,” you’re ahead of the curve, says Itamar Gilad. Itamar is a product leadership coach and author who also held senior product management and engineering roles at Microsoft and Google, where he worked at YouTube and led parts of Gmail.

In today’s conversation, Itamar looks back on his early career that – he readily admits – includes ‘not that many big wins.’ As he explains, “The engineer in me kept whispering, ‘you don’t really know. You’re just faking it.’ And the results spoke for themselves.”

It was then, while still at Google, that Itamar realized the power of discovery and user research. What he called, “all these good things that we now take for granted.” Once he embedded these techniques into his work, his perspective changed, and he started to consider a new product leadership playbook. What he came up with has replaced the traditional Plan and Execute model “that may have worked in the 20th century,” with an outcome- and evidence-based intuitive approach.

“We used to believe that if we spend enough time creating the perfect top-level plan, and build a set of cascading plans, and then execute well on these plans, we will achieve greatness,” Itamar says. “It simply doesn’t work that way.” Even ideas from the most visionary leaders were informed by research and evidence, hypothesis and testing, he adds.

In his book, Evidence Guided, Itamar presents an actionable model for bringing evidence-guided development into our organizations. Nested within Itamar’s larger framework are the GIST model, which leads to the ICE model, which then leads to the Confidence Meter. In this conversation, Itamar explains the role each model plays in specific detail and provides easy access to them.

Be sure to catch our entire episode with Itamar Gilad and consider this famous quote from the late British statistician George E. P. Box: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

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Can Product Operations transform your role as a product manager? Denise Tilles, who quite literally wrote the book on the subject (Product Operations, with Melissa Perri), thinks so. Especially if you’re interested in making better decisions faster – and who of us isn’t?

In her return visit to Product Momentum (having joined us from NY Product Conference, back in April), Denise reveals to hosts Sean Flaherty, Paul Gebel, and a standing-room-only audience of Product + Design Conference attendees how Product Operations unlocks the value of our organizations’ collective work.

What Is Product Ops?

Product ops provides the essential systems and supports that capture, review, and analyze data.

“It’s really about surrounding product managers with the tools they need to make faster and better-quality decisions,” Denise offers. It’s based on three key pillars:

Business + data insights. Quantitative measures like revenue, engagement, and market performance.
Customer + user insights. Qualitative research about customers, users, and they markets they comprise.
Processes + practices. Best practices and methods, combined with the systems thinking that complete your operating model.

“Product ops fine-tunes existing ways of working – not by being prescriptive, but by helping people understand how we work so we can work faster, smarter, and hopefully in a more pleasurable way,” Denise adds.

What Product Ops Is Not?

Product ops isn’t designed to take jobs away from product managers; nor does it seek to undermine their efforts. Product ops isn’t about building systems and processes for their own stake. And it isn’t necessarily a formalized role as much as it is an approach to efficient product building. In fact, as Paul suggests, “Even if we don’t have the title, even if we don’t have a product ops team, we can always bring a little bit of it to our daily work to make things a little bit better.”

Be sure to check out the full conversation with Denise Tilles; if you prefer the video experience, you can find our episode with Denise on the Product Momentum YouTube channel!

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In this episode of Product Momentum, Patricia Reiners chats with Paul Gebel and Brian Loughner (a Lead UX Designer at ITX); during the conversation, she tackles three critical topics that UX designers should consider when thinking about how best to interact with AI in their daily work, in their careers, and in their role as ethical humans.

About Patricia. In addition to hosting the Future of UX podcast, Patricia Reiners is a distinguished UX innovator and a prominent voice in the field of user experience. Based in Zurich, she works to develop advanced UX methodologies in emerging technologies like AI, focusing on future UX design industry trends.

How do human skills compare with AI capabilities?

AI can analyze content, generate ideas, and present options far faster that humans can, Patricia says. But it lacks the creative spark, personal judgment, and sense of empathy that only humans possess. Creativity involves emotional intelligence through lived experiences that AI cannot replicate – even with the best training. “Those are uniquely human traits that are critical in tech, particularly in leadership roles where you’re working with people.”

AI tools also lack the ability to perform critical thinking and demonstrate sound judgment, which Patricia says is “a super-important skill – especially for designers.” Unlike humans, she continues, AI struggles with making complex decisions that involve ethical considerations and subjective judgments. Designers often draw on research to make informed decisions based on values, principles, and context.

As a UX designer, how can I prepare for my future with AI?

Remember that AI is a tool, Patricia advises. “So, designers should get their hands dirty with AI and learn to collaborate with these tools so that we can better understand how they can make our work easier. When we understand their limitations and leverage them to improve our work, we become better designers.”

Dive into AI, she continues. “It’s so new, and things are changing all the time. AI works best when it augments our human abilities,” Patricia advises. “So, look for ways to integrate AI into your workflows to enhance your productivity.” Patricia also recommends that fellow designers join a UX meetup [like Upstate UX Meetup] to learn from others about the latest trends and technologies, and be willing to share your challenges and your knowledge with others.

How can I make sure the AI tools I use are ethical, protect PII, and are free of bias?

As John Maeda explained during his podcast episode, “We often forget that accepting the bad with the good is a theme of every new technology story.” That is, we understand that AI – like every new technology – is no panacea for all that ails the world. But we cannot discard them because they are flawed.

With respect to ethical considerations in AI, Patricia says that designers should do their best to find and use AI models that are trained with unbiased data. In the interim, she adds, “advocate for ethical practices; develop strategies for using AI before building products that might have been trained using questionable data.” And perhaps most importantly, Patricia says, “designers need to speak up to ask the tough questions about the quality of data AI tools have been trained on and where personal data (used by AI systems) are stored.”

Special thanks to Patricia Reiners for sharing her expert insights in this podcast episode, and especially for delivering an amazing workshop at ITX’s 2024 Product + Design Conference. Unable to attend this year? Check out what you missed!

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In this episode, Paul and Sean catch up with Ryan Rumsey just moments after his poignant keynote at the 2024 ITX Product + Design Conference. During his keynote and follow-up conversation, Ryan explained that the biggest challenges product builders face are people challenges, “deeply rooted in our own personal experiences and feelings.”

Ryan Rumsey is the CEO of Second Wave Dive, an on-demand strategic consultancy, and the founder of Chief Design Officer School, a learning platform for design leaders. He is also the author of two books and – as conference attendees can attest – a captivating speaker.

Assess Workplace Power & Influence

Ryan also highlighted the significance of power and influence in the workplace, especially within the design and creative domains where his expertise lies. He pointed out that people in design roles sometimes lack influence within corporate structures, leaving them with a sense that their ability to contribute value is somehow diminished.

“We can’t really talk about any of this without talking about power. In this sense, we’re talking working inside of corporations, where power typically doesn’t reside with people who are more on the creative thinking, artistic, exploratory, empathy side of the spectrum,” Ryan says.

Reframe the Meaning of Value Metrics

Designers and creatives can escape this perception by reframing what it means to deliver value and be successful, Ryan adds. We need to shift the focus from traditional metrics like lifetime value (LTV) and return on investment (ROI) to the emotional and personal aspects of work, he explains, stressing that personal fulfillment and how we make ourselves and others feel are crucial in our professional journeys.

“For a lot of us, we don’t tend to see value through our own eyes,” Ryan comments. “Instead, we tend to see value in ourselves as others see value in us. So if the culture is of LTV and that’s not your domain, it’s really hard to feel validated in value if that’s not your love language.”

Prioritize the Human Element

When we prioritize the human element, Ryan offers, we begin to focus on the well-being, motivation, and development of individuals within the team, and we create an environment where people feel supported, trusted, and empowered to contribute their best work. But even then, individuals working alone have limits to what they can achieve.

Invite Others To Be Right with You

“That’s why I embrace the advice I received from a friend and mentor some years ago,” Ryan shares. He said, ‘Look, you know what you’re doing. You’re doing all these things that, you know, are right. But you can’t reach your potential on your own; you’ve reached the limits of your aloneness here. You need others to be right with you.’ And I absolutely felt that double entendre aspect of other people are right, too, just from different angles.”

You can also catch the episode with Ryan Rumsey in video on the Product Momentum YouTube channel!

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In this episode, John Maeda explains that software products are tools that help us achieve our broader goals – like caring for loved ones and strengthening our relationships – rather than the ultimate objective. So it’s no surprise that John frames artificial intelligence as a power tool that levels up our human potential to create an even better future.

John Maeda, VP of Engineering and the Head of Computational Design and AI Platforms at Microsoft, joined the Product Momentum team to record a live podcast episode on the heels of his conference-opening keynote at ITX’s Product + Design Conference, in late-June.

Humans Are ‘Wired for Creativity’

“I think creativity is the foundation of creating capital,” John says. “That capital is emotional capital or sometimes financial capital. But it is a thing that maybe we humans are wired to do.”

Risk-versed vs. Risk-averse

Creating does not come without risk, however. Because the act of creation is a choice, it requires a competitor’s mindset. Deep down, true competitors don’t play to win; they play to maybe win. Like product managers, designers, and engineers who devote their expertise to create things that do not yet exist, they understand the risks that come with innovation. And they approach their work from a risk-versed mindset — an approach that drives our pursuit of innovation while recognizing the inherent risks.

Within the context of AI, we enjoy a vast ocean of opportunity to tap into, John adds. But to take advantage of AI tools in this way, we need to understand the difference between risk-versed and risk-averse. “To pursue that blue zone of possibility, you need to be risk-versed,” John explains. “AI is understandable; It just takes your attention to go there.”

Understanding AI Requires “The Player’s Mindset’

“Going there” is to embrace the player’s mindset – not the victim’s. While some see AI and grumble, “It’s going to take my job” or “It’s going to be a competitive force against me,” others see the blue ocean of opportunity.

“Anyone who’s afraid of AI is afraid of it because they don’t understand it,” John says. “Positives and negatives are a part of every new technology; we tend to focus on the negatives so much that we forget that everything technological is not always bad. If we are to truly understand [AI], it’s important for us to continue to ask these questions.

Be sure to catch the entire episode with John Maeda to hear him discuss the following topics:

(04:02) Life is lived in 4 quarters: 0 to 25 years, 25 to 50, 50 to 75 years, and 75 to 100. Make the most of the 2nd quarter.

(06:43) I like to pursue things that I don’t know; when you have no reference for how things are done, you’re kind of free to make your own way.

(9:22) What mindset do you choose: will you be a victim of AI? Or invite AI to be your co-pilot?

(10:39) The potential of AI to augment human capabilities: what humans can do by themselves, what AI can do for humans, and the new possibilities that arise when humans leverage AI.

(11:42) To understand and embrace AI, we need to be risk-versed, not risk-averse.

(14:04) How powerful art is! Creativity is the foundation of creating capital – both emotional capital and financial capital.

(17:57) Powerful tools in the hands of the wrong people is a theme of every technology story.

(19:17) Everyone seems to be talking about AI. But why isn’t AI everywhere already?

(24:07) We’re in the Unknown / Unknown quadrant for how to manage AI.

You can also watch our episode with John Maeda on the Product Momentum YouTube channel!

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In this episode of Product Momentum, Christian Idiodi shares insights gathered over his 20-year career as a product leader, leaning especially on the significance of human skills and highlighting the importance of product sense in product management.

Christian Idiodi is a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group and co-author of TRANSFORMED, with Marty Cagan and partners at SVPG. He recently joined co-hosts Paul Gebel and ITX Product Manager Dan Sharp for a conversation exploring the two sides of product sense and why its human component is essential to product success in the context of today’s AI-focused world.

Informed Decision-Making + Intuition

Product sense combines informed decision-making with intuition that great product managers develop over time, Christian says. “It’s about having an intuitive feel for what makes a product valuable, which requires a deep understanding of your users and how they experience it.”

Product Sense Is ‘Not Some Magical Gift’

But it’s not some magical gift that we’re born with, he adds. Product sense involves synthesizing data, everything from user feedback to market trends, and making quick, effective decisions that align with both user needs and business goals.“People who have product sense have worked hard to practice and fine-tune it,” Christian explains.

The Essence of Product Management

In this way, product sense lies at the very heart of product management: solving real problems for real users rather than focusing solely on commercial success. Companies lose their way, Christian says, by shifting their focus from helping people to extracting value from them. Product sense helps us maintain a balance between making customers happy and generating revenue for the business.

This episode marks Christian Idiodi’s second visit with Product Momentum. Check out his initial conversation with the team, Product Problems Are People Problems.

Marty Cagan and his partners at Silicon Valley Product Group, wrote INSPIRED, EMPOWERED, and (most recently) TRANSFORMED for product managers and teams; product leaders; and C-suite executives, respectively. Be sure to listen to the entire episode, as Christian explains how each book aligns with purpose to these audience segments.

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Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group)

Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (Silicon Valley Product Group)

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Welcome to this special episode of Product Momentum, where four ITX leaders share their hands-on experience establishing (Upstate Product Meetup) and growing (Upstate UX Meetup, to nearly 600 members!) two Rochester-area communities of practice (CoP).

Perhaps it was the recent conversations with Petra Wille and Jared Spool that inspired the idea for this up-close look at communities of practice. Or maybe we’re just eager to spread the word about our communities and support our colleagues. And, of course, it could be that we’re ramping up to host our upcoming Product + Design Conference, where the primary focus is always on bringing our communities together for learning and sharing knowledge.

Whatever the reason, the underlying theme of today’s episode is this: work as a designer or product manager is challenging enough; none of us should feel we need to go it alone. So spend a few minutes with ITX CoP leaders Paul Gebel (VP of Delivery), Christina Halladay (Director of UX Design), Sean Murray (Director of Product Management), and Brian Loughner (Lead UX Designer) and catch their advice about how to find (or start from scratch) your own Product or UX community of practice.

5 Tips for Building + Growing a Community of Practice

The community is about the members – first, foremost, always. The first question organizers should ask, Brian advises, is ‘What are you interested in?’ or, better yet, ‘what do you care about?’ Organizers should focus on serving their community, not their own agendas.
Don’t be afraid to fail. Accept the fact that not everything will work out as you expect, Sean says. “That’s totally okay. As CoP leaders, our job is not to direct the community; it’s to facilitate the effort on their behalf based on the direction our members say they want to go.”
CoP Size Doesn’t Matter. The CoP you launch or join doesn’t have to be large. “Upstate Product Meetup’s first gathering was like five people,” Sean says. “But it worked because the people who attended were there to talk about what they were doing as product managers – a topic we all shared and wanted to talk about.”
Balance in-person and virtual events. When you first get going, start with in-person events, Brian says. Then, as your community matures, you can mix in virtual events to ease some of the logistical challenges.
Provide a safe, inclusive environment. Attendees, especially first-timers, will be anxious. You can help relieve some of that social anxiety by doing the little things: provide directions and signage to help folks find your location, supply name tags and markers, show excitement about greeting your guests and introducing them to others, and stay positive.

Communities of practice offer opportunities beyond honing your craft. Sure, you’ll have lots of opportunity to learn and to give back to others. But maybe the greatest discovery you’ll make is how to create real human experiences that foster enduring relationships among your community.

The bottom line is this: Come with an open mind. Expect to make a connection. And remember: you have to play if you want to win.

A limited number of tickets are still available for the 2024 Product + Design Conference, June 27-28, in Rochester, NY. Reserve your seat now!

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What’s the best way to align product strategy with business goals? How can product managers communicate product value to the go-to-market side of the house? Rich Mironov, a 40-year veteran of product management and author of The Art of Product Management 2d, joins Product Momentum to address these and other vexing challenges in the world of product management.

Rich remains a good friend of ITX; he delivered a workshop and keynote at the 2023 ITX Product + Design Conference, and this episode marks his second visit to the podcast — his first visit coming 4 years ago.

Know Your Audience: Speaking the Language of Business

“Anytime I talk to business folks about something that doesn’t have currency symbols in it, I’m pretty much assuming they’re not listening,” Rich jokes. So it’s important for product managers to back up whatever you’re saying with economics. Explain why the company cares, instead of why the product team cares. “It’s a basic ‘know your audience’ thing,” Rich says.

Translating Use Cases into Financial Cases

Folks in product, engineering, and design could talk for hours about how we build stuff: the features and workflows, the algorithms and sequence, the code deployments and backlogs, Rich says. “But the go-to-market folks don’t really care what happens in the kitchen. They just want to get their meal on time and have it be hot and tasty.”

What they care about is the outcome of all that work. Will it lead to more customers, lower churn, and opening new markets? And then, of course, will it lead to more money?

Someone Has To Lead This Dance

Even in the absence of a company strategy, product teams can still build a really good product. But if it doesn’t fit the market we’re in or doesn’t meet the needs of our users, it just wanders out there.

Rich provides guidance on how to manage product strategy when there isn’t a clear company strategy from above. “The company strategy is bigger than the product strategy,” Rich observes. “But if nobody else is pushing, then I’m pushing so that everyone around the table can see the options we have. Someone has to lead this dance.”

In July 2024, Rich Mironov is offering a class for product managers wondering about how to move up the management ladder. Rich is also speaking and conducting workshop events in the Fall 2024 in Hamburg and Lisbon. Learn more.

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Back in episode 132 of Product Momentum, Janna Bastow talked about using AI tools to do much of the “grunt work” product managers and UX researchers do so that they can spend more time on the higher-value work that’s actually helping to transform product building. In this episode, John Haggerty and Prerna Singh go a bit deeper explaining how AIs can expedite – and simplify – those mundane, repetitive tasks to analyze qualitative data compiled from reams of user experience research.

John and Prerna will conduct a pair of workshops at the ITX Product + Design Conference, in Rochester, NY on June 27-28.

Leveraging AI for Customer Research

John’s workshop will include a comprehensive overview of AI applications in product management, covering key topics like product feedback analysis, churn prediction and retention, risk assessment, competitive intelligence, etc. “AI is really good at doing things like sentiment analysis, topic modeling, named entity recognition,” he says. But it can be a lot to take in. “The best, fastest way to get familiar with AI is to just play with it. Just have fun, go out and use it, whatever it is.”

Embracing the Data We Already Have

Prerna’s workshop in Rochester will help attendees understand the data we already have — and how might we leverage it to make better customer decisions. Gathering customer research doesn’t need to be some extensive, intensive effort, she says, “but is really something that we should be doing on a continuous basis to make higher quality decisions.”

Bias, Ethics, and AI

Both John and Prerna stress the importance of understanding AI biases, ethics by design, and ensuring equity in training data. They also highlight the significance of “preserving human elements in user research,” such as non-verbal cues and emotional feedback, to maintain genuine human connections.

Be sure to catch the entire episode to grab a few tips from John Haggerty about AI prompt engineering and learn why Prerna Singh believes humans are becoming more comfortable responding to an AI researcher than to another person — and the new frontier of opportunity this creates. Better yet, reserve your seat for the ITX Product + Design Conference, in Rochester, NY on June 27-28.

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As Holly Hester-Reilly explains, “Intuition isn’t magic. People who have good product intuition know this, because they’ve worked hard over time through lots of hard practice to build it up – and build better products in the process.” Holly is the founder and CEO of H2R Product Science (and a good friend of Product Momentum). We jumped at the chance to catch up with Holly right after her talk at the New York Product Conference.

3 Pillars of the Product Science Strategy

The product managers who develop this intuition have learned real, tangible skills, benefitting from an evidence-based scientific approach to get there. In her keynote, Holly touched on the three pillars of her product science strategy:

Evidence-based product strategy. A plan for how you will win in the marketplace.
Continuous Discovery + Delivery. Gathering evidence and new learnings with every build.
Empowered teams. Aligned on outcomes, trained and supported with context and tools.

Product managers, regardless of experience or seniority, can develop their own product intuition by applying the methods embedded in this strategy to learn more about their customers, their market, and their product. Evidenced-based decisionmaking helps validate our assumptions, test ideas, and measure outcomes.

Holly’s Key Takeaways

We’ve only summarized them here, so you’ll want to watch or listen to catch every nugget:

Not every outcome is equally important or equally uncertain. You need to prioritize the outcomes that matter most to your customers and your business, and assess their risks.
It is not enough to be right; you also have to be persuasive. Evidence strengthens your hand as you seek buy-in from stakeholders and team members.
Practice the Built-Learned-Planning demo. “Planning” is another way of saying what you ‘intend to learn.’

In 2022, Holly Hester-Reilly delivered a workshop and keynote at ITX’s Product + Design Conference. The 2024 Conference features John Maeda, Denise Tilles, Ryan Rumsey, Cliff Gilley, and more. Reserve your seat now.

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Among the many hats product managers wear is that of change agent. In many respects, product management is change management. PMs always seem to be flexing their approach to new circumstances, adapting to evolving markets and technologies, and side-stepping organizational landmines. “It’s hard,” says Zoia Kozakov, “especially when the change you’re trying to bring about might actually move the needle.” Zoia heads up device-based Digital Wallets at JPMorgan Chase.

Product Momentum caught up with Zoia Kozakov following her talk at the 2024 NY Product Conference, where she shared her observations on change management (and resistance to it) within the context of innovation and organizational culture. In her keynote and during our conversation, Zoia offered 3 key takeaways:

Embrace the Momentum

Not surprisingly, everyone here on the podcast team believes strongly in the power of momentum; Zoia builds on this notion, encouraging product managers to establish a mindset of continuous wins to keep team members motivated. “Building momentum with continuous wins is a way to keep everybody well-spirited,” Zoia says. “But remember that what keeps you well spirited is likely very different from what keeps me well spirited.”

Recognize the Symptoms of Resistance

Zoia highlights the dangers of organizational apathy as a symptom of momentum-sapping resistance. “To me, disassociation is the worst one,” Zoia adds, “and it shows up when that person who derails your meeting (or doesn’t speak up at all) becomes the villain of your whole change management effort.”

Find Your Innovation-Culture Fit

Zoia introduced the NYPC audience to the notion of innovation-culture fit – and maybe even coined a new term in the process. Product managers often experience resistance to change because the organization’s culture of innovation doesn’t align with their own. “PMs need to evaluate the innovation fit,” Zoia advises. “If working on process enhancement feels like innovation to you, then you should go work at the company that sees the world that way. But if you want to build a rocket ship, there are some that do that too.”

Zoia’s journey reminds us that change management is not just about implementing new strategies, but also about fostering a culture of continuous improvement, proactive engagement, and innovation alignment.

ITX’s 2024 Product + Design Conference is fast approaching! Reserve your ticket now to hear from John Maeda, Denise Tilles, Ryan Rumsey, John Haggerty, Prerna Singh, and more.

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As a profession, product managers have been battling through some pretty lean times of late. Layoffs in big tech, market uncertainty across the board, and steep competition for fewer vacancies keep many of us up at night. All the more reason, as Denise Tilles explains, that product operations is more important now than ever.

In this episode of Product Momentum, recorded live at the NY Product Conference, Denise introduces us to this fairly new phenomenon called product operations (aka, “product ops”). She says that exploring product ops solely through the lens of sustained market challenges is short-sighted.

Establish Strong Product Culture

“We all need to be more operationally efficient and crisp when we’re doing more with less,” Denise says. But it’s more than survival; it’s also about establishing the strong product culture that will enable organizations to scale for growth, she adds, “which is the goal.”

Part of it is just having a core understanding of what product operations is, Denise continues — and what it is not. “Product operations is not supplanting product management; it’s enabling it.”

Helping PMs Contribute Real Value

Product management still makes the decisions, she says. Product operations facilitates that process; it’s all about giving product managers the leverage and flexibility to contribute opportunities that offer real impact.

Product operations relieves product managers of time spent on “the work around the work” – by providing (as Denise and co-author Melissa Perri write in their new book, Product Operations) providing three key pillars: data insights, customer market research, and process/practices.

If you want to hear more from Denise Tilles, be sure to register for the ITX 2024 Product + Design Conference, June 27-28 in Rochester, NY, where she will be delivering a keynote on conference day 2.

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In this episode of Product Momentum, Laura Barnard invites us to imagine the strong business outcomes our organizations can realize when we create space for strategy and execution to work in concert, instead of at odds. Founder of PMO Strategies and author of The Impact Engine (available Sept. 2024), Laura has been a driving force behind the integration of project management and organizational strategy, helping clients discover the mindset shift that improves how organizations execute strategies through projects.

Sharing the Mindset Shift

The power behind this approach is that the burden for the mindset shift is shared by both the project manager (or project management office (PMO)) and the business executive. As the PMO works to understand the business leader’s desired outcomes (and to speak their language), the business leader begins to see the PMO as a strategic partner in solving their challenges.

“There’s actually a world where product people, project people, and business leaders happily coexist because they’re all doing their part to achieve business goals,” Laura says. “If you’re wasting time and energy defending turf and protecting egos, your business leaders won’t take you seriously. “The only thing they care about is, ‘what are you doing to help us achieve our strategic goals,’ Laura adds.

Shifting Left

A few episodes back, cybersecurity specialist Paul Connaghan spoke about embedding a security mindset into your software as early in the development process as possible. This “shift left” approach works for project management too. Too often, eager executives begin to execute strategy before they have a project plan in place.

“If we set those projects up for success before they start, we’d have this positive ripple effect of benefit to the rest of the life cycle of strategy delivery, project execution, and strategy realization, where you get those better business outcomes,” Laura says.

Facilitating Complex Change

Effective change management is about helping people understand the reason for change, and then bringing them along with you through the process. The secret, Laura continues, is to make the change about the people we’re serving in a way that puts them in the driver’s seat instead of feeling like they’re being dragged behind the car. People want autonomy, freedom, a sense of control, and the ability to be a part of the solution, Laura adds. “People aren’t resistant to change; they’re resistant to having change done to them.”

Join Laura Barnard and PMOs around the world in celebrating International PMO Day, May 14, 2024! Learn more.

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When you’re communicating as a product leader, how often do you consider what your audience needs to hear…at that precise moment in time? How do you deliver your message in a way that they can understand? Product coach Gabrielle Bufrem, in her keynote at the New York Product Conference (NYPC), says that “communication is effective only when it’s actually heard and interpreted.” In other words, just because you’ve said it doesn’t mean you’ve landed it.

Communication Is a ‘Soft Skill’?

This is especially relevant for product teams and their leaders, Gabi continues, because “product problems are people problems, and a lot of them are solved by really good communication.”

More than mere words and delivery, good communication is about timing (when to communicate). It’s about volume (how much to communicate). And it’s about perspective (audience context).

And they call communication a “soft skill.”

Timing and Context Matter

Regardless of where you are in your product management career, Gabi adds, understanding what to communicate, when to communicate it, and what that communication means in the context of your audience’s experience is vital to your effectiveness as a leader.

In our world of building software – often accompanied by lengthy, overlapping time horizons – you have to balance what you say about the long-term product vision with what you say in the short term about the next MVP release. All the factors that drive your what, when, and how – i.e., message, tone, sense of excitement vs. urgency, audience, etc. – create all sorts of variables that require close attention.

Start With Why

Perhaps Simon Sinek said it best with his book, Start with Why – a sentiment Gabi echoed during our conversation.

“Before product managers can get to how, we need to ask ourselves why. That is, ‘why am I communicating this? What am I trying to achieve?’ And if the answer doesn’t feel like something that’s helpful, is it right for me to communicate this now, or is there a different way that I can say it?”

Missed Gabi’s keynote? No worries; you can catch our conversation here, recorded live with Product Momentum!

If you were unable to attend the New York Product Conference in person, find out what you missed by reading our conference summary: Product Perspectives: Recapping the 2024 New York Product Conference.

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Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

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As the saying goes, not to decide is to decide. And, as April Dunford explains in this episode of Product Momentum, ‘not to decide’ — that is, the customer’s own inability to make a decision — swipes 40-60% of the average B2B salesperson’s revenue pipeline. (source: The JOLT Effect, by Matthew Dixon). B2B selling is hard, but the purchase side of the transaction is no walk in the park either. Call it what you want: dissonance, doubt, second-guessing. The anxiety that comes with the customer’s desire to avoid making a mistake can be paralyzing.

Recording Live at NYPC

Recording live from the New York Product Conference, April Dunford (author of Sales Pitch and Obviously Awesome) explains further: it’s not that buyers have determined that status quo is the better option. It’s that buyers simply can’t get to the level of confidence they need to pull the trigger.

How can product managers and salespeople work together to make the buying process less ominous?

From Positioning to Sales Pitch

“I think we need to approach it with the idea of ‘how can we be helpful to prospects,’ to help them make [these tough] decisions,” April says. “But at the same time, our mission is to sell stuff, right? So we need to communicate: ‘Why pick us over the other guys? What’s the value that we can deliver that no one else can?’ If we’re going to do that, we need a structure.”

Crafting a Compelling Story

April explains that the structure begins with understanding your positioning and then building a pitch that reflects that positioning. From that framework, “product and sales can work together to build a pitch that meets the needs of the Sales team in terms of doing discovery, handling objections, and crafting a compelling story that accurately reflects our product.” Perhaps as importantly, it also helps the buyer make a difficult choice and feel confident about it.

Learn more about how this structure works when you catch the entire podcast episode with April Dunford.

Want to hear more from April? Check out our earlier episode, How To Get the Positioning Right.

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Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

The Jolt Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision

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Integrating AI tools into the product management workflow isn’t about cutting humans out of the loop. There’s nothing in the product manager playbook saying, “yeah, yeah, just build this idea and ship it.” Instead, as ProdPad co-founder and CEO Janna Bastow suggests, use AI tools to remove some of the grunt work so that we can spend more time working on the important stuff that’s helping to transform product management.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Janna rejoins Paul and ITX Product Manager Sean Murray to discuss how AI tools are driving the transformation of Product Management. (Catch our first conversation with Janna here: The Product Leader’s Dilemma: Balancing Possibility, Predictability).

Swap Out the Grunt Work To Focus on the Premium

So much of what we do is just grunt work, Janna says, repetitive tasks that require little in the way of expertise. “AI tools remove a lot of that pain,” she added. “That’s the sort of thing that product managers can easily outsource to a GPT-type agent to help us reduce our effort on.”

But the real power of AI comes not in streamlining existing tasks, but in “creating time for higher-level tasks that require human interaction, like talking to customers and stakeholders and using those conversations to figure out what our strategy should be.”

AI as Strategic Copilot

Janna sees AI as more of a sidekick than a replacement for human engagement. “I really like the term ‘copilot’ that’s been flying around,” she says, highlighting an AI strong suit in providing insights and feedback that guide product managers’ decision-making and strategy development.

“[AI] is a copilot, an assistant. a sidekick,” she adds. “And it’s there to help us get to the point that we can communicate or make decisions faster and better. It’s all about making sure the whole org is making better products, and the product team is empowered to do so.”

Lowering Barriers of Entry Into Product Management

Years ago, would-be product managers steered away from the role – voluntarily and otherwise. As Janna explains, “The assumption was that we needed a computer science degree or that we should know how to code.” AI tools have lowered that barrier – maybe even removed it – attracting a more diverse range of talent. “It’s going to open product management up to people who otherwise weren’t going to look down this path.”

Learn more from Janna Bastow by reading her blog and checking out her webinars, talks, and podcast.

Be sure to catch Product Momentum – recording live from The Podcast Zone – at NY Product Conference. April 18 at The Times Center in midtown Manhattan. Join the Product Momentum team as we chat with conference keynotes April Dunford, Gabrielle Bufrem, Zoia Kozakov, and Holly Hester-Reilly.

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When product development teams build new software tools and systems, they like to start with the end in mind by nudging quality assurance and security scanning closer to the early stages of the process. Paul Connaghan, Principal Application Security Consultant at RiverSafe in London, UK, says this “shift left” approach goes straight to the heart of business operations by embedding a security mindset in the underlying architecture, in UX and UI design, and in the QA and app hosting apparatus.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Paul sat down with Paul Gebel and Jonathan Coupal, ITX’s VP of Infrastructure, stressing the importance of moving security considerations to the earliest possible phase of the SDLC (software development life cycle).

Shift Left
“Shift left has been something of focus for clients a few years now,” Paul says. “Once we’ve actually written some code, we want to test that code as soon as we can.”

Paul’s passion for app and system security, and threat modeling specifically, is obvious. It’s a task typically performed by security folks, Paul adds, as it can be quite involved to produce threat models for things that we don’t entirely understand. Nonetheless, he advocates for teaching product teams to do this for themselves.

Build a Security-Focused Culture
“It helps us address the skill challenge, because there’s just not enough people in cyber to effectively secure all the applications and products that are out there,” Paul shares. “But it also gets teams into the habit of having daily conversations about security, which is fundamentally really the thing that’s going to help close the [security knowledge] gap and build a security-focused culture.”

Question: within each sprint, how much capacity does your team allocate for security? None? 5%? More? Be sure to catch the entire episode to learn Paul Connaghan’s expert recommendation.

Learn more about application security and threat modeling by catching our earlier Product Momentum episode, with guest Chris Romeo.

Product Momentum Hits the Road. The Product Momentum team will be recording live at The New York Product Conference, powered by INDUSTRY. On April 18, at The Times Center in midtown Manhattan, attendees can watch and listen to our conversations with April Dunford, Holly Hester-Reilly, and more of NYPC’s amazing keynote speakers.

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Product strategy is the guiding light that illuminates the path to success for any product. However, articulating and executing this strategy is often easier said than done, says product management expert Roman Pichler. In this episode of Product Momentum, Roman shares valuable insights into the essence of product strategy and how to effectively navigate its complexities.

Defining Product Strategy

Strategy means different things to different people, Roman says. “I would suggest the strategy is a high-level plan: it describes the approach that we’ve chosen to make or keep a product successful.” Strategy and vision are not the same, he notes. “Strategy encompasses crucial elements such as the value proposition, target markets, business goals, and standout features. Without a clearly articulated strategy, product teams risk missing out on the benefits that strategic alignment brings.”

Responsibility, Ownership, and Influence

Traditionally, product strategy formulation has been viewed as the sole responsibility of top management. Roman advocates for a different, more inclusive approach, where product managers and cross-functional teams actively participate in strategic decision-making.

“A single person hardly ever has all the right information, the right data to make the right decisions,” Roman says. “I find it’s better to delegate the product strategy – or the decisionmaking authority around product strategy – to the people who are in charge or who work on those products, and then coach them.

“Empowering product managers to own and evolve strategies not only fosters motivation, but also prevents bottlenecks and promotes continuous adaptation.”

Empowerment and Trust

When it comes to empowerment, two factors are at play, Roman offers. “One we refer to as ‘personal power; that’s aligned with the organizational aspect. But when we look into what individual contributors and product people can do to empower themselves, that would be strengthening our expert power: the ‘referent power.’

The better we are at earning and exhibiting referent power – at crafting and setting a vision, creating and evolving a product strategy, and at understanding the specific markets and market segments our product serves – the more people are likely to trust us.

Product Momentum Takes the Show on the Road. The Product Momentum team will be recording live at The New York Product Conference, powered by INDUSTRY. On April 18, at The Times Center in midtown Manhattan, attendees can watch and listen to our conversations with April Dunford, Holly Hester-Reilly, and more of NYPC’s amazing keynote speakers.

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When Jared Spool first visited Product Momentum a few years ago, he talked about the struggle designers feel when they’re directed to add new features to a design without first understanding the problem to be solved. “Great designers don’t fall in love with their solutions,” he advised us. “They fall in love with their problems.”

In today’s episode, Jared chats with Paul Gebel and co-host Christina Halladay, Director of UX at ITX. With his trademark wit and wisdom, he doubles down on that advice by describing what he’s been up to since we last spoke, as a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre.

“I’ve been helping UX leaders function at that strategic level, bringing out the value of their contribution and helping them think about the right problems.”

Strategic UX vs. Tactical UX

“Most of the UX practiced these days is tactical UX,” Jared adds, “by the folks who have really great skills who can create designs and do usability tests and write fantastic content. But there’s a limit to how much they can contribute to the organization.”

On the other hand, he says strategic UX helps us get to the root of our users’ problems. It’s about introducing the power of UX early in the product development process and focusing on shipping the right thing. Before we can do that, though, we first need to make sure we’ve identified the right problem.

Strategic UX Drives Outcomes

Tactical UX is output-driven; strategic UX is outcome-driven.

“With strategic UX, we’re finally applying all the great things that UX people do – their skills and talents, the capabilities, the knowledge, the experience, the expertise – to make sure the organization is being competitive and that we’re actually solving big problems for their users.”

Leaders + Vision

Be sure to catch the entire episode to hear Jared Spool discuss leaders (as opposed to managers) and vision: “Leaders inspire others to rally behind a compelling Vision, which is the story that articulates a possible future (as opposed to a ‘do-nothing’ future) and inspires action from all levels of the organization.”

Product Momentum Takes the Show on the Road. Sean, Paul, and the rest of the Product Momentum team will be recording live at The New York Product Conference, powered by INDUSTRY. On April 18, at The Times Center in midtown Manhattan, attendees can watch and listen to our conversations with some of NYPC’s amazing keynote speakers.

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Trust is the glue that sustains personal relationships. Likewise, trust in AI’s source data holds the key to its future and our confident use of it, says Scott Ambler, Agile data strategist, consulting methodologist, author, and keynote speaker. Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Scott joins Sean and Paul to dig into the importance of data quality in AI applications, understanding and managing bias in AI, and the essential role humans play in harnessing AI’s potential – and its risks.

“If you’re trying to use AI to make data-driven decisions, it becomes a garbage in, garbage out situation,” Scott offers. “It’s really that straightforward. A lot of organizations have let their data debt increase over the years. As AI ingests low-quality data, you’ll get a low-quality answer.” That’s when fractures appear in your hard-earned trust.

Scott also explores the issue of pervasive bias in AI systems and pinpoints its source, underscoring the need for us humans to develop ethical practices that ensure fairness and equity in AI-driven outcomes.

“There will always be bias in your data,” Scott adds. “Humans are biased; it is what it is. And your data will reflect that bias in your business processes. So when you train your AI on that, part of the training process has to be to detect whatever biases are there.”

The key, Scott says, is to understand how humans can effectively leverage AI technologies. While AI offers tremendous potential for augmenting human capabilities and streamlining processes, it is not a panacea.

“When you look at it at a high level, AI is magical. Some of these Gen AIs are just incredible,” Scott concludes. We want to think it’s magic. But it’s not magic. It’s just hard work.”

Scott cautions against blind reliance on AI-generated outputs and emphasizes human oversight and judgment in validating and contextualizing AI-driven insights. Before AI, there was a human in that “last mile” who could filter out the garbage from the good stuff. And the problem now that AI can’t do that.”

This human-centric approach may be the key to AI’s future. If we acknowledge the complementary relationship between AI and human intelligence, maybe we’ll also recognize – and trust – that AI technologies will enhance human endeavors rather than replace them.

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In this episode, Building Better Games co-founders Ben Carcich and Aaron Smith join Product Momentum, offering an inside look at the contributions the video game industry has brought to enterprise tech – and vice versa. Specifically, Ben and Aaron share a fresh take on how holistic leadership and product management help us build things that matter to the people who use our products.

Aaron shares his personal journey where games provided a safe space for him to reinvent himself, shaping him into the leader he is today. And Ben reflects on how his experiences in game development nurtured his thinking and approach to holistic leadership; he emphasizes the challenges and responsibilities of leading a team of gamers tied to the experience only by their ongoing desire to participate.

“Here I was,” Ben says, “bringing together a group of people with disparate interests, and disparate skill levels…. I wasn’t paying them to be there. They were there by choice. I was leading them, and they were following me by choice. There’s all this stuff that you accept as a responsibility, … but you don’t view it as a burden because you’re happy to be there with that group of people.”

Aaron uses the analogy of a 3-deck ship to explain holistic leadership, with the top deck representing process, the next level is product, and the lowest level – below the water line – is culture: how people are actually behaving.

“As leaders, we have to care about culture first, that lowest level,” Aaron adds. “That’s what holistic leadership means: start at the most foundational level and work your way up. Don’t start with challenges at the most surface level and work your way down. By the time you think about what’s truly important, your ship will have sunk. Leaders need to internalize responsibility for that to be a holistic leader.”

Catch the entire conversation with Ben Carcich and Aaron Smith , and how they talk about the value product managers contribute to their enterprise tech roles – but also how that same value might be realized in the video games world where the term is rarely used.

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On the eve of its 20th anniversary, Flickr’s approach as a community-centric product continues to propel the company forward. For Stephanie Cantor, Flickr’s Senior Director of Product, the Flickr community extends beyond its 112 million global users; it is integral to the product itself. From ideation to prototyping, Flickr involves its users in every step, sustaining a platform that fosters creativity, connection, and serendipity.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Paul and Stephanie reminisce about her “amazing journey” to Flickr and reflect on the impact she has made in just her first year on the job.

Leading a team of smart, talented people presents challenges at any organization, no matter its scale. But imagine joining a team where the average tenure of your new colleagues is 6-8 years. This was Stephanie’s challenge when she arrived a little over a year ago. Her approach was simple, straightforward, and powerful.

“Everyone knows that I don’t do anything in a vacuum,” she explains. “I’m open and transparent…and very much into collaboration. Back in the day it was just me, an engineer, and I would make really horrible wireframes. And now, I love collaborating with everyone and I think that that’s like the biggest part of my product management philosophy.”

Listen to this episode to hear more from Stephanie Cantor, including:

The future of Flickr – remote work, a mobile platform, and sustainability
How Agile is reshaping Flickr
Inspiring old and new users
The “creative past lives” of all PMs
Her product management philosophy

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Product managers seem to enjoy talking about how tough it is to be a product manager. And it is no matter the context of your specific business. Fortunately, as the role becomes more professionalized – and more populated – product communities are popping up and providing ready access to others we can learn from, network with, and vent our frustrations to. All of which, Petra Wille says, underscores the significance of product communities and the need for a collaborative mindset.

Petra is a product coach, author of STRONG Product People and STRONG Product Communities, and co-organizer of the Product at Heart conference, in Hamburg, Germany.

The fact is, “we can’t innovate without involving,” Petra says, emphasizing the collaborative nature of successful innovation. It’s the sense of belonging, of being in the same game and facing similar struggles, that draws product managers to one another at community events, Petra adds.

“Before you decide to join a product community or even attend a meetup,” Petra advises, “make sure you know what you want to get out of it. Understand your personal and professional goals.”

Some product managers want to learn a new technical skill. Others are looking to benchmark their organization’s product management practice against others. And some just want to vent, Petra continues. Find the right fit, she jokes, “because there’s nothing more frustrating than getting a lot of helpful tips when the only thing that you wanted to do was release some steam.”

Petra tailors her coaching and guidance in ways that align as well with veteran product leaders as with freshly minted ones. The one constant is that no matter where you are in your career, great product people are always learning and collaborating with others.

Be sure to catch the entire episode with Petra Wille for take on upcoming trends in 2024, including:

Profitability and the sustainability of ‘digital business models’
Moral & ethical concerns around AI
Regulatory compliance with ecological restrictions, especially in the EU
First principles thinking, now from the perspective of a ‘global product community’

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In product, it’s easy to lock in on a user-focused or customer-centric mindset. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be if we lose sight of the bigger picture. As product managers, we have a business to run. We have team members to grow and develop. We’re responsible for broader financial metrics. Shelly Kalish describes this “zooming out” approach as a way to take a more macro view of our role and establish some context for it.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Paul Gebel is joined by Shelly Kalish, a global product leader with over ten years of experience at companies like Meta/Facebook, American Express, and now SitterCity.

“Zooming out is centered on taking a step back from our product to be able to see a bigger picture,” Shelly adds. “It’s everything from learning about market trends, technology, competition, etc. And it requires us to understand the goals of the business from the perspective of sales, marketing, and finance.” Put another way, it requires communication, that critical skill underlying the “three-legged stool” of product management: impact, optics, and execution.

Shelly also discusses the importance of “zooming in” not only in operational terms of examining the day-to-day optics and communication strategies,but also how we can grow to be a general asset for the organizations and teams we serve as product leaders. This zoom-in, zoom-out approach can be useful both for product growth as well as our individual career growth, Shelly explains.

Be sure to catch the entire episode to hear Shelly’s thoughts about:

How lateral growth can revitalize your career
How to prioritize and manage your seemingly endless to-do list
How inclusivity and creativity drive innovation

The post 124 / Mastering Product Management: ‘Zooming Out’ for Strategic Clarity, with Shelly Kalish appeared first on ITX Corp..

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“I have Cerebral Palsy,” says Dave Dame, Senior Director of Product Accessibility for Windows at Microsoft®. “But my money doesn’t. So if you want my money, you better build a product or a service I can use, or I’m going to spend my disposable income somewhere else.”

Imagine hearing that from the estimated 2 billion individuals worldwide who identify as having a disability. Not to mention those have a disability but don’t identify as such.“ So that’s 2 billion minimally that we know of,” Dave adds.

The fact is, he continues, we’re all going to be disabled someday. “It’s just that some of us beat you to it. So when we design products for someone like me today, we’re also designing for everyone else in the future. So why not get ahead?”

In today’s conversation with Paul Gebel and co-host Emma Rizzo, a UX Writer and Content Strategist at ITX, Dave explains that we’ve all needed accessibility features – and will need them again in the future – whether our disabilities are permanent, temporary, or situational.

Accessibility features allow those of us in the disabled community to do things they were never able to do before, Dave says. They can be innovative, and frankly, life changing. And for everyone else who is not yet disabled, these features open more options for use and often allow product people to discover the routes with the fewest pain points.

All this can be intimidating to consider. Dave Dame offers the following advice: “Don’t worry about saying the wrong thing; worry about saying nothing.” As product people, we are bound to make mistakes, that is when the learning occurs.

Interested in more on the subject of inclusive design and digital accessibility? Check out the following content from Product Momentum and ITX:

A 3-part blog series, authored by Susana Pallero, ITX Accessibility Consultant and a CPACC-certified Accessibility Solutions Specialist.

Digital Accessibility: Making the Case to Protect a Human Right
The Business Case for Accessible Design
Accessible Design Inspires Innovation for All

Product Momentum’s conversation with Sheri Byrne-Haber.

Digital Accessibility & Inclusive Design: Understanding the Why

Q&A with Antonella Iselli, a Senior UX Designer at ITX.

Becoming a Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies

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What’s the point of building a product if it doesn’t actually help to solve a user problem? And how do you grow and scale your product without understanding consumers’ behavior with it? Quincy Olatunde, Peacock’s VP of Products, Direct-to-Consumer explores these questions through the lens of data – what he calls the third leg of the 3-legged stool.

Only when working in concert do the interface, the platform, and the data support the product, Quincy says. In the same way it’s true for stools it’s true for software.

Quincy also talks about the nuanced distinction between being data-driven and data-informed. One constrains our curiosity, the other nurtures it. Being data driven, he adds, means that everything you do is tied to the data. Being data-informed, on the other hand, combines art with science to find the right solution.

As subtle as the difference seems on its face, it lies at the heart of what it means to be a product manager or leader – the ability to influence people, to lead through influence. “Half the time you don’t have the authority because you’re working across so many teams and departments to make your product successful,” he says.

It’s a reality that requires us to be curious about what can be, to be vulnerable in front of our colleagues, and to be comfortable asking questions when we don’t know.

On this last point, Quincy Olatunde leaves us with two all-time classic quotes:

“Don’t let data be the limitation of your imagination.” In other words, if our approach to problem-solving is limited to being data-driven, there is only so much that we can grow.
“Wake up stupid every day.” Borrowed from a colleague, Quincy reminds us to embrace each day “with the curiosity of a child.”

Tune in to catch the entire conversation with Quincy; see how the product truths that apply to his world of global media apply to us all.

Subscribe to Product Momentum now and be notified when the next episode drops!

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It hurts to admit, but product designers and teams don’t always know what our users need. We need to seek out user feedback and create ways for them to tell us spontaneously, often in the heat of the moment. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Jay Brewer & Zhuldyz Alimbek – fresh from the stage at Pendomonium 2023 – join Sean Flaherty and Kyle Psaty to talk about UX research and customer feedback and the essential value they deliver throughout the product development process.

User roles have become increasingly specialized in recent years, and so have user demands. At the same time, the pace of change is accelerating wildly. Taken together, these factors create a scenario that only adds to the importance and urgency of gathering feedback regularly – and from a variety of sources.

Zhuldyz, a UX researcher, highlights the power of spontaneous feedback, “which is received in the moment of frustration. That’s super important for us. It’s a different type of emotion,” she adds, “and it’s a different sense of responsibility you have as UX researchers or design team. It’s crucial to pay attention to this type of feedback, as it often reveals critical pain points and usability issues.”

Jay, Sr. VP of Digital Product Design, says it’s also important to find a balance between the spontaneous and interruptive feedback, as well as the negative and the positive.

“Finding that balance tends to even out those data doubters or those feedback doubters that we’re not actually getting a representative of engaged, kind of frustrated customers, not engaged customers. We need to go back and make sure we have a well-rounded set of feedback.”

Be sure to catch the entire episode with Jay Brewer & Zhuldyz Alimbek; they bring the UX perspective into the frame, doubling down on the power of collaboration within the product trio and the empathy required not just between builder and user – but among researchers, designers, and the product team as well.

It’s the ideal way to align user needs with product roadmaps to ensure that the right solutions are delivered.

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Yochai Konig, Vice President, Machine Learning & AI at Ada, has worked in product and specialized in AI-enabled capabilities for more than 2 decades. All of a sudden, it seems, the rest of the world is catching on.

Yet despite the recent buzz, many remain confused about how AI truly works. There was a lot of effort to create AI by learning from how humans do things and somehow transferring those methods to a machine, Yochai explains.

“But AI is not about this. AI is not functioning as humans do…. Instead, it’s about ‘let’s make as few assumptions, and insert as least bias, as possible.” In other words, let’s provide the raw data and the objective function and use the best AI in the world to find the best way for AI to do it.

“The purpose of AI is to serve the application,” Yochai Konig says, “meaning you have to set a measurable objective for the use of AI in the product.” It’s a theme that echoes comments from Pendo’s Todd Olson and Trisha Price in our earlier Live from Pendomonium episode, Entering the Age of Intelligence.

Yochai describes the field of AI as emerging – or, more precisely, emergent. But in doing so, he applies a unique approach to the definition. “In its most simplistic form, emergent describes what happens as the model gets to a different scale; and suddenly, new capabilities emerge.”

And that’s where we are with AI, large language models, and the like. As a community, we are making progress to understand this, he adds. “But some of these emergent capabilities just happened, the model developed this concept and has outputted it. Now, we’re trying to reverse engineer and explain how it is doing all of this stuff.”

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If you believe all you read about AI, it’s easy to come away feeling that it’s the cure for all ills. But in many ways, it’s a solution in search of a problem. In this episode with Pendo CEO Todd Olson and CPO Trisha Price, we move past the hype to remind ourselves, as Todd says, “AI isn’t just magical pixie dust you can sprinkle onto your products and get benefit. You still have to go back to the core product management fundamentals, which means your product has to solve real pain.”

Todd Olson & Trisha Price joined co-hosts Sean Flaherty and Kyle Psaty to kick off a 4-epiosde series of conversations with keynotes and presenters recoded live from Pendomonium 2023: A Festival of Product.

So, if AI isn’t the panacea we’ve made it out to be, how are product leaders supposed to think about it in this “age of intelligence”?

“There’s two ways to think about AI,” responds Trisha. “One is, how do I use it in my day-to-day job to make myself smarter, more efficient, and achieve my goals? And the second, how do I embed it into my product to help my users and solve real pain?”

When we connect these two components, AI tools start to feed off one another to create their own momentum.

“The more I can use AI to make my team more efficient, the more we can spend time figuring out how best to use it,” Trisha adds.

What if AI eliminated all the busy work that fills our schedules, Todd asks. Or synthesizes thousands of data points and distills them into something more actionable?

“That’s going to save time so that product leaders can now do more of the right things – e.g., negotiating with engineering, reaching out to customers, being more business- an outcome-focused.”

With AI still in its infancy, considering its potential can be an interesting exercise – exciting for some, daunting for others. Fear not, Todd says.

“Look, there’s plenty for product managers to do. AI can’t set the strategy or vision for a business, so product still has a role. But maybe AI can make it easier to go through reams of data to help inform that strategy. That’s where I think it’s really, really powerful. So hopefully we’ll be setting better strategies that won’t replace what people are doing, rather just make them better at their function.”

Catch the entire conversation with Todd Olson & Trisha Price –

Does AI actually deliberate over our prompts and questions?
The “dark age of AI” at Pendo, and how a shift in mindset cleared the way
TLMs, purpose-built for a specific function, and their applicability in the future of business
Why it’s important to “protect your data”

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In this episode, Christine Itwaru, Principal Strategist at Pendo, describes her journey from a product management role to product ops to strategy, tackling big-picture issues and leaves kernels of wisdom for us to use in our own product roles. Among them, how to strengthen the human connection between product teams and their users.

Key takeaways from our conversation with Christine Itwaru:

Product management starts with the human connection. “The human connection extends beyond the market you serve,” Christine says. “It’s internally at your company – the people who help you understand problems not just from a product perspective, but also that something they need you to solve so they can do their jobs well to help the business continue to grow.”

Product ops works to keep product teams healthy. The mission of a product ops team is to “help the product team in service of the health of the rest of the business,” Christine adds. “Product managers and product teams need to feel empowered to do their best work; product ops helps them achieve that.”

Strategy merges a macro understanding of the business with being in service to customers. Christine’s new-ish role as Pendo’s Principal Strategist allows her to remain close to the product team and Head of Product, which helps her understand their goals and how they align to product vision and company strategy. “My role combines business strategist and advisor to our customers and prospects – generally, to the entire product community.

The right way to approach AI is the same way we approach all things as product people. “Embrace AI in service of our customers,” Christine says, “and try to set ourselves up to do this thing really responsibly. We have so much to learn before we can make any definitive calls. And I love when companies are not pivoting 100%” because of some new thing that’s come up with AI.

Stay tuned for upcoming releases of Product Momentum episodes recorded live at Pendomonium 2023!

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Working in a startup brings the concept “CEO of the product” to a whole new level. Suddenly, as Gigantic CEO Michael Sacca and COO Chloe Oddleifson know well, you’re responsible for every aspect of your product’s development, launch, promotion, sales – and everything in between. Fun fact: there’s plenty to take away from the startup mindset for all us product managers.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Michael Sacca & Chloe Oddleifson share their journey, from 6 years of working together at Dribbble to now building Gigantic from the ground up. Gigantic is a product- and marketing-focused training institute that aims to fill knowledge gaps through perpetual learning.

“Michael and I were coming from a place where we knew our jobs inside and out,” Chloe says. “We knew exactly how to be useful, exactly how to bring value. And then we started Gigantic and moved into a world where it’s just us. There are no processes, there are no rules, nothing is set in stone, and there are no clear answers. We just have to pick up and figure it out.”

“It doesn’t take long to see the power of a brand,” Michael adds. “I don’t think I ever respected it before as much as I do today. We can have a better product than the competition out there, but it’s so much harder to get people’s attention” when you’re just starting out. “We can build whatever we want,” he adds, but getting the attention and going to market are much different and much harder.

“If someone wants to be the CEO of the product internally…,if you really want your head of product to be the CEO of the product, then they really need to understand those other disciplines and they need to be able to do them,” Michael says.

In many ways, that mindset becomes easier to execute when the culture that nurtures it is founded in joy.

“As we started thinking about the type of company we wanted to build, the type of culture we wanted to infuse, and the type of experience we wanted for our customers, joy was the term that best described it,” Chloe explains. “We should be able to find joy at and in the work we do because life is just too short for it to be any other way.”

Catch the entire conversation with Michael Sacca & Chloe Oddleifson to learn even more about that journey and their plans to deepen Gigantic’s impact.

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When we’re afraid to have difficult conversations, we hold ourselves back and create more frustration and work in the long run, says Marsha Acker, founder and CEO of Team Catapult. “We spend a lot of time trying to avoid conflict and the things that make us feel uncomfortable. And yet in our attempts to avoid all that, I think we create a lot of extra work for ourselves,” Marsha adds.

In today’s episode of Product Momentum, Paul and Marsha go deep on the topic of communication and leadership, exploring the structure of our communication and the role it plays in effecting personal and organizational change. Marsha is a coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and podcaster whose work is focused on communication in leadership.

“Communication sits at the core of our ability to lead,” Marsha says. We don’t all see the world in the same way, leading to gaps in understanding, she adds.

“What I’m articulating here is how I believe change happens,” Marsha explains. “When we communicate with one another, the words that we say, it’s like putting a train on a track. [That communication] moves us forward, propels us back, or just kind of keeps us stuck in a place. So I think it’s about how we communicate with one another and having a language to make sense of it that makes the difference.”

Leadership range and communicative competence are cornerstone concepts that Marsha uses to analyze the way successful leadership is measured. There’s a very specific way she helps people self-assess not only their ability to bring a variety of different communications into a conversation, but also to examine the breadth of their leadership style.

Listen to hear more from Marsha Acker in today’s episode of Product Momentum.

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Alla Weinberg, CEO of SPOKE & WHEEL, says that the key to designing relationships that resolve (even avoid) workplace tensions is to have different conversations than the ones we’re currently having. Our relentless focus on the work, she explains, distracts us from focusing on the people and making sure that we have created an organization where they feel safe.

Alla is a culture designer who has incorporated her design background with the principles of neuroscience, positive psychology, and relationship research. She is also an author; in her book, A Culture of Safety, she applies these principles to improve workplace culture. In our chat with Alla, she defines psychological safety through these lenses.

“To create psychological safety,” Alla continues, “we need to intentionally find time for conversations that are drastically, even radically different than what we are doing right now.”

Yes, we are at work to perform a job, to deliver a solution for our clients. But there are times, she says, when not talking about work creates deeper connections and, as a result, more resilient teams. Creating these connections is an opportunity to practice leadership, by introducing (if not modeling) candor and vulnerability.

“Leaders need to get vulnerable first,” she adds. “If you’re a leader and you’re seeing evidence that people don’t feel safe, you need to say that. Then ask your teams, ‘what am I doing to create that environment?’ And when they tell you, don’t be defensive or try to justify your behavior.

“Show yourself to be vulnerable and say, ‘Yes, I am doing that and I’m going to try to be better.’”

Keep in mind: psychological safety and resilience are not the same. It’s only when leaders create a psychologically safe environment for individuals that we can create resilient organizations.

Looking for more tips from Alla Weinberg to build resilience in your organization? Be sure to listen to the entire conversation.

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Success as a product manager requires finding the right balance between solving user problems and meeting rigid business demands. For Devan Goldstein, a Group Product Manager at Trello (an Atlassian product), “product management’s fundamental accountability is to ensure that the business gets what it needs out of the teams it has put in place to do the work.”

That means making sure users are getting what they need out of the product such that, in a perfect world, what they need is something that drives product market fit.

“It can’t be something they need that doesn’t create a sustainable business,” Devan says. “It can’t be something they need that is ancillary to the business’ reason for existing.”

How do we get there? Devan believes we solve this challenge by adopting a service orientation, aiming above all to help users, the business, and the team.

“Having this sense of omni-directional caring and empathy – not just for users, which is the one we talk about the most, but for your partners, for the teams that work with your partners, and for your stakeholders – helps us understand how all those overlapping needs intersect as inputs to the strategic and prioritization decisions we have to make,” he adds.

Tune in to hear Devan’s comments on the critical traits that all product managers should possess, including:

Empathy for both your users and co-workers.
Intentionality in your day-to-day interactions; nothing happens by accident.
Integrity and humility, even when they might compete.

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Vision and Strategy are terms often used interchangeably. It’s easy to do, especially when the future is racing toward us. But when we conflate the notion of vision and strategy — as Eastman Kodak learned the hard way years ago — we confuse our objective with the path to achieving it. How can we adjust our mindset to think in terms of re-imagining the future of our products in a way that helps us avoid this trap?

In today’s episode, Sean and Paul are joined by Erica Orange, Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer of The Future Hunters, one of the world’s leading futurist consulting firms. Erica uses futures thinking to help us understand the pace of change and evaluate trends in a rapidly changing world. By slowing things down, the future’s unknowns feel less ominous, more approachable. We get better at becoming comfortable with the ambiguity we confront every day and preparing to operate effectively in uncertain environments.

Erica explains how successful companies adapt their vision-driven strategies in real-time to fit uncertain, rapidly evolving markets.

“As we go into the future, successful companies need to begin with a blank slate for each strategy and reimagine what is appropriate and effective for each,” she says. “It goes back to the things that are all tried and true. Companies that do their future and their vision and their strategies in terms of the correct mental math will be the ones that get it right.”

Hold your vision near, Erica adds, and keep multiple strategies close by. This can make it easier to abandon the ones that aren’t working.

Be sure to catch the entire episode with Erica for a fresh take on the future that can be useful regardless of your role or industry.

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It can be overwhelming to think about all of the impacts – both positive and negative – that our products might have on those who use them. In this episode, Paul is joined by Matt Bernius, friend of ITX and Principal User Researcher at Code for America. Matt discusses trauma-informed design in an approachable way …

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For years product management’s “hard skills” have gotten much of the spotlight, maybe because they’re easier to get our arms around. But as product management coach and consultant Kate Leto explains, the conversation seems to be shifting toward product leadership’s more elusive collection of “soft skills,” which she refers to as emotional intelligence. In this …

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Imagine a world where you can just be yourself. Where you can be safe and be expressive and be just how you want to show up and not be worried about being judged for it. This is the sort of community that Landing product designer Alex Crandall is helping to build. It’s a refreshing world …

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The myth of product management is that human complexity can be reduced to a manageable framework, one that lets us show up for work feeling confident and comfortable and ready to take on the world. Not so fast, says Matt LeMay, internationally recognized product leader, consultant, and author of Agile for Everybody and Product Management …

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Product teams emerging from 3 years of remote-work hibernation are now living through what Gavin Deadman calls the “hand-off culture.” Acquisition marketer turned product management coach, Gavin supports a product team of 150 product managers and product leaders within the division of Flutter International and Flutter Entertainment. A prolific blogger, Gavin’s writing is must-read content …

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The world may be shrinking, but it doesn’t always feel that way. As product design leaders Krissi Xenakis and Jocelyne Dittmer explain, it’s more important than ever to get aligned around culture and craft, balancing the needs of the business with the needs of the team. Especially with remote and distributed teams, collaboration around complementary …

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For more than a decade, Futures Design thinker Phil Balagtas has been developing tools for fusing the concepts of strategic foresight and speculative design with traditional design strategy. On June 22-23 at the ITX Product + Design Conference, he’ll share many of these insights. In a Day 1 workshop and Day 2 keynote, Phil will …

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Though product management remains a relatively young profession, the pandemic-induced digital transformation has accelerated its maturation at a rate far faster than it would have otherwise. Yuting Chu believes this phenomenon has positioned product managers to take a more entrepreneurial approach to product development – one that incorporates the experiences of all stakeholders, called co-creation.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Paul chats with Yuting Chu, a veteran product manager and consultant. Though his background rests in quantitative methods, Yuting also brings a human-centered, empathetic perspective to problem-solving.

Product managers are naturally collaborative, he says. As the pandemic has accelerated the growth of digital products, the importance of co-creation is greater than ever before.

“Co-creation means surfacing the various perceptions, hypotheses, and experiences that all stakeholders have,” he adds. “By linking them together, we demonstrate that they’re just different parts of the same puzzle.”

One thing we’re able to recognize through co-creation, Yuting continues, “is that just because I disagree with you doesn’t mean you’re wrong. And just because everyone agrees with me doesn’t mean I’m right. The world’s far too complex for that.”

Catch the entire conversation with Yuting, and learn about The Partner Happiness Framework – a powerful quantitative tool to help product managers surface stakeholders’ pain points and develop an action-oriented mindset for converting problems into solutions in the most targeted and helpful way.

The speaker line-up for ITX’s Product + Design Conference 2023 is set! June 22-23 in Rochester, NY. Learn more!

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The recent acceleration of artificial intelligence into the product + design space may spark more answers than questions. But the questions that persist are big ones. In this episode of Product Momentum, Aaron Usiskin, Director of UX/UI Enterprise Incubation and Enablement at Zelis, explores this philosophical head-scratcher: with AI/ML, are we at risk of losing the humanity from our human-centered design practice?

Aaron guides host Paul Gebel and guest co-host Brian Loughner, a Lead UX Designer at ITX, through his multi-level response.

“There are so many ways that AI and ML have already streamlined our process as designers and UXers,” Aaron says, “that we shouldn’t step away from it. We really should embrace it even more than we do today.”

At the same time, he concedes, “AI is based only on the things that people have done on a website or a mobile app. Plus, it’s really hard to understand how one person or a group of people are going to use your system, regardless of how much research or AI you do.

“If you really want to understand people, you have to be among them. You have to be learning with them, interacting with them, communicating with them, interviewing them. And when you’re interviewing them, it’s not writing down their answers. It’s looking into their eyes, understanding the facial recognition of what they’re doing.”

There’s no AI that’s going to be able to tell you if someone’s paying attention, he adds. “I don’t think it’s ever going to take away the humanistic factor of design out of it.”

We’re looking to a future that combines the power of AI with the fundamentals of human-centered design. Thank goodness; that sounds like a winning combination.

Be sure to catch the entire conversation with Aaron: learn how to apply AI/ML to streamline the design process – but only after you have the fundamentals of user experience in place.

Join Jesse James Garrett, Rich Mironov, and Radhika Dutt at ITX’s Product + Design Conference, June 22-23 in Rochester, NY. Final 3 speakers to be announced soon. Learn more.

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Kax Uson’s journey from employee #1 at an e-commerce start-up in the Philippines to Head of Product at Adevinta looks familiar to the path so many product managers have taken. At every turn, she’s learned the processes and tools that come with the role – and then unlearned the ones that became a burden to her effectiveness in it.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Kax guides us along her journey and offers a primer on what it means to be a successful product manager in the 21st century.

“When users look at the products we build,” she says, “they don’t care whether it was built using Kanban or Scrum or Waterfall. Our users see only the product and feel the experience we’ve delivered for them. The process that we use to get there is not relevant.”

There’s a lot of focus in the product space on ‘getting these things right versus actually getting things done.’ The outputs over the outcomes, Kax adds.

“Things to do. Rules to follow as product managers. When really, that’s just a very small part of how to build products. I feel that we’re favoring more these tools and these frameworks, rather than learning how to work with people in order to build good products.

“Our contribution [as PMs] to product building is very intangible. Our role is to bring people together, to rise through the uncertainty and make sense of things, so that other people can actually understand what’s going on and bring trust inside the room. That’s a skill that you cannot learn from school, or any camp probably…it’s a skill that you learn by practice and by getting feedback and failing in some cases.

Be sure to catch the entire pod conversation with Kax; so many more nuggets to share.

Is this a reunion of Product Momentum alumni? Not quite. It’s ITX’s Product + Design Conference 2023. June 22-23 in Rochester, NY. Featuring Radhika Dutt, Jesse James Garrett, Rich Mironov – additional speakers coming soon! Learn more.

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Product and UX professionals want their product to be ‘the next big thing.’ Right? But Google’s Neha Bansal reminds us that designing a product with everyone in mind ignores the adage, “aim small, miss small.” Instead, Neha recommends narrowing your target market to what Andrew Chen called the atomic network.

“The broader your market, the harder it is to find product-market fit,” Neha says. “Starting small allows you to analyze the root cause when something isn’t working; when you have a small base of users – an atomic network – you can pick up the phone and ask about what you can do better.”

Neha Bansal is a product leader, angel investor, and mentor to dozens of startups. She currently heads Merchant Growth and Monetization for Google’s B2B commerce business. In this episode, Neha and Paul discuss Chen’s The Cold Start Problem and how product leaders can apply the atomic network mindset to find product-market fit.

Atomic networks help you gain traction and work through problems, Neha explains. When you know your audience intimately, it is easier to connect with them and work through the barriers and frustrations they are experiencing. Neha describes this as turning ‘zero’ moments into ‘magic’ moments.

Catch the entire episode to hear Neha describe how Facebook, Uber, and Bank of America identified and expanded their atomic networks first to find product-market fit on their way to becoming household names. Neha also shares key metrics that will let you know when you’ve discovered your own.

Jesse James Garrett and Rich Mironov to keynote at ITX Product + Design Conference 2023. June 22-23, in Rochester, NY. Early-bird tickets available until April 21. Learn more!

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The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects

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Open APIs are sets of rules that enable systems to freely communicate with each other. They allow companies to “tap into the wisdom of the crowd,” Marshall Van Alstyne explains, shifting the burden of value creation to external sources. “You want people you don’t know to bring you ideas you don’t have,” he adds.

In this episode, Sean is joined by guest host Nathan Shapiro, Head of Platform Strategy and User Experience at Paychex. Together, they draw out Marshall’s expert insights on the correlation between a firm’s open APIs and the progressive growth of its financial performance over time. Marshall is a Professor of Information Economics at Boston University and co-author of the international bestseller, Platform Revolution.

Firms that open their architecture and APIs expand their ecosystem and ignite an interoperability within it, thereby creating a network effect – a phenomenon by which the value a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products.

The key, Marshall adds, is to position your firm to “command the center” of your ecosystem.

“Individuals tend to gain influence or power in proportion to the degree of centrality within their network,” he says. “We found exactly the same thing for firms. The more focal you are, the more central you are in your ecosystem, the greater your increase in market capitalization.”

But, he cautions, opening your data is not without risk. Bad actors exist everywhere. So your firm needs to open for a reason, all the while weighing the pros and cons of sharing your data externally. One of those reasons, Marshall adds, is to “invert the firm,” a mindset that leverages APIS and enables you to share the production of value beyond your own employees.

Marshall is one of the world’s foremost experts on network business models. Be sure to catch the entire podcast to capture all his insights.

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Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You

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UX Design isn’t about building beautiful products for the sake of beauty itself, says Jon Daiello. We’re building something that solves people’s problems. “Design isn’t here to just manufacture,” Jon adds. “It’s here to help us understand what we should manufacture. That’s one of the big distinctions.”

In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Sean and Paul chat with Jon Daiello. Jon is a UX Design Manager at Paychex, where he encourages his designers to “have your head in the clouds and your feet in the mud.”

Think of design as “a long-term investment,” he says, like retirement planning. “You don’t start a job and have your retirement built on day one. Design is like that; you’re looking into the future and asking, ‘What is my goal? Where do I want to go? What do I want this thing to be in the end?’ Design can really help you kind of tease out what that future could look like.”

Over time, within the team’s Agile process, you’re choosing the most important pieces to deliver, Jon adds. So the business case is understanding that Agile practices are not in competition with design; but that they’re inside the process and baked in in a way that works with design.

Catch the entire conversation to hear Jon’s practical tips for answering the ultimate question: what are we actually solving for?

Get as many people involved as possible; workshops help.
Be creative with time you have available – even just an hour here or there can be productive.
Creativity blocked? Change your workspace. Try a different design medium.
Simple design tools like paper & pencil help express design ideas quickly and cheaply.

Early bird pricing is now available as the ITX Product + Design Conference returns. Save the date: June 22-23 in Rochester, NY. Learn more.

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Dr. Nesrine Changuel credits innate curiosity and a personal motivation for unlocking new knowledge as the catalyst that has brought her to Nokia, Microsoft, Spotify, and now Google. Her career journey has been thoughtful and deliberate, first as a researcher and later a transition to product management.

Nesrine explains how a growth mindset encourages learning – and the confidence that comes with it – that allows us to break out of our comfort zones to grow as individuals and product leaders.

The key to success, Nesrine adds, is never forgetting what the problem is. “Fall in love more with the problem than the solution,” she says. One way to achieve this mindset is to have a very clear product discovery roadmap that is distinct from your execution roadmap.

The discovery roadmap outlines a list of problems – not solutions. It leans on her experience as a researcher, generating incredible value validation that includes lots of time engaging with users to understand their challenges and pain points. And it’s work that brings together the product trio: product manager, UX researcher, and engineering to deliver products that improve users’ lives.

Be sure to listen to the entire pod; capture in minutes some of the vital nuggets Nesrine has picked up as her career continues to unfold, including:

Failing fast during product discovery: taking educated risks, validating them through regular, rapid feedback.
The power of iteration: the ability to stop, inspect, and adjust.
Avoiding the Scrum Fall Trap.
Using data to distinguish between what users say they want and what users actually do.

Product Collective’s Mike Belsito returns to emcee the 2023 ITX Product + Design Conference. Save the date: June 22-23, 2023 in Rochester, NY. Learn more.

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Inclusion is for everyone, says guest Bernadette Smith, CEO of Equality Institute. And, she adds, it’s good for business. Companies that prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion are more profitable than those that don’t. But the key piece of DEI best practices, she concludes, is inclusion. “In order to realize the financial benefits, we have to unleash psychological safety; we have to unleash inclusion.”

In this episode, Bernadette joins Sean and Paul and shares her best practices for bringing an inclusive mindset to your organization, many of which are captured in her best-seller, Inclusive 360: Proven Solutions for an Equitable Organization. She “keeps it real” in this discussion and is not afraid to admit that she’s still learning, too.

“We’re all on our own learning journey, whatever it happens to be or look like,” she says. “And when leaders model that, and share a sense of their own vulnerability, it gives other folks permission to do the same.”

Bernadette presents the A-R-C Method, a framework for getting to connection before content – a mantra that drives better conversations among teams. With practice, this simple method can help you create a more inclusive environment where there is genuine learning among individuals from diverse backgrounds.

Ask. Be curious. Learn more about another person’s perspective. Allow yourself to be vulnerable.
Respect. Be present and attentive. Listen…actively. Trust will follow.
Connect. We’re all on our own learning journey.

Using the A-R-C method is one way to foster the inclusion that drives innovation.

Catch the whole pod with Bernadette, and bring a true DEI mindset to your organization.

Save the date! The ITX Product + Design Conference is back. June 22-23, Rochester, NY. Learn more.

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The Product Momentum Podcast team is taking a brief pause this week but be sure to enter our 100th Episode Book Giveaway. We hope you’re enjoying some R&R time as well.

See you again in the New Year!

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No product manager wants to build a bad version of their software. But sometimes that’s what it takes to accelerate the learning process. Well, maybe not a bad version. But an early, admittedly incomplete one. Something you can quickly get out in front of users, gather some feedback about, and iterate on.

Today’s podcast guest, Candu co-Founder and CEO Jonathan Anderson, explains, “If you then decide to go down the development route, you’ll be so much smarter, so much further along the path of figuring out what the right thing to build is.” This concept of drafting is super-valuable, he adds, “but not because we know what the end product will look when we’re done. But because we don’t.”

Candu provides no-code web tools for SaaS apps; at its core, no-code is like products for product people. It helps non-tech-savvy product managers bring even greater impact to their teams – a sort of counter-punch to the vexing “all the responsibility, none of the authority” PM mantra.

“So often we think of building software a little bit like a sacred cow, something only a handful can do along a very prescriptive process.” Jonathan says. “Maybe it’s time to allow non-technical people – like product managers, growth teams, maybe even customer teams – to actually build some of these interfaces themselves.”

No-code, low-code tools help transform passive, receive-only PMs just waiting for requirements to fall from on high into more engaged product builders. We’re better positioned to shift the development effort upstream and figure out where that cut-off is – when the “bad” version of our software is still good enough to ship.

Be sure to catch the whole conversation with Jonathan; and don’t forget about our 100th Podcast* *Episode Book Giveaway. Enter for your chance to win!

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When UX design guru Jesse James Garrett first started out, user experience as we know it today wasn’t even a thing. Yet he remains among the most prominent voices in digital product design. As both witness and catalyst for more than 20 years, Jesse’s work in this space triggered much of the UX evolution and inspired the cultural change we’re now experiencing within our organizations. The emergence of product and design leadership has accelerated the ‘professionalization’ of traditional roles and has empowered teams to deliver better products and user outcomes.

As Jesse explains in this – the 100th episode of the Product Momentum Podcast – “The exciting thing is that many product leaders are finding the way to gain the empowerment and the support and the leverage to drive not just good product outcomes, but organizational outcomes that fundamentally shift the way these organizations approach and think about what they do.”

Product leaders are forever balancing the technical realities of what it takes to deliver a good product with the market realities of the business model, the competitive landscape, and customer realities, he continues. “And what I’m seeing are product leaders turning to design as a way to deepen their expertise … around that customer piece of the equation,” Jesse adds. “The designers who are elevating into those more senior leadership roles are the ones who are able to frame design in terms of its ability to deliver value around user insight more than around delivery.”

Sean and Paul chat with Jesse not to wax nostalgic about the early days of UX, but instead to discuss the growing influence that human-centered design is having on human-centered decision-making, which eventually brings about a human-centered culture within organizations.

Listen in to hear more tips from Jesse James Garrett about strategic leadership and the role of design in delivering value in this 100th episode of Product Momentum.

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Make no mistake. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are super-powerful tools; their benefits seem endless. But let’s not confuse them with superpowers. AI possesses a fragility, says Dipanwita Das, co-founder and CEO of Sorcero, who is working to improve patient outcomes through advanced analytics. More blind spot than flaw, the fragility of AI is nuance …

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Accessibility is not one of those things that’s done well when it’s tacked on to the end of a project, Sheri Byrne-Haber says. “It’s going to cost more, it’s going to put your schedule at risk, and it’s not going to offer the best experience.” Embedding accessibility into product design early on, she adds, becomes …

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Kent Weathers is Chief Product Officer at Brainmates and Director at the Association of Product Professionals (APP) – valuable perspectives for a conversation about the future of software product management. In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Kent joins Paul Gebel and asks us product people to imagine for a moment a world without …

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When Ralph Dandrea founded ITX a quarter-century ago, the notion of product was a whole lot different than it is today. In 1997, he and other product builders thought about software through the lens of themselves as users – not of the end users who were truly using the products they built. That thinking evolved …

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There’s a lot that product managers can do to empower themselves within their organizations. But the path is not a straight one. We know all too well the imbalance between our substantial responsibilities and the comparatively meager authority we have to execute on them. In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Bain Public’s Paul …

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As consumers of everything from soap to software, all we’re looking for is better, easier, simpler. Most of the time we can’t explain why a thing is better; we just know delight when we experience it. “That’s the height of product management done well,” says Martina Lauchengco. “And it’s also when product marketing takes over …

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Data we collect about our products are really just a summary of the thousands of stories our users would tell us if they could. Part of our job as product managers is gathering and processing these stories, and then converting them into the products and tools that enhance the human experience. In this episode of …

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When we trust others – including organizations – we do business with them whenever it makes sense. When we don’t, we look for alternatives. Trust is the foundation of every positive relationship, and its absence is the reason so many relationships struggle. In the product space especially, where we’re building complicated things that don’t yet …

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Turns out there is an ‘I’ in ‘team.’ Effective product leaders know the importance of giving credit to their teams for a job well done. But too often, we forget to accept some of the praise for ourselves. The risk we run in overlooking our own contributions can actually be detrimental to the team in …

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“It depends.” A two-word answer that might seem overly safe. But is the only honest response to the question: “What does it take to be a top product manager?” Among dozens of dependencies, the PM role depends on whether you’re at a startup vs. a large, well-established company, says Karthik Suresh, co-founder of Ignition and …

The post 91 / Capacity to Learn: A Skill All Top Product Managers Possess appeared first on ITX Corp..

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Not everyone experiences that polarizing, “fork in the road” moment in their career. That catalyzing realization when a choice needs to be made about which path to take. Before we get there, how do we recognize the signals telling us to step back, take stock, and unpack where we are in our personal and professional …

The post 90 / Amid The Great Resignation, It’s Time To ‘Productize Your Career’ appeared first on ITX Corp..

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Saleema Vellani first visited the Product Momentum Podcast 2 years ago, shortly before the release of her now best-selling book, Innovation Starts with I, and just as a global pandemic tightened its grip on our world. Now 2 years on, we’re delighted have her back on the pod, this time with Paul and ITX product …

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Imagine you have over 300,000 customers who love your product. Then, in the span of one weekend in March 2020, you suddenly find yourself with no product to deliver them. Where do you go from there? You go back to the basics, says James Mayes, who joined Sean and Paul in this episode of the …

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Service design is not new; in fact, today’s guests Adam Lawrence and Marc Stickdorn have been writing and teaching service design for more than a decade. But even in that time, the question of a precise definition for service design remains, as Adam points out, “very active.” “Service design is really the design process around …

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A staggering 70-90% of digital products fail or underperform, says Jonathon Hensley, co-Founder and CEO of Emerge. That translates to trillions of dollars in unrealized investment. Jonathon points to misalignment as the most common source of product or project failure. “Most products underperform not because the team didn’t care,” Jonathon explains. “I think what’s really …

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Vision and strategy and building a delightful experience are all necessary pieces of the product manager playbook. But Steven Haines says it’s not enough. Product leaders need business acumen, the oxygen that keeps your product alive. As founder of Sequent Learning Networks and the Business Acumen Institute, Steven has trained countless leaders in the fields …

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The role of product leader isn’t just about numbers and KPIs. It’s really about assembling teams of human beings and setting the stage for them to boost their capacity to build customer value. In this episode, Sean and Paul catch up with Megan Murphy, VP of Product at Hotjar. “What got us to now won’t …

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What is the role of design in startups? And what characteristics do the great designers share? In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, John Zeratsky joins host Paul Gebel to explain – interestingly, using David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers biography as a backdrop. The book “provided this interesting illustration of the difference between craft …

The post 83 / Design’s True Purpose: Answer The How appeared first on ITX Corp..

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As product managers, we’re taught to prioritize customer needs above all else. If that’s correct, where does threat modeling land in our list of priorities? After all, if we can’t provide a secure solution, our users will go elsewhere. Chris Romeo, CEO and co-founder of Security Journey, suggests we “shift left” to get these concepts …

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Gamification mechanics work because they motivate user audiences to participate, engage, and act. Yu-kai Chou, a gamification pioneer who began work in this space nearly 20 years ago, explains why the application of game technique is so much more than points, badges, and leaderboards. Gamification extracts all the fundamental components in games and applying them …

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In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Sean and Paul welcome Ronke Majekodunmi, Senior Product Manager at PayPal, for an inside look at product leadership. Especially during tumultuous times, it’s the leader’s job to acknowledge the context that the team is working in and to support them both personally and professionally. This can be …

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Josh Seiden broke into product development from the designer’s perspective, crafting beautiful things he could be very proud of. Sometimes they worked; sometimes they didn’t. “That deafening silence that comes when no users engage with your product is just a terrible feeling,” he says. So what we’re always trying to do is generate the maximum …

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Psychological safety is the great enabler, says Dr. Timothy Clark, founder and CEO of LeaderFactor. In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Tim joins Sean to give us a behind-the-scenes look at his 4 Stages of Psychological Safety and explain why it’s the foundation of all high-performing teams. Product leaders are vital to building …

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We product leaders work to solve problems that are fundamentally human, explains Tatyana Mamut, Senior VP of New Products at Pendo. By the people. With the people. For the people. Applying a human-centered mindset is key to creating value for our customers. An anthropologist by training, Tatyana brings her unique perspective to how product people …

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Jay Haynes, founder and CEO of thrv.com, guests on this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast. He and Paul discuss market disruption and the role Jobs-To-Be-Done plays in assessing the risks and optimizing the benefits. Jay learned all about the phenomenon of disruption from the late Clay Christensen; it’s what happens when market leaders become …

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In this final episode of our 3-part series on Self-Determination Theory, Scott Rigby, Ph.D. discusses Relatedness – “the experience of belonging or connection between people.” As product leaders, we feel the power of that connection when a customer says, “Wow, it’s like the people who designed this app were thinking about me when they built …

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Among the many lessons Shopify’s Mamuna Oladipo has learned in her career is that communicating a product vision isn’t a “one-and-done” exercise. Working with such diverse audiences requires product leaders to create a narrative around the vision and communicate it multiple times, in different ways. Not everyone, she explains, digests information in the same way or at the same pace.

In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Mamuna joins Sean and Paul to share her vast experience leading product teams across a broad range of industries. Currently VP of Product at Shopify, Mamuna’s experience includes service at Kickstarter, SeamlessDocs, and The Orchard, a division of Sony Music.

“A product leader’s view of the world is a lot better than their teammates’,” she says. “They can’t always see what we see. So our job is to help them get up there as efficiently as possible. We do that by ‘scaling trust’,” which is a sort of shorthand for deepening team cohesion, understanding customers’ needs, and thinking holistically about our product. It’s a significant investment, Mamuna adds, but it’s critical to communicating product vision and delivering value to your users.

Check out our pod conversation with Mamuna, and catch more of her insights –

Product work is people work. Spend time with the people who use your product and who build your product.
Change is going to happen. Learn to embrace it so you can minimize its impact on your team.
Words matter. Adapt your vocabulary – and your approach – to communicate the product narrative to diverse audiences.

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Scott Rigby, Ph.D. joins Sean and Paul for the second in a three-part series on Self-Determination Theory – specifically, the basic human needs of Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. In this episode, our conversation centers around Competence: the need to be effective and successful at what we’re doing. It doesn’t come easily, or immediately; rather, it’s part of a continuum that develops over time through a series of stages.

As product managers, we can think of these stages as a ramp, or an evolution, that begins with “understanding the schema” – i.e., the rules of the game. Schema frames the question, what can I do inside this experience? As learning occurs, competence deepens. And users gain comfort in knowing they possess the ability to be successful. This efficacy leads to skill – that is, a sense that not only can I accomplish this task; but I’m really good at it. Efficacy and skill form the foundation upon which we build a sense of growth in pursuit of mastery – the sense that I’ve reached a level of competence where I can create new ways of using this application or interacting in this environment, or I can be training others.

Catch more of our conversation with Scott, and learn to apply the Competence Ramp in building successful user experiences through your products. And be sure to tune in to part 3 of our conversation on Self-Determination Theory – Relatedness.

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As product leaders, we’re rarely hired to build a product from scratch. Unless, of course, you’re the founder. Much of the time we’re handed our predecessor’s backlog with little guidance – other than, perhaps, “Here, help us with this.” And with that, you’re faced with a decision to make: press forward, predictably and safely, in a project-led mindset. Or change tack, introducing the thrill of possibility and risk into a product-led process.

In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Sean and Paul are joined by Janna Bastow, co-founder of ProdPad, ProductTank, and Mind the Product. Janna discusses the tension within organizations between the predictability that shareholders long for, and the uncertain sprint-to-sprint existence of the product manager.

“The people who are investing in your company are watching your stocks,” Janna says. “They want predictability at that level. They don’t care about the individual product features and, you know, agile vs. waterfall vs. whatever else. To them, Agile is just a means to the end.”

But for product managers, predictability is often just as risky as innovation. To us, Agile helps us run our experiments we need – some of which lead to innovation. It’s not reasonable to expect us to know what the results of these experiment are, though. Janna suggests that product leaders should work with management to carve out the freedom and budget to find the right balance between predictability and possibility.

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Connecting the dots between theory and application is rarely an easy task. It’s made a bit easier, though, when the theory goes to the heart of human existence: we want – no, we need – to be the authors of our own narrative. And that narrative must be something that we endorse and take ownership of. In other words, humans need Autonomy.

In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Scott Rigby, Ph.D. joins Sean and Paul for the first in a three-part series discussing Self-Determination Theory – specifically, the basic human needs of Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. This episode focuses on Autonomy, with future episodes addressing Relatedness and Competence.

Autonomy, Scott shares, is not the freedom do whatever we want to do. “Autonomy is this idea of endorsement…that even within the structure of an organization, even when there are assigned goals and objectives, I can still endorse what I am doing – that I’m on board.”

And that’s a very important concept for product managers to embrace, particularly within the context of assembling and motivating product teams to create complex technical software. We need our teams to endorse the role they play in translating shared goals into reality as we bring together multiple disciplines to meet the needs of our users.

“There’s a lot of structure there,” Scott adds. “So we can’t define autonomy as freedom and expect to get the job done. When we create that optimal balance of structure with our team’s self-expression, we create the space for them to innovate and to solve challenging problems for their users.”

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What if there were a way to know that your product was going to win in the marketplace – and to know it even before you begin development?

In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Tony Ulwick – CEO of Strategyn and “father of the Jobs To Be Done framework” – joins Sean and Kyle Psaty, ITX’s VP of Marketing, to talk all things JTBD. Tony walks us along the process of innovation through the JTBD lens, offering a systematic way to deliver an innovative solution with every product release.

Innovation, Tony says, is “coming up with a solution that addresses unmet needs.” When you talk to users, he adds, you’re better able to identify and address their needs. Then you can segment them to make sure you’re providing the right solutions to the right people.

“Innovation doesn’t have to be a guessing game,” Tony says. “Once we have those inputs, we have the necessary insights to make innovation predictable.”

Listen in to catch all of Tony’s insights, including his thoughts on:

When iteration is useful and when it is not
Different types of jobs that products can accomplish
Other elements necessary for success

Register now for Strategyn’s next webinar – Thursday, October 21, @1:30 pm ET – as Tony hosts Sean to discuss how empowered teams unite behind a shared product vision.

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Product Momentum Podcast: Recent Episodes

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