• The sales-led roadmap reality - In many B2B organisations, roadmap ownership effectively sits with sales, driven by short-term revenue pressures rather than long-term strategy
• Customers vs markets tension - Product teams often fail to shift from building for individual customers to designing for scalable market opportunities
• The leadership perception gap - A stark ~50-point disconnect exists between how leaders assess themselves and how their teams experience them, pointing to either deluded leaders, poor communication or unreasonable IC expectations
• Lack of strategic foundations - Weak or absent vision and objectives create a vacuum where every deal feels equally valid
• Product leaders as system designers - Leaders must take responsibility for shaping environments where good product work is actually possible
• Discovery isn't just external - Product teams neglect internal discovery, failing to understand stakeholders, sales processes, and organisational dynamics
• The cost of short-term thinking - Chasing large deals often creates hidden long-term costs that outweigh immediate revenue gains
• AI as efficiency, not transformation - Current AI usage is reported as largely tactical (summarisation, documentation), not fundamentally changing product outcomes
• Optimism despite dysfunction - Even with systemic issues, many product managers remain positive about the future of the discipline

... and much more.

You can check the full report here - no email address required: https://b2bproduct.io/?okip

Janna is the co-founder of ProdPad, a roadmap, idea management and feedback platform that brings clarity to your organisation. She was kind enough to step in as a guest host for the episode, so why not check what the platform can do for you? https://www.prodpad.com/

• Janna: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jannabastow/
• Saeed: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saeedwkhan/
• Jason: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-knight/

We cover a lot, including:

• Digitising a traditional sport – Building a connected darts experience requires blending physical play with digital layers like tracking, stats, and online competition without losing the tactile essence of the game
• Balancing heritage and innovation – Introducing new product experiences in a 100-year-old brand demands careful alignment between modern features and long-standing identity
• AI as a pragmatic tool – Rather than chasing trends, AI is applied where it adds clear value, such as computer vision for scoring and an AI referee for dispute resolution
• Focus over experimentation – In a high-pressure delivery environment, prioritisation matters more than exploring every new technology or idea
• Building inside a non-digital organisation – Establishing product thinking in a manufacturing business requires translation, education, and patience on both sides
• Hardware and software alignment – Unlike pure software, product timelines are constrained by manufacturing cycles, creating hard deadlines and forcing disciplined execution
• Hiring for passion and proximity – Teams perform better when they have genuine interest in the product domain, especially in consumer experiences tied to physical interaction
• Differentiation through awareness – Deep competitor understanding is essential not for copying, but for identifying where to stand apart and create unique value
• Private equity vs venture dynamics – Product strategy shifts significantly depending on ownership model, with PE favouring speed and certainty, and VC allowing more exploration
• Book smarts and street smarts – The most effective product leaders combine formal knowledge with real-world experience, adapting frameworks to context rather than following them rigidly

... and much more.

Nick mentioned an article I wrote about fractional product leadership - you can check it out here: https://oneknightinproduct.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-fractional

• Winmau: https://winmau.com
• Winmau careers: https://winmau.com/pages/careers-with-winmau

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-kenn/

• AI shifts the product bottleneck – As AI tools make engineers more productive, the limiting factor increasingly becomes product discovery and decision-making rather than development capacity.
• Product management isn't going away – AI can automate some tasks, but judgement, prioritisation, and making decisions under uncertainty remain core human responsibilities.
• The rise of the product builder mindset – New AI tools allow product managers to prototype ideas directly, giving them a more hands-on way to explore solutions.
• The vibe coding spectrum – AI development tools exist on a spectrum from simple browser-based tools through to full developer IDE integrations, letting teams adopt them at different levels of technical depth.
• Vibe prototyping vs vibe coding – For most product managers, the real opportunity isn't replacing engineers, but quickly generating interactive prototypes that help teams explore ideas before committing to production code.
• Divergent thinking still matters – AI tools often generate a single solution, so teams need to deliberately explore multiple directions and alternatives rather than blindly optimising the first result.
• Prototypes have four key audiences – Early prototypes help clarify ideas for the creator, align the product team, communicate concepts to stakeholders, and gather feedback from real users.
• Context beats clever prompting – The quality of AI-generated output depends far more on the context, requirements, and constraints you provide than on the prompt itself.
• Iteration beats one-shot builds – The real power of these tools comes from rapid experimentation and refinement rather than expecting a perfect result from a single prompt.

... and much more.

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danolsen98/
• Dan's Website: https://dan-olsen.com/
• Dan's Vibe Coding Template: https://dan-olsen.com/vibe-coding/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/danolsen
• Lean Product Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/lean-product/
• The Lean Product Playbook: https://amzn.to/1EYCUdP

• What Synthetic Users actually is - generating in-depth qualitative interviews with AI-powered "synthetic" participants to help teams reduce risk and accelerate discovery
• Most companies don't do enough, or any, research in the first place, and they need as many tools in their locker to help with the ultimate goal: making great products.
• The pragmatist's view of AI - why Hugo doesn't care whether LLMs are "conscious", only whether they produce useful outputs
• The agentic "swarm" approach - using specialised sub-agents (planners, interviewers, critics) instead of one giant prompt to improve quality and reduce drift
• B2B vs B2C - why synthetic research works well in B2B contexts, and the harder (future) problem of modelling organisational dynamics
• Bias, sycophancy and realism - the technical concerns around LLMs and how to validate responses with pilots and human comparison studies
• How to use synthetic research in practice - filtering ideas, informing human interviews, and treating it as an accelerant rather than a replacement
• "It shouldn't exist" - the moral argument against synthetic users, reacting to UX thought leaders and their objections, and why some of those objections aren't really about evidence

... and much more.

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugomanuelalves/
• Website: https://www.syntheticusers.com/
• Twitter/"X": https://twitter.com/Ugo_alves

We cover a lot, including:

• Navigating the Three-Sided Marketplace - Jess describes the Just Eat Takeaway product as a complex ecosystem connecting 60 million active customers with nearly 400,000 partners and a vast network of couriers. The core insight here is that the "product" isn't just an app; it is the seamless orchestration of these three distinct groups, where a failure in one branch inevitably disrupts the value for the others.
• Scaling Global Platforms with Local Nuance - Despite operating a global tech platform, Jess emphasises the importance of "optionality" to respect regional differences, from currency formatting to cultural preferences like cash usage. This approach allows the company to maintain a unified technical infrastructure while remaining flexible enough to adapt when a specific market, like the UK or Canada, leads the way in new category demands like grocery delivery.
• The Power of Customer Closeness - Moving beyond data and reports, Jess advocates for getting "on the ground" to talk to couriers and visit partner restaurants. By understanding the physical realities, such as a busy kitchen staff finding a feature too cumbersome to use during peak hours, product leaders can solve real-world friction that data trends alone might overlook.
• Cultivating Dual-Track Career Paths - Recognising that not every brilliant product mind wants to manage people, Jess champions the value of senior Individual Contributor roles. She highlights that technical and strategic mastery is just as vital as people management, and providing high-level growth opportunities for ICs ensures the organisation retains its most creative and experienced problem solvers.
• Leading Through Influence and Commerciality - Jess argues that the best product leaders act as "first-rate business partners" rather than just a bridge between engineering and the business. By focusing on "win-win" outcomes and deeply understanding commercial metrics like order volumes and market trends, product teams earn the credibility needed to influence strategy at the highest levels.

Check out Just Eat Takeaway's website: https://justeattakeaway.com, or their careers page: https://careers.justeattakeaway.com.

You can connect with Jess on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicalrhall.

We explore what customer research looks like in an AI-accelerated world: where AI genuinely helps, where it falls short, and why talking to real people remains irreplaceable. Along the way, we dig into interviewing craft, curiosity, synthetic users, and some enduring myths that still undermine product discovery.

We cover a lot, including:

• Why customer interviews still matter in the age of AI - why large language models can accelerate research workflows but cannot replace the insight, judgement, and transformation that comes from engaging directly with customers.
• AI as a research intern, not a strategist - AI performs well in certain tasks - transcription, tagging, and basic analysis - but prioritisation, interpretation, and strategy must remain human responsibilities.
• The neuroscience of listening and curiosity - both interviewees and interviewers experience genuine pleasure when curiosity is satisfied, reframing interviews as a mutually rewarding process rather than a chore.
• What AI misses in real customer conversations - considering the "spiky", unexpected insights that emerge in interviews - and why these often get lost when teams rely too heavily on automated summaries.
• Synthetic users, digital twins, and their limits - breaking down different types of simulated users, where they can be useful, and why they depend on high-quality human research to be credible at all.
• The problem with the "faster horses" myth - dismantling the misattributed Henry Ford quote and exploring how it's often used to avoid engaging with customers rather than to encourage innovation.
• Research as a way to change teams, not just products - how involving teams directly in research builds shared understanding, alignment, and better decision-making across organisations.
• Why AI accelerates confusion without product clarity - AI only compounds impact when a clear product vision and customer understanding already exist - otherwise, teams simply move faster in the wrong direction.

• Learn more about Michele's company, Geocodio: https://www.geocod.io/
• Check out the new edition of "Deploy Empathy": https://deployempathy.com/.
• Connect with Michele on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mjwhansen/
• Meet Michele at the pub in London! We'll be there on Jan 15th 2026: https://luma.com/xyqi9e2z

• Alibi Progress vs Real Progress - how teams hide behind "the right way" of doing things, obsessing over methods and templates instead of asking whether any of it actually works
• The Progress Wheel - Tim's diagnostic loop that ties strategy, OKRs and discovery together so teams can see where they're actually stuck and what to do next
• The three attributes of good product strategy: Decisiveness, Layering and Executability
• How to handle OKRs when leadership gives you metrics you can’t influence using zones of control and contribution
• How to sell discovery to sceptical stakeholders - by framing it as "protecting the company's investment", not a fluffy UX ritual
• Reverse-mapping discovery when you're handed a solution - even if you have to build it, work backwards to define the outcome
• Why frameworks should be starting points, not destinations - and why Tim would be disappointed if anyone adopted his wheel dogmatically

... And much more.

You can grab a copy of Real Progress here:

• Tim's site: https://herbig.co/real-progress-book/
• Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/398275190X

• Website: https://herbig.co
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/herbigt/

We cover a lot, including:

• There's no greater crime than building something the universe doesn't need: Sean's ten key product principles that he lists on LinkedIn - first developed at Tesco - all matter, but building pointless stuff tops his list of product sins.
• Use the right tool for the job: Amazon shaped Sean's product DNA, but he's clear that context is king - you can't simply transplant Big Tech practices into legacy environments and expect them to work wholesale.
• Most companies under-invest in their strategy: When progress stalls, it's usually because teams are spread too thin across BAU work and one-off feature requests. The best product firms align time and capacity to strategic bets (or admit that they're a professional services company).
• Adopt a portfolio mindset: Sean's capital allocation framework helps leaders size and re-balance investments, ensuring resources go where they'll have the biggest impact - and revisiting regularly (but not too regularly) to stay honest.
• Learn the language of money: Too many product leaders avoid finance. Sean argues that financial literacy isn't optional if you want credibility with the board and real influence on business outcomes. Learn the numbers!

You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanon/. There you'll find a number of articles, including the one we discuss in this interview: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-dont-need-more-engineers-better-strategic-bets-sean-o-neill-s0vze/

You can connect with special guest interviewer Sterling O'Neill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sterlingoneill/.

We cover a lot, including:

• Making technology more human: Georgie believes technology should make the world smaller, not bigger - by connecting people, not distancing them. At Moonpig, the goal isn't just to sell cards or gifts, but to help people express love and connection through meaningful gestures.
• Product with purpose: Moonpig's mission is to be “the world's greatest gifting companion.” Every card printed represents a moment of love, humour, or memory between people. Georgie sees product management at Moonpig as building moments that matter, not just features.
• Balancing connection and innovation: Moonpig has embraced AI and personalisation, but Georgie cautions against rushing ahead for technology's sake. Instead, the team focuses on introducing innovation in a way that feels natural and accessible to mass-market users.
• Leading product, technology, and data together: As CPTDO, Georgie bridges three major domains. She admits she's not a data scientist or engineer, but focuses on seeking to understand - asking open questions, learning continuously, and leading through consistency rather than control.
• On empowerment and leadership: While she values empowered teams, Georgie is pragmatic about balancing autonomy with business realities. She also believes true innovation needs governance, not chaos.

Check out Moonpig's website: http://moonpig.com/, or their careers page: https://www.moonpig.group/careers/.

You can connect with Georgie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginasmallwood/.

• Why Product Delight is more than just a “nice to have”, and isn't just confetti on your boring app
• The three pillars of Product Delight: reducing friction, anticipating needs, and exceeding expectations
• The difference between surface delight (like balloons on your Apple Watch) and deep delight (features that serve emotional and functional needs together)
• Why delight matters just as much in B2B products as in consumer apps, and why everything is B2H
• How to get buy-in from leaders and stakeholders by linking emotional connection to revenue, retention, and referrals
• The Delight Grid and Nesrine's four-step model for embedding delight into your product process
• The risks of chasing the wrong kind of delight (like Deliveroo's failed Mother's Day campaign or Apple's awkward gesture fireworks)

... And much more.

You can grab a copy of Product Delight here:

• Nesrine's site: https://nesrine-changuel.com/product-delight-book/
• Amazon UK: https://a.co/d/1J7JLZZ

• Website: https://www.nesrine-changuel.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nesrinechanguel
• Newsletter: https://nesrinechanguel.substack.com

We cover a lot, including:

• Transforming a heritage retailer: Holland & Barrett is delivering double-digit growth through a sweeping digital and cultural transformation, investing in everything from supply chain systems to customer-facing apps.
• Global vs local: The company builds strong global digital capabilities (like search and e-commerce infrastructure) while tailoring ~20% of the experience for each market to meet regulatory and customer needs.
• High street resilience: Despite doom-and-gloom headlines, Holland & Barrett is thriving by focusing on product-market fit, preventative healthcare, and efficient tech-enabled operations.
• The app transformation: Taking the mobile app in-house turned it from a struggling third-party product (<5% of digital revenue, 3-star rating) into a core strategic channel (>30% revenue share, 4.5+ rating).
• Internal product management is sexy too: Katya insists that logistics, pricing systems, and data management are some of the most rewarding areas for product managers, enabling everything else to work.
• Team structure: Around 100 people in product, design, and research, split between "firm foundations" (core systems) and "omnichannel customer experience", plus a small but mighty product ops team.
• Leadership leap: Moving into her first CPO role was daunting, but support from her manager pushed her to take the leap and build a truly independent product function inside the company.
• Skills for success: Katya highlights high agency, emotional intelligence, and the ability to navigate crucial conversations as must-haves for product leaders.

Check out Holland & Barrett's website: https://www.hollandandbarrett.com/, or their careers page: https://apply.hollandandbarrettjobs.com/jobs/vacancy/find/results/.

You can connect with Katya on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denikekatya/.

You can also check out Katya's podcast, Rocking Cribs & Careers. here! https://open.spotify.com/show/3rheb2Q1YuUvdmeYS8ngqA.

We cover a lot, including:

• TrustedHousesitters' unique proposition - a two-sided marketplace mixing travel and pet sitting, where both pet owners and sitters pay a subscription to help create mutual trust and respect.
• Scaling through word of mouth - 70-75% of members join via a friend, and how the team are working to amplify that growth while keeping trust at the centre.
• Balancing marketplace dynamics - keeping supply and demand in sync, supporting new sitters with no ratings, and using AI and personalisation to build confidence.
• Using AI responsibly - from accelerating customer insight analysis to improving customer support, AI speeds up decision-making but always in service of company strategy.
• Building empowered product teams - why Jamie invested early in product ops and product marketing instead of hierarchy, and how she's now preparing to scale with Product Directors.
• Commercial product management - the importance of PMs with business acumen who can link solving customer problems with driving commercial outcomes.
• Executive alignment as the hardest (and most valuable) job - why alignment across the C-suite is the best air cover a leader can provide for their teams.
• Lessons from leadership - why some of the hardest decisions are killing months of work, the surprise of soft skills dominating the CPO role, and why leadership still matters in the AI era.

Check out Trusted Housesitters' website: https://trustedhousesitters.com/, or their careers page: https://www.trustedhousesitters.com/careers/.

You can connect with Jamie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiemercer/.

We cover a lot, including:

• What commercetools does: An API-first, composable commerce engine powering online trade for major global enterprises and manufacturers, enabling flexibility, resilience, and constant uptime for B2C and B2B commerce.
• Composable commerce explained: Allowing customers to mix and match best-of-breed components across the commerce value stream or opting for "pre-composed" solutions built on the same composable foundation.
• Strategic focus in a flexible platform: How the team decides where to build, buy, or partner, using value stream mapping to prioritise and avoid being pulled in too many directions.
• AI and agents in commerce: From data tagging to conversational assistants and dynamic pricing, Shiri shares early enterprise adoption patterns and the role of commercetools' MCP layer in letting customers plug in the agents they trust.
• Product team structure: A 55-person product org spanning UX, product management, and close engineering partnerships, with domain-focused teams and a strong CPO–CTO pairing model.
• Balancing explore vs exploit: Encouraging teams to pivot to higher-value domains when propositions mature, and celebrating decisions to stop work that’s no longer impactful.
• Customer-led vs strategy-led delivery: Using proactive roadmap communication to align big customer requests with company strategy and KPIs, turning reactive asks into collaborative problem-solving.
• Technical and business balance in PMs: Moving from a largely technical PM base toward a mix of skills, with growing focus on business value and direct engagement with business stakeholders.
• Leadership approach: Shiri's focus on connecting product strategy to company strategy, advocating at the executive level, and ensuring her teams feel purpose, autonomy, and mastery in their work.

Check out commercetools's website: https://commercetools.com/, or their careers page: https://commercetools.com/careers/jobs.

You can connect with Shiri on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shiri-mosenzon/.

We cover a lot, including:

• What Domestic and General actually does: A century-old, billion-pound business with 6.5 million subscribers across 12 markets, providing repair and replacement services for household appliances through service plans and insurance products.
• A behind-the-scenes powerhouse: Domestic and General powers customer journeys via major retail and manufacturer partnerships (e.g. Argos, AO, Hotpoint), often handling registration, support, and repair logistics under their partners' brands.
• Product complexity in a partner-led model: Coordinating customer experience, retailer requirements, manufacturer constraints, and service delivery logistics - without directly employing a single repair technician.
• Building product from scratch: How Hannah established a product function at Domestic and General, moving from a traditional delivery model to domain-based product teams focused on growth and customer retention.
• Evolving team structures: Starting with customer and partner-aligned squads before transitioning to domain-oriented teams, reflecting shifts in strategic focus and incorporating feedback from engineering and delivery teams.
• Product vs Proposition: Domestic and General brings together digital product managers and proposition managers - handling platforms and customer experiences on one side, and the commercial performance of insurance offerings on the other.
• Philosophy of simplification and belief: Encouraging resilience and optimism, Hannah champions a mindset that anything is possible - helping teams cut through complexity and deliver tangible outcomes.
• Pragmatism over product purism: While Domestic and General aspires to be product-led, the focus is on real-world delivery - balancing best practice with the pace and realities of a high-growth, partner-centric business.
• Executive-level impact: Demonstrating the value of Product by delivering outcomes. Early wins - such as improving online claims and conversion rates - helped build credibility and demand for product ways of working.

Check out Domestic and General's website: https://www.domesticandgeneral.com/, or their careers page: https://careers.domesticandgeneral.com/.

You can connect with Hannah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-kershaw-421b7b25/.

We cover a lot, including:

• What Native Instruments actually does: From DJ hardware to post-production tools for Netflix and the BBC, plus powering other companies' products via their platform.
• The intersection of creativity and technology: How Native Instruments empowers artists with tactile, high-fidelity tools, and why they're a side-gig for superstar DJs on staff.
• AI in music creation: Where it fits, where it doesn't, and the ethical principles Native Instruments uses to ensure artists retain full creative control.
• Product in a hybrid model: Balancing perpetual licences and growing subscription models, and how business models shape product release strategies.
• Pragmatism over idealism: Why product managers must adapt frameworks to the business "physics" of their company, especially in an era of tighter budgets.
• A unique form of product management: Building physical hardware, mission-critical desktop software, and cloud services... all under one roof.
• Team structure and specialisms: How PMs, designers, engineers, QA, and unique "sound designers" collaborate to shape sonic outcomes.
• Why legacy is both a strength and a constraint: Navigating customer expectations, technical debt, and platform longevity.
• Why big-shot product leaders from established big tech companies need to take a pause and not just try to install something that worked before in a company with a very different context.

Check out Native Instruments' website: https://www.native-instruments.com/, or their careers page: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/careers/.

You can connect with Simon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sicross/.

Benji's hot take? Having been diagnosed with ADHD relatively recently, he's come to regard ADHD as somewhat of a superpower for product managers, and something that enables him and others to be more effective at their jobs rather than being something to be suffered from.

• Find Benji on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjiportwin.
• Or check out People Building Products: https://pbp.team/

Shobhit's hot take? That too many product managers think that their work will speak for itself but, if they want to get ahead, they should start relentlessly promoting themselves; both inside and outside of the company they work for.

• Find Shobhit on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shobhitchugh/.
• Check out Intentional Product Manager: https://www.intentionalproductmanager.com/

Check out my appearance on The Intentional Product Manager podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2399157/episodes/16218073-fractional-product-management-with-jason-knight

Valeria's hot take? That product managers need to take the lead in creating a sustainable future, making sure they make a difference by considering the impact of their product decisions on their users, their stakeholders... and the planet we live on.

Find Valeria on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerastromtsova/.

In this episode, I speak with Bhavesh Vaghela, Chief Product & Technology Officer at London Marathon Events. Bhavesh started out working as an engineer at HP before a rich career journey through Barclays, TSB, Callsign and Collinson, before moving into the CPTO role at London Marathon Events.

We cover a lot, including:

• What London Marathon Events actually does beyond race day, and how it drives physical activity across society
• How London Marathon Events approaches Product in a hybrid digital/physical world, and why product goes far beyond apps and websites
• Balancing a seamless B2C customer experience with the hard technical demands of world-class live events
• What it means for Product and Technology planning when the date can't slip, and getting it wrong could ruin a world record attempt
• Balancing the CPO and CTO hats: how combining Product and Technology under one role can drive alignment and delivery in the right type of organisation
• Product Management at London Marathon Events: a small team of unflappable, smart people driving high impact with strong purpose
• Why domain expertise matters, but curiosity matters more, and what to do when everyone has an opinion about your product
• The importance of building a culture of learning through experimentation, humility, air cover and making it ok to fail
• Why now is a brilliant time to join London Marathon Events: purpose, opportunity, and the irresistible rise of running

Check out London Marathon Events' website: https://www.londonmarathonevents.co.uk/, or their careers page: https://www.londonmarathonevents.co.uk/london-marathon-events/careers.

You can connect with Bhavesh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhaveshvaghela/.

Kanika's hot take? That some project managers out there are actually product managers in disguise. Their responsibilities have changed, their job titles have yet to catch up, and it's up to them to seize the opportunities of the new world of product management.

Find Kanika on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanikatolver/ or check out her website: https://kanikatolver.com/.

In this episode, I speak with Maud Larpent, Chief Product Officer at Treatwell, the largest hair and beauty booking platform in Europe which works with 75,000 salons across 15 countries. Maud started out working at Reuters, before moving into product leadership at TripAdvisor and Expedia and onwards to Treatwell.

We cover a lot, including:

• All about Treatwell and how it's more than just a booking app
• How Treatwell balances B2B and B2C needs, and why the B2B side is central to delivering a great consumer experience
• Structuring product at Treatwell: team size, "three-in-a-box" model, and balancing tech ownership with customer problems
• How B2C product teams can stay motivated and aligned in a surprisingly sales-led organisation
• The importance of being honest about your product maturity when hiring, and hiring people who want to help you get better
• Making the transition to leadership: letting go of needing all the answers and learning to lead through others
• Balancing strategic and tactical involvement, and making sure you encourage teams to solve problems instead of blindly executing executive ideas
• Why Treatwell is a great place for product people: meaningful challenges, international teams, and a mission to support entrepreneurs

Check out Treatwell's website: https://www.treatwell.co.uk/, or their careers page: https://apply.workable.com/treatwell/.

You can connect with Maud on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maud-larpent/.

Alex's hot take? That thoughtful product onboarding and education is more important than showing all your features all at the same time, and will lead to better activation rates and product growth.

Find Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-rastatuev/ or check out his mentoring profile: https://partnerup.intelligentpeople.co.uk/mentor/alex-rastatuev/.

In this episode, I speak with Debbie McMahon, interim Chief Product Officer at the Financial Times, one of the UK's most well-known and distinctive newspapers. Debbie started out working at the Department for Work & Pensions, moving into a product strategy role there before spending time at the BBC and onwards to the FT.

We cover a lot, including:

• All about the FT and its move away from being "just" a newspaper
• How the FT structures Product; size, scope, dependency management and whether they have product owners
• How to advocate for the value of product management with non-tech leaders and editorial stakeholders
• Balancing product management idealism and book principles with the real world of the FT
• The importance of being honest upfront about your organisation's context when hiring people
• Making the jump to CPO; what was different, what was the same
• How CPOs can avoid being seen as ivory tower thinkers or, worse still, "poop and swoopers"
• Why product people should work at the FT

Check out the FT's website: https://www.ft.com, or their careers page: https://aboutus.ft.com/careers.

You can connect with Debbie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmcmahon/.

We product people can often be so in love with our craft and our terminology that we forget that no one else wants to hear it. We need to craft a narrative that moves beyond esoteric, fuzzy concepts about delight and happiness. These are important, but not as important to the leadership team as how those things make money for the company. We need to get off our high horses and meet our stakeholders where they are, just like we would with our users.

Too many product managers are not aware of how their company makes money, how things are priced and packaged, and the effect that this will have on the types of decisions they can make. We need to up our game when it comes to financial literacy and understand the growth levers that we can pull if we want to have an impact at the top level.

It's always hard when there's a seemingly blockbuster deal on the table that has big revenue numbers attached, but is going to derail the roadmap for months. It's important to understand the positions of other non-product stakeholders and get their buy-in so that you're not the only person against the deal. Make sure you build bridges with your colleagues and go in with a united front.

There are four different types of money stories: Cost savings, Upselling, New Market and Customer Satisfaction. These all use simple heuristics to sense-check the revenue impact of any initiative. Product people can get obsessed with accuracy, but your colleagues are guesstimating all their numbers, so get comfortable with directionally correct numbers. You can still make prioritisation debates clearer by "counting the digits" or comparing orders of magnitude.

There are big differences between how Private Equity-funded and Venture Capital-funded startups work. They have different timeframes, different goals and, ultimately, a different mindset. There's no right or wrong here, simply an acknowledgement that your company's investment context will dramatically impact the types of decisions the leadership team will make. If you know this context, it can help you make better decisions (as well as decide whether it's the type of company you want to work for)

Rich's original essay, which has led to conference talks as well as this interview, can be found here: https://www.mironov.com/moneystories/

"The Art of Product Management takes us inside the head of a product management thought leader. With color and humor, Rich Mironov gives us a taste of Silicon Valley's tireless pursuit of great technology and its creation of new products. He provides strategic advice to product managers and tech professionals about start-ups, big organizations, how to think like a customer, and what things should cost. He also reminds us to love our products and our teams."

Check it out on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Product-Management-Second-Innovator-ebook/dp/B0CVL45F36.

You can catch up with Rich on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richmironov/. Or check out his website: https://mironov.com.

Tami's hot take? That all product managers are leaders, even if they don't feel like it. As a PM, whatever your situation (and however high or low your sights) it's your job to inspire the team and influence your colleagues.

Find Tami on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamireiss/ or check out https://tamireiss.com/.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot

Alexander's hot take? That the language your product "speaks" is a fundamental part of the product's user experience, and is often left lacking. It's important to consider localisation upfront, and ensure that you take cultural considerations into account, not just Google Translate the text as an afterthought.

Find Alexander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amurauski/ or check out his company, Alconost, at https://alconost.com/en.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot

LLMs boil down to relatively simple mathematics at an unfathomably large scale. Humans are terrible at visualising big numbers and cannot comprehend the size of the dataset or the number of GPUs that have been used to create the models. You can train the same LLM on a handful of records and get garbage results, or throw millions of dollars at it and get good results, but the fundamentals are identical, and there's no consciousness hiding in between the equations. We see good-looking output, and we think it's talking to us. It isn't.

There were language models before LLMs, but the invention of the transformer architecture truly accelerated everything. That said, the fundamentals trace further back to "simpler" algorithms, such as word2vec, which proved that it is possible to encode language information in a numeric format, which meant that the vast majority of linguistic information could be represented by embeddings, which enabled people to run equations on language. After that, it was just a matter of time before they got scaled out.

The best way to be disappointed by an LLM's results is to ask detailed questions about something you know deeply. It's quite likely that it'll give good results to start with, because most people's knowledge is so unoriginal that, somewhere in the LLM's training data, there are documents that talk about the thing you asked about. But, it will degrade over time and confidently keep writing even when it doesn't know the answer. These are not easily solvable problems and are, in fact, fundamental parts of the design of an LLM.

The concept of agents is not new, and people have been talking about them for years. The key aspect of AI agents is that they need self-motivation and goals of their own, rather than being told to have goals and then simulating the desire to achieve them. That's not to say that some agents are not useful in their own right, but the goal of fully autonomous, agentic systems is a long way off, and may not even be solvable.

LLMs are an incredible tool and can open up whole new worlds for people who are able to get the best out of them. There are limits to their utility, and some of their shortcomings are likely unsolvable, but we should not minimise their impact. However, there are unethical people out there making completely unsubstantiated claims based on zero evidence and a fundamental misunderstanding of how these models work. These people are scaring people and encouraging terrible decision-making from the gullible. We need to see through the hype.

"Large language models (LLMs) have fundamentally transformed how machines process and generate information. They are reshaping white-collar jobs at a pace comparable only to the revolutionary impact of personal computers. Understanding the mathematical foundations and inner workings of language models has become crucial for maintaining relevance and competitiveness in an increasingly automated workforce. This book guides you through the evolution of language models, starting from machine learning fundamentals. Rather than presenting transformers right away, which can feel overwhelming, we build understanding of language models step by step—from simple count-based methods through recurrent neural networks to modern architectures. Each concept is grounded in clear mathematical foundations and illustrated with working Python code."

Check it out on the book's website: https://thelmbook.com/.

You can also check out Machine Learning Engineering: https://www.mlebook.com and The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book: https://www.themlbook.com/.

You can catch up with Andriy here:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andriyburkov/
• Twitter/"X": https://twitter.com/burkov
• True Positive Newsletter: https://aiweekly.substack.com/

Sam's hot take? That we are on the cusp of societal collapse and product managers, as well as people in tech in general, have taken their eye off the ball. Product people need to adopt new mindsets and build different kinds of products to help us weather the storm... although, maybe the storm can't be weathered at all.

Find Sam on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-greenwood/.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot

Olha's hot take? That product managers need to beyond being facilitators and unblockers, and move towards being true growth partners to the business. Too many people are working in a bubble and not taking account of the commercial impact of their roles, and the ones that do will outpace the ones that don't.

Find Olha on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oyohansen/.

Or check out Olha's newsletter: https://oyogrowth.substack.com/.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot

You can build a portfolio career with a variety of different offerings, and get involved in the types of problems that excite you. This feels risky, but people get laid off from "real" jobs all the time. The most important thing is to optimise for what you're passionate about, and it may well be that you move between full-time employment and advisory or fractional roles. It's not a one-way street, and you're in control.

Content creators should not be scared of poking fun at meaningful topics. Using humour is a great way to help build connections with people around potentially sensitive areas. That doesn't mean you should make everything a joke, but you can certainly mix it up. You might think it's risky for a solopreneur, needing to build credibility, to be seen as an unserious clown. But, do you really want to work with people who can't take a joke?

Speaking of knowledge (nice segue!), Elena has written a lot about Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Product-Led Sales (PLS). PLG is the strategy of using your product as its own acquisition channel through enabling a great self-service experience, quick time-to-value and all the other things that B2C apps have had to worry about for years. PLS, on the other hand, is about filling your sales team's pipeline with high-quality leads that have already experienced your product through PLG, and demonstrated enough usage to make it worth having a data-backed conversation with the buyers at that organisation.

Don't adopt PLS for the sake of it; instead, look for signals that it's appropriate for you. Traditional sales-led motions focus on the buyer but, if you solve a problem that matters more to end users than buyers, you should consider Product-Led Sales as a method for building internal champions and advocacy for your product. You should also be conscious of competitive threats; your traditional, top-down buyer-led sales motion may work today, but keep your eyes open for new PLG players attacking your underbelly.

Let's face it, most sales-led organisations are terrified of giving sales prospects access to their product without supervision. The user experience is almost certainly terrible and there's no "Aha!" moment to speak of, just a pile of features that got added to satisfy procurement teams. You need to get a good product manager in to overhaul the experience, good product marketers to work on optimising acquisition, and great data analytics so you can make sure you aren't just sending garbage to the sales team. If you don't send them high-quality leads, they'll stop trying to sell to them.

Traditional sales-led organisations that are crushing their quotas don't need to go down the product-led growth or product-led sales route if it doesn't work for them. Similarly, product-led companies shouldn't have to go upmarket to succeed. The most important thing to consider is how to build on your existing strengths and complement them, and getting the mix right. You can run both at the same time, and this is better than throwing all-in on a go-to-market motion where you have no credibility, experience or right to win.

• Check out Elena's newsletter and other work: ElenaVerna.com
• Follow Elena on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenaverna/

Zoe's hot take? That product people need to get serious about ethical AI, and put people, processes and protections in place to ensure that AI products create the impact that we all want to see in the world.

Find Zoe:

• ...on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoelaycock/.
• ...on "X": https://x.com/firestartr.
• ...on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/firestartr.

Or check out Diffblue: https://www.diffblue.com/.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot

His hot take? That leaders too often rely on gut feel and recency bias when performing performance reviews, relying on point-in-time assessments and trying to be nice rather than supporting the career growth of their teams.

Find Myles on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/myles-sutholt/.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot!

It's important for everyone in the company to be aligned on what's important, where the company's going and how they're going to get there. It's crucial for product and business leaders to do the work; both to create a vision and strategy and to share it with everyone who is needed to execute it.

Strategy is about making a coherent set of choices about how we're going to achieve our goals or make our company vision real. But, too many companies have fluffy, vague vision statements that could mean anything, and leaders who want to do everything all at once and don't want to make choices. This limits their ability to actually achieve anything.

A product strategy should support the company strategy and vision but, if there's no company strategy or vision, it's hard to create or defend such a strategy. On the other hand, you should still do the work to create one; either you'll get to go and execute the strategy or you'll have a straw man proposal to provoke further discussion around what the strategy should be.

Back in the day, a lot of product managers were expected to write specifications and get stuff done. They weren't even expected to be strategic, and many still aren't to this day. These skills are learnable; product people need to do their best to up their game, and company leaders need to get more comfortable both delegating responsibility and coaching their employees to have these skills.

"Founder mode" can be used to justify just about any behaviour, invites "hero syndrome" and can lead to micromanagement and single points of failure. Good leaders absolutely need to be deeply involved in their business, but this should not be at the expense of creating strong, aligned teams that can take many day-to-day decisions without them.

• You can catch up with Martin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martineriksson
• You can also check his website: https://martineriksson.com
• Keep up-to-date with The Decision Stack: https://www.thedecisionstack.com/

His hot take? That product people should stop looking for the "golden nugget" of knowledge. Martijn argues that instead of seeking a single breakthrough insight, product managers should focus on consistent iteration and learning through small, incremental steps.

Find Martijn on LinkedIn or check out Group Effort.

Also, remember to check out the conference that he's organising, and we'll both be speaking at: Product Mastery Conference

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

His hot take? Most product managers neglect data—not because they dislike it, but due to a lack of time and skills, which can lead to wrong priorities and poor decision-making. He also highlights the current limitations of AI in data analysis, emphasising that while AI accelerates workflows, it still requires human oversight for reliable outcomes.

Find Martijn on LinkedIn or check out DataSquirrel.ai.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

• 2024 Retrospectives and 2025 Predictions

• Product Management and Go-To-Market Strategies

• AI in Workflows and Whether Product Management is Dead 💀

• LinkedIn Growth Strategies

• Balancing Opportunities and When To Say No

• Networking and Community Building

This is the audio of that conversation, but you can see us both (complete with Christmas hats!) on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/XdjiVO-gXOg?si=XM1wQs-QwP6lx_rr

Check out my appearance on Maja's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6kip2mtuyE

... and Maja's previous appearance on my podcast: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/maja-voje

Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays to you all!

His hot take? The traditional product trio - PM, design, and engineering - isn't enough anymore. He advocates for transforming the trio into a square by adding a customer-facing, "operational" team member. This person, deeply connected to customer needs and speaking to customers every day, can help to bridge the gap between the product team and the customer and enable stronger customer focus and faster iteration cycles.

Find Adam on LinkedIn or check out Quantum Metric.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

Her hot take? That introversion is a superpower for product managers and something to be embraced rather than overcome. She is a strong advocate for people to find their own way in product management, and not having to live up to clichés or stereotypes.

Find Grace on LinkedIn.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

His hot take? That LLMs and other generative AI tools are the equivalent of an angle grinder. For those who don't know, angle grinders have big, spinning metal discs that make them ideal tools for certain use cases (like cutting up concrete) but are terrible for anything else. Assaph believes that LLMs have a large number of use cases where we should use them, but that there's still an inevitable need for human decision-making and a sense of taste that AI will never have.

Find Assaph on LinkedIn or subscribe to his newsletter. If you're interested in fantasy novels, check those out too.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

His hot take? Within 5 years, employment as we know it will sharply decline. Matt predicts that advancements in AI will render traditional employee-employer relationships obsolete, because why would companies hire people to do easily automatable tasks? On the other hand, Matt believes this is a good thing and will enable an entirely new way of working.

Find Matt on LinkedIn or drop him an email at Solo Scale AI.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

• Is Product-Led Growth Really For You? (Leah Tharin, Product-Led Growth Guru & Head of Product @ Jua)
• Embracing Change to Innovate in Product Management (Greg Coticchia, CEO @ Sopheon)
• The Big Pivot to Reinvent Product Management (Yana Welinder, Founder & CEO @ Kraftful)
• Debbie Levitt's Hot Take - Democratising our Work means AI is Going to Steal all our Jobs Sooner (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck")
• Greg Prickril's Hot Take - AI is going to change everything for Product Managers (Greg Prickril, B2B Product Management Coach, Consultant & Trainer)
• Andy Walters' Hot Take - We’re Soon Going to be Living in an AI-Assistant-First World (Andy Walters, CEO @ Emerge Haus & Generative AI Expert)
• Bjarte Rettedal's Hot Take - AI Models Should Be Under Public Ownership or Completely Transparent (Bjarte Rettedal, UX Designer)
• Reinventing the Future of Customer Success with Human-First AI (Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight)

Behavioural science is the study of how people think, act, and interact with their environments. By understanding human "bugs" and irrational behaviours, product managers can create products that align with user needs, addressing pain points inside and outside the app.

It's important to align behavioural tactics with user goals. Ethical applications, like encouraging language learning with Duolingo streaks, contrast with manipulative design patterns that exploit users for profit without delivering real value.

Cognitive biases are the shortcuts our brains take to help us make decisions. Common biases like anchoring, cognitive dissonance, and the sunk cost fallacy have an impact in product decisions. For example, Amazon Prime uses cognitive dissonance to encourage consolidated deliveries, appealing to users' environmental consciousness while reducing costs.

AI can accelerate behavioural research by simulating user responses, though it is not yet capable of replicating cognitive biases fully, even when told to exhibit them. However, biases in AI training data may introduce new challenges, requiring vigilance in its application.

Some people will be sceptical, so it's important to tie behavioural science theory to measurable KPIs and you can use A/B testing to demonstrate value. Not everything has to be a big development effort. Even reworking copy to focus on gains instead of losses can drive changes in user behaviour.

You can find Yael and learn more on YouTube at ProductBS or connect with her on LinkedIn

• Valentine's Special! A Love Letter to Problems, not Solutions (Uri Levine, Founder @ Waze & Author "Fall in Love with the Problem, not the Solution")
• Understanding & Interrupting Cognitive Biases in Product Design (David Dylan Thomas, Author "Design for Cognitive Bias")
• Using Solution Tests to Make Sure You're Building Products Users Want (Jim Morris, Founder @ Product Discovery Group)
• Standing up for User Research... and User Researchers (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck")
• Building Life-Centred Products with Collaborative Product Discovery (Sophia Höfling, Co-founder & Head of Product @ Saiga)
• Betting on the Value of Product Design at the Organisational Poker Table (Andy Budd, Executive & Design Leadership Coach & Founder @ Clearleft)
• Moving Beyond Survival and Paying Off Your Vision Debt (Radhika Dutt, Consultant and Author "Radical Product Thinking")
• Bjarte Rettedal's Hot Take - AI Models Should Be Under Public Ownership or Completely Transparent (Bjarte Rettedal, UX Designer)

A successful product commercialisation strategy needs five key elements: Clear market understanding, monetisation approach, marketing strategy, sales process and plan for renewability. More than anything, company leaders need to think about this stuff upfront and not just wing it.

The data shows that selling products to existing service customers, especially as bundles, is typically more successful than trying to enter new markets. It's tempting to try to go downmarket with cheaper, standardised offerings, but this is challenging due to lack of brand recognition and relationships.

Many leaders focus on pricing, but packaging is often the bigger challenge. Packages should be designed around market segment needs rather than defaulting to simple "good, better, best" tiers without clear rationale. There must be a clear story for why customers would upgrade from one package to another.

A common mistake is trying to commercialise products using existing service-oriented sales and marketing teams. Organisations need to plan and budget for different kinds of capabilities and talent, rather than expecting current staff to develop new skills while maintaining their existing responsibilities.

Shifting from one-time service engagements to recurring product revenue requires changes in how companies measure success, moving from annual revenue targets to customer lifetime value. This transition typically takes several years and requires sustained leadership commitment to stay the course.

"More and more professional services firms are “productizing” their services to grow and scale. But successfully marketing and selling standardized services or products is very different from marketing and selling traditional professional services. Commercialize, a follow-on book to Productize, explores why commercializing new ideas is the most significant stall point when B2B services organizations productize. The book then outlines how the most successful firms commercialize packaged services and new products and get to revenue impact fast and efficiently."

Check it out on Amazon or the book's website.

You can find Eisha and learn more on the Vecteris website or connect with her on LinkedIn (mention you heard her on the podcast when connecting!)

• Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude)
• The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Productization (Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author "Productize")
• Making Sure you REALLY Know your Customers and Pulling out of Growth Stalls (Adrienne Barnes, Founder @ Best Buyer Persona)
• Fearlessly Defeating the Four Horsemen of a Product-Friendly Culture (Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author "Productize" & "Fearless")
• OKIP LIVE! Is Product/Market Fit Really Dead, or Just Resting? (Andrea Saez & Dave Martin, Right To Left)
• Chris Locke's Hot Take - Product Leaders Need to Adopt a VC Mindset (Chris Locke, CEO @ Aspire)
• Jeremy Kirouac's Hot Take - Founders Need Product Management Training (Jeremy Kirouac, Fractional Product Leader)
• Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant)

Driving factors include audience size, audience motivation, speed of value delivery, stickiness and virality. Dragging factors include friction and competitive pressure. There's no specific solution to the Growth Equation, it's about optimising the factors to deliver startup success.

What founders think is "minimal" often isn't. Startups burn months and months on what they think is a minimal solution, but it rarely is. There are stories of startups spending 18 months getting their first version out, getting excited, seeing no traction, and then repeating the doom loop. It's important to get stuff out there and into people's hands quickly to see if you can get traction rather than get stuck building things that no one wants.

Early-stage founders often aim to attack a broad Ideal Customer Profile, believing that it gives them the best chance of getting traction. They make the mistake of tackling sophisticated, mature customers with a never-ending list of "yes, but also..." requests. It's important for early founders to target beach-head customers so you can land and expand. You also need to ensure that you can respond and adapt your early ICP based on real-world feedback.

Being a startup founder means you get to do things you love, like building a product, but you're also responsible for getting it to market. Early sales efforts must be led by the founders; it's a mistake to hire experienced salespeople too soon and expecting them to build your GTM playbook, and external SDR agencies are not going to get your target customers excited about your vision.

It's a common problem: A startup founder is encouraged to hire a product manager, but they're still too close to the vision to want someone to join and start challenging everything. They just need to get the ideas out of their head and into the world. "Proper" product management can come later, developed over time, rather than arguing the toss upfront and never getting anywhere.

"The Growth Equation is your roadmap to early-stage growth, designed specifically for founders navigating the toughest part of the journey: from zero to one. Finding your first customers, figuring out your go-to-market strategy, and scaling your revenue can feel overwhelming when you're up against limited resources and conflicting advice. That's why this book provides clear, actionable steps to help you break through those barriers and take your startup to its first $1M in revenue and beyond."

Check it out on Amazon or the book's website.

You can catch up with Andy on LinkedIn. You can also check his website.

• Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary)
• Nailing your Product/Market Fit Strategy by Focusing on the Mission Critical (Maja Voje, Growth Strategy Expert & Author "Go-To-Market Strategist")
• The Big Pivot to Reinvent Product Management (Yana Welinder, Founder & CEO @ Kraftful)
• Building Great Companies through Community-Led Growth (Lloyed Lobo, Author "From Grassroots to Greatness")
• Nailing your Brand Marketing by Embracing your Zone of Genius (Orly Zeewy, Brand Strategy Consultant & Author "Ready, Launch, Brand")
• Helping Superhero Startup Founders Stay Away from their Kryptonite (Richard Blundell, Founder @ Vencha & Co-author "The Go To Market Handbook for B2B SaaS Leaders")
• Upping Your Odds of BEATING the LinkedIn Algorithm (Ivana Todorovic, CEO @ AuthoredUp)
• Jeremy Kirouac's Hot Take - Founders Need Product Management Training (Jeremy Kirouac, Fractional Product Leader)

His hot take? That product management is one of the least glamorous functions in an organisation. It's often portrayed as a sexy role where you're the "CEO of the product" with autonomy and responsibility, but for most product managers, the role is arduous and grating, involving invisible work like coordinating between teams, dealing with competing interests, and working with less authority than expected.

Find Jas on LinkedIn or check out his newsletter, Fintech R&R.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

• Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude)
• John Cutler's Hot Take - The Instagram-ification of Product Management is Driving us Crazy (John Cutler, Product Educator & Author @ The Beautiful Mess)
• The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs)
• Practice Makes Perfect: Embracing the Messy Reality of Product Management (Matt LeMay, Product Management Consultant & Author "Product Management in Practice")
• Applying Product Management Principles to Life (Miloš Belčević, Author "Build Your Way")
• Dean Peters' Hot Take - There's More to be Said About the Instagram-ification of Product Management (Dean Peters, Principal Consultant & Trainer @ Productside)
• May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport (May Wong, Product Operations Consultant & Coach)
• Chris Butler's Hot Take - Product Managers DON'T Need to be Technical (Chris Butler, Staff Product Operations Manager @ GitHub)

Her hot take? That companies are either paying the "research tax" - spending too much time and money on research and never making a move - or the "stupid tax" - making decisions based purely on gut feel and no evidence. Both of these taxes can get your organisation in trouble, and the best path is to strike the right balance of speed and quality.

Find Victoria on LinkedIn.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

• Standing up for User Research... and User Researchers (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck")
• Getting into the Habit of Continuous Discovery (Teresa Torres, Author "Continuous Discovery Habits")
• Making Sure You Make an Impact through User Research (Steve Portigal, User Research Consultant & Author "Interviewing Users")
• Product Leadership Principles for Tumultuous Times (Giff Constable, Author "Talking with Humans" & "Testing with Humans")
• How to Deploy Empathy to Truly Understand User Needs (Michele Hansen, Author "Deploy Empathy")
• Chinese Startup Culture & Putting the Minimum into MVP (Carlos Lastres, Creative & Marketing Director @ Kaiyan Medical)
• Reducing Waste by Only Spending Time on Really Good Ideas (Julia Shalet, Author "The Really Good Idea Test")
• Retail Product Management in a Global Pandemic (Rhiana Matthew, Senior Product Manager @ Publicis Sapient)

His hot take? That the classic product management advice that comes out of the US and Western Europe just doesn't apply to Nigeria, where market dynamics mean that you have to make very different product decisions, and even the local training courses are dominated by Western voices.

Find Boluwaji on LinkedIn.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

• Supporting Product Managers & Standing Up for the Value of Product Management (Princess Akari, Founder "People in Product")
• Building Disruptive Products by Harnessing Power Users (Moustapha Seck, Founder @ Fluid)
• Making our Product Teams Stronger through Building Communities of Practice (Petra Wille, Author "Strong Product People" and "Strong Product Communities")
• From Physiotherapist to Product Manager (Samuel Ogunkoya, Product Manager @ ProducteevTech)
• Challenges & Opportunities for Africans Making Products for Africans (Abisoye Falabi, Senior Product Manager @ TradeDepot)
• Product Management in Africa & Dreams of an African Silicon Valley (Layo Ogunbanwo, Founder @ Practical Product)
• Product Processes & the Importance of Work / Life Balance (Busayomi Omotosho, Product Manager @ Softcom)
• Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")

Don't try to fit a stereotypical mould of a "good speaker" - authenticity resonates more with audiences.

Everyone has their own motivation for public speaking, and anyone can fall in love with it if they're doing it for a reason they care about.

Even if you feel that other people are already talking about your topic, or that it's all been said before, go and say it anyway. You're the only you.

You can make your presentations more engaging and memorable by incorporating stories, even in stuffy business settings. Your audience will thank you for it.

You don't need to be a big name to make a big impact. You just need to find the people who need to hear what you have to say. You can still make a difference.

Every speaking opportunity is a learning experience. Some of them will go great, some of them will go terribly, but you can learn something from all of them.

"Present Yourself is for everyone who has ever fought for an equal shot at the spotlight. Christina Wodtke, Danielle Barnes, and a diverse group of accomplished speakers share stories that will inspire you to communicate with authority. This self-guided, step-by-step framework features practical, actionable advice for authentic and effective public speaking."

Check it out on Amazon or the book website.

Catch up with Danielle on LinkedIn or check out Women Talk Design.

Catch up with Christina on LinkedIn or check out Elegant Hack for details of all the other books she's written.

• Diving into the Deep End as a Woman in Product (Darby Maloney, Product Manager @ Divvy & Occasional Swimming Pool User)
• Closing the Gender Pay Gap and Hiring Diverse Product Teams (Chris Mason, Co-Founder @ Intelligent People)
• Standing Up for Diversity & Inclusion When No One Looks Like You (Merina Khanom, Product Manager @ BBC iPlayer)
• Maintaining a Collaborative & Inclusive Product Culture at Scale (Anna Curzon, CPO @ Xero)
• Defeating Bias, Prejudice and Bullying in the Workplace (Kim Scott, Author "Radical Candor" & "Just Work")
• Building Your Product Muscles & Developing Strong Product Teams (Petra Wille, Product Leadership Coach)
• Product Management in Africa & Dreams of an African Silicon Valley (Layo Ogunbanwo, Founder @ Practical Product)
• Building Data Driven Products & Dodging Unsolicited Advice (Emily Reid, Product Manager @ FCT)

His hot take? Product managers should stop defaulting to prioritisation through value divided by effort, which he argues can stifle innovation. Value and effort aren't unimportant, but they're just part of the puzzle. He believes the path to deciding what to build next should emerge from discussions with smart, diverse teams, focusing on the desired outcomes and business goals.

Find Mark on LinkedIn.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

• OKRs: The Gateway Drug to Agility & Good Product Management (Jeff Gothelf, Product Management Consultant & Co-author "Lean UX" )
• Adventures in Product Management (Dan Olsen, Author "The Lean Product Playbook")
• Fighting Fires in B2B Product Management (Rich Mironov, Author "The Art of Product Management")
• Your Product is a Joke - How to use Improv Comedy Principles in Product Management (Amogh Sarda, Co-founder @ Eesel)
• Putting Customers at the Heart of your Product Decisions (Hubert Palan, Founder @ Productboard)
• Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant)
• Jordan Dalladay's Hot Take - We Should Build Roadmaps Of Risks, Not Features (Jordan Dalladay, Product Consultant @ inherent ventures)
• Build Better Products at Scale with Product Operations (Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles, Product Consultants & Co-authors "Product Operations")

His hot take? We should invert our approach to product roadmapping. Instead of listing features to build, create a "risk-based product strategy" that outlines all the assumptions and potential pitfalls that could prevent success. This approach helps teams prioritize learning and experimentation, validating their riskiest assumptions first and dragging their vision into reality more effectively.

Find Jordan on LinkedIn and you can check out his firm, inherent ventures.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

• OKRs: The Gateway Drug to Agility & Good Product Management (Jeff Gothelf, Product Management Consultant & Co-author "Lean UX" )
• Adventures in Product Management (Dan Olsen, Author "The Lean Product Playbook")
• Fighting Fires in B2B Product Management (Rich Mironov, Author "The Art of Product Management")
• Your Product is a Joke - How to use Improv Comedy Principles in Product Management (Amogh Sarda, Co-founder @ Eesel)
• Putting Customers at the Heart of your Product Decisions (Hubert Palan, Founder @ Productboard)
• Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant)
• Build What Matters with Vision-Led Product Management (Rajesh Nerlikar, Author "Build What Matters")
• Build Better Products at Scale with Product Operations (Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles, Product Consultants & Co-authors "Product Operations")

His hot take? That product managers don't need to be technical and that it might even be a net negative to their relationship with the engineering team.

Find Chris on LinkedIn and remember to check out his AI product course, "AI Product Design Patterns" .

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.

• Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude)
• The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs)
• Practice Makes Perfect: Embracing the Messy Reality of Product Management (Matt LeMay, Product Management Consultant & Author "Product Management in Practice")
• May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport (May Wong, Product Operations Consultant & Coach)
• Dean Peters' Hot Take - There's More to be Said About the Instagram-ification of Product Management (Dean Peters, Principal Consultant & Trainer @ Productside)
• Applying Product Management Principles to Life (Miloš Belčević, Author "Build Your Way")
• Product Processes & the Importance of Work / Life Balance (Busayomi Omotosho, Product Manager @ Softcom)
• Jeremy Kirouac's Hot Take - Founders Need Product Management Training (Jeremy Kirouac, Fractional Product Leader)

His hot take? That startup founders live in information bubbles that concentrate solely on revenue and don't spend enough time teaching them good product management fundamentals. This impacts their chances of building a good product company and impacts their relationship with product management teams as they scale.

Find Jeremy all over Canada, or on LinkedIn.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

• Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary)
• Build Products Businesses Want with the Lean B2B Pyramid (Étienne Garbugli, Author "Lean B2B", "Find your Market" and "Solving Product")
• Your Product is a Joke - How to use Improv Comedy Principles in Product Management (Amogh Sarda, Co-founder @ Eesel)
• Chris Locke's Hot Take - Product Leaders Need to Adopt a VC Mindset (Chris Locke, CEO @ Aspire)
• Upping Your Odds of BEATING the LinkedIn Algorithm (Ivana Todorovic, CEO @ AuthoredUp)
• Greg Prickril's Hot Take - AI is going to change everything for Product Managers (Greg Prickril, B2B Product Management Coach, Consultant & Trainer)
• May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport (May Wong, Product Operations Consultant & Coach)
• Dean Peters' Hot Take - There's More to be Said About the Instagram-ification of Product Management (Dean Peters, Principal Consultant & Trainer @ Productside)

His hot take? That product leaders need to adopt the mindset of Venture Capitalists to truly drive growth through their product initiatives; placing a series of bets, backed by data, with clear stage gates for decision-making and adopting a portfolio approach to product prioritisation.

Find Chris on LinkedIn and remember to check out his training company, Aspire.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.

• Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary)
• Paying Off Your Organisation's Human Debt Through Agility & Psychological Safety (Duena Blomstrom, Founder & CEO @ People Not Tech)
• Fearlessly Defeating the Four Horsemen of a Product-Friendly Culture (Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author "Productize" & "Fearless")
• Greg Prickril's Hot Take - AI is going to change everything for Product Managers (Greg Prickril, B2B Product Management Coach, Consultant & Trainer)
• May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport (May Wong, Product Operations Consultant & Coach)
• Dean Peters' Hot Take - There's More to be Said About the Instagram-ification of Product Management (Dean Peters, Principal Consultant & Trainer @ Productside)
• Build Better Products at Scale with Product Operations (Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles, Product Consultants & Co-authors "Product Operations")
• Applying Product Management Principles to Life (Miloš Belčević, Author "Build Your Way")

This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.

Beware snake oil salespeople who claim to be making millions off of their LinkedIn content and are trying to sell you frameworks to be just like them. There's no cookie-cutter approach, the algorithm is changing all the time, and the majority of these people are basically lying about the results you will get and laughing their way to the bank.

Direct sales pitches underperform compared to content that offers value with a subtle call to action. Posts with a soft sell, focusing on the audience’s needs and delivering value without the CTA, perform better. You can't just keep selling things or trying to get people to click links... LinkedIn hates you leaving the platform and they will de-boost your posts.

Posts with external links often get down-boosted because LinkedIn wants to keep users on the platform. Adding links in the comments or at the very end of the post is a better strategy, though even this approach reduces post impressions.

However it might look, LinkedIn explicitly prioritises real conversations and interactions rather than people mindlessly sharing clickbait. Concentrate on having real conversations, replying to comments, and replying to the comments on comments. This will boost your own impressions.

There's no statistically significant impact on having either of these badges. The badges are just there to make you feel special and keep you coming back to LinkedIn so that they can keep advertising to you. People with blue badges don't obviously have better content than those without, and people with gold badges are just being rewarded for feeding the AI-training hamster wheel.

Engagement Pods are private groups of people who share their posts with each other so they can game engagement and try to defeat the dreaded algorithm. However, these are super-easy to detect and they show up quickly even to external analysis. There are better ways to win at LinkedIn than paying exorbitant fees to snake oil salespeople.

You can catch up with Ivana on LinkedIn or check out AuthoredUp.

• How to Move Fast Without Breaking Things (Dani Grant, Co-founder & CEO @ Jam)
• Valentine's Special! A Love Letter to Problems, not Solutions (Uri Levine, Founder @ Waze & Author "Fall in Love with the Problem, not the Solution")
• Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary)
• The Big Pivot to Reinvent Product Management (Yana Welinder, Founder & CEO @ Kraftful)
• Nailing your Product/Market Fit Strategy by Focusing on the Mission Critical (Maja Voje, Growth Strategy Expert & Author "Go-To-Market Strategist")
• Nailing your Brand Marketing by Embracing your Zone of Genius (Orly Zeewy, Brand Strategy Consultant & Author "Ready, Launch, Brand")
• Helping Superhero Startup Founders Stay Away from their Kryptonite (Richard Blundell, Founder @ Vencha & Co-author "The Go To Market Handbook for B2B SaaS Leaders")
• Building Great Companies through Community-Led Growth (Lloyed Lobo, Author "From Grassroots to Greatness")

Her hot take? Product leaders send their teams off for training but then don't do anything when they come back, and nothing changes. This leads them to question the value of the training, but it's almost never the quality of the training that's at fault, it's what they (don't) do with it.

Find Jenny on LinkedIn and remember to check out her course on Reforge.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.

• The Role of Product Management on Truly Agile Development Teams (Allen Holub, Software Architect, Consultant & Outspoken Twitter Agilist)
• Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude)
• Escaping the Build Trap with Product Operations and Strong CPOs (Melissa Perri, Product Management Leader, Educator & Author "Escaping the Build Trap")
• OKRs: The Gateway Drug to Agility & Good Product Management (Jeff Gothelf, Product Management Consultant & Co-author "Lean UX" )
• The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs)
• Going Beyond the Dreaded Product Demo and Creating the Perfect Sales Pitch (April Dunford, Author "Obviously Awesome" and "Sales Pitch")
• Enabling Strategic Product Decisions through Product Operations and Portfolio Management (Becky Flint, CEO of Dragonboat)
• Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")

This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.

Yes, they both have the same "CS" initials, and this can confuse people, but it's not the same role. Customer Success conceptually sits somewhere in between Sales and Customer Support and drives customer value and retention. Customer Success is also more than a role, it's a company strategy. It's also part of the product you sell.

These days, CEOs and investors value profit today over profit tomorrow. Retention is a huge driver of pure profit, and it's one of the highest-leverage activities you can invest in for a recurring revenue business. On the flip side, leaders are looking to become as efficient as possible and reduce the human effort to drive this retention, leading to a requirement for digital customer success strategies.

Chris Degnan (CRO at Snowflake) recently opined on the 20VC podcast that he sees no use for Customer Success teams and would immediately get rid of them. That doesn't work for everyone though, and there are many companies that legitimately need Customer Success teams. It's fair enough to say "Customer Success is a strategy" but someone needs to wake up thinking about this and having it as their biggest priority. Customer expectations are rising all the time, and not all products can look after themselves.

Too many teams have almost no relationship, or only speak when there's an escalation. Both teams have a legitimate claim to own the customer experience, but they should own it together. The best Customer Success teams don't just bring escalations, or even the "What" but the "Who" and the "Why". This makes the relationship strategic and helps build a great product.

If you're not keeping up with AI you're going to be left behind. It's important to focus on the evolutionary and revolutionary changes that you can bring to your product. There need to be guardrails in your product to ensure that the customer experience doesn't degrade, and you need to be sensitive to the fears and paranoia of internal teams that might feel threatened... but it's going to happen so you need a strategy to survive and thrive in the AI-powered future.

"In Digital Customer Success: The Next Frontier, a team of trailblazing Customer Success professionals and digital entrepreneurs delivers an insightful discussion of the next stage in Customer Success management. In the book, you'll discover how to design and deploy touchless and automated digital interventions that help your software users learn and grow as they use your product and unlock the value trapped within it — without ever needing to reach out to a live Customer Success Manager. "

Check it out on Amazon.

You can catch up with Nick on LinkedIn or check out Gainsight. You can also check out the blog post that Nick mentions, The One Thing Billionaire Frank Slootman Got Wrong.

• Is Product-Led Growth Really For You? (Leah Tharin, Product-Led Growth Guru & Head of Product @ Jua)
• Embracing Change to Innovate in Product Management (Greg Coticchia, CEO @ Sopheon)
• The Big Pivot to Reinvent Product Management (Yana Welinder, Founder & CEO @ Kraftful)
• Helping Superhero Startup Founders Stay Away from their Kryptonite (Richard Blundell, Founder @ Vencha & Co-author "The Go To Market Handbook for B2B SaaS Leaders")
• Andy Walters' Hot Take - We’re Soon Going to be Living in an AI-Assistant-First World (Andy Walters, CEO @ Emerge Haus & Generative AI Expert)
• Bjarte Rettedal's Hot Take - AI Models Should Be Under Public Ownership or Completely Transparent (Bjarte Rettedal, UX Designer)
• Greg Prickril's Hot Take - AI is going to change everything for Product Managers (Greg Prickril, B2B Product Management Coach, Consultant & Trainer)
• Debbie Levitt's Hot Take - Democratising our Work means AI is Going to Steal all our Jobs Sooner (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck")

Her hot take? Product managers complain about stakeholders, but they're just doing their jobs and we need to spend some of our energy on understanding them and properly collaborating rather than treating them as annoyances.

Find Rina on LinkedIn or check out Productside

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.

• May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport (May Wong, Product Operations Consultant & Coach)
• Untrapping Product Teams and Getting Rid of Bullsh*t Management (David Pereira, Author "Untrapping Product Teams")
• Dean Peters' Hot Take - There's More to be Said About the Instagram-ification of Product Management (Dean Peters, Principal Consultant & Trainer @ Productside)
• John Cutler's Hot Take - The Instagram-ification of Product Management is Driving us Crazy (John Cutler, Product Educator & Author @ The Beautiful Mess)
• Build Better Products at Scale with Product Operations (Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles, Product Consultants & Co-authors "Product Operations")
• Knowing your Customers, Seeking Evidence and Sticking up for Continuous Discovery (Hope Gurion, Product Leader and Team Coach @ Fearless Product)
• Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")
• Applying Product Management Principles to Life (Miloš Belčević, Author "Build Your Way")

His hot take? Within the next few years, we're going to be moving to an AI-assistant-first operating model, and we can't stop it. There are too many financial incentives, but it might actually be better for users too; as consumers, but also potentially for their private lives too.

Find Andy on LinkedIn or check out Emerge Haus

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

His hot take? AI models should be under public ownership or at the very least fully transparent. We don't let people release supplements or medicines without extensive testing, so why are we OK with something as potentially high-impact as AI models?

Find Bjarte on LinkedIn or bjarterettedal.com

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

His hot take? AI is going to change everything about product management. It's going to mean fewer jobs are required to deliver products, but it also opens up opportunities for business-focused product managers to make a real impact in their jobs, and accelerate them in doing so.

Find Greg on LinkedIn, Prickril.com or https://www.coachpms.com/

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.

Her hot take? Product management is a team sport, and too much product management literature focuses on what the product manager should do, not what the team should do.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.

Sometimes it can seem almost impossible to change things yourself, but you don't have to change it all at once. If you can start showing the impact of smaller changes that deliver value then you can get both interest and buy-in from stakeholders. This gives you permission to try more things.

David coined the term "bullshit management" to represent the work you have to do in many low-performing product companies. Bullshit management is where you spend all your time working on the work around the work, prioritising requirements with no context and being actively prevented from delivering value to your users, and it has to stop.

Coordinative flow is when you spend more time in meetings about the work and struggle to align people than you do actually doing the work. It's focused on outputs and gives you someone to blame when it goes wrong. Collaborative flow is when teams come together to work on problems... collaboratively and use what they know to uncover what they don't know.

Sometimes you have to hold your nose and do things in ways that you don't believe are effective, or actively destructive. This is part and parcel of the job and something you have to get used to. As long as you can find small ways to make an impact in some areas, you can give way in other areas. Rome wasn't built in a day.

We're all primed to look clever and give answers as quickly as we can but product people need to think deeper than that and ask good questions. Why do we really need that? What does success really look like? What don't we know?

"Untrapping Product Teams guides you to simplify what gets unintentionally complicated and equips you to overcome dangerous traps while steadily driving customer and business value. This isn't just another book about product management. It's a thought-provoking guide filled with simplicity, encouraging you to act today for a better tomorrow."

Check it out on Amazon.

You can catch up with David on LinkedIn or check out his website.

• Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude)
• Build High Growth Products by Following the Product Science Success Path (Holly Hester-Reilly, Founder @ H2R Product Science)
• Pragmatic Digital Transformation in Traditional Industries (Dan Chapman, Director, Product Line Leader @ Merck)
• Optimising Product Planning with the Quartz Open Framework (Steve Johnson, Product Coach)
• Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant)
• Surviving a Lack of Product Thinking & Riding the Product Maturity Curve (Nis Frome, VP Product @ Feedback Loop)
• Is this Seriously Game Over for Scrum? (David Pereira, Editor @ Serious Scrum)
• Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")

His hot take? That there's more to say about the Instagram-ification of product management, the root causes and contributory factors.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

This episode is sponsored by June. June is a user retention hub for early-stage B2B SaaS companies that enables early-stage B2B SaaS companies to understand and act on their product usage, dig into activation, churn and key feature usage. Check out June here.

• Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude)
• The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs)
• Practice Makes Perfect: Embracing the Messy Reality of Product Management (Matt LeMay, Product Management Consultant & Author "Product Management in Practice")
• John Cutler's Hot Take - The Instagram-ification of Product Management is Driving us Crazy (John Cutler, Product Educator & Author @ The Beautiful Mess)
• Applying Product Management Principles to Life (Miloš Belčević, Author "Build Your Way")
• Nils Davis's Hot Take - Product Managers Need to Tell Better Stories on their Resumes (Nils Davis, Resume Coach & Go-to-Market Consultant @ Confidence & Impact LLC)
• Debbie Levitt's Hot Take - Democratising our Work means AI is Going to Steal all our Jobs Sooner (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck")
• Build Better Products at Scale with Product Operations (Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles, Product Consultants & Co-authors "Product Operations")

It's been tough out there, and loads of amazing people have been laid off and struggled to find new roles. Some might doubt they'll ever get another job again! But there are good and great jobs available if you know where to look.

There's a "dark web" of networking and personal relationships, without which you might struggle to get introduced to some of the jobs. At the highest level, the majority of jobs are not posted publicly. Whether you like it or not, you need to play the game and build strategic relationships with boutique recruiters and especially investors.

Most people are trying to optimise for something in their new job. Maybe it's a big pay packet. Maybe it's a mission they believe in. Maybe it's the stage of company, influence and impact. There's no wrong answer, but make sure you know what you're getting yourself into and what success looks like.

Many of us have squiggly careers and we've bounced between industries or types of company. This is fine, but if you're looking to get a job in a particular niche then you need to optimise your career narrative to tell a story about why YOU are the person for that niche.

Some founders or business leaders will always prioritise someone with a stellar name on their CV, and this can leave people who have worked for lesser-known companies feeling adrift. However, you can take a strategic view of your job search, outwork and outsmart your competition.

You can catch up with Aakash on LinkedIn, or Twitter or check out his newsletter.

• Connecting Product Management to Business Goals by Mastering your Product Strategy (Gabrielle Bufrem, Product Leadership Coach & Advisor)
• Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary)
• How to Build Products when the Founder IS the Product (Saagar Bains, Fractional Product Leader & Former Head of Product @ The Body Coach)
• Landing That Perfect Role by Finding Your Inevitable Edge (Erika Klics, Job Search Strategist & Founder @ ErikaKlics.com)
• Supporting the Next Generation of Female Product Managers with Women in Product UK (Namrata Sarmah, Founder @ Women in Product UK & CPO @ INTO)
• Making our Product Teams Stronger through Building Communities of Practice (Petra Wille, Author "Strong Product People" and "Strong Product Communities")
• Nils Davis's Hot Take - Product Managers Need to Tell Better Stories on Their Resumes (Nils Davis, Resume Coach & Go-to-Market Consultant @ Confidence & Impact LLC)
• Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")

His hot take? That the majority of product managers are doing themselves a disservice by producing resumes that simply list a bunch of tasks that pretty much all product managers have done.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time at https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot

Visit Nils's site: https://perfectpmresume.com/ Nils on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilsdavis/

His hot take? That the Instagram-ification of product management sets unrealistic standards, and is driving us all crazy.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

Her hot take?

That if we are all fine doing each other's jobs (and maybe not doing them well) then AI can do all of our jobs today.

Also available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT5IBKsIE-E&ab_channel=OneKnightinProduct

The relationship between product management and sales teams is traditionally tricky, and a common complaint from B2B PMs. Saeed Khan and I are looking to help with this with an online course and we'd love your feedback on your relationship with sales. This will help shape the course and, if you want to take part when the course is ready, we'll give you a special discount.

Please fill in the survey here. Thanks!

It's important to dispel the myth of multi-armed product managers who can just do everything. There's too much for everyone to do! This creates barriers to doing great product management work and pulls product managers away from doing the real, value-add product management work that they're judged on.

The three pillars are ways to think about how to organise enablement. They are "Business & Data Insights", "Customer & Market Insights" and "Process and Practices". They are all the foundation of good product decision-making, and all companies will have a certain level of maturity already.

You don't need to fix everything at once. If you already have good capabilities in one or more areas, fix the ones that you don't have good capabilities in! You don't need to boil the ocean, just find the biggest gaps and opportunities to improve, and start to work on them.

There's such a thing as too much process but, even if you don't call it process or try to define it, all work involves a process. It's important to have people to oversee the process at scale, prevent duplication or rework, and make sure that process is right-sized rather than ever-expanding.

There are plenty of ways to go with product operations as you scale, but the most important thing is being really honest with yourself about what your most important limiting factors are, what your product managers are spending time on and what's going to work for you.

"Many companies want to reap the benefits of economies of scale that comes with being a product-led company. As our businesses change shape to focus more on software, so do our ways of working. We need to make sure we’re breaking down these silos of information and capabilities that arise at scale. To react quickly and set great Product Strategies, leaders and team members alike need access to high-quality data and a process to implement their decisions."

Check it out on Amazon or the book website.

"To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. "

Check it out on Amazon.

You can catch up with Melissa at melissaperri.com, check out https://productinstitute.com or follow her on LinkedIn.

You can catch up with Denise at denisetilles.com or follow her on LinkedIn.

• Escaping the Build Trap with Product Operations and Strong CPOs (Melissa Perri, Product Management Leader, Educator & Author "Escaping the Build Trap")
• OKRs: The Gateway Drug to Agility & Good Product Management (Jeff Gothelf, Product Management Consultant & Co-author "Lean UX" )
• Achieving Product Excellence with the Product Operations Manifesto (Antonia Landi, Product Ops Consultant & Co-Author "Product Operations Manifesto")
• Adventures in Product Management (Dan Olsen, Author "The Lean Product Playbook")
• Going Global! When and How to Take your Product International (Chui Chui Tan, International Growth Adviser & Director @ Beyō Global)
• Your Product is a Joke - How to use Improv Comedy Principles in Product Management (Amogh Sarda, Co-founder @ Eesel)
• Leading & Evolving Product Teams Through Hyperscale (Brian Shen, Product Director @ ClickUp)
• Optimising Product Planning with the Quartz Open Framework (Steve Johnson, Product Coach)

When working with incoming product leaders, potentially without a product background at all, it's important to have a coach who has product experience who can help you identify your weaknesses, assess the state of play and provide actionable advice. Ultimately, it's important to empower the coachee.

It's important to define who your target customer is and what are their key attributes. This could be demographics, firmographics or whatever characteristics you need to know who you most need to learn from to calibrate your decisions as a product team. But, too many product teams end up resorting to proxies in other functions who "know the customers".

Some people are just naturally confident about everything and can react badly if their ideas are challenged. But, as product people, we absolutely need to look beyond innate confidence and work out what informed the perspective. Which customers are we basing it on? Can I speak to some of those customers? It's not about trashing people's ideas but moving forward with confidence.

Sometimes teams get stuck into cycles of trying to do "perfect research", possibly because they're afraid that they're only going to get one shot at it. This means that they end up not making any moves at all, and everyone ends up getting frustrated at the amount of time product teams take to do anything.

All teams have an imperfect understanding of their product, the pain points associated with their product and their customers. Continuous discovery helps address this by removing blind spots but doesn't aim for perfection - simply evidence about how to make your next move. Is it contributing to user researcher lay-offs? It feels difficult to argue this when it feels like the majority of companies don't do any user research in the first place. User researchers and continuous discovery can co-exist.

You can catch up with Hope at Fearless Product or follow her on LinkedIn.

• Data-Informed Decision Making and the Three Cs of Product Management (Roger Snyder, VP of Products & Services @ 280 Group)
• Adventures in Product Management (Dan Olsen, Author "The Lean Product Playbook")
• Getting into the Habit of Continuous Discovery (Teresa Torres, Author "Continuous Discovery Habits")
• Build High Growth Products by Following the Product Science Success Path (Holly Hester-Reilly, Founder @ H2R Product Science)
• Selling Product Thinking by Influencing Companies at the Right Time (Anthony Marter, Product Coach)
• Putting Customers at the Heart of your Product Decisions (Hubert Palan, Founder @ Productboard)
• Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant)
• Build What Matters with Vision-Led Product Management (Rajesh Nerlikar, Author "Build What Matters")

Join hundreds of other product people in New York City on April 18th 2024 for the New York Product Conference! You'll learn from some of the best minds in product today — including Dennis Crowley (Founder of Foursquare), Sahil Lavingia (Founder of Gumroad), April Dunford (product positioning expert and bestselling author) and so many others through masterclass keynotes, interactive working sessions, small group discussions and more. Topics covered include Product Strategy, Product Leadership, AI for Product Managers, Customer Research, and more. 

Pricing increases on the first of the month, so you'll want to register soon. Plus, use the code OneKnightInProduct and save another $50 when you register!

Whilst Marty doesn't like to unnecessarily label things, or have any sniff of "process" for the sake of process, he started to realise that just saying "the way the best companies work" was too vague and handwavy. However, the core principles of great product companies and product teams have not changed, and this isn't a framework.

These days, it's fashionable to beat up product "thought leaders" and complain that they're being too dogmatic, idealistic, or unrealistic. But, SVPG didn't invent any of these principles, they just observed them in the best-performing product companies. It's still important to apply critical thinking and make sure they make sense to you and your organisation.

It's not always easy to transform, and there are limits to how far you can go bottoms-up, but you can generally make progress one step at a time. There's an incredible amount of onus on product leaders to evangelise and champion this change and, if they can't (or won't) do it, they shouldn't be product leaders.

It's easy to see this as something that just affects product teams, but the whole organisation needs to buy into the change. Reading bits of "Inspired" at them, or talking about the number of experiments you've done this week, is unlikely to sway them, You need to show business results and real impact and make them care about it on their terms.

The competencies remain the same... Product Managers, Product Leaders, "proper" Product Designers (not just pixel pushers) and Tech Leads who care as much about what they're building as how they're building it. If you just expect to get results with a disengaged, outsourced engineering team, graphic designers and product owners, you're going to be disappointed.

It's easy for people like us to sit there and talk about the benefits of product transformation and how we should all definitely do it but, for some people, this is all alien. In cases like this, a good product coach can be the difference between success and failure. But, there are so many product coaches these days, so make sure you get a good one.

"The most common question after reading INSPIRED and EMPOWERED has been: "Yes, we want to work this way, but the way we work today is so different, and so deeply ingrained, is it even possible for a company like ours to transform to the product model?" TRANSFORMED was written to bridge the gap between where most companies are right now and where they need to be. The leaders of these companies know they must transform to compete in an era of rapidly changing enabling technology, but most of them have never operated this way before. "

Check it out on Amazon.

"Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products. The goal of EMPOWERED is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you’ll need to create just such an environment. "

Check it out on Amazon.

"How do today’s most successful tech companies―Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla―design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than most tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love―and that will work for your business. "

Check it out on Amazon.

You can catch up with Marty at Silicon Valley Product Group or follow him on LinkedIn.

• Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude)
• The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs)
• How to Build an Effective Product Organisation (Marty Cagan, Author "Empowered" & "Inspired")
• Pragmatic Digital Transformation in Traditional Industries (Dan Chapman, Director, Product Line Leader @ Merck)
• Optimising Product Planning with the Quartz Open Framework (Steve Johnson, Product Coach)
• Surviving a Lack of Product Thinking & Riding the Product Maturity Curve (Nis Frome, VP Product @ Feedback Loop)
• Is this Seriously Game Over for Scrum? (David Pereira, Editor @ Serious Scrum)
• Transforming companies & instilling a product mindset (Dave Martin, Founder @ Right to Left)

We can apply product management principles to one's life, beyond just professional settings. This includes using prioritisation frameworks to manage personal goals and tasks, and considering whether there's a "North-Star metric" that can help guide personal growth and decision-making.

Whether we're switching contexts between different roles in our careers or having to balance multiple responsibilities, we can apply product management strategies to help us prioritise our time and manage our mental bandwidth.

There's no magic formula for "value", but it's important to understand the deeper meaning of the concept of value, whether delivering value to customers or identifying what brings value to one's life.

We don't have to use prioritisation frameworks for everything, but applying product management prioritisation techniques can help us focus on what is most important. If we practice enough, we can get into the habit, and it even becomes somewhat intuitive to our life decisions.

We can use our empathic and discovery mindset to help solicit genuine feedback and dig into people's motivations in conversations. This offers the tantalising prospect of being able to bridge ideological divides and improve the quality of our interactions with society as a whole.

"Perhaps you have heard about product management. Maybe you use it in your work. If that’s the case, chances are high that you know that product management is full of useful frameworks, principles, and tools that focus on prioritization and maximizing value, better planning, agile delivery, and more. But what if you want to use these tools in your personal life? How would you do that in a way that will make sure you will live a better, happier, and more fulfilled life? In this book, author Miloš Belčević will show you how."

Check it out on Amazon.

You can catch up with Miloš on LinkedIn or check out his website.

• Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude)
• Practice Makes Perfect: Embracing the Messy Reality of Product Management (Matt LeMay, Product Management Consultant & Author "Product Management in Practice")
• The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Productization (Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author "Productize")
• Achieving Product Excellence with the Product Operations Manifesto (Antonia Landi, Product Ops Consultant & Co-Author "Product Operations Manifesto")
• Paying Off Your Organisation's Human Debt Through Agility & Psychological Safety (Duena Blomstrom, Founder & CEO @ People Not Tech)
• Embracing Change to Innovate in Product Management (Greg Coticchia, CEO @ Sopheon)
• Fearlessly Defeating the Four Horsemen of a Product-Friendly Culture (Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author "Productize" & "Fearless")
• Pragmatic Digital Transformation in Traditional Industries (Dan Chapman, Director, Product Line Leader @ Merck)

In these digital days, it seems like most people think UX people are just there in the corner to colour in people's ideas, but UX should be a strategic role that enables user and customer-focused decision-making and makes sure we always balance our business's needs with those of our users.

We've been moving fast and breaking things for long enough now to realise how often it doesn't work. User research feels unconscionably slow to some people, but it doesn't have to be slow, and doing good user research (whoever does it) is an investment in trying to get things right.

Back in the old days, product managers were hiding in the corner with the UX people, as agilists and engineers rode through the company calling all the shots. Now the UX people are hiding with the engineers whilst the PM makes all of the decisions. There's a power imbalance, and it's not a true "trio".

It's not fair or reasonable to lay all of this at the doors of PM thought leaders championing certain approaches. There are plenty of UX thought leaders who champion them too. But, people are getting laid off and at least some of them are blaming PM-led product discovery as the root cause.

Most books have something useful in them, and all approaches can work in some contexts. Debbie has her approach, others have their approaches, and there's no one "right way". But, it's important to make sure that approaches can be challenged, expanded upon, and that the approaches and techniques are described clearly and without room for interpretation.

"Customers Know You Suck is the how-to manual for customer-centric product-market fit. Its highly actionable models, maps, and processes empower everyone to improve the Customer Experience (CX). Learn how to investigate, diagnose, and act on what's blocking teams. Gather the evidence and data that better inform decisions, leading to increased satisfaction, conversion, and loyalty. Use our governance model for implementing and monitoring the progress, success, and failure of internal process changes and experiments."

Check it out on Amazon or pay what you want.

Debbie is a fan of doing good discovery, naturally. Here's a video of an approach she recommends called the Knowledge Quadrant: Workshop: Discovery Phase - Knowledge Quadrant

You can catch up with Debbie on LinkedIn or check out Delta CX.

• Using Solution Tests to Make Sure You're Building Products Users Want (Jim Morris, Founder @ Product Discovery Group)
• Getting into the Habit of Continuous Discovery (Teresa Torres, Author "Continuous Discovery Habits")
• We're All Responsible For Accessible Product Design (Holly Schroeder, Senior UX Researcher & Accessibility Advocate)
• Making Sure You Make an Impact through User Research (Steve Portigal, User Research Consultant & Author "Interviewing Users")
• Product Leadership Principles for Tumultuous Times (Giff Constable, Author "Talking with Humans" & "Testing with Humans")
• How to Deploy Empathy to Truly Understand User Needs (Michele Hansen, Author "Deploy Empathy")
• Chinese Startup Culture & Putting the Minimum into MVP (Carlos Lastres, Creative & Marketing Director @ Kaiyan Medical)
• Building a Culture of Continuous Discovery (Cindy Alvarez, Author "Lean Customer Development")

It's not enough to just sit there and layer "community" on top of your existing marketing and expect it to pay back instantly. It has to be part of your company's DNA, something that your customers and your employees can be inspired and motivated by. Attribution is hard, but the results will come.

You cannot take your community for granted. You need to provide them with constant, consistent value with no immediate expectation of reward. They will keep coming for the value, and you are engineering serendipity for future conversations.

That said, if you don't ask, you don't get. You cannot be afraid of trying to offer paid value to your community, even if it feels uncomfortable to ask. If you are providing value then people will be happy to talk to you. Not everyone will become a customer, but some will. Use the reciprocity bias to your advantage.

Don't try to go too wide chasing vanity metrics. You will get more value out of a smaller community of people who share your exact passions than out of a generic sea of people who couldn't care less. Make sure you identify your people, show up for them, and own your white space.

There are more communities and products to solve problems for communities than ever before but, if you have the right community, you can use it to your advantage. Having an engaged, passionate community can help prevent your company from becoming a commodity.

"In a world where traditional marketing is losing its edge and products are struggling to stand out, a thriving community is your biggest asset. Recognizing that true success lies not in products or technologies, but in the power of people, author Lloyed Lobo explores the intricate art of harnessing the community's strength as your ultimate acquisition channel, brand differentiator, feedback source, retention lever, and catalyst for transformative change."

Check it out on Amazon.

You can catch up with Lloyed on LinkedIn or Instagram.

Whether you're experimenting with putting it in your own products or using it to turbocharge your product management duties, you need to check out generative AI if you want to stay ahead of the curve. It's not going to replace product managers any time soon, but it can help us dream bigger.

75% of CEOs are terrified that generative AI will kill their business. It's like the Kodak story on steroids, and it's not even about tankers getting outmanoeuvred by speedboats anymore. Big companies are also getting in on the game and you need to have a response.

It's as important as ever for product managers to focus on solving real user problems, no matter what the tech. We can't just slap ChatGPT onto everything and call it a success. Generative AI can help us and our customers in new and interesting ways but we must concentrate on solving their real problems.

This could be down to falling in love with the technology, struggles with pricing or quality, lack of explainability or poor understanding of your customers' most important jobs to be done. Make sure you're intentional about your go-to-market plan to avoid failure.

So many of these solutions are built on the same back-end, and there are de facto default LLMs. In some cases, startups building on top of things like ChatGPT end up disappearing overnight because OpenAI has developed a new feature of its own. It is possible to create moats through proprietary data, excellent UX and good old-fashioned verticalisation. Make sure you create a moat!

"Did you know that incorporating AI into products is now a pivotal strategy for businesses worldwide? According to a 2023 study from Accenture, a staggering 75% of C-suite executives agree that failure to integrate AI effectively in the next five years could lead to business obsolescence. "Reimagined: Building Products with Generative AI" is your essential guide in this transformative journey. It's not just about understanding AI and Generative AI technologies; it's about strategically harnessing them to drive innovation, team efficiency, and market success.

Check it out on Amazon.

You can catch up with Shyvee on LinkedIn or check out Product Management Reimagined.

People tend to think about a product portfolio, they think about a massive web of products, but even one-product companies may have multiple product managers working on different aspects of the product and these may well still need to be traded off against each other.

We're always told to create visions, strategies and roadmaps, but you need to be able to lay these out for a variety of stakeholders and explain them in ways that resonate with them.

You may not have a Product Ops team, but someone is doing the product ops work. When you have a small team, maybe you can handle the work but, eventually, you'll need a team to ensure the product teams deliver.

Going further, product ops professionals who aren't comfortable with managing a portfolio shouldn't be in the job. Product ops people aren't babysitters for the product management team, they're senior, strategic partners.

Sometimes, you might not make big, strategic bets with unclear payoffs if you only use financial ROI metrics. You may also make bad resourcing decisions if you don't consider which teams are available when, and not taking account of bundles of value when making trade-offs.

You can connect with Becky on LinkedIn. You can also check out Dragonboat. Alongside their SaaS software, they also have a bunch of available resources.

This episode is sponsored by Succeeding in B2B Product Management, a cohort-based, live course that Saeed Khan and I are launching on Maven in January. If you're a B2B product manager struggling to make an impact, a B2B product leader looking to promote healthy product practices, or a B2B founder looking to get your teams to be true business partners, check the course out here. You can use discount code OKIP to get $100 off the price of admission.

The true definition of a brand is that it is the sum of all experiences that customers have with an organisation over time. Brands don't live in the minds of the company, or its founders. They live in the minds of their customers.

Some startup founders either don't bother with marketing at all, or they give up as soon as the first thing they try doesn't work. But, you need to start early and invest for the long term. There are so many brands competing for mindshare and you need to make sure that you remain part of that in an attention-poor market.

It can be pretty common for companies to either ignore their website entirely or try to cram as much information as possible on there and overwhelm potential customers. Your website is likely to be the first touchpoint that a potential customer has with your brand, and you need to clearly and concisely explain why they should care about you.

Yes, it's easier to intercept avoidable problems before they occur, but there are plenty of good conversations you can have whatever the situation within the company. It's never too late to try to make a difference, and you can find that the entire company will get energised and rally to the cause once you've put the work in to define what the cause really is.

It can be really common for founders and solopreneurs to try to solve every problem for everyone because they're interested in everything and they think that it will increase their chances of success. But, if you can find the thing you're uniquely good at and focus your efforts there then you have a much higher chance of sticking in someone's mind and being their go-to solution for that specific problem.

"You may be familiar with the Silicon Valley expression about the iterative approach to software development, "We’re learning to fly the plane while we’re building it." If so, think of a startup―with all its moving parts, phases, and personalities―as flying a plane, while you’re building it, booking passengers, marketing the airline, interviewing co-pilots, and serving coffee. In this book, Orly Zeewy navigates the turbulence and provides a flight plan so you know when you’ve landed in the right airport."

Check it out on Amazon.

You can catch up with Orly on LinkedIn or visit Zeewy Brands.

It can be tempting for founders to think they know exactly what they need, rely on feedback from customer-facing teams, or not speak to anyone until they've already built the thing they want to build. Feedback from sales teams and founders is an incredibly important vector, but should only be the start of the discussion never the end.

There are methodological constraints to continuous research, alongside the difficulty of finding the time and buy-in to do it but, on the other hand, it can be incredibly impactful to have rapid research tightly coupled to the product team. On the other hand, well-planned up-front research can still help you to find truly disruptive insights for your company. Do both!

People look at the word "bias" and worry about the negative connotations, but "bias" just represents how our brains are wired. Cognitive biases will affect how we interview people, and we should do our best to counteract their effect and improve on getting better (even if we're not perfect).

It can be a heavy burden to bear if all of your well-planned and well-executed research ends up having no effect on decision-making at all. It's important not to get downhearted, and work out ways to build actionable, accessible repositories to enable your stakeholders to make the best decisions possible.

We don't need to be able to create 45-minute plays off the cuff, and knowing when to stick to our interview plans and when to deviate from the script, enables us to get to the real generative insights that we need from our users and find out what we don't know we don't know.

"Interviewing people is a skill that most professionals who do research assume they already possess. But not everyone knows how to ask questions well. Expert researcher Steve Portigal updates his classic Interviewing Users to provide fresh guidance on interviewing techniques, as well as new content. This edition includes a new foreword by Jamika D. Burge and features two new chapters: one about analysis and synthesis and sharing research results, and another about ensuring that your user research efforts will have an impact on your organization. There are seven new short essays (we call them sidebars) from guest contributors. Plus, you’ll find updated examples, stories, and tips for leading interviews, and new sections about bias, remote research, ResearchOps, planning research, and research logistics. You’ll move from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about people."

My listeners can get 20% off with promo code KNIGHT on the Rosenfeld Media website. This code is valid until 21st December, 2023. Alternatively, check it out on Amazon.

You can catch up with Steve on LinkedIn or visit Portigal.com.

This episode is sponsored by SuperProduct. Have you ever wished you could simplify competitive research, and reduce time commitment and effort but still get extraordinary insights? Well, have I got news for you! You can try SuperProduct's new course which teaches you how to unlock the potential of AI-powered insights about your competitors and about your market. This course demystifies AI and teaches you how to be the mega prompt maestro that will transform ChatGPT into your personal research assistant. Check the course out here, and make sure to use code KNIGHT to support this podcast.

Startup founders often start off spraying and praying, hoping to get any traction at all and start to build their revenue. This is understandable, but generally a mistake. It's important to start off way more narrow than feels comfortable and have a really solid plan to get your next 25 customers. Everything else can follow.

Even when organisations start off with a solid value proposition, this can change over time. But, in any case, one of the main problems with startups slowing down (or failing to scale up) is often not a lack of sales ability, but a lack of fundamental GTM narrative. You need to fix it upstream.

Startup founders put everything on the line to bring a sometimes impossible-seeming vision to fruition. It's easy to criticise them when things are going wrong, but no one has invested more time and effort into their startup than them.

It's important for founders to be self-reflective and understand their own weak spots. In some cases, this is the first leadership position they've ever held. In other cases, they'll have glaring gaps based on their own past experience. It's OK to have gaps! But, it's important to be honest about the gaps and get the right people to help you.

It's tempting to get a seasoned seller into the business to get the numbers in but, actually, there's an even more crucial role that you need to hire first. Listen to the episode to find out who, but it's not a product manager - this can come later after you've got a foothold in the market and the founder can no longer scale.

"There are few people we admire more than the Founders and Leaders of software companies who have the courage, determination and, some might say, sheer madness to put their livelihoods and reputation on the line, to leave their own ‘dent in the universe’. It's a day to day, up at dawn, pride swallowing siege to lead such a business. And we know this for a fact because we’ve walked in your shoes many times. Over the last 25 years, we’ve been involved in the start-up, scale up and exit of several successful technology businesses, that between them have realized close to billion dollars of shareholder value. But along the way we've also had more than our fair share of disappointments and have the mental scars and bruising to prove it. We’ve made mistakes and fallen in what felt like bottomless pits. But fascinatingly enough, we learned as much from the ones that didn’t work, as we did from the successes. It’s these lessons which we thought we'd share in this book."

Check it out on Amazon.

You can catch up with Richard on LinkedIn or visit Vencha.

This episode is sponsored by SuperProduct. Have you ever wished you could simplify competitive research, reduce time commitment and effort but still get extraordinary insights? Well, have I got news for you! You can try SuperProduct's new course which teaches you how to unlock the potential of AI-powered insights about your competitors and about your market. This course demystifies AI and teaches you how to be the mega prompt maestro that will transform ChatGPT into your personal research assistant. Check the course out here, and make sure to use code KNIGHT to support this podcast.

Organisations where product teams form bottoms-up communities of practice are more up to date in their knowledge and thinking, work more closely together and break down silos. Forming these communities makes better product work easier.

Sometimes, it's just a peer learning group. Sometimes, it's a book club. Sometimes it's just a bunch of people going to conferences together. Sometimes it's just a way to share updates with each other. The precise format of a community, and the rituals it observes, are less important than that it exists.

It's easy to see community engagement as something that will atrophy over time, and this is possible, but it's relatively straightforward to build an early rhythm to bed in practices and build muscle memory to make sure that the community sticks.

It's important to focus your community on solving real problems that the team has, rather than the philosophical concept of "learning", which is valuable, but not tangible enough. Find things that matter, and get people together around those things.

You might think that communities of practice are just for bigger companies and, to some extent, they are. However, there are always communities out there that will help you; either communities of people with a specific interest or just general meetup communities where you can chat with peers.

"STRONG Product Communities is a comprehensive guide that empowers product people, product leaders, HR, and Learning & Development professionals to develop and nurture successful product Communities of Practice (CoP). The book offers valuable insights gathered from survey data, interviews with CoP leaders, and the author’s hands-on experience."

Check it out on Amazon.

"Are you a product leader looking for advice on how to be certain that every product manager on your team lives up to their full potential? Do you want to make sure your product people are competent, empowered, and inspired, and would you like to know how you can best help them on this journey? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then this book is for you!"

Check it out on Amazon.

You can connect with Petra on LinkedIn. You can also check out Strong Product People, or Petra's coaching website.

There hasn't been a standard sales pitch approach since forever and, most of the time, it seems that companies just hand the same document down from sales rep to sales rep without ever really considering what it says, or even who owns it. But, there's a method to create one that wins.

It's really important to move beyond just a big list of features with some marketing slides at the front and back, and have a sales deck that tells a story about your differentiated value, your view on the market, and why you are uniquely positioned to solve the problems that market has.

You need to organise your product demos around your differentiated value and take prospects on a journey rather than clicking through every single button and tab in the product. You need to show them why the features you have matter, not just that you have them.

It's natural to want to talk about yourself, and not mention your competitors at all. But, if you don't position yourself against your competitors then you allow your competitors to position themselves against you. Prospects want help navigating alternatives, and that means not just concentrating on yourself.

Again, it's natural to try to avoid calling out perceived weaknesses in your product, but good salespeople already handle these in the field. It's worth getting ahead of these objections so you can answer them upfront because prospects aren't always going to mention them explicitly.

"World-renowned product positioning and marketing expert April Dunford knows that standing out in a crowded market is the key to getting sales. In Sales Pitch, she shows entrepreneurs, salespeople, marketers, and business leaders how they can achieve success by building a narrative that clearly communicates how your product is different and better than anything else on the market. Using a simple step-by-step method and compelling case stories, the author of Obviously Awesome guides you through a solid sales pitch structure that helps customers make confident buying decisions, while positioning you to clearly win in the market."

Check it out on Amazon.

"You know your product is awesome — but does anybody else? Forget everything you thought you knew about positioning. Successfully connecting your product with consumers isn’t a matter of following trends, comparing yourself to the competition or trying to attract the widest customer base. So what is it? April Dunford, positioning guru and tech exec, will enlighten you."

Check it out on Amazon.

You can catch up with April on LinkedIn. You can also check her podcast, Positioning with April Dunford or her newsletter, also called Positioning with April Dunford.

It's not normally a bad product that's the problem. There are a zillion reasons for startup failure, but beating the odds is not a product management or a sales or marketing problem. We have to work cross-functionally, join forces and work together to align the company around success.

Traditional definitions of product/market fit focus on whether you can deliver value to a specific market segment, but it's important to bring other dimensions into play, such as the most effective business model and people's willingness to pay. You have to capture enough value to build a sustainable business.

It's really easy for early startup founders to try to go wide and fix everyone's problems, but this is generally a mistake. It's important to maintain discipline, be strategic, and realise that not all opportunities are created equal. You don't have to make a sale at all costs.

Founders sometimes fall prey to product imposter syndrome, where they fail to extract fair value from their customers because they're not sure the product is good enough, or feel bad asking for money. We need money! But, don't expect your customers to just tell you a fair price. It's important to do decent pricing research.

Business science has matured over the last couple of hundred years, but there are timeless principles from military strategy that can help us succeed. Pitting small resources against larger competition, being nimble, responding to change and executing fast can help us succeed in a crowded marketplace.

"In Growth and Marketing, we were taught how the “big tech” companies grew to their heights more than a decade ago. They had bigger budgets, teams, and global talent. Markets were less saturated. Customers were more excited about innovation. You need a different playbook for GTM. One that applies to bootstrap startups, clever leaders in innovative companies, and independent innovators. So I went on a journey. I devoted a year of my life to interviewing 54 experts from companies such as: Hubspot, Miro, Figma, Metabase, CXL, and many more to ask them to share their “go to market” advice that will most securely and successfully guide you to product-market fit."

Check out the book website.

You can catch up with Maja on LinkedIn.

Leaders want the benefits of productisation, but are afraid to jump in because of the investment required, and whether the bets are going to pay off.

Employees are afraid that they are going to lose their jobs, that their skills and knowledge will become less valuable, or that the client they have invested time in will reject the new model.

It's no surprise that products need a vision, but it's even more important to explain the "why" of productisation, and to connect an aspirational vision to the hard business metrics and KPIs that resonate with a service-mindset organisation.

Eisha talks about the four horsemen of product-friendly culture: Knowing, Perfectionism, Scarcity Mindset and Individual Heroics. Productisation changes the game and these traits can sink productisation efforts. The company needs to shift mindset and probably needs to bring in new expertise.

Product leaders in transforming organisations are not the same as product leaders in tech-first product organisations. Technical chops are secondary, and they need to have much better stakeholder management and communication skills to succeed. They need to ensure there is no tissue rejection by an organisation that just doesn't understand.

"Transforming a B2B services business model to a more scalable, profitable, productized company can have many points of failure - but the biggest and most underserved is the cultural transformation required to support successful productization. The encore book from Eisha Armstrong and her team at Vecteris, Fearless tackles this frequent point of failure and dives deep on the change management required to build a Product-Friendly Culture."

Check it out on Amazon. You can also check out the book website

"More and more traditional professional services firms are turning to "productization" as a strategy to grow, improve valuations, and to fend off new digital-first competitors. However, many of them will fail and waste a lot of money in the process. Productize first outlines the "Seven Deadly Productization Mistakes" made when pursuing a product strategy, then provides the blueprint for overcoming each of these missteps. It is designed to be a practical playbook for any leader of a professional services business who wants to successfully accelerate growth."

Check it out on Amazon. You can also check out the book website

You can catch up with Eisha on LinkedIn.

Product managers often get tied up in the craft of product management and the latest frameworks, but Saagar started out working for his family business and had to work out everything as he went. This gave him an incredible bias for action, to do things that don't scale and to get scrappy where needed. These are traits that many PMs should develop rather than getting precious about process.

Saagar spent some time working for Deloitte Digital and, in many cases, building stuff without being told why it was being built. This left him feeling unsatisfied, and like he wasn't doing "Proper Product". Luckily, even though The Body Coach started building with an external agency, the "why" was so strong from the founders that Saagar could take over something that made sense.

If you have millions of users with a direct relationship with the brand upfront, you can't just throw anything out the door. There's an incredible amount of brand equity and trust that needs to be satisfied, and there is a higher quality bar. That said, you still have to pick your battles, and there's still good product prioritisation work to be done.

When you have an incredibly well-respected founder who lives and breathes the product, you're going to get requests. Some of them will even make sense. But, product people who don't have evidence against the requests, or a better plan in general, are going to get overridden and they only have themselves to blame. That said, it's important not to rail against feature requests just because they're from a founder.

When working with creators with a massive following, who have invested so much of themselves into a company, the worst thing you can do is just walk in expecting them to bend to the awesome power of product management. Saagar spent several hours walking and talking with the founders before even getting the job, to understand their motivations and forge a bond. This ultimately helped him be more successful.

You can connect with Saagar on LinkedIn.

There's a lot of controversy about the merits (or lack of) of MBAs in product management. MBAs are not essential, but they can be helpful when trying to crack the C-suite as you've already spent a lot of time working on your business sense. There are other ways to get this though; the most important thing is to develop that business sense one way or another.

It's hard to land a Chief Product Officer job, and even harder to stay in there. You require a mix of skills, and just being the best at product management doesn't help. It requires a mix of business acumen, executive presence (sad, but true) and the ability to tell a story in terms that resonate with your leadership peers.

Community-building is not an easy skill to teach someone; it requires a certain mindset and certain instincts. There are different types of people in the world, and some of them are natural "connectors" who just know how to join the dots and get people together.

There are various communities around the world that support product managers, or female product managers specifically, but a lot of them have quite a narrow focus on certain job levels or roles. Having top female CPOs available for free in a community is a superpower.

Some sad sacks will sit and grumble about having a "women in product" group rather than just a generic "people in product" group. but the numbers don't lie. Women are still underrepresented in senior positions, and it's easy for companies to blame "pipeline problems". So let's all build the pipeline, so they don't have an excuse anymore.

You can connect with Nam on LinkedIn or check out Women in Product UK, where you can interact with the community and get onto the WhatsApp group.

There are no magic bullets to organisational transformation, but it's also simpler than it sounds. You need to take a number of smaller, measurable steps that move the needle. And teams have a lot more power to affect change than they think - they don't need to await permission.

We let the status quo persist because we don't challenge ourselves, and think this is just the way business works. There's too much fear in the workplace and it's holding us back.

People are afraid of looking incompetent, intrusive or troublesome at work. This is natural, but it limits us in the workplace. Start noticing when you exhibit these behaviours, and they'll start to go away automatically. It's important to speak up.

As with tech debt, all companies accrue Human Debt as they grow. Human Debt is the result of all the abandoned initiatives and missed opportunities to affect change. It adds up and the interest repayments can start to cripple you.

Some bad behaviours will eventually naturally expire. As a society, we've gotten better at standing up for what's right (although there's still plenty of work to do). But, ultimately, you should pay the most burdensome Human Debt off first.

"Built upon fascinating research and an international array of case studies, People Before Tech is an incisive examination of how organizations through their digital transformations become stranded with unoptimised teams and disenfranchised employees. Duena highlights that it is vital not just to implement technology, but also to integrate it into the existing organizational culture and structure, before providing practical guidance and advice on how business leaders and HR professionals can heighten efficiency and effectiveness of workplace teams through collaborative and innovative initiatives."

Check it out on Amazon.

You can connect with Duena on LinkedIn or on her website DuenaBlomstrom.com, where you can find links to all her various endeavours!

There's no one way to do product management, and no one's doing it "right". It all depends on what you need for your stage of company, and whether you're sales-y, ops-y, or product-y in mindset.

In a sales-led organisation, it's common for big deals to torpedo the best-laid plans. Your appetite to do this work will vary, but it's not as simple as saying "X% of revenue and we do it!" But, whatever the number is, it should be really, really high.

One of the founders is generally the de facto "head of product", often with no specific product training. They do many of the same things that the product team would do, but not necessarily in the same way, and with less process. This can cause clashes when the first PM comes in.

You do need some rigour from the PM you bring in, otherwise, what's the point of bringing them in? But, if you bring someone in who is too dogmatic or has worked for much larger organisations, you may find a cultural mismatch and inevitable clash when everything they do seems to slow you down.

Founders may mis-hire if they don't have a strong understanding of what product managers bring to the table, or how they want to work. It's unpleasant to think of, but sometimes the first PM takes the hits, moves on and is replaced by a second PM who can start to make progress since the founders have a better idea of what they'll get the second time around.

You can connect with Jennifer on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

My former podcast guest, Saeed Khan and I are thinking of putting together a B2B Product Management cohort course on Maven. Our goal is to help B2B PMs make peace with the differences between B2B product management and much of the classic product literature, and enable them to be true business partners rather than stuck in a remorseless feature factory. We're assessing interest right now, so if this sounds good, please fill in our course questionnaire. Thanks!

But it's also one of the hardest to do. It's serious, serious work, which is why so many product teams just end up with a list of tasks, or a "pizza strategy" (pepperoni! chicken! M&Ms!)

No one wants to say "no" and people can suffer from the fear of missing out. People can be afraid to take a stance. But, it's essential to narrow your focus to the absolute essentials if you want to make any progress at all.

Product leaders need a deep understanding of their users and customers, but also of the wider business context. You need to be conscious of what the company (and the board) wants.

It's easy to get dragged into a neverending feature list, prioritising whatever the next thing is. Product leaders need to work with wider leadership to identify broad goals, how they can get there & what the 3-5 year plan is.

UX designers are there to look after the users and the engineering team is there to look after the tech. It's absolutely essential for PMs to be trusted business partners if they want to make a big impact.

You can connect with Gabi on Twitter or on LinkedIn. Or, check out her website.

We're slowly moving away from Taylorist, resource-focused management to a less-directive style of leadership. Not all companies are there yet, but even laggards are seeing what other organisations are doing and the benefits it brings.

Coaches facilitate conversations of inquiry and aim to support their clients to take action, evolve and, ultimately, empower them to be the change they want to see in themselves.

At the heart of coaching is the art of coaching, not reflecting your own biases and life story onto people. A good coach can use fundamental coaching skills to coach anyone, whatever their life situation or career niche.

It's less useful to look at the specific behaviours and more at the dynamics of a mentoring relationship; that of benevolence from and respect for a more senior practitioner who has seen your situation before.

It's traditionally hard to attribute specific metrics to coaching or mentoring relationships, but that doesn't mean the effect isn't there. It's not always easy, but we can use qualitative data to show the impact of our efforts.

"Julie Starr’s books on coaching and mentoring are recommended reading on development programmes around the world."

Check out all three books at Starr Coaching, or wherever you get your books.

Julie has a huge amount of free resources at LearnStarr (free registration required). Make sure to check it out.

You can connect with Julie on LinkedIn. You can also check out the Starr Coaching website.

You can't send everyone on a 1-hour course, not talk about it afterwards or have any kind of follow-up, yet somehow expect to sustain organisational change. Transformation takes sustained effort & you need to keep talking.

There's an implicit design in any conversation. You should use whatever works for you, but being aware of what isn't working allows you to re-design the conversations that don't work and get better results.

If everyone's stuck, leaders can help people get unstuck by getting people to ask the right question to offer the right insight in service of what we want to create more of in the world.

And, like all software, and all CPUs, there could be problems with clock speed, or bugs in the system that prevent us from getting to where we want to go. Thoughtfully designing conversations allows us to iron out the bugs.

Getting away from the desire to respond within 200ms, not tuning people out because you're formulating your next thought & playing back people's words can really help change your conversations for the better.

"Life is built one conversation at a time. Learn which conversations matter, how to transform those conversations, and balance them all while leading change. Human beings are conversational animals. Every day we're in constant communication with ourselves, other people and the world around us, and while not all conversations may seem important, they all have the potential to transform our personal, professional and cultural lives for the better. This book explains how conversations work and offers practical advice on how to improve the quality of our exchanges."

Check it out on Amazon.

You can catch up with Andres on LinkedIn, or visit his website or The Conversation Factory.

APIs at their heart are simply the way that different applications talk to each other. For example, Uber talking to Google Maps or talking to PayPal. They enable seamless integration of a product ecosystem.

It's important to have a customer-centric approach & strategy for APIs. You need to make sure that they're discoverable, useful & provide value. This is also true for internal APIs... internal users are your customers too!

For example, you can't track people's user journeys as easily. You often don't have the same visibility. It can also take a long time to go from initial discovery to actually receiving value from your product.

Sometimes value is obvious and sometimes it's not, but it's important to define what "value" means for your users (it's probably not just "number of API calls") and work out ways to measure that so you can optimise it.

You're still speaking to users, focusing on their use cases & delivering value. The way that you express this may be different but, ultimately, an API product manager is still a product manager!

"API Analytics for Product Managers takes you through the benefits of efficient researching, strategizing, marketing, and continuously measuring the effectiveness of your APIs to help grow both B2B and B2C SaaS companies. Once you've been introduced to the concept of an API as a product, this fast-paced guide will show you how to establish metrics for activation, retention, engagement, and usage of your API products, as well as metrics to measure the reach and effectiveness of documentation—an often-overlooked aspect of development."

Check it out on Amazon.

You can connect with Deepa on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

It's unambiguous. It's backed by data. It's the best way to build quality products. Applying these techniques means your software is always releasable, and every change is safe

Any team can adopt continuous delivery. It's not a factor of 10x "rock star" developers, but empowered teams of developers working together, collaborating and *talking* to each other.

Continuous feedback based on small changes, constantly validated, ensures high-quality products. You don't want to go back & fix it later. You can't inspect quality into a system at the end of a development cycle. Build it in upfront.

What you release to customers is a business decision. This isn't about throwing half-finished features at users but having software that you know works. You can use feature flags to manage availability.

We need to move away from PMs giving developers human-language representations of code and telling them to convert it for a computer. The best devs are problem solvers and should be involved in working out the best solution.

"Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process.This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours―sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base."

Check it out on Amazon.

Dave has a course out that helps people get good at all the stuff we talked about in the podcast. If you're interested, check the course out here.

Dave also mentioned a talk by his co-author Jez Humble. I'm not 100% sure if this is the one, but it looks pretty good anyway. Check it out.

You can connect with Dave on Twitter. You can also check out the Continuous Delivery YouTube channel.

Yana was solving a problem she deeply cared about, but when ChatGPT hit primetime she realised she could solve an even more important problem. She dreaded sending the email to existing users, but everyone was super-positive.

Yana did some background research by stealthily positioning herself at conferences as the founder of a startup solving the new problem. People were super-keen to share feedback and this gave her confidence in the pivot.

There's still plenty of room for product managers in an AI-powered world. The best PMs will use smart technology to automate away necessary, but ultimately lower leverage tasks, and enable PMs to concentrate on strategy.

Is there a danger that people forget how to do PM work without AI tools? Sure, but Yana likens the situation to using Google Maps. How many people know how to get where they're going without assistance?

There are well-known issues with inaccurate text coming out of LLMs, but the tech is developing fast. It's possible to mitigate the worst of the effects by including deep context & narrowing focus rather than using LLMs as a Swiss Army Knife.

You can catch up with Yana on Twitter or check out Kraftul at Kraftful.com.

Your Inevitable Edge is the thing that makes you unique. No one else brings it to the table. Everyone has a juxtaposition of skills & experiences that makes them unique. It's important to identify & leverage it to be successful when job hunting.

Don't just make a list of literally every job that matches a search term & scroll through it one by one. You need to understand what company profiles are truly a fit for you and avoid spraying and praying.

It's all about positioning - we should be good at this! Being able to tell your unique story is important, but make sure you pitch it at the right level, set appropriate context & don't go too deep on interesting, but ultimately irrelevant, stories.

You need to make a human connection with everyone you meet during the interview process. Build empathy with them and work out what they care about, why they're asking the questions they're asking and listen between the lines.

When times are hard, it's easy to cast your net out for unsuitable/too-junior jobs. You'll get interviews because they're curious, but you won't get hired. This will knock your confidence. If you do get the job, you'll probably hate it.

You can catch up with Erika on LinkedIn or visit her website, ErikaKlics.com.

Otherwise known as A/B tests, split testing involves systematically varying a user experience for different groups of users & then comparing the end result to see how those changes impacted behaviour for better (or worse).

These are terrible odds, but the good news is that terrible odds aren't hard to make a little better. It's important to get as much signal from as many sources as possible upfront so you have the best chance of success.

Split-testing is a great way to learn, but it's not the only way to learn. Make sure you use a mixture of experiments, surveys, qualitative inputs, feedback and any other data source you can get your hands on. It's all signal.

You need to be careful that you're going overboard. It's possible to test too much & get caught in eternal loops. It comes down to fear of mistakes but, unless you're putting medicine in someone, you can make a mistake.

You don't have to have a mass-market B2C app to get good tests going. There's scope to experiment in B2B but you need to do your homework, get as much data as you can upfront & make sure you put your chips on the right part of the table.

You can catch up with Andres on LinkedIn.

This episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!

Marketers have been trying to cram leads into the top of the funnel for 100 years but it doesn't serve the needs of modern marketers in recurring revenue SaaS businesses. We need to consider the customer journey pre and post-acquisition

Business leaders can lose sight of the market & the product vision as companies evolve. They need to forget the funnel & empower their marketing teams to do the same & focus relentlessly on customers, not inward-facing metrics.

As companies evolve, they can end up with a very fragmented set of customers that don't form a coherent ICP. To succeed with customer-led growth you need to work out who your best customers are and optimise for them.

How these problems manifest themselves may be different, but there's generally some low-hanging fruit that can be picked straight away. Progress on harder problems can be stymied by unclear ownership or responsibility

If you don't focus your marketing on your best-fit customers and optimise everything to speak to them, you're just throwing your money away trying to scale marketing up. Fix the basics first!

"Your product is great. So why is marketing it so hard? Many SaaS companies struggle with marketing. Teams try everything they can to drive more traffic, leads, and signups. Yet revenue growth remains... lumpy. Slow. Frustratingly inconsistent. If this sounds familiar, the problem isn’t you or your ideas; it’s that you’re guessing at what resonates with your target customers. In Forget the Funnel, Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop share the Customer-Led Growth Framework they've developed to help companies of all sizes solve their product marketing struggles and hit ambitious targets. This framework helps you get inside your customers’ heads, map and measure your customers’ experience, and uncover which tactics will actually move the needle for your company."

Check it out on Amazon. You can also check out the book website

You can catch up with Gia and Claire on Twitter (Claire, Gia), LinkedIn (Claire, Gia) or visit their website, Forget the Funnel.

This episode is sponsored by One Knight Consulting. Yes, yes, that's me. As you probably know, I've moved into freelance coaching and consulting for B2B product companies. I want to help your company, your team and your... well, you, get better at product management. If you want to chat to me about what I can do for you, why not head over to book a call with me and we can discuss your needs and how I can help.

Greg worked with Carnegie Mellon University to create a degree in product management, but it's important to realise that any learning is the start of a journey... you need to get punched in the face by a real job a few times.

It's common for PMs to learn from failure, but it's possible to go too far the other way and treat early success as The One Way to future success. You need to remain humble and never stop learning & adapting.

It's easy to use Kodak or Blockbuster as cautionary tales but these were successful organisations making a boatload of money. They needed to embrace change, but it's not surprising that they didn't.

Big companies are inherently resistant to change. If they want to stay ahead, they need to create or acquire small companies without baggage and leave them to it rather than try to make them fit in.

It's easy to get excited about new tech, but we should get equally excited about repositioning existing products or building new business models to serve novel segments. Everything should always be focused on the users!

You can catch up with Greg on LinkedIn.

You can try out Sopheon on sopheon.com

This episode is sponsored by One Knight Consulting. Yes, yes, that's me. As you probably know, I've moved into freelance coaching and consulting for B2B product companies. I want to help your company, your team and your... well, you, get better at product management. If you want to chat to me about what I can do for you, why not head over to book a call with me and we can discuss your needs and how I can help.

It's difficult to pin down as problems are different in every company. Maybe it's data analysis, organising processes or building communities of practice. You're there to remove blockers to being product-led.

Many Product Ops tasks already existed before Product Ops. How much you need a dedicated team depends on how much pain are you willing to tolerate. What's slipping through the cracks? Product Ops helps you scale sustainably.

There are some crossovers with agile coaching, project & programme management but we should also reclaim the word "process"… process isn’t always bad - it just needs to serve you, not the other way around.

There’s so much ambiguity & a need to move past the "what is it" question. They came up with a document to help product teams to understand the parameters (and prerequisites) of the function.

The most important is the ability to affect change - without this, Product Ops people just become process people or team assistants. On the other hand, these prerequisites are 100% valid for just generally being a good product company.

Check out the Product Operations Manifesto and feel free to add your name to the list!

You can connect with Antonia on LinkedIn.

This episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!

It's not necessarily a free trial/freemium, but it's more important than ever to let people understand the value they're getting from your product rather than hiding behind (possibly auto-generated!) marketing content.

PLG just addresses a different segment in a better way than sales-led. For bigger deals, you still need a sales team, but product-led sales mean getting better quality leads by demonstrating the value upfront.

There are some segments where PLG might not make sense. If people don't know they have the problem you solve, if they won't proactively search you out or recommend you or if your solution is super-innovative, maybe try PLG later.

The product management team doesn't own PLG. The whole organisation needs to align around what "success" looks like for a customer and optimise all incentives towards achieving that.

People can't just rely on "product sense" to tell if they're being successful with PLG. Product organisations need to have good quantitative data & measure product satisfaction. Data should be tracked per team, not per user.

You can connect with Leah on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or check out all of her lovely content on Leah’s ProducTea.

This episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!

The faster you're shipping, the more you're learning, and the faster you're going to understand what you should be doing. It's better to embrace inevitable uncertainty, get something out in the world and see how people react to it.

Not everyone needs to deploy 1,000 times a day. What fast means for you depends on your customers and their appetite for change, alongside internal factors that might impact it. Find the right fast for you.

You can't just go faster by ordering people to work faster - it's not sustainable. You need to work out what levers you can pull, what shortcuts are acceptable, and what's in and out of scope. You need to be willing to trade to get speed.

CEOs and business leaders often complain about speed and wish everything could be faster. It's important to be transparent with them, let them know the trade-offs & give them a stake in the decision so they buy in.

Often, teams spend a large proportion of their time on BAU and fighting fires. Keep track of this, because if you're spending 50% of your time not executing your strategy you're not going as fast as you can (and the results will reflect this).

You can connect with Ed on LinkedIn, or check out Hustle Badger.

This episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!

We've all seen the movies, the books and the horror stories. But there's also an incredible opportunity to change the world for the better. We need to be vigilant, and confront the concerns head-on.

But don't just go in blindly - you need to assess that adding AI capabilities to your product actually solves a real problem and isn't just cool tech. In short, you need to be a product manager!

Having technical skills and being capable of understanding AI on a high level is helpful, but only to help you have good conversations with your colleagues. As a PM, your job remains to manage the product!

Not everyone is cutting edge and there can be barriers to adoption. There are multiple ways to prove the solution and integrate gradually to show the benefits and remove the fear of change.

AI is often seen as a black box, but there are ways to help explain what it's doing and justify its decisions. This is especially important when considering the impact of bias, and ensuring an ethical solution.

You can chat to ChatGPT on the ChatGPT website or visit the Open AI website.

This episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!

Agile folk talk about value all the time but how does that map to company priorities? There are structures & systems we need to use to turn "value" into profit & meet the company’s financial goals.

Pricing is not a number, it’s a system, and it's a team sport. Your software solution's pricing & packaging should evolve over the product lifecycle.

Value doesn’t occur in isolation; consider the system. if you’re building a solution to improve thing A in a positive way, but it negatively impacts thing B then the solution is intrinsically less valuable

... but they do care about your ability to sustainably serve them a solution they need. But, beware! It’s possible to build too much quality and provide more than your customers are prepared to pay for.

We play games for leisure until they’re boring. At work, we serve our customers until it’s boring to the business. If we play the game well we don’t win the game, we simply win the right to play again.

"Profit is your key to survival. Without profit, you cannot maintain or grow your business. Without profit, you cannot serve your customers or provide benefits to your employees. Without profit, investors have no reason to invest. Without profit, the goals of the business are unattainable. In Software Profit Streams, serial entrepreneurs Jason Tanner and Luke Hohmann unveil the essential tools and processes for creating profitable software-enabled solutions that have long-term impact."

Book link coming soon!

Not convinced by SAFe in startups? Luke wants you to think again. Check the article out here.

You can catch up with Luke on his website. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn.

This episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!

Your competitors are out there and, in many cases, there'll be interesting stuff on their websites but you need to use a variety of techniques to really get to the bottom of what they're doing.

It may be Marketing 101, but it's important to understand the space you're playing in, the audience you're going after & who your direct & indirect competitors are before doing competitor research

There are many tools and approaches you can use, but you need to know what question you're trying to answer. Just finding interesting "stuff" is... interesting, but maybe not particularly useful.

Be aware of what competitors are up to, but blindly copying them is not a good strategy. You need to be in charge of your own destiny, be a leader and do things others can't replicate.

"Product" is one of the many "Ps" in marketing. Product managers should care about packaging, positioning, pricing, promotions and all the rest. It's not just about what you build or how you build it.

You can catch up with Bethan on LinkedIn or Twitter as well as apparently TikTok if you're into that sort of thing. Make sure to check out Open Velocity too.

This episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!

There's nothing wrong with being a service company, but there are very attractive reasons to productise. Growth, higher margins, higher exit value and getting away from having to add headcount.

It's natural for leaders and employees to feel fear of the unknown or of change. But fear is the enemy of growth. Yes, things could go wrong, but think of what could go right!

Productisation has to be done right... it can't be an afterthought. The company needs to devote people and financial support to the effort otherwise it will inevitably fail and you might as well not start.

Service companies can make good money selling to all comers, but product companies necessarily need to niche down. The company likely doesn't have a strong history in ICPs & segmentation but it needs to develop those skills.

Plenty of companies offer a product/services mix and there is nothing wrong with this. What matters is that you productise thoughtfully & disrupt yourself before getting disrupted by someone else. You need to want to change.

"More and more traditional professional services firms are turning to "productization" as a strategy to grow, improve valuations, and to fend off new digital-first competitors. However, many of them will fail and waste a lot of money in the process. Productize first outlines the "Seven Deadly Productization Mistakes" made when pursuing a product strategy, then provides the blueprint for overcoming each of these missteps. It is designed to be a practical playbook for any leader of a professional services business who wants to successfully accelerate growth."

Check it out on Amazon. You can also check out the book website

You can catch up with Eisha on LinkedIn.

This episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!

Dani went from PM to VC but felt the call of entrepreneurship irresistible. She found a problem that she was passionate about solving and wanted to do something meaningful for herself, her users and her team.

The impact of a startup is felt not only by your users but your users' users. If you can save people time, effort, or both, then you can contribute to changing the world one company at a time.

As a founder, you're in the business of delivering a great meeting & making it easy to shine. For early-stage companies, VCs care less about the detail than the team and the vision. They know the execution will change.

First impressions count. If you're building productivity tools, you can't make people's lives harder. You need to ship something that works - moving fast and breaking things was a valid strategy only before people knew better

Devs have a big role here, but the whole company needs to come together around quality, define enough detail up front, and keep the scope small to help deliver a quality product.

You can catch up with Dani on LinkedIn or on Twitter

You can try out Jam on jam.dev

Here's the VC video that Dani recommended: How to Nail Your Startup Pitch Deck - Rebecca Kaden

This episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!

Working with traders teaches you to think on your feet in volatile environments, think three steps ahead & build a thick skin. These are all valuable traits for PMs.

Working in a variety of jobs has helped her get comfortable with first-principles thinking and asking even the most basic questions. It's important to model this behaviour for your team.

Pooja was hard on herself after her first child and wondered if she could make a success of work after going back. She learned to appreciate the job she was doing and be her own champion.

A PM's job is not to have all the answers or all the best ideas, but to be the Socratic Police Officer and ask good questions to get those around you to bring their own insight to the table for you to tie together

It's important to create leverage with the CEO, by having the right motivations, setting clear expectations about who owns what for what time horizon, and being comfortable delegating to other leaders.

You can catch up with Pooja on LinkedIn, although she's about to have a baby so maybe wait a bit!

This episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part, but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!

Uri is often asked if selling Waze was the right decision, but you can only make decisions based on the information you have. It's more important to make a decision than wait for the perfect decision.

You should be passionate about the problem you're solving, but don't assume that anyone else cares as much as you do or wants to solve it the way you want to. You have to get out & speak to people who have the problem

When you're building something no one has built before, you never know if it'll work. You need to experiment, fail fast and have multiple shots on goal. The faster you fail, the sooner you can have another shot.

If you're not creating value, people won't come back. Retention is the most important way to measure P/MF & make sure that the solution to your users' problem is actually valuable. Getting people to value quickly is essential.

You might have different customers who care about different features, but they all care about something. The metrics might differ, but the ultimate goal is to deliver value & solve a real pain for all these different people.

"Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution offers mentorship in a book from one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and empowers you to build a successful business by identifying your consumers' biggest problems and disrupting the inefficient markets that currently serve them."

Check it out on Amazon.

You can visit Uri at his website UriLevine.com or follow him on Twitter.

This episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring, and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part, but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!

• What are the pillars of an effective product strategy?
• How do you know a strategy is working or not?
• What do you do when there is no product strategy?

I interviewed Adam back in 2021 about Survival Metrics. Check the episode out here.

You can find Adam on Twitter. He's also got a Substack mailing list and his website is theadamthomas.com

This episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring, and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part, but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!

It doesn't matter where you worked before - there's always context and a reason for old decisions. Take time to understand them. Oh, and make sure you leave a clean audit trail when you move on!

Ronke has moved jobs for the wrong reason before and this has inspired her to make a list of questions she must have satisfactory answers to before moving. Create your own list and don't get buyer's regret.

Storytelling is one of the best ways to drive cross-functional alignment and get everyone in the company on the same page. You should craft an inspirational story and ensure that everyone from top to bottom knows it.

Don't just go off into your ivory tower and write something yourself. Build shared ownership by getting the team to collaborate. This means you can start to let go, not need to be in every meeting, and empower the teams.

Ronke has had some bad work experiences in the past and this has inspired her to "run her race her own way", be her authentic self and give back to the community. We can all make a positive difference to other people's lives.

You can catch up with Ronke at her website. You can also connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter .

This episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring, and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part, but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!

These came from different places, but the philosophies that underlie all of these ideas are the same: understanding our customers, working in shorter cycles, making decisions based on evidence, and continuously improving.

There are many principles of good product management, but moving away from output enables focus on the change in behaviour you want to see & have the humility to accept you don't have all the answers upfront

OKRs are easy to explain, but difficult to implement. Used right, they can empower teams to make measurable impact towards an aspirational goal, without micromanagement or deciding on a fixed plan upfront.

OKRs enable teams to focus on impact, changing customer behaviour in a way that matters to their business & knowing whether they've succeeded. Cramming individual task lists into the OKR format doesn't achieve anything.

Some people start with OKRs by mistake or give it a quarter & then give up. Using OKRs well takes work. If it's not working, make sure you have open & honest retros to understand whether it's fixable & whether you can try again.

"Lean UX is synonymous with modern product design and development. By combining human-centric design, agile ways of working, and a strong business sense, designers, product managers, developers, and scrum masters around the world are making Lean UX the leading approach for digital product teams today In the third edition of this award-winning book, authors Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden help you focus on the product experience rather than deliverables."

Check it out on Amazon.

"As companies evolve to adopt, integrate, and leverage software as the defining element of their success in the 21st century, a rash of processes and methodologies are vying for their product teams' attention. In the worst of cases, each discipline on these teams -- product management, design, and software engineering -- learns a different model. This short, tactical book reconciles the perceived differences in Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and Agile software development by focusing not on rituals and practices but on the values that underpin all three methods."

Check it out on Amazon.

Jeff is running some self-paced courses on OKRs, including in Spanish! Check them out here.

You can catch up with Jeff on his website. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn.

This episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!

We look to these firms for guidance, but they all build products differently & have created processes that work for them. What they do have are principles. We should copy the principles but work the way that works for us.

The numbers are guesses but are useful to start conversations & make sure you're asking the right questions. It's important to revisit scores over time to see what's changing as you learn new things.

Itamar uses the Confidence Meter to describe the different levels of confidence. This brings to life what you are describing when talking about confidence & shows it's not linear; the best evidence is substantially better than the weakest.

Itamar uses the GIST framework (Goals/Ideas/Steps/Tasks) to break down opportunities, prioritise for impact & get away from the feature factory. It's important not to kill ideas too quickly, and continuously revisit them.

The principles are customer focus, evidence-guided decision-making, adaptive planning & empowering teams. These are the cornerstones of product management. Customer focus is still the most important & everything else can flow from there.

You can catch up with Itamar on his website, where you can sign up to his mailing list and get access to his tools. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

This episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!

Books have to take a position, and they're always going to be simplified versions of reality. It's positive to disagree with what you find in these books, but you can learn something useful from just about any book.

Getting into holy wars about frameworks is not constructive. Not everything works in all contexts, and if it doesn't work you're not a "bad" product manager. Concentrate on delivering value the best way you can.

There's no one standard job description for a product management role, but Matt likes to boil it down to CORE: Communication, Organisation, Research and Execution. Depending on the company, there might be additional important skills.

PMs need to concentrate on enabling good decisions. PMs are not "CEOs of Product" & may not be able to influence senior stakeholders all the time. There may be reasons for decisions outside of their control

If you find yourself in a defensive posture, you're already behind. Often, the harder you try, the worse you can make things. Do what you can to affect change, but try to avoid fighting with your leadership & concentrate on helping your users.

"Updated for the era of remote and hybrid work, this book provides actionable answers to product management's most persistent and confounding questions, starting with: What exactly am I supposed to do all day?"

Check it out on Amazon.

You can connect with Matt on LinkedIn or visit his website.

I recently found out that my former leadership coach has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Tracy helped me through some tough times, and helped me improve in various areas. I'm grateful to her to this day.

Tracy's friends are trying to raise funds so that she can enjoy some final experiences with her family, and leave behind fond memories for after she's gone. If you'd like to donate anything at all, please visit the link here.

You don't need to overengineer from the start, but you do need to make sure you have flexible building blocks in place so that you're not starting from scratch when you do want to expand.

Countries aren't defined solely by their languages - they have different currencies, different date formats, and different norms - you can't just do "International Spanish" and be done.

You can map potential market size & return on investment against efforts required & ease of entry to help you decide where to prioritise. You'll be working off imperfect information but it's important to think it through.

You can sell to local companies with global offices counterparts or you can set up an organisation/partner in other countries. They both have pros and cons and it's important to be intentional.

Sometimes, big whale customers or globally-minded investors will heavily encourage you to get into a market you don't really want to go into. This is OK, but it's important to take an MVP approach rather than go all in.

You can connect with Chui Chui on LinkedIn or visit Beyō Global's website.

This episode is sponsored by One Knight Consulting. Spoiler alert, that’s me! I started One Knight Consulting because I have seen variations of the same problems plaguing product companies and I’ve seen them again and again. If you’re looking to get an independent diagnosis of your business with actionable next steps, trying to hire product people or coaching the ones you’ve already got, you can book a call with me. We can discuss your needs and how I can help.

Companies hire expensive engineers then get them into endless discussions about nothing, and lock them into backlogs. If engineers are given full business context, they can help to change the world.

Teams need to stop planning. It's less like a fire-and-forget rocket ride to a predetermined destination, and more like being on the Enterprise and responding to interesting signals from nearby planets.

You can structure conversations with sceptical stakeholders like a series of tests and follow a process to build trust outside of the technology organisation. There's a method and it works.

"Accountability" is often used as a stick to hit teams with by untrusting managers looking to maintain control. Teams can work with stakeholders to maintain buy-in and engagement.

It's no good complaining about your company or stakeholders, blaming them for everything & having a defeatist attitude. By having constructive conversations, everyone has a chance of affecting the change they want to see.

"Agile Conversations brings a practical, step-by-step guide to using the human power of conversation to build effective, high-performing teams to achieve truly Agile results. Consultants Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick show readers how to utilize the Five Conversations to help teams build trust, alleviate fear, answer the “whys,” define commitments, and hold everyone accountable. These five conversations give teams everything they need to reach peak performance, and they are exactly what’s missing from too many teams today. "

Check it out on Amazon.

If you want to join a free community of tech & non-tech execs who are all learning from each other, check out Squirrel Squadron.

You can connect with Squirrel on LinkedIn or visit his website.

I actually interviewed Saeed in one of my first podcast episodes. It has a certain "Simpsons Season 1" quality about it but, if you're curious, feel free to check it out!

This episode is sponsored by One Knight Consulting. Yes, yes, that's me. But listen up. I started One Knight Consulting because I have seen variations of the same problems plaguing growing startups, scale-ups and larger, digitally transforming companies again & again. These problems can cause friction between teams, slow product development, lacklustre sales, and ultimately lead to constrained growth. If you're scaling your product organisation, struggling with cross-team alignment or having trouble executing your product strategy to support your business goals, book a call with me and we can discuss your needs and how I can help.

It's not about being negative or blaming "bad product managers" for everything. But, there are repeated dysfunctions across a large number of companies and we can't fix them if we ignore them.

Bad job specs are a symptom of a deeper truth: Not many people outside product management really understand it, or what "cross-functional" working means at all. We should avoid being "glue".

Product management is the ultimate "school of hard knocks" trade & many people practising it speak only in the theoretical/struggle in different contexts. PMs need good coaching.

There needs to be some level of rigour within PM teams to help set them up for success. Doing everything ad hoc gives you ad hoc results. Don't overegg it, but don't underegg it either.

We need to be able to define leading measures of success and connect our efforts to actual business success. PMs need to have a far higher level of interest in business outcomes.

It's better to have a former PM and coach them into a leader than to have a non-product businessperson brought in. Someone with good pattern recognition who can bring everything together is essential.

You can read the article that inspired this interview right here.

You can connect with Saeed on Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastodon or check out Transformation Labs.

You can reach out to Andrea on LinkedIn or on Twitter.

You can catch up with Dave on LinkedIn or Twitter

Find out more about Right to Left at their website: https://www.righttoleft.io. You can also grab the white paper "Product-Market Fit is Dead" and browse the rest of their free content.

This episode is sponsored by One Knight Consulting. Yes, yes, that's me. But listen up. I started One Knight Consulting because I have seen variations of the same problems plaguing growing startups, scale-ups and larger, digitally transforming companies again & again. These problems can cause friction between teams, slow product development, lacklustre sales, and ultimately lead to constrained growth. If you're scaling your product organisation, struggling with cross-team alignment or having trouble executing your product strategy to support your business goals, book a call with me and we can discuss your needs and how I can help.

Bob has trouble reading and writing, and this forced him to admit what he didn't know and find ways to get customer insight that didn't involve reading reports. Jobs to be Done was the result.

Bob's hack became an indispensable framework to identify customer motivation, with applications through sales, product, design... even religion & HR! The importance of uncovering "struggling moments" is universal.

Bob has had great mentors throughout his life: Clayton Christensen, W. Edwards Deming, Willie Moore & Genichi Taguchi. They poured so much into him, all in different ways, & he feels obliged to pay forward what he learned

Product, marketing, sales & customer success need to stop shouting at each other and concentrate on helping their customers make progress. We're all on the same side!

The 5 bedrock skills of innovation are: Empathetic Perspective, Uncovering Demand, Causal Structures, Prototyping & Trade-offs. To have the best chance of success you must master them all or find people to help.

"This journey of entrepreneurship and innovation shouldn’t be a solo trip. If you’re missing something, struggling to begin, or have reached a plateau, fellow entrepreneur and innovator Bob Moesta knows your next steps because he’s been there himself. Now, in Learning to Build, Bob helps you develop the five fundamental skills every successful innovator practices to be their best. He provides you with the resources you need to learn these skills, grow through experience, and adapt your mindset."

Check it out on Amazon.

"For a lot of us, selling feels icky. Our stomachs tighten at the thought of reciting features and benefits, or pressuring customers into purchasing. It's really not our fault. We weren't taught how to sell, plus we've been sold before, leaving us with a bitter taste. Here's the truth: sales does not have to feel icky for you or your customers. In fact, with the right approach, sales can be an empowering experience for all.."

Check it out on Amazon.

You can connect with Bob on Twitter, LinkedIn or check out The Re-Wired Group.

This episode is sponsored by One Knight Consulting. Yes, yes, that's me. But listen up. I started One Knight Consulting because I have seen variations of the same problems plaguing growing startups, scale-ups and larger, digitally transforming companies again & again. These problems can cause friction between teams, slow product development, lacklustre sales, and ultimately lead to constrained growth. If you're scaling your product organisation, struggling with cross-team alignment or having trouble executing your product strategy to support your business goals, book a call with me and we can discuss your needs and how I can help.

Do you not fit neatly in a box? Do you consider yourself a jack of all trades/someone who wears many hats? You might be a generalist & there are lots of generalists out there. Embrace it and find your people!

All companies could benefit from good people, but startups especially need people to be the connectors, tie things together and solve whatever problems arise whatever the domain. Generalism is a superpower here.

Milly started Generalist World by speaking to a few people, but every single person's eyes lit up & they were all super-passionate. This is a perfect signal that you're doing something right!

We can make hiring less transactional & more human by not just talking about job roles, but problems that you need to solve and the skills you need to solve them.

It's just so easy to create a community these days. Companies & brands are jumping on board, doing the bare basics & leaving a ghost town behind. Companies need to be strategic & intentional to be successful.

You can connect with Milly on Twitter, LinkedIn or check out Generalist World.

This episode is sponsored by Product People. If you’re a company founder or product leader who needs to get a product management team up and running quickly or cover parental leave check out Product People. They’ve got a thriving community and 40 in-house product managers, product ops pros, and product leaders. They onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. Check out Product People to book a free intro chat and quote code OKIP to get a 5% discount.

Companies can be growing, growing, growing and then all of a sudden just stall. There are factors that influence this, but if they're not addressed then growth stalls can last for years or decades

Too many leaders believe in themselves too much that they miss the signs of a growth stall & fail to address them. Status quo bias and ignoring dissenting opinions can impede efforts to fix it.

Identifying stalls early naturally helps, but if you catch it late then you can still turn it around as long as you're realistic about what "turning it around" means and adjust your expectations.

If teams have different user personas defined, no one has user personas defined. There needs to be a concerted effort to understand your ideal customers and it should be a top-down, aligned effort.

The top reasons for growth stalls are: Not understanding your customers, Not understanding your positioning, Knowledge gaps & misalignments between teams. You need everyone to know the same stuff & pull in the same direction!

You can connect with Adrienne on LinkedIn, Twitter or check her website, AdrienneNakohl.com.

This episode is sponsored by Product People. If you’re a company founder or product leader who needs to get a product management team up and running quickly or cover parental leave check out Product People. They’ve got a thriving community and 40 in-house product managers, product ops pros, and product leaders. They onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. Check out Product People to book a free intro chat and quote code OKIP to get a 5% discount.

Even if you're going for long-lived mission-based teams, they're still going to change through attrition, company growth, lay-offs or mergers. It's important to manage this change effectively.

Books like Team Topologies tell you how to set up your teams to deliver value effectively. Dynamic Reteaming can work hand in hand with that approach and help you get there.

Sometimes people & teams will get moved around & sometimes this change will come top-down. It's ideal for team members to have a say, but ultimately it's important for the leadership to communicate, communicate. communicate

Some companies allow people to decide what teams they work on, but your mileage may vary and, ultimately, in many companies, it's important to mix grassroots and executive input to get true success

The patterns within Dynamic Reteaming include people-focused approaches to use before and after team changes. The most important principles are to be kind, thoughtful and to treat people with respect.

"Your team will change whether you like it or not. People will come and go. Your company might double in size or even be acquired. In this practical book, author Heidi Helfand shares techniques for reteaming effectively. Engineering leaders will learn how to catalyze team change to reduce the risk of attrition, learning and career stagnation, and the development of knowledge silos. Based on research into well-known software companies, the patterns in this book help CTOs and team managers effectively integrate new hires into an existing team, manage a team that has lost members, or deal with unexpected change"

Check it out on Amazon. You can also check out the book website

You can connect with Heidi on LinkedIn.

This episode is sponsored by Product People. If you’re a company founder or product leader who needs to get a product management team up and running quickly or cover parental leave check out Product People. They’ve got a thriving community and 40 in-house product managers, product ops pros, and product leaders. They onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. Check out Product People to book a free intro chat and quote code OKIP to get a 5% discount.

Mirela is committed to bringing talent into product management with the Product People operating model which gives APMs real-world product experience whilst maintaining quality for clients

Mirela wasn't excited by building a SaaS product to solve everyday problems, and she found lots of problems through her own consulting which showed her the real problem and why a product agency is needed

But it's not always the case that good onboarding = a good experience. There are plenty of examples of great onboarding into poor company culture and bad onboarding into a great culture. It's the culture that's important!

Product managers are at the centre of everything and the requirements of the role can be really ambiguous depending on the company. The product culture is often underdeveloped which can drag product managers down.

You need to come up with a plan. There are things you can ask for in advance, stakeholders to map and sensitive topics to uncover. These can help you work out where you need to focus to be successful.

You can check out Mirela's blog post, Blazing Fast Onboarding for Product Managers.

You can connect with Mirela on LinkedIn.

This episode is sponsored by Product People. If you’re a company founder or product leader who needs to get a product management team up and running quickly or cover parental leave check out Product People. They’ve got a thriving community and 40 in-house product managers, product ops pros, and product leaders. They onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. Check out Product People to book a free intro chat and quote code OKIP to get a 5% discount.

In Australia, staff turnover in design agencies is around 30%, and she's seen similar patterns around the world. A big part of the problem is around communication & collaboration, both internally & externally, and she wanted to fix that

Mackenzie has had negative pushback from industry figures about her mission to "un-f**ck the design industry" but also a lot of positivity from innovators & disruptors who know exactly how f**cked it is.

Mackenzie has had feedback that has led her to pivot, or entirely rewrite parts of the application, and she's been able to get really strong signals of Product/Market Fit early.

Mackenzie went to a pitch event without knowing it was a pitch event, fluffed her first pitch, and got blanked by the judge. She regrouped, came back, and won the event. Don't give up!

Mackenzie had never started a company before and she has learned on the job. She's found it helpful to be a straight-shooter & direct, but there remains a pressure for women to act differently to men

You can connect with Mackenzie on Twitter, or check out Brieft.

This episode is sponsored by Product People. If you’re a company founder or product leader who needs to get a product management team up and running quickly or cover parental leave check out Product People. They’ve got a thriving community and 40 in-house product managers, product ops pros, and product leaders. They onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. Check out Product People to book a free intro chat and quote code OKIP to get a 5% discount.

Being misrepresented taught her how things can be taken out of context, how to get better at writing & connecting with people outside of her bubble. This has proven helpful when writing about crypto.

"If it ain't broke don't fix it" won't cut it. It is broken and it needs fixing. Web3 offers a chance of a future where everything is decentralised and you aren't owned by banks or corporations.

Rachael's trying to use her writing & communication skills to make Web3 accessible. She wants to avoid companies hiring clueless consultants and help companies make a real impact.

The same old Web2 investors have sensed a gold rush and are coming in to try to make money, but there's a strong sense of community and inauthentic people will quickly be sniffed out.

There's a lot of work going on to bring a proper consumer-grade experience to Web3 apps, which has been lacking but is getting better. There is also work going on to make people feel secure and that they won't lose all their money to hacks.

You can connect with Rachael on Twitter, or check out Narrativ3.

This episode is sponsored by Product People. If you’re a company founder or product leader who needs to get a product management team up and running quickly or cover parental leave check out Product People. They’ve got a thriving community and 40 in-house product managers, product ops pros, and product leaders. They onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes. Check out Product People to book a free intro chat and quote code OKIP to get a 5% discount.

People within a company often can't see the wood for the trees. They know too much and don't understand how complex their messaging has become. Having an independent audit can help to understand what doesn't work.

Messaging is more than just words. It's a strategy informed by company values, overall positioning & ideal customers. It helps people understand why they should care about your product

✅ Clarity - Everyone should know what you do consistently ✅ Ease - Don't try to say too much or confuse people ✅ Relevance - Resonates with your audience's needs

Diane has her ROAR (Research, Opportunity, Assembly, Review) framework, which of course has hard outputs. But so much of the benefit is the clarity & alignment you get through going through it.

Messaging is based on some of the fundamentals of the company, including its mission, vision & strategy. It needs deep leadership involvement as well as a cross-functional group from around the company

You can connect with Diane on LinkedIn, or check out Lion Words.

Here are some highlights from the episode:

Jacs had a variety of roles before product management, a role she didn't know existed (even though she had been doing it). Her varied experiences helped to round her out as a PM.

Jacs was unsure whether her social media content was resonating, so asked her followers and got incredible interest from PMs looking for support with their wellbeing.

Product management can be great, but it's also a tough role due to being at the centre of everything, with nowhere to hide & you're often an easy target for blame. PMs often lack people to tell them what's OK & what's not.

There's a lot of boring, reductive, cookie-cutter content out there which feels almost philosophically anti-product management. But, on the other hand, the power and support of the PM community is amazing.

It's not easy to talk to your boss in all companies & often it's easier not to try. Companies can make it easier by taking an active interest in your well-being. Sharing your experiences can help others share theirs.

If you are interested in getting support from like-minded product people, check out Product Mind, or find them on Twitter or LinkedIn.

You can connect with Jacs on Twitter, or check out My Sketchy Head.

Here are some highlights from the episode:

Half the time, companies don't seem to know what to ask for. This means they confuse candidates and get the wrong people applying for the jobs. A mixture of technology & human consulting is needed to fix this.

PMs talk about outcomes all the time but need to focus on outcomes in their CVs. Candidates stuff every single thing they've done into their CVs, with little connection to real results & often badly formatted or overlong.

It's common for people to blame the ATS for all of their problems, but ATS systems always involve humans and aren't using as much fancy AI as some might claim. They're not perfect, but nothing is.

All people have unconscious biases, and some are downright prejudiced. We should always do what we can to limit the chance of bias, and doing so isn't a personal attack on the hiring manager.

In a world of remote working & different working preferences in general, the metaverse may open up opportunities around in-person assessments as well as remote working. But we've got a long way to go before we get there.

I'm currently looking at consulting opportunities. If you'd like to speak to me about how I can help you build great products, or the teams that build great products, check out One Knight Consulting and book a free, no-commitment call to chat about your needs.

You can hit Shaun up on LinkedIn, or check out MyProductPath.

Here are some of the highlights of our discussion:

They did further research after the first book and identified a new protagonist, the "Mobilizer", who can be your best advocate within the company (but not a champion!)

It's getting more & more complicated selling into organisations, and the buying journey has become like spaghetti. Finding the "economic buyer" is no longer enough to land the sale.

If you're going after established demand and known solutions you're going to get dragged into a price-based bake-off. Challengers find unknown pains, challenge the status quo & break the frame

Buyer journeys are complex & some customers can be surprised when things get held up. But you're not, you've seen it all before! Give them the info they need to help close the sale from their side.

Being really insightful is table stakes. You need to be able to help your customers frame their decision and give them confidence in the decisions they're making for their company.

.. And much more!

I interviewed Brent's co-author and co-conspirator Matt Dixon about his work and how customer indecision is a critical problem for B2B sales. Check out the episode here.

Check it out on Amazon.

Check it out on Amazon.

You can hit Brent up on LinkedIn.

Here are some of the highlights of our discussion:

There are great sales books out there, but many of them are based on opinion and "what worked for me". Matt and his team took an outsiders' data-based approach and uncovered the surprising truth

Matt is not a salesman. This led some people to doubt his findings, but the data speaks for itself. The Challenger approach specifically resonated with startup founders who are natural challengers!

Sales have traditionally been taught to be relationship builders but in today's world of information overload, it's not enough to have a cosy conversation. Buyers need to be challenged, debated & given insight

It's not enough to defeat the status quo. Buyers can be afraid to make a decision whatever the status quo. Traditional sales approaches make the problem worse.

There's a playbook to defeat customer indecision that helps to take risk off the table & make buyers understand they're making a great decision. Product teams are crucial partners in helping sales teams do this.

Check it out on Amazon.

You can also check out the book website.

Check it out on Amazon.

Make sure you check out "The Challenger Customer" and "The Effortless Experience" too!

You can hit Matt up on LinkedIn.

Here are some of John's weighty thoughts:

John can get pretty in-depth, but there's plenty of room for targeted, optimised, "just do this" takes out there. As long as they're reducing the gatekeeping around product management not increasing it.

There are lots of great teams out there not working as per the books. There are also great Big Tech-style practitioners who can only thrive in certain environments and would flounder anywhere else.

Systems thinking is important for product managers trying to make sense of their product or organisation. Nothing is linear, everything is composed of self-reinforcing loops. Think you're a change agent? You're part of the system too!

Systems thinking or otherwise, product people can have complicated messages that could sound esoteric or theoretical to non-product folks. It's important to find a way to land your message with your target audience.

Sometimes you're going to have to build a feature & it might even be the best move! Work with your CEO, not against them, when they ask for a feature & make sure you know what game you're playing.

John has an actionable 5-step plan (containing 6 steps) which enables you to work out what you want, what your colleagues want, demonstrate the value of product practices and, if all else fails, when to leave.

You can hit John up on Twitter, or sign up to his mailing list The Beautiful Mess.

Here are some of Roger's insights:

But you can't be a slave to them. Use these frameworks as a baseline to help you ask the right questions about your business, then use what you need for the situation you're in.

Even the best training can't do it all, but it can be an accelerant. Training, certificates & certifications all have their place as part of your journey but you need to get rear-ended a couple of times.

There's so much data out there that can help you make great decisions but don't just consume it blindly! You need to make sense of it to have the greatest impact, work out what metrics really matter & work out when "what matters" changes

Many teams are still unable to make data-informed decisions due to lack of access, lack of tooling or stakeholder gatekeeping. Learn to tell stories about why it's important and ensure you explain the WIFM.

It's important to set up a fact base for your product vision and populate it with the three Cs of product management: Company, Competitors and (of course!) Customers. You can then use all of that data to inform a compelling vision.

Listen to the episode for this and more!

You can reach out to Roger by email, or check out the 280 Group website.

Here are some of Allen's spicy takes:

It's easy to get hired by the engineering team to help them learn how to make sausages better but the better goal is to work out if you want to make sausages, and you need top-level buy in for this

You should be able to share your version of the truth in an open, direct way. If people don't like it, they can listen to someone else! Context is important, but it's not ivory tower thinking to try to change a system.

Removing organisational blockers and waterfall thinking is important, but you can't just leave them to it and not support them. They need support to become a learning organisation.

You don't need backlogs, you don't need scrum masters, you don't need Sprints. You don't need any of it. Scrum was just a way to make agile acceptable to bureaucratic micromanagers. But all frameworks fly against agile thinking.

It's important that they're part of the development team, that they're not a silo, they aren't the boss or decision maker for the team & they aren't a replacement for the customer

We don't need big long complicated specs, we don't need backlogs, estimates, story points or velocity charts. We'd be better off with index cards stuck to a wall (or Miro!)

Listen to the episode for this and more!

Allen is writing a book! Check out the progress of the book here.

If you want to go to Allen's upcoming class on User Stories, check out the details here.

You can reach out to Allen on Twitter, or book a chat with him.

Here are some of Claire's insights about her career and approach to work:

Claire moved to HealthTech because the opportunity was right. It's great to join a worthy company but you need a team you can work with, a problem you can contribute to & a company that needs your skills.

There are a lot of benefits of having clear, joined up leadership between tech & product but it has to work for your organisation & you need a strong leader that ultimately supports the business and not one or other of the functions.

Use frameworks as conversation starters and mechanisms to help you along but you still need to do the hard work of product management to actually make a difference in the world. Frameworks won't help you win on their own.

It's possible for leaders to be credible & professional and have a sense of humour. It's important to bring your full self to work & to social media as long as you are respectful to your colleagues and customers.

Just because work can be hard doesn't mean you should have a negative mindset. It's important to be realistic & critical but mix this with a sense of optimism, "how might we" attitude and empower yourself as a product manager or leader.

There continues to be bias against women & mothers at work. Women have to live up to expectations that men don't. Claire beat the system by refusing to ask for permission to do her job, and you should too.

Listen to the episode for this and more!

You can reach out to Claire on Twitter, find her on LinkedIn, or most importantly on TikTok!

Here are some of Yana's insights on IoT & startups:

Yana was Head of Product at IFTTT & they have an important mission - to make IoT devices interoperable. Yana wanted to solve an even greater pain - how to make them work well at all. She started a company to do this

Early adopters have very technical needs & want more features. Mainstream users want good quality & ease of use. Early adopters are your biggest champions but you need a plan to scale past them

Many investors have been burned by hardware projects and people want to knock you down. Also, not everyone is Adam Neumann - underrepresented founders can barely raise off the back of successes, let alone failures.

AirTags have been in the news for stalking, but Apple have at least made an effort to fix that. Not everyone has their resources, but it's important to at least keep an eye on digital rights groups and try to stay clean

Don't just throw yourself into something cool - make sure there's appetite for what you're building, go as lean as possible to start with and leverage No Code tools to help you get started quick

Listen to the episode for this and more!

You can reach out to Yana on Twitter.

We speak about a lot, including:

• The state of the product hiring market today and how product management recruitment has changed over the last 20 years
• How product management has moved from IT to a strategic partner for product-led companies and when companies should hire a CPO
• Whether we're seeing more product practitioners getting a seat at the top table and how there are two main types of product leadership job
• Why you should be careful which job you wish for, and how to know when to stop trying to climb the career ladder
• Whether product job titles are getting more consistent and whether it's true that job titles don't matter
• Why women should consider not divulging their current salary as it can help to perpetuate gender biased salary and whether the gender pay gap is getting better or worse
• What hiring companies can do to make sure they're developing a diverse talent pipeline and the importance of hiring for "not fit" rather than culture fit

And much more!

You can find Chris at Intelligent People or check him out on LinkedIn.

We speak about a lot, including:

• The origin story behind Career Strategy Lab, how they can help you get a new job, and whether it's just designers or everyone in the product trio
• That chicken & egg scenario when you can't get a job without experience, but you can't get experience without a job, and whether this is just something that affects PMs or hits designers too
• Whether UX job descriptions are any better than Product Management job descriptions and some of the reasons we have poor job specs and poor interviewing process
• How job specs are really just wish lists and the importance of actually reading them rather than just clicking "Quick Apply" to anything with a matching job title
• The importance of customising resumes, CVs and cover letters, why this sounds controversial, and how to make it scale
• Why it might be OK to interview for jobs that you don't actually want to get some practice, and the benefits of taking an MVP approach to your job application
• Whether ATS systems are really the gatekeeping problem that some people make them out to be, and the importance of making personal connections where you can

And much more!

I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, you can buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway!

You can find Sarah on her personal website or check out Career Strategy Lab. Sarah is also active on Twitter.

We speak about a lot, including:

• Why the world needs doesn't need another person's opinion on what makes a good manager, and how he wants to move away from opinions and move to data driven, measurable results
• How the US Marines set the stage for him to be a good manager, what moving to Big Tech taught him about focusing on results, and how the military can teach Big Tech a thing or two about Commander's Intent
• Why it was important to simplify the mission to make managers better, because most people aren't getting better and some are getting worse because there's so much conflicting information out there
• Why companies are so bad at developing managers, and how his STAC (Select, Teach, Assess, Coach) approach might help get us away from the best Individual Contributor getting thrown into the pit with no support
• How everyone wants to do great work & be totally psyched whilst doing it, and why people's direct managers are ultimately the key to making that happen
• The big three of Direction, Coaching, Career, how they can help managers thrive and the importance of helping managers not just concentrating on the stuff they're best at
• Whether managers are born or bred, and whether introverts or extrovert make the best managers

And much more!

I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, you can buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway!

Check the book out wherever you get your books, or check it out on Amazon or the book website.

I spoke to Russ's former colleague Kim Scott last year on the podcast about her book "Just Work" - it was a fantastic conversation and you can check it out here.

You can find Russ on his website or check him out on LinkedIn or Twitter

We speak about a lot, including:

• Why she wanted to write a book to help early stage founders and product managers understand how to market their products to make sure they make a difference
• How most tech companies are getting their marketing wrong, what it looks like when they do, and what they should be doing instead
• The problems companies can have using traditional marketing approaches led by traditional market folks, and how any initial successes inevitably fade out
• Whether you need to go all in and drink the Product Marketing Kool Aid or can iterate your way to product marketing success
• Some of the traits of a good product marketer, how they are similar to product managers, whether you need specialised product marketers or it's just a mindset issue
• How soon you need product marketers and whether there's value in fractional roles helping you out when you're early
• Top tips for product managers who want to work effectively with their product marketing team, and treat them as equal partners in their product success

And much more!

I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, you can buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway!

Check the book out wherever you get your books, or check it out on Amazon or the book website.

You can find Martina on her personal website. Also, if you bought a copy of her book, you can send your receipt to info@svpg.com for a free chat!

We speak about a lot, including:

• How the second edition has gone down, why there's a second edition at all and why this book matters to B2B entrepreneurs & product managers
• How the book can help both non-technical, subject matter expert startup founders as well as tech-first founders with little to no B2B experience
• The Lean B2B methodology, represented by its handy pyramid and key considerations at the various levels
  • Vision: How to systematise your product vision, where to get started, and whether you need a Eureka moment
  • Market: Working out who your target market is, the perils of going too wide, and how many people don't even really know what a market is
  • Jury: Getting your buyers, approvers, users and even veto-ers together to ensure there's a good reception for your proposition
  • Needs: The merits of good customer discovery and why we need to understand our buyers and sellers
  • Offer: How to factor in risks, associated costs to your value proposition, and why it's important to separate the value from the specific solution
  • Solution: How to get your MVP into the hands of early adopters, and whether all types of B2B customer are ready for MVPs
• What happens after the pyramid once you've validated your solution, and what product/market fit really means in a B2B sense

And much more!

I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, you can buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway!

Visit The Book Website for more info, and links to Étienne's other books.

You can find Étienne on LinkedIn, Twitter or visit his website.

We speak about a lot, including:

• Her work at Cazoo, helping to transform a traditional industry for the good of users & the planet, and what "putting the soft into software" really means
• The start of her journey, how long she's known she's a woman and how no one chooses to be transgender for fun or because of peer pressure
• Her disappointment with celebrities that she used to admire or support, how transgender people are unfairly labelled by people with zero knowledge, and how everyone should be humble enough to do the work and learn to be better
• The transition roadmap - how she got ready, the step-by-step approach she took, how she was happy to find people were generally supportive and not as hateful as the mainstream media often portray
• The letter she wrote to her colleagues when she came out at work, the level of detail she went into, types of inappropriate questions transgender women get and her desire to avoid living "reality TV" transgender
• How troublesome the "Hugh Grant" style bumbling apology for misgendering your colleagues can be, and why you should just apologise and move on
• What we can all do, both through our company culture and our own actions to ensure we foster a diverse, welcoming workplace and help our transgender colleagues feel accepted & safe

And much more!

Saielle is undergoing further surgery to help with her transition. If you would like to donate, please check out Saielle's fundraiser.

If you want to donate to charities that support gender diverse charities, check out Mermaids in the UK, or The Trevor Project in the US.

You can reach out to Saielle on Twitter or visit her blog.

We speak about a lot, including:

• The story behind founding Eesel, how they're trying to make finding your own documents as easy as finding President Obama's shoe size, and whether they can save us from Slack thread hell
• The pros & cons of starting a company with a founder who lives 10 hours' time difference away, and how to make it work for you
• The jump from big structured product company to startup life, how you have to identify your ground truths as well as accept the layers of uncertainty that will evolve as you go and making sure you don't change everything all the time
• How you should bring nuance to product principles, what this means and why sometimes it's worth spending some time in the solution space and working back to the problems
• His love of improv comedy, how he got into it, and how it maps to product management practices more than you might think:
  • The base reality - working out where you're at and the unarguable truths of your situation
  • The game - the key insights or ways that you can affect the base reality
  • The funny scene / a great product - executing and bringing it all home
  • The importance of keeping it simple, not getting sidetracked or going after everything you could

And much more!

I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, you can buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway!

You can find Amogh on Twitter or check his blog, The Paperclip.

We talk about a lot, including:

• How she made the move into product management from customer support, got that tricky first product management job by putting extra hours in on top of her day job, and the importance of finding good mentors to help you along the way
• The story behind that video, why she was making a video about product management with a laptop in a swimming pool in the first place, and whether she stands behind her (and her colleague's) description of product management
• The three main types of criticism she got after the video went viral, how much of that was about her being a woman, how much was about her being a product manager and the crass double standards it exposed
• The effect of the abuse on her mental & emotional state, and how she started to worry about her job and the credibility that she had to work so hard for
• How young women in general have to work extra hard, in a way that young men don't tend to have to do, to prove that they're intelligent, reliable and good at their job
• How she tried to give due credit to engineers & designers for doing the "impressive" work and it why it was disappointing to be attacked in return
• The supportive comments that she got after the hate, how much this meant to her and how some people got in touch to admit wrongdoing and that they'd changed their minds
• Whether she's going to double down on tech videos in future, and if she does whether she'll do the next ones in a serious looking room with lots of books behind her

And much more!

A brief interruption from my sponsor - me!

I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway!

Here's the original video that started it all off.

The swimming pool video

Darby also posted two follow up videos:

Rebuttal 1 Rebuttal 2

You can find Darby on TikTok or Instagram.

We're also trying to get her to spend more time on Twitter!

We speak about a lot, including:

• Why he decided to write his new book now, and how he tried to make it actionable and fresh with numerous real world examples from his own career and long experience consulting with B2B firms
• How the vast majority of B2B innovations fail, how his book aims to offer a solution to this and give a process to enable B2B product leaders to get from zero to their first ten customers (and who those ten customers should be)
• How his experience in Climate Tech has helped him come up with recommendations on how to frame seemingly esoteric B2B products in ways that resonate with those customers' real problems and drawing a line back to real world ROI
• The six stages of the B2B Innovators' Map (Strategic Alignment, Market Discovery, User Discovery, Solution Planning, Prototyping, Early Adopters), what they involve and when to double back
• The importance of cutting your losses with Early Adopters, and not succumbing to the temptation to do absolutely anything to keep a customer on board if you've proved it doesn't make sense for you in the wider context of your product
• The risks of coming to the end of the process with a niche product for a limited audience, and how to make sure that the things you're building are made generic for an entire market
• What comes after the B2B Innovator's Map and the importance of aligning next steps with your leadership team to take your learnings to the big time

And much more!

Visit The Book Website for more info.

You can find Daniel on LinkedIn or DanielElizalde.com.

An interview with Andy Budd. Andy is the founder of Clearleft, one of the UK's original design consultancies. He's now an in demand speaker, thought leader and advisor on the topics of design & entrepreneurship.

We speak about a lot, including:

• The story behind his departure from day-to-day operations at Clearleft, how he believes that startup founders have a shelf life as CEO, and the importance of bringing new blood into the company as you scale
• The problems with getting design practices changed in established companies and why he's focusing now on going back to basics with early stage startups and working with founders to instill good design practices from the beginning
• Why it's important to get design into the startup as early as possible to apply structure and rigour, but how many founders have done more product discovery than we give them credit for
• How early product managers in founder-run startups are often brought in as the equivalent of short order chefs and the folly of trying to turn McDonalds in to a Michelin starred restaurant
• The common situation when early founders being people into the company to help apply process, get frustrated when everything slows down but how it's fair enough for founders to feel this since it's ultimately their business on the line
• How most companies should probably do more research but how most product designers should be more pragmatic and realise that ultimately they can help to sustain the business with less-than-perfect designs
• The trouble that product & design people can have getting to the top table, the things they might need to do to get there and how product & design teams are playing chess while the rest of the leadership team are playing poker

And much more!

You can find Andy on Twitter or check out andybudd.com

An interview with Nicole Reineke. Nicole is a strategist and author with 75 patents to her name. She wanted to help others unlock the innovator within them and wrote "Compassion Driven Innovation" with a cross-functional group of co-authors. The book aims to give business owners and product leaders a proven methodology to defeat the Innovator's Dilemma and get the best innovation results.

We speak about a lot, including:

• Some of the early reception for her book, how people have started to adopt it and use in within their organisations, and how she wrote it very cross-functionally with 2 co-authors from different fields
• Why she needed to "write the book she needed to read" after having been granted 75 patents and realising that there was a method to drive true innovation
• How she started off researching a number of companies to work out the four core root causes of innovation failure: Exclusivity, Missing the most pressing challenges, Overestimated value and Unsupported moon shots
• How this book tackles some of the gaps left behind by the classic Innovator's Dilemma and offers innovators a way to solve it
• The tale behind the compassion driven innovation methodology, how can it help mitigate the 4 different types of innovation failure, and the 4 stages of the compassion driven innovation process: Include, Discover, Enlighten & Activate.
• The importance of transparency and openness, using artifacts to ensure everyone knows why decisions are being made, and having political nous to make sure you get buy in and nip dissent in the bud
• Why it's essential to be able to pivot based on new information or data throughout the innovation cycle, not falling in love with your ideas and the perils of discovery theatre

And much more!

Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.

You can find Nicole on Twitter or LinkedIn

An interview with Radhika Dutt. Radhika is a product leader, consultant & author of "Radical Product Thinking". This is actually the third time I've spoken to Radhika about some of the themes from her book, and product vision in general and on this episode we go deep on vision vs survival.

We speak about a lot, including:

• How the book's going international these days into various markets, how it's going down there and whether she has plan for world domination
• Why she's not making the mistake of some product companies and avoiding getting seduced by expanding market share or increasing revenue by going to international markets unprepared
• Why revenue can never be your North Star or part of your vision at all, and how product companies need to learn to prioritise vision against survival
• The concept of vision debt where you just build stuff to survive, how much vision debt is healthy and how you're always going to have to pay it back
• The importance of storytelling when trying to sell the benefits of a vision-led approach and a lesson from the different strategic approaches Marvel & DC took with their films
• The idea of an ethical line in the sand which product people don't want to cross but how easy it is to accidentally cross it, not with one big mistake but many small ones
• Why you should examine your personal vision and survival metrics, make sure you stay true to yourself and take an ethical stand where you can

And much more!

Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.

We covered some of the broader themes from Radhika's book in our first episode Episode 82 - Curing Product Diseases with a Radical Product Vision or our second episode Episode 92 - Digital Pollution & The Product Hippocratic Oath.

You can find Radhika on Twitter or LinkedIn

An interview with James Mayes. James is the co-founder and former CEO of Mind the Product, one of the world's leading product communities. James came on to talk about the recent acquisition of Mind the Product by Pendo, his new role as Product Evangelist for Pendo, and some of the themes he's talking about on his travels.

We talk about a lot, including:

• Why the Mind the Product team decided to sell themselves to Pendo in the first place, why they did it now and whether they've maintained editorial independence post-acquisition
• Whether there was any concern that they might be doubling up or treading on each others' toes with the two sets of product conferences, podcasts and online communities
• His new role as a Product Evangelist, what that means for Mind the Product and for Pendo, and whether he's an evangelist for product management as a whole or for Pendo's solutions
• Whether he's the Pendo answer to John Cutler, the prospect of an arms race of content creation and whether James could beat John in an arm wrestle
• Whether there's a growing need for product advocacy to help product people be successful & some of the similarities with developer relations teams
• His continuing desire to support the growth of product teams and product processes but also the fundamental craft of product management
• Some of the thoughts on his mind right now about scaling product teams through technology & the missed opportunities of many attempted digital transformations

And much more!

You can email James at james@mindtheproduct.com or connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

An interview with Tessa Kriesel & Wesley Faulkner. Tessa & Wesley are passionate advocates for the craft of Developer Relations (DevRel), building communities and supporting users of products aimed at developers.

We talk about a lot, including:

• What DevRel is, what they love about it and how there's not one boring DevRel person in the world
• Their journeys into DevRel and whether there's a standard career path for people trying to get into the trade
• The types of companies that need DevRel teams and how the concept of "developer-first" and "developer plus" products informs when you need to spin up a DevRel team
• Where DevRel sits within the organisation, the other functions it intersects with and whether it's really just a part of marketing
• Why it matters that business leaders understand the true value of DevRel rather than seeing them as one team to do just about anything that comes up
• Whether we need DevRel at all when the vast majority of PMs claim to be technical enough to talk to developers anyway
• The ways that DevRel and Product teams can work together, some of the things that DevRel teams need from PMs & what they can give back in return

And much more!

If you want to catch up with Tessa, you can reach out to her on Twitter, on Polywork, at TessaKriesel.com or check out Devocate

If you want to catch up with Wesley, you can reach out to him on Twitter, on Polywork or check out his podcast Community Pulse.

An interview with Jim Morris. Jim's a product discovery & experimentation coach who wants teams to stop wasting their time with discovery if they're not going to do anything with it. He's currently running Product Discovery Group out in Silicon Valley.

We talk about a lot, including:

• The goals of Product Discovery Group, the problems he helps to solve, how he got started as a product discovery coach and that time he hung out with Jeff Bezos
• How many companies see funding as the ultimate validation of their idea but forget to talk to their customers and check if the idea is actually viable for the business
• Why we need to remember that product discovery is not just there as an artificial stage gate to delay decision making and should always serve the overall business goals
• How there are bad product companies with good product managers and good product companies with bad product managers, and how Silicon Valley startups are in the same boat as the rest of us when it comes to good product discovery practices
• How we can bed product discovery in with leadership, how to persuade them that there's a different way to lead, and how to skill up product teams that have never done product discovery before
• The concept of a Solution Test, the importance of presenting multiple solutions, why you have to get interactive rather than just show stuff, and why you should never concentrate on usability first
• How to apply structure to your discovery data collection to make it easier to extract insights from the data and turn them into action

And much more!

You can reach out to Jim on Twitter, on LinkedIn or check out Product Discovery Group.

An interview with Sophia Höfling. Sophia is a former Head of Product at Babbel and now co-founder and Head of Product at Saiga, a Berlin-based productivity startup where they're aiming to save people from life admin. Sophia's passionate about life-centred design and collaborative product discovery.

We talk about a lot, including:

• The mission behind Saiga and how they have started with a Wizard of Oz product as they try to work out the most important problems to solve
• The tricky transition from established product companies to new startup foundership and having to do everything yourself
• The concept of life-centred design and why we can't just listen to users but have to consider the holistic impact of our products on all stakeholders
• What to do when your customers don't care about the ethical merits of your product but you want to do the right thing anyway
• The importance of collaborative, rather than cooperative, product discovery and how to include people from outside the classic product trio in your discovery journey
• Whether doing all this discovery slows you down, whether that's OK and the importance of timeboxing discovery efforts to avoid getting caught in an infinite loop
• How to get buy-in for product discovery from sceptical leadership and convince them of the benefits of a good discovery flywheel

And much more!

Check out Sophia's articles on Medium, including

It’s time we move to life-centered product development

The importance of collaboration in product discovery (and how to get it right)

If you want to catch up with Sophia, you can reach out to her on LinkedIn.

We talk about a lot, including:

• Explaining what the heck a "boondocker" is to this Brit, the problems they where having that were worth solving, and how they created a mix of Airbnb and Tinder to solve it
• Whether starting a company with your mum is the ultimate Mom Test and the pros and cons of working with close family members
• How she had no experience with the RV community, but used her RV influencer mum's experience to understand the needs that the community had and how they might solve them
• Some of the challenges of creating a digital platform for people that are by definition "off grid" and how the platform grew over time as mobile technology improved
• Whether playing the long game and working to build community relationships would have been possible if they'd been forced down the growth at all costs VC route
• How their successful exit came about, how they had to pick a company that they could trust to carry on their good name, and whether the community felt it was a betrayal or sell out
• How she's started a new company to solve a problem she had in her first company, and how she's going about engaging with a brand new community for the second time

And much more!

If you want to catch up with Anna, you can reach out to her on Twitter or check out Subscribe Sense.

We talk about a lot, including:

• His work with Merck, how there are actually two Mercks and a summary of the differences between them and why they diverged
• The challenges & opportunities of working in product management when your end users are hardcore scientists, and whether this is the one time you actually do need to be an industry expert to be an effective product manager
• Whether situations like the Theranos scandal loom large over the medical research industry, and how "move fast & break things" doesn't work when people's lives are on the line
• That tricky balancing act where you're trying to be agile and move fast whilst working for a company (and an industry) that values process, predictability & compliance
• Whether working for a big multinational means he's defaulted to having to use SAFe and why legacy waterfall companies are attracted to such frameworks
• Whether being an introvert in product management is a barrier or a superpower, and how to survive all the meetings & presentations when your natural tendency is not to want to be in the room
• Why idealistic product principles only get you so far, how to work out which ones matter, which don't, and why waterfall might actually be the better option sometimes (🤢)

And much more!

If you want to catch up with Dan, you can reach out to him on LinkedIn or on Twitter.

We talk about a lot, including:

• How he got into writing and consulting about cognitive biases in the first place, whether you need to go back to college to learn about this stuff and whether it's intimidating having your work reviewed by academic experts
• Why we have cognitive biases, how our brains are constantly lying to us, and how we'd struggle to cope with having to make a trillion decisions a day without them
• The importance of taking complicated scientific concepts back to a human level and making sure you can explain things like you would to a five-year-old
• How cognitive biases can manifest themselves when we're designing products, the most common biases that we might come across, and why the framing bias is by far the most dangerous bias of all
• Why it's sometimes important to insert speed bumps into our products rather than continuously trying to optimise for speedy decision making
• Some of the ways to interrupt cognitive biases in product design, including the red team / blue team approach and the Black Mirror test
• The importance of participatory design and giving the people most affected by bias the power to decide when something that affects them is actually ready to go

And much more!

Visit the book website or check it out on Goodreads.

If you want to catch up with David, you can reach out to him at https://www.daviddylanthomas.com

We speak about a lot, including:

• How he started out in engineering and moved into product management after finding that he got more joy out of working with & designing solutions for his users
• The core elements of product management, how they're not complicated individually but difficult to execute consistently, and how mentors can help you understand what's OK and what's not
• His journey from Canada to Africa to Canada to Africa and how the classic book Zero to One inspired him to tackle meaningful problems for Africa's poorest communities
• How Africa has a lot of opportunities to fix things as so many basic things don't work, how he identified the key problem to solve and the research he had to do to validate his idea
• The importance of leaving technology out of it when dealing with marginalised communities & how you have to do way more listening than talking in order to build trust
• His desire for entrepreneurs and investors to look across Africa, not just concentrate on the biggest markets and how to pick the right markets to enter into there
• Why it's important to enlist power users to build advocacy and help you co-create solutions in traditional industries that are not used to trying out new solutions
• The need to keep your power users close, but not too close as you try to work out how to build for the wider market and prepare to scale the business