Navigating the job market, finding your specialization, and making career decisions that suit your needs can be a complex process. That's why we sat down with HHoang Nguyen , Director of Product at Westwing, to dig into these intricate topics and offer some insight. In the realm of AI, not only do we discuss its fascinating aspects, but we also delve into how to discover innate talents and develop a passion for product management within it. Featured Links: Follow Hoang on LinkedIn | Hoang's 'How To Evaluate Your Next Career Opportunities' talk at PMF 2022 | 'Unlocking Your Superhero - How To Find Your Specialization' video

This week's episode on The Product Experience podcast demystifies what it truly means to lead an empowered team and helps you navigate the tricky waters of autonomy and accountability. Uncover invaluable advice on earning and extending trust, understanding the power dynamics in a team setting, and transforming company relationships. Featured Links: Follow Andrew on LinkedIn | Make Things That Matter | Marty Cagan's article 'Product vs Feature Teams' | Buy Charles Feltman's book 'The Thin Book of Trust: an Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work' 

Today, on a very special episode on The Product Experience, Randy Silver joins us for a change on the other side of the mic as a guest! Lily Smith interviews Randy to talk all about what differentiates good product managers from exceptional ones as well as touching upon his experience in speaking at #mtpcon London 2023. Featured Links: Follow Randy on LinkedIn | Get the Product Environment Canvas: outofowls.com/mtp | CPO Circles | Product in the (A)ether |

Experimentation is a key aspect of product management. What are the most important things to consider when experimenting and testing new product features? And when do you know when it's the right time to do just that? At #mtpcon London 2023, Randy Silver and Lily Smith, were joined by Faith Forster, VP of Product at Dext, and Iqbal Ali, Experimentation coach and consultant for a live podcast episode of The Product Experience! Tune in for an uncut conversation on testing in product, along with a Q&A section from the audience that witnessed and participated in the discussion.   Featured Links: Follow Faith on LinkedIn | Follow Iqbal on LinkedIn | Follow Lily on LinkedIn | Follow Randy on LinkedIn | AI, failings, and product villains: 9 lessons from #MTPCon London

This week, we go back into the archives when Susana Lopes, Director of Product at Abatable, joined us on the podcast. In this episode, we discuss how she used the State of the Product presentation to manage stakeholders and drive alignment. Tune in for an episode filled with practical insights and invaluable resources.Featured Links: Follow Susana on LinkedIn | Susana’s State of Product Slide Deck | Porter’s 5 Forces model | ‘What is SWOT analysis?’ piece | Buy Melissa Perri’s book 'Escaping The Build Trap' | Buy Marco Iansiti & Karim R. Lakhani’s book 'Competing In The Age Of AI'  | Tools to Help Product Managers Think Strategically and Commercially

 In this week's podcast,  Dan Balcauski shares his thoughts on the challenge of measuring uncertainty in pricing strategy and how tools like Fermi decomposition can be game-changers. Additionally, if you've ever wondered how to manage existing customers when you decide to tweak pricing and packaging, we've got you covered. Tune in for some pragmatic advice on pricing strategy, indicative pricing, and the reasoning behind 'contact us for a quote' approach. Featured Links: Follow Dan on LinkedIn | Product Tranquility | Buy 'How to Measure Anything Workbook: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business' book by Douglas Hubbard | Fermi Estimate examples | 'Decoding the mysteries of pricing strategies' - Part 1 of Dan Balcauski on The Product Experience

In this week's podcast, we invited Mel McVeigh, VP of Product at Condé Nast. In our conversation, we discuss all of the unique challenges of building products within a global mass media company and hear from Mel how to transform products and build teams. Featured Links: Follow Mel on LinkedIn | Mel's website | Condé Nast | Watch the full Met Gala 2023 at Vogue

On this week's podcast episode, product veteran Itamar Gilad joins us on the podcast to provide insights on implementing evidence-guided principles into product management. He argues that as product managers, we must be driven by evidence to find product success. Featured Links: Follow Itamar on LinkedIn | Buy Itamar's new book 'Evidence-Guided: Creating High Impact Products in the Face of Uncertainty' | Free e-book downloads on Testing Product ideas, ICE Prioritisation, OKRs done right, and many other resources at Itamar's website | Sign-up for Itamar's 'High-Impact Product Management' newsletter | 'High-Integrity Commitments' feature at SVG | Itamar's previous episodes on The Product Experience podcast 

In this week's podcast, we were joined by Dan Balcauski, Founder and Chief Pricing Officer at Product Tranquility. Dan sheds light on the common misconceptions around pricing and gives valuable advice on aligning your pricing strategy with your business objectives. Featured Links: Follow Dan on LinkedIn | Product Tranquility | 'How To Price Your Product: A Guide To The Van Westendorp Pricing Model' feature at Forbes | 'Identifying and multiplying your best customers' - Tamara Grominsky on The Product Experience | Buy 'What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services'  book by Anthony Ulwick

Many organisations and teams have faced the challenge of scaling a product. This week we invited Dave Martin and Andrea Saez, authors of "Product Momentum Gap", to share their wisdom and help bring together product strategy and provide customer value.Featured Links: Follow Andrea on LinkedIn and her website | Follow Dave on LinkedIn | Dave's page at Right To Left | Sign up for release updates for Andrea and Dave's forthcoming book 'The Product Momentum Gap' | Dave's 'How to execute your product strategy' (using the Value Creation Plan) 10-Step Plan

With only 30 days to go until our flagship conference, #mtpcon London, we thought that this week, we'd take a trip down memory lane to when we invited AI and Health Tech leader, Randeep Sidhu on the podcast. Randeep, who will be speaking on the #mtpcon main stage on 20 October, spoke to us about lessons learned from building the Covid-19 tes t and trace app in the midst of the pandemic. Featured Links: Follow Randeep on LinkedIn | NHS COVID-19 app | Gov.UK NHS Covid-19 App Privacy Notice | Understanding the Impact of Covid-19 on BAME Groups NHS Data Report

In this week's episode, we sit down with Alex Watson, Product Director at Spotify's Core Experience. Together, we unpack the tools and mindset necessary for anyone navigating a career in product management. We delve into the critical aspects of understanding your motivation for career progression and the unique benefits that different levels of seniority hold.Featured Links: Follow Alex on LinkedIn | The Wired Jester | 'Managing Internal Communications for Big Projects' feature at Mind The Product | Alex's thoughts on 'Self development and Career Progression as a PM in Spotify'

In this week's podcast, we were joined by Tobias Freudenreich, a product leadership coach and consultant based in Hamburg. This episode dives deep into the structure of cross-functional teams and explains how this structure can help us build great products that people love.  Featured Links: Follow Tobias on LinkedIn and his website | Tobias' 'Introducing Cross-Functional Leadership' blog post | Tobias' 'Product Leadership' talk at ProductTank Berlin | Martin Eriksson's 'The Decision Stack' framework | 'Getting Started With Outcomes' post by Josh Seiden

Transitioning from a CPO to a CEO is a daunting task, requiring more than just technical skills. In the second half of our chat, Namrata delves into the importance of long-term planning and developing skills. Specifically, we discuss the intricacies of combining sales and product roles, highlighting the potential challenges that come with it. The discussion brings to the forefront the need for product management professionals to develop a comprehensive suite of business and sales skills.Apart from Namrata’s journey, our conversation also takes a turn into the world of product communities and their impact. Featured Links: Follow Namrata on LinkedIn | Namrata's website | Women In Product UK on Instagram 

Listen to our conversation with Lucie Buisson, Chief Product Officer at Contentsquare. Lucy is a master at building high-performing teams who focuses on creating value for customers while striking a balance between scalability and feature development. She's got loads of experience and wisdom to share, whether you're leading a team or being part of one.She discusses the importance of maintaining close relationships with teams and customers, while celebrating successes amidst new challenges. Featured Links: Follow Lucie on LinkedIn and Twitter | Contentsquare | Hypergrowth feature at Tech Blast

Rerun: OKRs are a simple concept — but deceptively hard to get right.  There’s an awful lot of horror stories about implementations gone wrong, along with any number of gurus and guides on how to get it right. Storm Fagan — now the Chief Product Officer at the BBC, formerly at JustEat — joined us on the podcast to break down how she made OKRs scale at a big company by keeping them simple. (Hint: that wasn’t her first approach.)Featured Links: Follow Storm on LinkedIn and Twitter | Work with Storm at the BBC | Just Eat | 'How to write OKRs that don't suck' MTP piece by Adrian HowardLevel up your product management skills with an interactive, remote product management training workshop by Mind the Product. Hone your skills with a small group of product peers, get coached through your product challenges by an expert trainer, and walk away with frameworks and tools you can use right away. Learn more.

On this week's podcast, we sit down with Mirela Mus, Founder and CPO of Product People, as we unbox the career progression in product management. We decode the vital differences between various product leadership roles, from VPs to Directors and Heads of Product. Listen as Mirela details her incredible journey into product management and discusses how Product People has set themselves apart by focusing wholeheartedly on career opportunities and meeting client needs.Featured Links: Follow Mirela on LinkedIn and Twitter | Product People | 'No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention' book by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer | Open Roles at Product PeopleLevel up your product management skills with an interactive, remote product management training workshop by Mind the Product. Hone your skills with a small group of product peers, get coached through your product challenges by an expert trainer, and walk away with frameworks and tools you can use right away. Learn more.

Product Operations has been the talk of the town over the past two years, but why is it so important in product management, and what does the role entail? In this week's podcast, Antonia Landi, Product Operations Consultant, leads us on a journey through the world of product ops, outlining its purpose, significance, and how its role can vary based on a company's specific needs. We delve into the misconceptions around product ops and discover that it’s not just about creating mural boards but is an essential cog in the product development machinery.Featured Links: Follow Antonia on LinkedIn and Twitter | Antonia's website | The Product Operations Manifesto | Product Ops Overview feature at SVPG | 'Product Operations - The Fuel for Winning Product Strategies' piece on Product Lab.Our #mtpcon San Francisco 2023 Keynote Kit brings you all of the insights from our San Francisco keynote talks plus additional helpful discussion points and thought starters so you can easily translate the insights into actions – perfect for making effective improvements to your role, team, and product. Sign up now.

Ever wondered what it takes to thrive in product management across different sizes of organizations?  We welcome experienced product leader, Liz Clow, Chief Product Officer at memmo.me. We journey through her experiences across diverse organizations, you'll learn how to put OKRs into practice to steer teams effectively and maintain laser focus. We'll explore the delicate art of saying 'no' to certain initiatives to retain focus and the importance of adaptability when a strategy misfires. In addition, we dig into the nuances of leadership styles in different organizational contexts. Learn how data-driven decision making and a robust product mindset can transform any company, regardless of size. Featured Links: Follow Liz on LinkedIn and Twitter | Memmo | Liz's 'Navigating different org sizes as a product leader' piece at Mind The ProductOur #mtpcon San Francisco 2023 Keynote Kit brings you all of the insights from our San Francisco keynote talks plus additional helpful discussion points and thought starters so you can easily translate the insights into actions – perfect for making effective improvements to your role, team, and product. Sign up now.

Join us on the podcast this week where we uncover the world of content design with Erica Jorgensen, seasoned content designer at Chewy and author of 'Strategic Content Design Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX'.  Erica  walks us through her professional journey and how she fell into the realm of content strategy.  She enlightens us on the significance of using quantitative research in understanding why words work or not, and how different businesses can reap enormous benefits from a content designer. Our chat with Erica takes an intriguing turn as we dig into the kinship between content design and user experience. She opens up about the importance of quality content as an engineering issue, and when it's prime time to make the case for hiring a content designer early in a project Featured Links: Follow Erica on LinkedIn and Twitter | Erica's website | Buy Erica's book 'Strategic Content Design - Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX' | The Content Design Manifesto | Screaming Frog SEO Spider Our #mtpcon San Francisco 2023 Keynote Kit brings you all of the insights from our San Francisco keynote talks plus additional helpful discussion points and thought starters so you can easily translate the insights into actions – perfect for making effective improvements to your role, team, and product. Sign up now.

Christian Idiodi, Partner and SVPG joins us on the podcast this week! We speak with Christian about onboarding new product hires, and the work he is doing for the first in-person product conference for the African continent. Featured Links: Follow Christian on LinkedIn and Twitter | Innovate Africa Foundation | Inspire Africa | The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

This week on the podcast, we speak to Kax Uson, Head of Product at Adevinta. She tells us all about her story of going from IC to her product leadership, and the key lessons learned along the way. Featured Links: Follow Kax on LinkedIn and Twitter | Kax's website | Women In Product | Kax's 'Coaching for Confident Product People' page 

Tune back into our chat with Donna Lichaw on this week's podcast. In part two of the episode, she continues to share key insights in reinventing product leadership and success in product.   Featured Links: Follow Donna on LinkedIn and Twitter | Donna's website | Donna's book 'The Leader's Journey' | Career and alignment: Part 1 - Donna Lichaw on The Product Experience

Donna Lichaw, product expert, consultant, and author of ‘The Leader’s Journey’ joins us on the podcast this week. She shares the lessons to reinvent your leadership journey, by activating your superpowers, transforming your team, and poising your business for success in product.Featured Links: Follow Donna on LinkedIn and Twitter | Donna's website | Donna's book 'The Leader's Journey' | 

In product, basic business analyst skills often get misrepresented in the midst of the plethora of tasks that product managers have to juggle. In this weeks' podcast, Dr J Harrison joins us on the podcast to discuss how product can collaborate more effectively with business analysts. Featured Links: Follow Dr J on LinkedIn and Twitter | Dr J's website | Dr J and Josephine Baird's 'It Is Complicated' podcast | 'Lean Experimentation in Action: A Concise Guide to Validating Product Ideas and Avoiding Failure' book by Kylie Castellaw and Maryam Aidini

How can pricing of a product be affected by supply and demand? In this weeks' podcast we spoke with Vishal Kapoor, Senior Director or Product Management at Shipt, he discussed the process behind dynamic product pricing strategy, when it's right to introduce this strategy, and the lessons he has learned along the way.Featured Links: Follow Vishal on LinkedIn | Shipt | The Innovation Dispatch | 'Prioritisation: Bringing order out of chaos' feature at Mind The Product | 

Have you encountered the challenge of delivering more features quickly with limited resources in your product? Many product managers tend to fall into the trap of becoming feature factories. In this week's podcast, we had a conversation with Assaph Mehr, a product leader and coach, who shared insights into the analogy of transitioning from a feature factory to a garden. Join us to learn how to adopt a gardener's mindset as a product manager, inviting people in, creating new attractions, and ensuring the consistent quality of your garden for your customers throughout the year. And let's face it, who doesn't appreciate the beauty of gardens?Featured Links: Follow Assaph on LinkedIn and Twitter | Assaph's 'Product development: or how to turn factories into gardens' piece at Mind The Product | Felix The Fox Mysteries | Taylorism / Scientific Management definition | "Always be closing!" scene from Glengarry Glenn Ross (1992) | 'Pave the cow's path' piece on Three Saplings

Dinushi Pieries, VP of Product Management at J.P. Morgan, has years of experience in the product space, having worked for prominent tech organizations for several years. Her expertise ranges from managing services to spearheading the development of innovative portals. In this week's podcast, we spoke with her on the topics of platform product management, open source, and her approach to measuring success when working on new tools.Featured Links: Follow Dinushi on LinkedIn and Tik Tok | The Open Source Software Security Mobilization Plan | GitHub Copilot | Amazon CodeWhisperer | IBM Project CodeNet

Tune into our conversation with Kirsten Mann, CPO at Prospection to hear her key lessons learned from moving the organisation from services-led to product-led.Featured Links: Follow Kirsten on LinkedIn and Instagram | Kirsten's feature 'A case study: The journey to becoming a product-led company' at Mind The Product | Prospection

How can product managers design the right conversations with stakeholders, teams,  and customers alike? Tune into our conversation with Daniel Stillman, Author of Good Talk - How To Design Conversations That Matter' to find out. Featured Links: Follow Daniel on LinkedIn and Twitter | Daniel's website | The Conversation Factory | Daniel's book 'Good Talk - How To Design Conversations That Matter' | 'The Rose, Bud, Thorn Retrospective' technique | 'Six Guidelines For Getting To Yes' piece at Harvard Law School Blog

Tanguy Crusson, Product leader at Atlassian joins us on The Product Experience podcast this week to talk all about product launches. Tune in to find out his thoughts on why most products fail, and learn how he successfully launched a new product at Atlassian. Featured Links: Follow Tanguy on LinkedIn and Twitter | Atlassian Presents: Unleash - 'How we created Jira Product Discovery' video | Sean Ellis Test: 'A successful method to figure out product/market fit' piece

We all have passions and desires in life by how can we use our individual passions and channel this into creating products that customers love?  In this week's podcast we speak with Manon Dave, Chief Product Officer to get our creative juices flowing in product management. Featured Links: Follow Manon on LinkedIn and Twitter | Manon's website | Manon's 'Keeping product creative, innovative... and fun!' talk at #mtpcon London 2022We’d love to hear your feedback on how we can improve The Product Experience podcast. Let us know your thoughts by filling out this quick form!

Data has been the talk of the town for product managers over the past few years. To provide some insights on data as a product, how to manage data products, and conclude whether it's pronounced 'Dayta' or 'Daata', we spoke to data expert, Omar Sallam, Senior Product Manager at Booking.com.Featured Links: Follow Omar on LinkedIn and Twitter | Omar's Product School 'How to manage data-as-a-product' webinar | ProductTank CairoWe’d love to hear your feedback on how we can improve The Product Experience podcast. Let us know your thoughts by filling out this quick form!

Tim Herbig has made many mistakes (who hasn’t?). Fortunately for us, Tim not only owns up to his mistakes, he’s written a book to help the rest of us avoid making the same ones.  We’ve all had issues with how to work best – not only within our individual teams, but with the rest of the organisation as well. In our conversation, he shares some simple and practical methods to diagnose when you have a problem and how to solve it.Featured Links: Follow Tim on LinkedIn and Twitter | Tim's official website | Buy Tim's book 'Lateral Leadership: A Practical Guide for Product Managers' | The Auftragsklärung Framework | 

If you're starting a new role in product at whatever level, it can sometimes be difficult to get started, especially if you're chucked in the deep end.  In this week's podcast episode, we speak with Leah Tharin. She provides some insights on your first 90 days in a new product role and the best ways to gain trust from your new team.  Featured Links: Follow Leah on LinkedIn and Twitter | Leah's website | Leah's 'Productea with Leah' podcast | 'The Shit Sandwich and Other Terrible Ways to Give Feedback' piece at I Done This Blog 

This week on the podcast, we jump straight back into our conversation with Ben Foster. Tune in to hear what he had to say about war, peace, vision, strategy, and how to tie it all together in a perfect bun.  Featured Links: Follow Ben on LinkedIn and Twitter | Prodify | Ben's book 'Build What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management' | Ben's 'Product Vision and Strategy in the Real World' talk at INDUSTRY Global '22 | Product Vision and Strategy: Part 1 - Ben Foster on The Product Experience

Vision and strategy in product go hand in hand. In this week's podcast episode we speak to product expert Ben Foster about how to craft these two aspects of product in the real world. Visit AnswerLab.com/mtp to fill in a form for your chance to win a free ticket to Mind The Product San Francisco 2023. Use promo code mtp to enter! Featured Links: Follow Ben on LinkedIn and Twitter | Prodify | Ben's book 'Build What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management' | Ben's 'Product Vision and Strategy in the Real World' talk at INDUSTRY Global '22 

After nearly 200 episodes on The Product Experience podcast, and four years of interviewing amazing guests, Lily and Randy decided to take on the topic of product coaching by themselves.Based on their expertise in coaching and leading product teams, they dive deep into this topic to share insights for anyone who might be coaching curious.Featured Links: Follow Lily on LinkedIn and Twitter | Follow Randy on LinkedIn and Twitter | BBC Maestro | Out of Owls | 

What is design debt and how do so many teams end up in this conundrum during or after the design phase? In this week's podcast, Bansi Mehta, CEO of Koru UX Design teaches us a lesson on how product teams can work with design teams to recognise, avoid, or even tackle design debt.Visit AnswerLab.com/mtp to fill in a form for your chance to win a free ticket to Mind The Product San Francisco 2023. Use promo code mtp to enter! Featured Links: Follow Bansi on LinkedIn and Twitter | Koru UX | '5 Practical Tips for PMs to Effectively Manage Design Backlogs' piece by Renuka Savant

It's not always so easy being green in product management. Listen to our conversation with Amy Wagner, Agile Consultant and Coach, where we discuss permaculture for agile teams and why it's important to inherit a green culture in product. Visit AnswerLab.com/mtp to fill in a form for your chance to win a free ticket to Mind The Product San Francisco 2023. Use promo code mtp to enter! Featured Links: Follow Amy on LinkedIn and her website | Perennial | 'What people think building a sustainable internet involves vs what it might actually be' feature by Hannah Smith / The Green Web Foundation | 'Carbon Neutral Roadmaps': Chris Adams on The Product Experience | 'Permaculture Principles' feature by David Holmgren | 'Permaculture Principles' piece by Bill Mollison | The Green Web Foundation | Amy's company website | The Permaculture Principles

OKRs here OKRs there. Every product team seems to have an opinion on how effective they are and their best approach to making best use of the metric model. We spoke with OKR expert Sten Pittet, to find out ways on how to get the most out of this goal setting strategy, and discuss where most product people go wrong.  Featured Links: Follow Sten on LinkedIn and Twitter | Tability | Slides from Sten's talk 'OKRs are the new Git' | 'OKRs are hard. But I still love them' feature by Camille Fournier | 'Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results' book by Christina R Wodtke | 'Measure What Matters: The Simple Idea that Drives 10X Growth' book by John Doerr

There's a ton of stuff going on in the product and wider workspace today. Tune into our conversation with Esther Weinberg to hear about how product people can deal with company transformation during times of disruption.  Featured Links: Follow Esther on LinkedIn and Twitter | The Ready Zone | Esther's article 'The Power of a Reality Check, Moving from Reactive to Responsive' | Better.com CEO fires 900 employees over Zoom - CNN Business | Work Trend Index Report - Microsoft's latest research on the ways we work

What are the keys to making a quality product for quality customers? There was no one better to talk with than Lina Zubyte, Head of Quality, at Doodle AG to discuss this. Jump into this quality conversation in this weeks' podcast episode. Featured Links: Follow Lina on LinkedIn and Twitter | Quality Bits | 'What is quality?' article

In this weeks' podcast,  we jump straight back into our conversation with Lucy Spence where we speak with her about trade-offs in product management. Featured Links: Follow Lucy on LinkedIn and Twitter | Lucy's page at Medium | Lucy's 'Trade offs' talk at UX Brighton 2022 | Listen to Lucy's part 1 episode her.

Today on the product experience podcast is all about trade-offs in product. Lucy Spence, Product Director at Appvia talks to us about her unique take on this important aspect of product management.  Featured Links: Follow Lucy on LinkedIn and Twitter | Lucy's page at Medium | Lucy's 'Trade offs' talk at UX Brighton 2022

What is it like starting a brand new job in product with a shiny new title? How do you approach onboarding and ensure that you have a smooth transition into your new team? Lily and Randy in this podcast episode provide their top tips on getting things off on the right foot.  Featured Links: Follow Lily on LinkedIn and Twitter | Follow Randy on LinkedIn and Twitter | BBC Maestro | Randy's 'Your First 2 Weeks' article at Out Of Owls

There's a stage in many product interviews where the hiring manager asks you to prepare a presentation. With limited information about the level of detail and the quality of your competition,  how are you meant to know what flies and what doesn't? On this weeks' podcast, we spoke with Edward Biden, Founder of Hustle Badger and former CPO at Future Learn and YunoJuno to guide us through this challenging interview stage.  Featured Links: Follow Ed on LinkedIn and Twitter | Ed's website | Hustle Badger | Ed's JobandTalent interview deck

Welcome back to The Product Experience podcast! For our first podcast episode to kick off 2023, we speak to Andy Polaine, Design Leadership Coach, about the systems and languages behind a product. The perfect topic to start the new year.Featured Links: Follow Andy on LinkedIn, Twitter and Mastodon | Andy's website | Andy's 'Mind Your Product Language' Speaker Deck from MTP Engage Hamburg 2022 | Buy Andy's book 'Service Design' | Andy's newsletter 'Doctor's Note' | Andy's podcast 'The Power of Ten' 

Some of the most successful people we know credit their mentors for making the difference in their careers. We’ve recently heard great talks from the likes of Barry O’Reilly, Marty Cagan, and Gibson Biddle where they talk about having a ‘personal Board of Directors’.  But how do you go about getting a mentor and getting the most out of the relationship?  We asked Devaris Brown to join us on the podcast to mentor us in the art of mentoring. Featured Links: Follow DeVaris on LinkedIn, Twitter and his website | Meroxa | 'Networking for Introverts' feature at People Of Colour In Tech | DeVaris's 'Using Playbooks to Drive Innovation' talk at Shift Dev 2019 Conference | 'Do You Need a Coach, a Mentor, or a Therapist?' piece at The Institute of You 

With 2023 just around the corner, product managers have been spending the last few weeks looking at their OKRs and thinking about the direction of their product. To help us better comprehend product strategy and direction, we spoke with Product Leader, Chiedza Muguti to discuss making your product strategy come alive. Let's jump right in! Featured Links: Follow Chiedza on LinkedIn and Twitter | Alteos | 'Giving direction in product with Janna Bastow, Chiedza Muguti, and Nacho Bassino' feature at Mind The Product

New products get tested and brought to market every day across different scales and sectors. What are the most essential go-to-market keys to make a product launch successful? There was no one better to discuss this with than Lea Hickman, now Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group—who played a crucial part in introducing Adobe's subscription model for the creative cloud—joins us on the podcast to discuss bringing products to market. Featured Links: Follow Lea on LinkedIn and Twitter | Silicon Valley Product Group | Marketecture definition | Martina Lauchengco's book 'Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products'

Featured Links: Follow Marty on LinkedIn and Twitter | Silicon Valley Product Group | Coaching - Managing Time article at SVPG | Two in a Box PM article at SVPG | Shreyas Doshi on Twitter | How to run a Project Premortem Exercise with your Team feature at Atlassian 

Product innovation can get more challenging with the multiple layers of management you have to deal with in larger organisations. How can product managers channel their inner creative thoughts while collaborating effectively in large organisations? There was no one better to ask than Daniel Elizalde, Author of B2B Innovator’s Map, who had all of the answers about B2B product management, innovation in enterprises, and much, much, more.Featured Links: Follow Daniel on LinkedIn and Twitter | Daniel's website | Daniel's B2B Innovator's Map | Daniel's previous episode on The Product Experience 'The Internet of Things'

Featured Links: Follow Esha on LinkedIn and Twitter | Meta | WhatsApp

On this weeks' podcast episode, we welcomed the man who needs no introduction...Marty Cagan, Founder and Party of SVPG , and Author of ”Inspired” and “Empowered” delved into a plethora of topics including  strategy, vision, ethics, and ways of working. We struggled to fit so much product wisdom into one episode, so we decided to split it into two parts! Sit back, grab a drink, and listen to some of the wisest words of wisdom in product.  Featured Links: Follow Marty on LinkedIn and Twitter | Silicon Valley Product Group | Coaching - Managing Time article at SVPG | Two in a Box PM article at SVPG | Shreyas Doshi on Twitter | How to run a Project Premortem Exercise with your Team feature at Atlassian 

Rerun: We learn something from every guest that joins us on the podcast, but it’s not that often that something they say makes it onto our wall. Dave Martin (co-founder of Right to Left) chatted with us about building great habits for product people, and how to make sure they stick.  He also tells us about his simple question to ask at the end of every week – something that’s already made a difference to the way we work!Featured Links: Follow Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter | RightToLeft | Marty Cagan's books 'Inspired: How To Create Tech Products Customers Love' and 'Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products' | Professor Alison Wolf on 'Not Accepting Good Enough' video | Gallup's book 'First, Break All The Rules: What The World's Greatest Managers Do Differently' 

Lily and Randy in this special episode, take a trip down memory lane to have a chat about the best Roadmap insights they've heard from a range of product episodes on the podcast over the past year. Tune in to listen to actionable insights from Philips Nwachukwu, Janice Fraser, Maahir Shah, and more! Featured Links: Follow Lily on LinkedIn and Twitter | Follow Randy on LinkedIn and Twitter | Roadmaps features at Mind The Product | Guests included in this episode: Maggie Crowley, Philips Nwachukwu, Alexander Hipp, Kausambi Manjita, Storm Fagan, Roisi Proven, Ha Phan, Anthony Marter, Christian Crumlish, Maahir Shah, Cassidy Fein, Janice Fraser, and Petra Wille

What is the art and science behind a global music platform like Spotify nailing its algorithms to ensure that all users get the exact results that users want when using the search bar? On this week's podcast, Lily and Randy sat down with Jonny Brooks-Bartlett, Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Spotify, to discuss this process, and much, much more! Featured Links: Follow Jonny on LinkedIn and Twitter | Jonny on Medium | Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's book 'Everybody Lies: Big Data, New data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are' | Reinforcement Learning at GeeksforGeeks

This week on the podcast experience, we're talking all about churn. How do you reduce customer churn. What are the biggest obstacles? What are the biggest challenges? And are there any misconceptions behind the perfect churn strategy? Churn expert, Andrew Michael, CEO of Avrio, was able to answer all of our questions with ease and more.  Featured Links: Follow Andrew on LinkedIn and Twitter | Andrew's podcast Churn FM | Avrio | Clearbit | 'The Aha Moment' - Abdelrahman Wahba on The Product Experience | AppsFlyer | Agorapulse

What makes a great manager and what are the most important factors in making the leap to leading a team? In this weeks' podcast episode, Lily and Randy were joined by the amazing Melike Hope, Product Director at Twitter, to talk all about managing product managers and scaling up your career ladder.  Featured Links: Follow Melika on LinkedIn and Twitter | Melika's IC to Manager video | 'How to be a great manager' - Claire Lew on The Product Experience

This week's episode on The Product Experience is going to sound a little different...Lily and Randy in this special episode, take a trip down memory lane to have a chat about the best OKRs insights they've heard from a range of product episodes on the podcast over the past year. Tune in to listen to actionable insights from Storm Fagan, Todd Olsen, Petra Wille, and more! Featured Links: Follow Lily on LinkedIn and Twitter | Follow Randy on LinkedIn and Twitter | OKRs features at Mind The Product | Listen to this podcast on Youtube! | Guests included in this episode: Storm Fagan, Todd Olson, Petra Wille, Nicholas Jemetta, Kausambi Manjita, Roisi Proven, Janice Fraser, and Jason Knight.

What is The Metaverse and how can it helps product managers in their daily craft? To help us make sense of the movement, Lily and Randy talked with Mitchell Bayer-Goldman to help us unpack all of the buzzwords and complexities about The Metaverse, and why us as product managers should note of where the concept is going. Bonus points for how many times we mention the word "Metaverse"! Featured Links: Follow Mitchell on LinkedIn and Twitter | Volta | Matthew Ball on The Metaverse | 

 What are the most important factors when a organisation decides to adopt a product-led growth approach? On this weeks' podcast episode, we spoke with Executive Product Coach, Noa Ganot all about how to do this the right way and pitfalls to avoid. Featured Links: Follow Noa on LinkedIn and her website | Noa's Infinity Product Leadership Academy on LinkedIn | Noa's 'Deep Product' blog | Product-led Certification Course by Pendo and Mind the Product

It can be tough, even at the best of times, to remain engaged at work – to find a community of people to share with and learn from. Emily Webber’s seen this in action and has started (and nurtured) successful communities both at work and at home. In this rerun podcast episode, she joined Lily and Randy to go deeper into how to build great communities with remote teams.Featured Links: Follow Emily on LinkedIn and Twitter | Emily's Blog | Tacit | Read Emily's book  'Building Successful Communities of Practise: Discover How Connecting People Makes Better Organisations' | In The Ether has all the details on how to run a great virtual lean coffee | The Diversity Charter | Sharon Bowman's book 'Training From The Back Of The Room!' | Robin Dunbar's Social Circles feature in The Guardian | Emily and Robin's joint research paper 'The Fractal Study of Communities of Practise: Implications for Business Organisation'

It's a common saying that 'ego is the biggest product killer'. In this weeks' podcast episode, CPO at R-Zero, Tony Poon, delves into a discussion with Lily and Randy about how to ensure that your ego doesn't get in the way of discovering and managing the best products. Featured Links: Follow Tony on LinkedIn and Twitter | R-Zero | Understanding the Id, Ego, and Superego in Psychology

This week on The Product Experience the topic of choice was product discovery. However, with both of our hosts having worked extensively in this subject area before, they decided to hijack this episode and take on the topic all to themselves...For this special episode, Randy Silver and Lily Smith share their best tips on customer interaction and product discovery from their combined product knowledge, years of working in discovery, and being involved in over 170 episodes interviewing product experts around the globe.Featured Links: Follow Randy on LinkedIn and Twitter | Out of Owls | Follow Lily on LinkedIn and Twitter | Bower Collective | Product Discovery page at Mind The Product

We all know what OKRs are. Most of us use them or have tried to at some point. But it’s a much smaller group that have used OKRs well, and for their intended purpose. Natalija Hellesoe, co-author of OKRs at the Center, joins us on the podcast to chat about taking your practice to the [...] Read more »Follow Natalija on LinkedIn and Twitter | OKRs at the Centre website | Natalija's virtual meet up group for OKR practitioners | 'What is an OKR? Definition and examples' What Matters featureThe post Putting OKRs at the Centre – Natalija Hellesoe on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

It seems like everyone on the product scene is about launching brand new products in large organisations, however, we speak with Ben Sehl, Senior Product Lead from Shopify to find out key things to do this in the most effective way. Featured Links: Follow Ben on LinkedIn and Twitter | Shopify CEO Toby Lutke on Twitter | Hydrogen | Hydrogen - StackBlitz | 'Transparency, participation and collaboration: the distinguishing principles of open source' feature | Shopify's GSD Framework

We jump right back into where we left on in part two of this series with experience product coach Itamar Gilad. We carry on discussing evidence-based decisions, and how this approach can enable teams to achieve key product goals.Featured Links: Follow Itamar on LinkedIn and Twitter | Itamar's website | 'Idea Prioritization with ICE and the Confidence Meter' piece | Sign up for Itamar's newsletter 

In part one of two of this podcast series, we spoke with experienced product expert Itamar Gilad to find out more about evidence-based decisions, ideas, and key product goals. Featured Links: Follow Itamar on LinkedIn and Twitter | Itamar's website | 'Idea Prioritization with ICE and the Confidence Meter' piece | Sign up for Itamar's newsletter

We all know what product design is but what does inclusive design, and why does it need to be a priority for product managers? On this week's podcast, we were joined by Saielle DaSilver, Director of User Experience at Cazoo to talk all about designing products for people who might face limitations when using your product.  Featured Links: Follow Saielle on LinkedIn and Twitter | Saielle's website Blossom | Kat Holmes' talk 'Design for 7 Billion. Design for One' | Kat Holmes' Inclusive Toolkit | Kat Holmes' book 'Mismatch' | 'What is Inclusive Design? Principles and Examples' by Justin Morales | Help Saielle with Gender Transition

What's it like launching new products within a big organisation like Ocado? In this weeks' podcast Lily and Randy sat down with Hannah Gibson, Chief Product Officer at Ocado Technology to discuss her experiences in product management over the past 10 years at her organisation, and the key lessons learned from launching a new product inside a much bigger establishment.  Featured Links: Follow Hannah on LinkedIn and Twitter | Work with Hannah! | Ocado

How can product managers get more work done by doing less? On this weeks’ podcast, we spoke with Jim Morris, Founder of The Product Discovery Team about the benefits of having a team-led approach to research, and how that can be an effective way to collaborate effectively and improve your product over time.Featured Links: Follow Jim on LinkedIn and Twitter | Product Discovery Group | Watch 'The Trident Principle' advert | 'Discovery Team models' feature at Mind The Product

What is the secret to succeeding in the product management craft? In this podcast episode, we were joined by Enterprising Senior Product Manager, Ronke Majekodunmi to discuss how building relationships are a key asset to developing your product career, and how to master the art of developing alliances.   Featured Links: Follow Ronke on LinkedIn and Twitter | Ronke's website | Ronke's podcast Product Magic | Emily Webber's free eBook 'The Team Onion'

In this weeks' podcast, we jump straight back into our chat with Daniel Harris about customer-centricity and developing that mindset in product management. Let's get straight back to the chat! Go check out part one of this conversation if you missed it. Featured Links: Follow Daniel on LinkedIn and Twitter | 'The State of Customer Centricty' model at CX Partners | 'Developing a Customer Centric Mindset' talk by Amon Kiplagat at Mind The Product ProductTank Birmingham

Customer centricity is about bringing the human dimension to everything that you do with your product. To create that process, you need to create an environment where product managers can innovate and thrive. Daniel Harris, Experience Strategy Director at cxpartners joins us on the podcast to talk all about how to deliver that great customer experience to all who invest if your product.Featured Links: Follow Daniel on LinkedIn and Twitter | 'The State of Customer Centricty' model at CX Partners | 'Developing a Customer Centric Mindset' talk by Amon Kiplagat at Mind The Product ProductTank Birmingham

Matt Walton was one of the founders of FutureLearn, where he scaled the product team and organisation from nothing to the significant player in online education that it is today. Along the way, he learned a lot about continuous improvement of both the product and the processes for building it – including the use of four different types of retrospectives. He joins us on the podcast to level up our retro game.Featured Links: Follow Matt on LinkedIn and Twitter | Matt's website | Matt's Mind The Product talk 'Be in a Band, not an Orchestra: how to grow an Agile Product Team' | Funretrospective's 'The Retrospective Prime Directive' | Management tools at 15Five and Trello

What does a good Hypothesis look like in product and what does it include? In this weeks' podcast episode, Lily and Randy say down with  Mark Tsirekas, VP of Product at ZOE to discuss both the scientific and the non-scientific methods behind hypothesis and testing. Featured Links: Follow Mark on LinkedIn and Twitter | Zoe are hiring - work with Mark! | Mark's website MTsireud

Experienced product manager and technology expert Rick Klau, currently California's Chief Technology Innovation Officer sat down with Lily and Randy on the podcast this week to discuss innovation in government throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. They also had time to share insights on OKRs and frameworks in product management.Featured Links: Follow Rick on LinkedIn and Twitter | California Design System | Work for California Department of Technology (CDT) | Digital Covid-19 Vaccine Record Portal | California Volunteers | U.S. Digital Response (USDR) | Code for America |'How Google sets goals: OKRs / Startup Lab Workshop' - watch

On this week's podcast, we speak to Lily Smith, Head of Product and Gro....wait...that name sounds familiar? For this special episode on the podcast experience, we decided to turn the tables and interview our very own podcast host, Lily Smith, Head of Product Growth at Bower Collective. With her many years of experience working in product management as well as listening to key insights from product experts over the last 2 years on the Product Experience, she discusses what it takes to be a great Product Manager along with Product Leader and fellow Podcaster, Jason Knight. Featured Links: Follow Lily on LinkedIn and Twitter | Join the refill revolution at Bower Collective | Follow Jason on LinkedIn and Twitter | Jason's podcast 'One Knight in Product'

What it's like to join a new company and set up a new product from the start. On this weeks' podcast, we spoke to Maggie Crowley all about her experiences during this process. We also had some time to discuss hypotheses and testing in product. Featured Links: Follow Maggie on LinkedIn and Twitter | Work with Maggie at Charlie Health | 'Build With Maggie Crowley' podcast

In recent years the Fintech industry has exploded with many product managers delving into this fast-growing sector. However, what would it be like to pack up all of your things and land a Fintech job in a  completely new continent? On this week's podcast, we spoke with. Makera Kigarada, Principal Product Manager at Fintech start-up M-KOPA to hear about how he got started in the new market as a product manager, and his key lessons learned so far. Featured Links: Follow Makera on LinkedIn and Twitter | M-KOPA | TechCrunch piece on African Fintech growth | Economist feature on mobile phone boom in Africa

What is an OODA loop and how can it be used in product management? OODA stands for observe, orient, decide, and act. In this week's podcast, Kausambi Manjita, Co-Founder and CEO of Mason joins us to talk all about this military concept and how it has been a useful asset in building products and scaling a SaaS business.   Featured Links: Follow Kausambi on LinkedIn and Twitter | Mason - the content platform for eCommerce teams | The Ultimate Guide to the OODA Loop | Canva

In this episode of The Product Experience, Todd Olson, co-founder and CEO of Pendo, reveals how he climbed the leadership ladder and shares his advice for anyone keen to do the same.Featured Links: Follow Todd on LinkedIn and Twitter | Pendo - The Product-Led Organization Digital Workshop | Todd's book 'The Product-Led Organization' | Patrick Thean's book 'Rhythm - How to Achieve Breakthrough Execution and Accelerate Growth' |'Inside the Tornado' book by Geoffrey A. Moore | Jobs at Pendo

If a product manager is doing their job really well, they will be invisible and the results will speak for themselves. In this rebroadcasted podcast episode, product coach, consultant, and author speaks with Lily and Randy about the product management craft and how the best product managers do their job really well.Listener of The Product Experience? We need your help! Fill out this short survey to help us improve the overall experience of our community-led podcast. Featured Links: Follow Matt on LinkedIn and Twitter | Matt's Website | One Page / One Hour | Sudden Compass | Matt's book 'Product Management in Practise'

What is the secret to exponential product growth? Daphne Tideman, growth coach joins us on the podcast this week to talk all about how Product/market fit, the importance of business/channel models, and where companies go wrong when looking to grow their products. Listener of The Product Experience? We need your help! Fill out this short survey to help us improve the overall experience of our community-led podcast. Featured Links: Follow Daphne on LinkedIn and Twitter | Daphne's book 'Growing Happy Clients' | Read Daphne's articles on Medium |  Reid Hoffman 'Blitzscaling' book | 'Thriving In Hypergrowth' - Cassidy Fein on The Product Experience

If used well, machine learning (ML) can be a key tool to gain the most effective data about your users. However, how do you conclude if it's the right approach for your product and teams? We spoke with Ha Phan, Director of Discovery Products at Pluralsight, to develop a stronger understanding of how we can best use ML in product management.  Featured Links: Follow Ha on LinkedIn and Twitter | Not Hotdog on the App Store | 'A thank you letter to my team' article by Ha Phan

Releasing new products and features are a routine part of a product manager's craft. But what are the keys to a successful product launch, and how do you make sure you have all the right components upon release? We spoke to launch expert, Derek Osgood, to gain all of the key insights.Featured Links: Follow Derek on LinkedIn and Twitter | Derek's website | Ignition - The first dedicated GTM platform for PMMs | 'Critical Customer Touchpoints for a Successful Product Launch' feature at Mind The Product

Since January 2020, Fintech growth has been off the charts. The industry has seen a 337% increase in active users and is only predicted to grow further. We spoke with Deepika Adusumilli, Product Manager at HSBC Retail Banking and Wealth Management to hear more about what it's like to have a product role in this fast-growing sector. Featured Links: Follow Deepika on LinkedIn and Twitter | King Games | The Definitive Guide to Fintech Ecosystems | Forbes '10 Ways Fintechs are Using Experience Design to Outcompete Banking' 

Product people wear lots of hats - but sometimes we want to swap from one role to another.  Author, Consultant, Product lead and recovering-UXer Christian Crumlish joined us on the podcast to talk about why someone might want to move from UX to Product Management, what superpowers they bring to the role, and the biggest surprises they might have.Featured Links: Follow Christian on LinkedIn and Twitter | Christian's website | Buy Christian's book 'Product Management for UX People' | Design in Product | CA Gov Covid project

Roisi Proven's last episode was one of our most popular, so we had to have her back for a return chat! She updates us on what she's learned about data ethics and unbiased data sets as Director of Product for Altmetric, and on the horrible story she made up that came true. Featured Links: Follow Roisi on LinkedIn and Twitter | Altmetric | Roisi's previous episode 'The Black Mirror Test' on The Product Experience | The 6 most common types of bias when working with data

Figuring out what to prioritise is one of a product team's biggest challenges. Using a North Star metric to orient around can make it easier - but, as Maahir Shah (Product Manager at Facebook) tells us, it can also lead you in the wrong direction.  He joined us on the podcast to talk about how to take your use of metrics to the next level.Featured Links: Follow Maahir on LinkedIn and Twitter | Maahir's blog | Definition of Exit Criteria | 'How I got my job in Product' piece by Maahir at Mind The Product

Most of our time as product people is spent trying to figure out how to improve things. Every once in a while, we find ourselves where everything seems to work and we're growing  like crazy.  Congratulations: you're in Hypergrowth.  And while it sounds amazing (and can be), it comes with a separate and unque set of challenges. We talked with Casssidy Fein, Vimeo Director of Product Management, about how to navigate this evironment.Featured Links: Follow Cassidy on LinkedIn and Twitter | Cassidy's website | Harvard Business Review article on Blitzscaling | Work with Cassidy! She's hiring at Vimeo

Product people are charged with representing the needs of the customer as well as the needs of the business—but what happens when these are in conflict? We asked ethics consultant Cennydd Bowles to chat with us about how to handle some tricky situations in product.Featured Links: Follow Cennydd on LinkedIn and Twitter | Cennydd's website | NowNext Studio | 'What is the Gini Coefficient?' piece at CFI | Cennydd's book 'Future Ethics: the must read guide to the ethics of emerging technology'

Making your roadmap work hard for you is one of the critical skills of a Product Manager. Find out how Jeremy Levy, CEO of Indicative, leverages customer data to inform his product roadmap. In this episode we also discuss who should be responsible for the data strategy in the business and why it's so much easier to get it right these days.Featured Links: Follow Jeremy on LinkedIn and Twitter | mParticle | INDOCHINO case study at Indicative | Jeremy's 'Analytics are the key to optimising the product roadmap' feature at Mind The Product

After over three years on The Product Experience, we have reached our 150th episode! With so many amazing guests and countless memorable moments, we reckon it's a landmark worth celebrating! In this compilation episode on the podcast, we look back at the highlights from some of our favourite shows. Tune in to listen to the best moments from our conversations with guests like Melissa Perri, Josh Seiden, Gabrielle Bufrem, and more!  Episodes included in the compilation:  Outcomes Over Outputs – Josh Seiden | The Black Mirror Test – Roisi Proven | Roadmaps Are Dead. Long Live Roadmaps! – Janna Bastow | How To Say No – Gabrielle Bufrem | The ABCs of Product - Melissa Perri

We've run a number of podcast episodes about product discovery because it's one of the hardest things to get right. Even the most experienced product people find it hard to avoid common mistakes. This week, product coach and consultant Anthony Marter joins us on the podcast to chat about the tricky balance between strategy, business case, and discovery.Featured Links: Follow Anthony on LinkedIn and Twitter | Product Aotearoa | Teresa Torres on 'What Roles are Represented in a Product Trio?' | Marty Cagan on 'The Four Big Risks' | John Cutler on 'The (Messy) Shift to Starting Together'

There's a huge shift that takes place when you move from managing a product (with a team) to leading a Product Team.  It's not just a change in how you spend your day - it's a whole new outlook, with a focus on different skills and competencies.  Jason  Knight joined us on the podcast to talk about some of the lessons he's learned along his journey.Featured Links: Follow Jason on LinkedIn and Twitter | Jason's podcast One Knight in Product | Jason's 'Moving from Individual Contributor to Product Leader' article 

 Philips Nwachukwu, a Senior Product Manager at The Bulb Africa, joins us on the podcast this week to talk about how he transitioned from a jack-of-all-trades to starting a Product Operations function, as well as the unique challenges he sees for Product people working in Africa.  Featured Links: Follow Philips on LinkedIn and Twitter | Practical Product's 'State of Product Management in Africa' report | Punch article on the trust deficit in Nigeria

If the last coupleof years has taught us anything, it’s that predicting the future is hard.  In this podcast episode, sponsored by Amplitude, we turn to Margaret Heffernan to learn how to do it better. She’s a captivating speaker with more than 12 million views of her TED talks and a prolific writer who recently published Uncharted: How To Map The Future – if she can’t help, there’s no hope!Featured Links: Follow Margaret on LinkedIn and Twitter | Margaret's Website | Margaret's page at TED | Margaret's latest book 'Uncharted: How to Map the Future'

If you're the kind of person that listens to the Product Experience and reads articles on MTP, then you're already familiar with any number of frameworks, methodologies and principles to make you a better product manager.  But knowing them isn't enough to do the job — or, at least, not to do it well.  Figuring out what works for you is way more important.  That's something we discussed with Esha Shukla, Product Manager at WhatsApp, for this week's podcast - she's spent the last few years refining her approach to 5 solid principles that really work.Featured Links: Follow Esha on LinkedIn and Twitter | Meta | WhatsApp

 Ashley Smith has a long career of helping early-stage startups scale into successful organisations. In this episode, Ashley talks to our hosts about product-led growth, and how everyone can and should do it.Featured Links: Follow Ashley on LinkedIn and Twitter | OpenView Partners Product-Led Growth Index 

One great product person can do some amazing things.  An entire team of great product people is a force multiplier, creating an environment that is far more than the sum of its parts.  We talked with Petra Wille - Coach, Author & co-creator of MTP Engage/Hamburg - about what it takes to 10x your team.Featured Links: Follow Petra on LinkedIn and Twitter | Petra's website: Strong Product People | The PM wheel Framework | Buy Petra's book 'Strong Product People' |'A Better Shipyard' - Joff Redfern on The Product Experience

Product people have a tendency to solutions—we're enlightened enough to know better, but we always need to resist the urge to try and fix every problem we come across. That's an especially hard challenge when the problems are internal. Keeping on top of your mental wellbeing is critical, so we talked with Nicholas Jemetta about how to take of yourself (as well as the rest of your team).Featured Links: Follow Nick on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram | 'Fancy Dress Dad' - Nick's lockdown story on the BBC | Donate to Nick's 'Fancy Dress Dad' Mental Health UK JustGiving page | Joe Wicks' The Body Coach

Guido Lonetti’s career started out at age 14 in his bedroom – he built an MP3 search engine website that immediately started making money until his parents quashed that idea! In this episode, he shines a light on the diverse product culture in South and Latin America, where he’s spent time as a Head of Product and the co-organiser of ProductTank Buenos Aires.Featured Links: Follow Guido on LinkedIn and Medium | Biggest Product Management cultures in South and Latin America: Marketplace and Travel | Startups: Mural and Tiendanube | New companies: Nubank and Rappi

At some point, virtually every product person has had a run in with their CEO and thought to themselves, "Hey, I could do a better job than they do.  Maybe I should start my own thing."  Most of us then think about all the things we'd have to take on (or about the lack of a steady paycheck) and decide to keep working for others.  But some of us don't - we hand in our notice and follow the dream of starting something new.  This week, we talked to Alexander Hipp - co-founder of Beyond, formerly of Xing and N26 - about why he made the decision, what it's been like so far, and what he'd advise anyone making a similar decision.Featured Links: Follow Alexander on LinkedIn and Twitter | Beyond - a community platform for Creators | The PM Library - be part of the first social book library for the Tech and Startup industry | Eco-friendly products at Riptide

One of the biggest challenges of working in product is figuring out what story we're trying to tell, and bringing everyone on board with that story.  On this week's podcast, we talked with Janice Fraser about ensuring that the story you're telling is rooted in truth—and all of the things that can get in the way.Featured Links: Follow Janice on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram | Janice's Website | Janice's piece and talk on 'Uncovering the Truth' at Mind The Product 

OKRs are a simple concept — but deceptively hard to get right.   There's an awful lot of horror stories about implementations gone wrong, along with any number of gurus and guides on how to get it right. Storm Fagan — now the Chief Product Officer at the BBC, formerly at JustEat — joined us on the podcast to break down how she made OKRs scale at a big company by keeping them simple. (Hint: that wasn't her first approach.)Featured Links: Follow Storm on LinkedIn and Twitter | Just Eat | Work with Storm at the BBC | 'How to Write OKRs That Don't Suck'  MTP piece by Adrian Howard 

Just when you've finally convinced everyone to work mobile-first, the world goes multimodal. If you're not already working on how you might need to plan for voice interaction and conversation design, physical interaction, and even augmented reality, don't worry - you'renot alone.  We sat down with Cheryl Platz  (author, and now Director of UX, Player Platform for Riot Games) to learn how to adapt our products.Featured Links: Follow Cheryl on LinkedIn and Twitter | Cheryl's Website | Cheryl's book 'Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences' | Capturing Customer Context - free downloadable worksheets | 'How Calm Technology Can Help Us Be More Human' talk by Amber Case

We initially ran this episode back in May, but that was before Frances Haugen came forward as the Facebook whistleblower.  Our guest, Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, worked in the same area of Facebook as Haugen (civic integrity), albeit years earlier; he also held a similar role at Twitter.    We asked him to join us on the podcast to help understand how product people can do great things without fundamentally breaking the internet.Featured Links: Follow Sudhir on LinkedIn and Twitter | Sudhir Breaks the Internet Podcast | Signal: The Tech and Society Lab at Columbia University | Guy Rosen - VP Integrity at Facebook | Front Porch Forum | Civic Signals

We've talked about avoiding and escaping feature factories a number of times—but how do you take the next step, to become an outcome-driven product organisation? Becky Flint, CEO at Dragonboat, was able to provide all of the answers — after all, she built the product portfolio organisations at Paypal, Shutterfly, and others.Featured Links: Follow Becky on LinkedIn and Twitter | Dragonboat | 'Outcomes Over Outputs' - Josh Seiden on The Product Experience | 'Another Side of the Rocks, Pebbles and Sand Story' piece by Aditya Kothadiya | Dragonboat is hiring - work with BeckySupport our sponsorsGive Sprig (formerly Userleap) a try for free by visiting Sprig.com to build better products.

Evolving your organisation from a feature factory to becoming outcome-focused is a challenge many of us have faced - but how do you actually do it? Impact Mapping is a great way to help take stakeholders and teams from focusing on the how-to the what and why.  We asked consultant, trainer and author Tim Herbig to give us the crash course on the topic, including how to get people to understand the difference between an Impact, an Output, and an Outcome. Featured Links: Follow Tim on LinkedIn and Twitter | Tim's Website | Read Tim's 'Using Impact Mapping to Navigate Product Discovery' piece | 'Idea Prioritization with ICE and the Confidence Meter' by Itamar Gilad | Gojko Adzic's book 'Impact Mapping: Making a Big Impact with Software Products and Projects'

Why do good people make bad products? You know the feeling: you're trying to complete a transaction on someone else's site or app,and it Just. Does. Not. Work. You wonder who the poor product manager is for it - or if there even is one. And then you remember the last time you sat in on customer support calls, and how hard your own product can be to use.  How does this happen? We chatted with Rachel Obstler, Heap's VP of Product, to understand how we can use metrics to suck less. Featured Links: Follow Rachel on LinkedIn and Twitter | Heap | 'Why Every UX Designer Should Be a Data Analyst'  Modus article

Back in the dark ages of web design — back when the job title Webmaster was a thing — every team included someone who specialised in Information Architecture (IA). These days, that work is often considered to be part of UX, but that can mean that we're not doing the job well enough. Abby Covert joins us on the podcast to chat about why IA is important, how and when we should work with Information Architects, and how you can incorporate the principles and lessons from the discipline into your work.Featured Links: Follow Abby on LinkedIn and Twitter | Abby's Website | Abby's first book 'How To Make Sense Of Any Mess: Information Architecture For Everybody' | Pre-order Abby's forthcoming  book 'Stuck: The Purpose, Process And Craft Of Diagramming' | Max Cohn's 'Karl Marx Visits The Cheesecake Factory' | IHOP's omelette pancake batter secret feature at Huffington Post

We always encourage people to experiment with their product development techniques - but experimenting with your team can be a step too far.  We talked with Monzo Chief Product Officer Mike Hudack (ex-Facebook, Deliveroo) about how he approaches this: what's worked and what hasn't, avoiding cross-team dependencies, communication & collaboration, and much more.Featured Links: Follow Mike on LinkedIn and Twitter | Molly Graham's 'Give Away Your Legos' and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups Blog | Work with Mike at Monzo - he's hiring!Support our sponsorsGive Sprig (formerly Userleap) a try for free by visiting Sprig.com to build better products.

We've all had the experience of presenting to the leadership team - but what do they say about you when you leave the room?  What's it like to work at that level? And how do you get promoted to the C-suite? We talked with experienced product & boardroom vet Tanya Cordrey about all of this - and much more - for this week's podcast.Featured Links: Follow Tanya on LinkedIn and Twitter | Jörg Malang Five Ways of Becoming a Respected Product Leader in the C-Suite | The Guardian

When we sat down with Roll20.net Product Director Kenton Hanson for this week's podcast, we were hoping to hear tales of how he and his  product team (or band of adventurers!) went on quests to conduct user research. We wanted to hear about dodging orcs and dragons (stakeholders) while collecting  treasure (insights).Instead, we learned that it's only Roll20's marketing team that cast spells.  But we also learned a lot about conducting research for such a large, passionate community, qualifying candidates, sharing learnings, and much more.Featured Links: Follow Kenton on LinkedIn and Twitter | Kenton's Website | Roll20 | Patrick Lencioni's teamwork system The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team | Erika Hall's book Just Enough Research Give Sprig a try for free by visiting Sprig.com to build better products.

We all want more customers - but being able to understand who your best customer segments are, prioritise for them, and then land more of them?  That's a game-changer. We talked with Tamara Grominsky (Unbounce's VP of Strategy) about some easy-to-implement techniques that will help you do just that.Featured Links: Follow Tamara on LinkedIn and Twitter | Tamara's Website | Unbounce Segmentation Presentation | Strategyzer's canvas:  How to Capture Customer Jobs, Pains, & Gains that aren't Subjective | Forbes' Guide to the Van Westendorp Pricing Model | Profitwell's Patrick Campbell wrote about  Pricing for Bottom Line GrowthGive Sprig a try for free by visiting Sprig.com to build better products.

There's nothing more useless to a Product team than a big backlog.  Bringing backlogs to life - making them usable, relevant, and getting value from them - is something that transforms ordinary teams into extraordinary ones.  To guide us on how to do that, we asked Jeff Patton - creator of User Story Mapping - to join us on the podcast.Featured Links: Follow Jeff on LinkedIn and Twitter | Jeff's upcoming Training Sessions | Buy Jeff's book 'User Story Mapping' | Alistair Cockburn's book 'Writing Effective Use Cases'Give UserLeap a try for free by visiting UserLeap.com to build better products.

There's no better training ground than working in Emergency Services for learning how to  deal with stress, uncertainty, prioritisaton with imperfect information, and challenging stakeholders - all skills that are key to working in Product.  Nathan Henry joins on the podcast this week to chat about how he levereges the skills he developed as a 911 Operator. Featured Links: Follow Nathan on LinkedIn and Twitter | Brené Brown's 'Rising Strong' book | Work with Nathan at Postlight | A day in the life of a 911 Dispatcher videoGive UserLeap a try for free by visiting UserLeap.com to build better products.

As product people, it's important for us to love our products, our customers, and the problems we're trying to solve. (though not in that order!).  A lot of the time, though, we're not really working on something truly important.That's not the case for Randeep Sidhu—he got a call to help rescue the UK's Covid-19 app, dropped everything, and dove in. In this episode sponsored by UserLeap, he joined us on the podcast to talk about what that was like, what he learned, and how he built a team and re-launched the product in just 6 weeks.Featured Links: Follow Randeep on LinkedIn and Twitter｜NHS Covid-19 App | Gov.UK NHS Covid-19 App Privacy Notice | Understanding the Impact of Covid-19 on BAME Groups NHS Data ReportGive UserLeap a try for free by visiting UserLeap.com to build better products.

Over the last 15 years, Merissa has gone from New York media to Australian finance to German fintechs - with a number of stops in between.  She joins us on the podcast to talk about what she's learned along the way, including: from working in different cultures & industries, influencing executives,knowing if you want to be a people manager, and more!Featured Links: Follow Merissa on LinkedIn and Twitter｜Merissa's article 'Bringing product thinking to any team' | Merissa's article 'How to win at remote product management - Covid 19 edition' | Merissa's article 'Experiment like a boss' | Merissa's New Feature Template form  | Roman Pichler's Decision Making Chart  | Ken Norton's blog post,  'It's time to fight for a dual product management career path' UserLeap Give UserLeap a try for free by visiting UserLeap.com to build better products.Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

What holds most Product people back?  Hint: it's not ability. For this week's podcast, we talked with Martina Hodges-Schell and Teresa Leighty about how to make changes in your company's environment that actually work, for you, and your teams.Featured Links: Follow Martina on LinkedIn, Twitter & her Website｜Follow Teresa on LinkedIn and Twitter | Heath & Sea | John Chambers article 'The key to business transformation? Empowering your people'

Understanding your company's business model is a key skill for all product people - but understanding how that affects your company's valuation is what takes things to the next level.  What are you maximizing for - and how does your pricing model impact that? We talked with Giff Constable (ex-Chief Product Officer,  Meetup) about all this - and much more - for this week's podcast episode. Featured Links: Follow Giff on Twitter and LinkedIn｜Giff's Website  | Buy  Giff's book Talking to Humans  | Buy Giff's book Testing with Humans | Giff's Sci-Fi novel Becoming Monday | 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy book by Hamilton Helmer

We all know that solving your customer's problem - in a way that's feasible, viable and usable - is the key to a product's success.  (Or one of them, anyway!) Inherent in that is clearly understanding your users, and their peoblems.  We talked with Peter Yang (Product Lead @ Reddit) about understanding the needs and mindsets of creators, and how to build products for them.Featured Links: Follow Peter on LinkedIn and Twitter｜Creator Economy｜Build for Creators Course  | Buy Peter's book 'Principles of Product Management'  | Rob Fitzpatrick's book 'The Mom Test' 

Want to make a veteran product person sad? Just ask them how they've used MVPs in the past.  Once you get past the sobbing, you're likely to get stories of  the myriad ways that a perfectly good experiment got turned into a v1 release.  It doesn't have to be like that!  Dan Olsen joins us on the podcast to teach Lily & Randy how to actually control the scope of an MVP, guide us through some of his favourites, and why MVP failure can be considered a success.Featured Links: Follow Dan on LinkedIn, Twitter and his Website｜Read Dan's The Lean Product Playbook｜Types of MVPs | Lean Product Meetup | The original MVP article How to successfully validate your idea with a Landing Page MVP  - and the follow-up,four days later,| A Landing Page is NOT an MVP | Aaron Walter's book Designing for Emotion

You've optimised your product to solve a problem for your users. You've refined the sales funnel, built for scale, and made sure that accessability is baked in from the start. Great job!But what about ensuring that your customers can trust it?  We talked with Nathan Kinch, an Entrepreneur & Digital Trust Expert, about the big picture - and how you can get started on it, today.Featured Links: Follow Nathan on LinkedIn and Twitter｜Greater Than Learning｜Greater Than Experience | Data Trust by Design best practices feature at Medium | Open Data Institute Data Ethics Canvas | The Dunning-Kruger Effect explained | Hemingway App | Donella H. Meadows' book Thinking In Systems

You may have heard about Project Aristotle — an effort by Google that revealed Psychological Safety as the common element in their highest-performing teams. Understanding what that is — and how we can create a culture of safety in our teams — isn’t quite as easy. We spoke with Alla Weinberg, author of A Culture of Safety, about the elements of safety, how to recognise teams that have it, and how to support the teams that don’t.Featured Links: Follow Alla on LinkedIn and Twitter｜Spoke & Wheel｜Read Alla’s book, A Culture of Safety｜David Marquet’s book ‘Turn the Ship Around!’: A True Story of Building Leaders by Breaking the Rules

We all know that discovery is important — but how it’s done is just as critical. Randy had the chance to collaborate with service design consultant Simon Wilson on a project recently, where mapping formed the basis for much of the discovery work. We invited Simon onto the podcast to talk about this approach. Featured [...] Read more »The post Using maps as part of discovery – Simon Wilson appeared first on Mind the Product.

Debbie Madden wants you to make better teams because she knows what she’s doing. The founder and CEO of NYC-based Stride Consulting, Debbie offers practical advice for hiring managers, anyone looking for a new job, or who wants to change the culture in their current organisation. And it’s not just that hiring for diversity is a lofty [...] Read more »The post Hire Women! – Debbie Madden [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

Egyptian-born Abdelrahman (Abdo) Wahba co-founded popular Arabic audiobook site Iqraaly—but it wouldn’t have seen its current success unless Abdo had taken the time to analyse deeply what made customers stay loyal. To do that, he had to get to his “Aha moment”. Now based in Berlin as the Chief Product Officer for the Offerista Group, [...] Read more »The post The “Aha moment” – Abdelrahman Wahba [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

The job of a Product person is hard to define. We’re a little of everything, depending on the day and what’s needed. The one thing we can all agree on is that it’s never really done. Christian Idiodi—partner at Silicon Valley Product Group—joins us on the podcast to break down what’s expected of us, what [...] Read more »The post Product Management: What is the job, really? – Christian Idiodi appeared first on Mind the Product.

In 2008, Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh published his first book, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes To The Streets. A few years later, that got the attention of  Mark Zuckerberg, which led to a role working in Integrity for Facebook, and later, as Director of Social Science Research and Health Research [...] Read more »The post Breaking the internet – Sudhir Venkatesh appeared first on Mind the Product.

In his new book, Product Direction: How to Build Successful Products at Scale with Strategy, Roadmaps, and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), Xing Product Director Nacho Bassino details the parts of the job that any senior product person needs to master – but which are really difficult to learn before you’re responsible for them.  We chatted [...] Read more »The post How to create a product strategy – Nacho Bassino appeared first on Mind the Product.

Building and managing products is hard. Building an organisation that manages existing products, and is optimised to build new ones is exponentially harder — which is why we spoke with Cait O’Riordan, Chief Product and Information Officer at the Financial Times, for this week’s podcast. A veteran of the BBC and Shazam, she’s now working [...] Read more »The post Building for success at every stage of product development – Cait O’Riordan appeared first on Mind the Product.

Monika Turska defines the job of a Product Manager as someone who helps make better decisions, faster. But making the right decisions—whether it’s the ones that we’re actively making, or the ones we’re empowering our algorithms to make—requires a real understanding of the environment they’re being made in. We asked Design for Cognitive Bias author, [...] Read more »The post Designing for Cognitive Bias – David Dylan Thomas appeared first on Mind the Product.

For many product people, it’s a dream to get in early at a startup — or to start their own. Unless you have the ability to bootstrap, that means you’ll need access to money, which often means working with venture capital. That can be a mysterious and scary world, so we asked Dharmesh Raithatha, CPO [...] Read more »The post Product and VC: What You Need to Know – Dharmesh Raithatha appeared first on Mind the Product.

When we talk about product strategy, we often go back to the double diamond approach: identify the problem that you need to solve, then work on creating & optimising a solution for it. There’s a similar approach to Product careers — first, we need to get the job, then we need to excel in it.  [...] Read more »The post Cracking the PM Career – Jackie Bavaro on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

For most of us, the way that we conduct user research has been different during a year of lockdowns.  Not so much for Anna Lee Anda, UX Research Manager at Zendesk — as someone with a global customer base, she’s been working with these techniques for ages. She joined us on the podcast to talk [...] Read more »The post Remote Research – Anna Lee Anda on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

We all know that we need to measure what matters; that if it’s not measured, then it’s not managed. We know that we need to have a North Star; that we need to run A/B tests; and that A/B tests are awful. We also know there’s a massive difference between what we read in the [...] Read more »The post Metrics of Success – Rik Higham on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

How much should you be charging? Are you leaving money on the table, or are you scaring away potential customers? Pricing strategy can be one of the biggest challenges for product people, so we asked Founders Factory coach Fanni Fejes to share some of the lessons she teaches founders. In this episode, sponsored by Hotjar, listen [...] Read more »The post Pricing Strategy for Product Dummies – Fanni Fejes on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Estimation is a dark art — get it wrong, and your stakeholders will never forget (or forgive). We talked with agile consultant Liz Keogh about how to get this right, who estimates are for, her invaluable scale for estimating complexity, and how to pronounce the word Cynefin. In this episode, sponsored by Hotjar, listen to learn [...] Read more »The post Estimating Complexity – Liz Keogh on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

There’s no glory in working on internal tools – no one ever gives you credit for success, it’s almost impossible to recruit for, and there’s never enough time to fix all of the things that are needed. It’s no wonder that we don’t talk about it very often. But they’re the key to making lots [...] Read more »The post Managing Internal Tools – Emily Patterson on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

One of the key things to do in any product lifecycle is to review if it’s meeting your user’s needs. The last time we sat down to do this for the podcast, we decided to use the Jobs To Be Done approach, which led to a key question: how might we power up our JTBD [...] Read more »The post Getting Started with JTBD – Mike Belsito on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

We all know what OKRs are. Most of us use them or have tried to at some point. But it’s a much smaller group that have used OKRs well, and for their intended purpose. Natalija Hellesoe, co-author of OKRs at the Center, joins us on the podcast to chat about taking your practice to the [...] Read more »The post Putting OKRs at the Centre – Natalija Hellesoe on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Accessibility is one of those things that we all know we should do, but are rarely confident that we’ve done it well.  To get over that hump, we talked with Prof Jonathan Hassell about how and when to embed and test for accessibility (or a11y!), when you can skip it, and how to convince stakeholders [...] Read more »The post Building Accessible Products – Jonathan Hassell on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Over the last decade in the public sector, there’s been a global explosion in citizen and resident-centered design and development, with movements in the UK, Estonia, Australia, Canada, USA, and many more strengthening their approaches. Where it’s been done well, it’s made a huge difference.  At the same time, civil services are always facing budget [...] Read more »The post Public Service Product Management – Tom Loosemore on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Startups, scale-ups, and unicorns get all the press – but there are an awful lot more product people working at large organisations. Katie Saindon, Senior Manager of Product Management at GE Healthcare, is one of them. Working on their digital products and platforms, she’s learned a lot about how to survive and thrive in a [...] Read more »The post Lifting the Feature Factory Boulder – Katie Saindon on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Everyone – or so we’re told – has the dream of joining or founding a hot startup and making their fortune, all while really proving their product chops. Though he’s now a Product Manager at Facebook, Karthik Suresh co-founded Altrest and grew Craft.io from an early stage. He joins us on the podcast to share [...] Read more »The post Managing Your Startup Options – Karthik Suresh on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Startups are often talked about as if they’re all the same, as if experience in one is directly transferable to another.  Georgie Smallwood, Chief Product Officer at Tier Mobility, joined us on the podcast to chat about the differences in working for earlier stage companies and those that are scaling up. She covers why she [...] Read more »The post The Stages of Startups – Georgie Smallwood on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Some of the most successful people we know credit their mentors for making the difference in their careers. We’ve recently heard great talks from the likes of Barry O’Reilly, Marty Cagan, and Gibson Biddle where they talk about having a ‘personal Board of Directors’.  But how do you go about getting a mentor and getting [...] Read more »The post The Power of Mentoring – DeVaris Brown on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

We learn something from every guest that joins us on the podcast, but it’s not that often that something they say makes it onto our wall. Dave Martin (co-founder of Right to Left) chatted with us about building great habits for product people, and how to make sure they stick.  He also tells us about [...] Read more »The post The Habits of Successful Product Managers – Dave Martin on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

One of the things we’ve learned in 2020 is just how important it is to have great facilitation skills as product people. That’s why we’re revisiting our chat with Elena Astilleros from earlier in the year – she’s the author of Invisible Leader: Facilitation secrets for catalyzing change, cultivating, innovation, and commanding results, a topic [...] Read more »The post The Invisible Leader: Facilitation Secrets – Elena Astilleros on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

As product people, we work extensively with images. While our designers may be doing the heavy lifting, who hasn’t spent an extra 30 minutes trying to find the perfect image to help get a point across for an executive presentation?  (It can’t just be us who does that…) That’s why we invited Grant Farhall, Chief [...] Read more »The post A Picture is Worth A Thousand Stories – Grant Farhall on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

In 2020, we had to brush up on our skills. Building quickly and testing with users is key to many product people, but this year demanded a new approach when we couldn’t do our work in person. With that in mind, we’re revisiting our chat with Cookpad’s Head of Product for Premium Services, Philip Pantelides, [...] Read more »The post Rapid Prototyping – Philip Pantelides on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

As we start to wrap up the year and panic shop for gifts, our thoughts naturally drift to everyone’s favourite part of the holiday season: playing with toys! Our go-to person to learn more about creating a great play experience is Melissa Pickering, Strategic Product Director at The LEGO Group. Melissa joined us on the [...] Read more »The post Designing for Play – Melissa Pickering on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

Being on the inside of a company as it takes off is a special kind of experience – and being in a product leadership position while that’s going on gives a unique viewpoint. Gibson Biddle has been lucky enough to have gone on that ride at Netflix, and he’s generous in sharing the lessons he [...] Read more »The post Building Defensible Advantages – Gibson Biddle on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Matt Walton was one of the founders of FutureLearn, where he scaled the product team and organisation from nothing to the significant player in online education that it is today. Along the way, he learned a lot about continuous improvement of both the product and the processes for building it – including the use of [...] Read more »The post Using Retros to Create Continuous Improvement – Matt Walton on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

It’s been drilled into our heads time and time again – as product people, we know that we are not the customer.  What follows is that we need to get to know our customers, to figure out what their problems are, how they perceive and prioritise them, and how they react to the solutions we [...] Read more »The post Product Research Rules – C. Todd Lombardo & Aras Bilgen on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

A quick update to this episode:  Since we recorded this episode, one of our guests has made a change.  Eli Montgomery is now known as Saielle Montgomery and goes by the pronouns she/her. We’ve worked with her to updated the links below, but we wanted to make sure that there wasn’t any confusion about the name for people just listening to it for the first time now.Diversity at work comes in many forms, but neurodiversity is one that we don’t discuss as much in the workplace. This week, we’re joined on the podcast by Marton Gaspar and Eli Montgomery, to give us two different points of view on the topic. Marton’s recently been talking publicly about his experiences as an autistic [...] Read more »The post Not Your Typical Product People – Marton Gaspar & Eli Montgomery on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

We first saw Onfido’s Susana Lopes talk about how she used the State of the Product presentation to manage stakeholders and drive alignment at London’s Product Camp. She’s since written two great articles on the subject (Tools to Help Product Managers Think Strategically and Commercially Part 1 and Part 2), and she joins us on [...] Read more »The post The State of the Product – Susana Lopes on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

When you have questions about roadmaps, it pays to talk to someone who has spent way too much of her life thinking about them. Janna Bastow – co-founder of both Mind the Product and ProdPad—has been trying to fix the problems of roadmaps for most of her professional life. She hacked together the first version [...] Read more »The post Roadmaps Are Dead. Long Live Roadmaps! – Janna Bastow on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

“People are hard.” That’s what Mind the Product co-founder Janna Bastow said in her keynote speech at #mtpcon in 2017. As product managers, we have to deal with demanding, unreasonable people who hold us to unrealistic standards and want everything delivered yesterday – and as a parent, you have to deal with stakeholders and team members [...] Read more »The post Balancing Family Life with a Career in Product Management – Shelly Kalish & Karen Hershenson on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Talking to users is easy. Talking to them in a way that gets you useful information is hard. Using that information in a way that helps align stakeholders and teams on the path to building great products? That’s the hardest of all. Lucky for us, our guest on the podcast this week is Robert Chokr, [...] Read more »The post User Research Interviews – Robert Chokr on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

As we’ve got an Ask Me Anything session with Colin Pal coming up soon (October 14th), we’re re-broadcasting this episode from earlier in the year so that you can get to know Colin and prep some questions for him! The AMA is for Prioritised and MTP Leader members so if you’re not a member yet, [...] Read more »The post Building Products in AsiaPac – Colin Pal and Adrienne Tan on The Product Experience [rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

In our previous episode, Adam Thomas introduced how he uses a military technique (BLUF) for prioritisation. This week, former US Marine William Treseder – now co-founder and SVP of Product at innovation consultancy BMNT – joins us to talk about how he works with Government, Defense, Academic and Corporate clients to transform their innovation culture. [...] Read more »The post Accelerate Your Product Development – William Treseder on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

The one thing every product person needs is a new acronym that comes from the military, and Adam Thomas is here to help. Sarcasm aside, Adam’s made good use of the BLUF technique: Bottom Line Up Front, a short template, clearly laying out what the team is working on and how they plan to do [...] Read more »The post BLUF Your Way to Success – Adam Thomas on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Matt LeMay has a problem. He’s a content machine. He’s written 3 books (two books on product and one on the musician Elliot Smith), plenty of music, and much more – which means that he’s prone to going down a rabbit hole before sharing his work with a team. To combat that, he now employs [...] Read more »The post Perfection is the Enemy of Progress – Matt LeMay on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Product people love to study frameworks, techniques, and approaches that have worked at other companies. In Kate Leto’s new book, Hiring Product Managers: Using Product EQ to go Beyond Culture and Skills, she gives an overview of how to actually use those tools – both in building a team and day-to-day, as a product professional. [...] Read more »The post Using Product EQ to Hire the Best Product Managers – Kate Leto on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

April Dunford’s mtpcon Digital 2020 keynote on positioning was so good that we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to dig deeper into the topic with her. This is one of the dark arts for many product people, and it has such a deep effect on everything else you do – take a listen to upgrade [...] Read more »The post Obviously Awesome: Positioning Your Product – April Dunford on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Bugs are the bane of existence for product teams. They frustrate our users, ruin the best-laid plans, and screw up our sprints. Figuring out how to deal with them is a problem for many teams: do we have good acceptance criteria? How do we test? What’s better, unit tests or user acceptance testing? Who has [...] Read more »The post Building Quality Products – Stacy Kirk on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Is product management an art or a science? Holly Hester-Reilly, the founder of H2R Product Science and a former Chemical Engineer, uses her background to apply scientific principles and techniques to product development.  She joins us to chat about evidence-based product strategy, continuous discovery & delivery, and empowered teams. In this episode, sponsored by Amplitude, [...] Read more »The post The Science of Product – Holly Hester-Reilly on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Just call him Mr Joe. A UK-based consultant, Joe Leech has built a reputation for managing change (for both users and stakeholders) and as the guy to call when a product launch has gone wrong.  Joe gave one of the most entertaining and engaging talks at Mind the Product in London 2018, so we followed [...] Read more »The post Managing Change – Joe Leech on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

One of our favourite pub discussions after a ProductTank is to try and define the difference between a product and a service. (We’re fun like that.) These days, we’re doing all of our meetups and events remotely, so Andy Budd joined us on the podcast to talk about the difference between product managers and service [...] Read more »The post Service Design and Product – Andy Budd on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Teaching something is hard – to do it well, you need both an incredible command of the subject and great communication skills. Teaching in the form of a narrative story? That’s another level of difficulty and in her new book, The Team That Managed Itself: A Story Of Leadership, Christina Wodtke does just that. Drawing [...] Read more »The post Leading Teams to Success – Christina Wodtke on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

All the sexy stories around product management come from startups, or revolve around working like a startup. Working in an enterprise gets much less respect – but being successful in a large firm is no picnic. It takes a very particular set of skills to be able to communicate, influence, prioritise and execute at scale [...] Read more »The post Product In The Enterprise – Alicia Dixon on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Nandini Jammi started out in product marketing and growth, but after the US elections in 2016, her career took an unexpected turn when she joined Sleeping Giants, an organisation that aims to make bigotry and sexism less profitable. In this episode of The Product Experience, sponsored by Amplitude, learn how to apply this ethos to [...] Read more »The post Sleeping Giants – Nandini Jammi on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

Product people have a lot of things in common: we’re curious, we like connecting the dots, we try to solve more problems than we create, we get bored easily, we’re pretty social (even if we also identify as introverts), and we enjoy looking at things at both a tactical and strategic level. Unfortunately, we’re also [...] Read more »The post You Are the Product – Kristina Walcker-Mayer on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Working in product is a dream job for lots of people but sustaining a dream career certainly isn’t without challenges. There are problems around burnout, advancement, the challenges of specialisation, and in being a generalist. Jeff Gothelf has been there. He woke up one day and realised that his path forward as a design leader [...] Read more »The post Forever Employable – Jeff Gothelf on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Over the course of lockdown, how we maintain relationships with our nearest and dearest has been tested. But Fabrice des Mazery, CPO at Thiga, suggests the skills we’ve honed during this time can actually be useful in building relationships with our customers. In this episode, sponsored by Amplitude, he draws on his experience at Deezer, [...] Read more »The post Build Relationships With Your Customers – Fabrice des Mazery on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Berlin-based Product Coach Shaun Russell was always destined to work in Product. He co-founded Audiobubble while still in school and gave himself all the responsibilities of a Product Manager years before ever hearing of the title. In the years since he’s put a lot of thought into the development of his practice and has spoken [...] Read more »The post Breaking Into Product – Shaun Russell on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that predicting the future is hard and in this episode, sponsored by Amplitude, we turn to Margaret Heffernan to learn how to do it better. She’s a captivating speaker with more than 12 million views of her TED talks and a prolific writer who recently published Uncharted: How To [...] Read more »The post Making Better Predictions – Margaret Heffernan on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

One of the critical skills never mentioned in the job description is being a great meeting facilitator. We’ve all been thrust into the situation of trying to wrangle a room full of people into working together to create a strategy, generate a plan, or get past a roadblock. Elena Astilleros has been there, too – [...] Read more »The post The Invisible Leader: Facilitation Secrets – Elena Astilleros on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

The story of the first ProductTank – held in the back room of a London pub, arranged by Martin Eriksson, attended by a handful of people – has been told many times. And so, to celebrate the 10th anniversary, we wanted to hear from someone else who was there, in the room, when it all [...] Read more »The post World Product Day Special – 10 Years of ProductTank, Arne Kittler & Selena Hadzibabic on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

In previous roles, Julia Whitney led teams at WGBH and the BBC, so she’s familiar with rooms full of people in meetings where decisions not only don’t get made, they’re sometimes actively avoided. Now an executive and leadership coach, she’s devoted a lot of time over the last few years to working with teams on [...] Read more »The post Making Decisions That Scale – Julia Whitney on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

One of the tropes we’ve heard again and again is that product people don’t actually build anything. We’re not designers (except when we are) or engineers (unless we can code) or anything actually, y’know, useful. What that viewpoint misses is that we build understanding, alignment, and purpose – and that our best tool is conversations. [...] Read more »The post Troubleshooting Agile – Jeffrey Fredrick & Douglas Squirrel on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

At ProductCamp Southwest UK earlier this year, Adrian Howard ran a session that focused on something he termed ‘Sturgeon’s biases‘ – where he talked about how the experience of being in a community was not evenly distributed, about the fact that like-minded people tend to group together, and that 90% of everything is crap. We [...] Read more »The post 90% of Everything is Crap – Adrian Howard on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

It can be tough, even at the best of times, to remain engaged at work – to find a community of people to share with and learn from. Emily Webber’s seen this in action and has started (and nurtured) successful communities both at work and at home. She joined us to continue where her 2018 [...] Read more »The post Building Communities That Work – Emily Webber on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

We’ve heard it again and again – these are odd times; we’re not working remotely, we’re working during a crisis; this is not the new normal. You’re not working the same way, and your customers have different needs than they did a month ago. We turned to Teresa Torres – our first repeat guest! – [...] Read more »The post Remote Discovery – Teresa Torres on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

For obvious reasons, most of us are currently working from home, along with teams that are also all remote. Even if you’ve worked from home before, even if you’ve done it under tough conditions, this is different. Amir Salihefendić should know. As the founder and CEO of Doist (makers of Todoist and Twist), his company [...] Read more »The post Remote Working For Product Organisations – Amir Salihefendić on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Throughout their careers, whatever question either Lily or Randy has had, Roman Pichler’s probably had some great advice on the topic! A longtime consultant, author and teacher, we grabbed him for a chat focusing on some of the lessons contained in his fourth book, How to Lead in Product Management. Quote of the Episode A [...] Read more »The post Conversations, Conflict and Leadership – Roman Pichler on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

When you want to learn about the state of product management across Asia, there are two people who come to mind: Adrienne Tan (CEO and co-founder of Brianmates in Sydney) and Colin Pal (Chief Product Officer, Caterspot in Kuala Lumpur). With more than 25 years of experience between them, they’ve been there since the beginning, [...] Read more »The post Building Products in AsiaPac – Colin Pal and Adrienne Tan on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

A couple of things we’re hearing people talk about a lot this week are how they’re adjusting to working in a different way, and how they are adjusting their strategies to deal with the current situation. These are situations that are fraught with the possibility for unintended consequences – something Roisi Proven covered in her [...] Read more »The post The Black Mirror Test – Roisi Proven on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

Nobody rants quite like Laura Klein. Others have tried, but we’ve yet to find anyone else with her depth of experience (spanning stints as a developer, designer, researcher and product manager), her empathy for both users and stakeholders, her experience as a teacher, and her sense of humour. She’s author of Build Better Products: a [...] Read more »The post Build Better Products – Laura Klein on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

One of the things we’ve learned from doing this podcast is that it’s important to schedule in time to reflect and to revisit some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way.  It’s been a recurring theme, actually – something that’s been mentioned by Barry O’Reilly, Rian van der Merwe, and John Cutler – and [...] Read more »The post Outcomes Over Outputs – Josh Seiden on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

The best product people are the ones that are insatiably curious, who want to learn more, who want to get better at all aspects of the job.  In many businesses this can be hard – there’s not always an established culture, or people around who have done the job before and can help upskill the [...] Read more »The post Building Better Product People – Sebastian Sabouné on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

At MTP Engage Manchester (February 2020), Rakhi Rajani (Associate Partner at QuantumBlack) joined us for our first-ever live podcast recording. Talking to Rakhi we learned why Engage organiser Adam Warburton called her the smartest person he’s ever worked with as we discussed building teams, hiring at scale, when you need troublemakers, and why she had [...] Read more »The post Cognitively Diverse Teams – Live from MTP Engage Manchester – Rakhi Rajani on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

If you listen to the end credits of the podcast every week, then you already know Marc Abraham’s voice – he’s ProductTank’s Global Coordinator, a co-curator of the Mind the Product conference, an author (of My Product Management Toolkit), and he’s got a day job as a Head of Product at ASOS.  What you might [...] Read more »The post I Got 99 Problems – Learning From Jay-Z – Marc Abraham on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

We’ve all had that one manager that we’ll do anything to avoid for the rest of our careers – but have you ever stopped to think if you’re that person for someone else? That’s the question that prompted Claire Lew to start Know Your Team and here she joins us on the podcast to give [...] Read more »The post How To Be A Great Manager – Claire Lew on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

If you’ve ever had to fill a role in your team, then you already know how broken most hiring processes are.  It’s even harder if you’re competing for top talent but are only able to pay at NGO/charity scales.  That’s the situation that Simprints found itself in when they decided to treat their hiring process [...] Read more »The post Hacking The Hiring Process – Alex Yang & Max Bevan on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

W. Edwards Deming wrote, “In God we trust, all others must bring data.”  Product people hold on to this as a mantra – how else can we defend ourselves from random requests? – but we’re not always taught how best to use data.  In this week’s episode, Lens.ai founder Mike Bugembe joins us on the [...] Read more »The post Cracking The Data Code – Mike Bugembe on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

For the 50th episode of The Product Experience, we’re proud to have Chris Adams join us to talk about making your products more sustainable. One of the rare people who’s seen our world from all sides – Chris has been a developer, designer, researcher and product manager – he came on the show to share [...] Read more »The post Carbon Neutral Roadmaps – Chris Adams on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

There’s a lot of debate in the product and research communities about quantitative vs qualitative approaches to metrics, so we sat down with Tomer Sharon (MD/Head of User Research and Metrics at Goldman Sachs) to talk about how he uses Google’s HEART approach to track what matters. Formerly of Google and WeWork, Tomer talks about [...] Read more »The post Keeping Track Of Your HEART – Tomer Sharon on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

One of the hardest skills for product people to acquire is that of saying no. After all, when everyone comes at you with ideas, prioritisation can be a massive challenge. So it’s refreshing when we get a chance to come at it from the opposite direction in order to generate good ideas. Gal Josefsberg, VP [...] Read more »The post Where Do Good Ideas Come From? – Gal Josefsberg on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

We’re taking a short break from releasing new episodes over the holidays. We’ll be back with new interviews in early January. But don’t despair! In the meantime, we’re re-running two episodes that fit the theme of the season: reflection and planning for 2020. Randy’s Pick ‘Tis the season to make a list of resolutions for [...] Read more »The post Crazy Busy Product People – Rian van der Merwe on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

We’re taking a short break from releasing new episodes over the holidays. We’ll be back with fresh interviews in early January. But don’t despair! In the meantime, we’re re-running two episodes that fit the theme of the season: reflection and planning for 2020. Lily’s Pick I think, by now, we all know that product management [...] Read more »The post Moving Up the Career Ladder with Thor Mitchell [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

Taking a break from the always entertaining/sometimes informative podcast Jake & Jonathan (formerly known as The Product Breakfast club, which he co-hosts with Jake Knapp), AJ&Smart CEO Jonathan Courtney joined us to chat about Design Sprints, workshops, and how to get groups of people collaborating. Quote of the Episode One of the best things about [...] Read more »The post How To Rock Your Workshops – Jonathan Courtney on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Todd Green knows a few things about creating and managing things that attract a lot of attention – before he joined King (makers of Candy Crush etc), he helped to define the digital experience for The X Factor, and the [Your Country] Idol and [Your Country]’s Got Talent franchises.  We talked to him about how [...] Read more »The post Let’s Play a Game – Todd Green on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Jimena Almendares has held senior product roles and leadership positions at Zynga and Meetup, and now runs the Global Expansion efforts for Intuit. She has plenty of great stories to tell from those roles, but it’s her time as Chief Product Officer at OKCupid that we wanted to talk about. Jimena’s team completely revamped the [...] Read more »The post The Truth Behind the Data – Jimena Almendares on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

If you’ve got a background in waterfall processes, it can seem as if agile techniques are just about making it up as you go along. (MTP’s own James Mayes once commented that waterfall, on the other hand, “is making it up before you even begin”.) What happens if we embrace this, and bring improv techniques [...] Read more »The post Don’t Call it Improv – David Farkas on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Mixcloud CTO and co-founder Mat Clayton helped bootstrap his company from humble beginnings in an empty warehouse with no internet connection to more than 15 million active users over a 10-year period, all before they took their first round of funding.  He joined us to talk about startup life, scaling, making hard decisions, and more. [...] Read more »The post Beats, Bootstrapping and Life – Mat Clayton on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Author, advisor, professor, and podcaster Barry O’Reilly joined us on The Product Experience where we learned that he has a lot of sympathy for senior executives. These are people, he points out, whose entire career has led them to a position of responsibility and reward – so it naturally follows that the behaviours that got [...] Read more »The post Learning to Unlearn – Barry O’Reilly on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

If you – or your kids – have ever controlled a Lego creation from an app, then you’re familiar with Melissa Pickering’s work.  Now Lego’s Head of Interactive Play, blending digital and physical play, she got her start as an Imagineer at Disney (designing rollercoasters!) before founding a STEM startup.  She joined us on the [...] Read more »The post Designing for Play – Melissa Pickering on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

David Bland is the CEO and Founder of Precoil, an author, and a long-time practitioner of agile and lean startup.  He joined us on the podcast to talk about how to create focus around what matters to your users by using different testing methodologies – a topic he and Alex Osterwalder cover in their book, [...] Read more »The post Testing Business Ideas – David Bland on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

With over 20 years of experience in industries ranging from manufacturing to aerospace, to energy, and more, Daniel Elizalde has seen it all. Currently VP, Head of IoT at Ericsson North America and also an IoT instructor at Stanford University, Daniel talks to Randy and Lily about how to gain the skills needed to confidently [...] Read more »The post The Internet of Things – Daniel Elizalde on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

A manager of product management at Pivotal Software, Brazilian native Gabrielle Bufrem has worked on  three continents (North America, Europe and Asia) and hails from a fourth.  She’s delivered great talks at our #MTPEngage conferences in Hamburg and Manchester, but we caught up with her after a talk about “saying no” at Edinburgh’s Turing Festival. [...] Read more »The post How To Say No – Gabrielle Bufrem on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

After starting out as an agency (37 Signals), those at Basecamp realised that the tools it used to manage its own projects would have value for others. What followed was a bootstrapped journey to creating an entire suite of products, using Basecamp’s own approach on how to work well together. Over the years, the company [...] Read more »The post Shape Up – Ryan Singer on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Guido Lonetti’s career started out at age 14 in his bedroom – he built an MP3 search engine website that immediately started making money until his parents quashed that idea! In this episode, he shines a light on the diverse product culture in South and Latin America, where he’s spent time as a Head of [...] Read more »The post South and Latin America – Guido Lonetti on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Nandini Jammi started out in product marketing and growth, but after the US elections in 2016 her career took an unexpected turn when she joined Sleeping Giants, an organisation that aims to make bigotry and sexism less profitable. In this episode of The Product Experience, learn how to apply this ethos to your products, where [...] Read more »The post Sleeping Giants – Nandini Jammi on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Presently a partner at expansion stage venture capital firm OpenView, Ashley Smith has a long career of helping early-stage startups scale into successful organisations. In this episode, Ashley talks to our hosts about product-led growth, and how everyone can and should do it. Quote of the Episode It really comes down to: listen to your [...] Read more »The post Product-Led Growth – Ashley Smith on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

After starting his career on the road with a circus (yes, really), no business setting should ever be a challenge for Jeff Gothelf – after all, he’s worked with real clowns.  Jeff sat down with our hosts for a rare in-person conversation during Scotland’s Turing Festival to chat about effecting change, focusing on outcomes, using [...] Read more »The post Sense and Respond – Jeff Gothelf on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

For our first episode back after a summer break, we chat with Philip Pantelides, who takes us on a journey through Japan, Indonesia and beyond. (er, Bristol.) As the Head of Product for Premium Services at Cookpad, Philip has become known for his unstinting attention to detail, and taking rapid prototyping to a whole new [...] Read more »The post Rapid Prototyping – Philip Pantelides on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

We’re taking a short break from releasing new episodes for the month of August. We’ll be back with new interviews in September. But don’t despair! We’ve asked a few friends to pick some of their favorite episodes to re-broadcast in the meantime. This week’s pick comes from Mind the Product co-founder, Martin Eriksson. Martin Eriksson’s [...] Read more »The post Don’t Worry About Being Cool with Petra Wille [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

We’re taking a short break from releasing new episodes for the month of August. We’ll be back with new interviews in September. But don’t despair! We’ve asked a few friends to pick some of their favorite episodes to re-broadcast in the meantime. This week’s pick comes from our co-host, Randy Silver. Randy Silver’s Pick Of [...] Read more »The post Marketplace Thinking – Christopher Nheu on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

We’re taking a short break from releasing new episodes for the month of August. We’ll be back with new interviews in September. But don’t despair! We’ve asked a few friends to pick some of their favorite episodes to re-broadcast in the meantime. This week’s pick comes from our Executive Producer, Emily Tate. Emily Tate’s Pick [...] Read more »The post Killing Zombies – Lisa Long on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast] appeared first on Mind the Product.

Roisi Proven is a true product person: she has a penchant for imagining the worst, which she’s turned into a superpower to put all of her product decisions through a rigorous ethics test.  That’s useful – but she’s also found a way for you to engage your team in a creative way, using the model [...] Read more »The post The Black Mirror Test – Roisi Proven on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

A nice bit of serendipity this week: this week’s guest, Josh Seiden, had his new book (Outcomes Over Output) recommended in last week’s episode by guest Rich Mironov. While we didn’t plan this, it’s no surprise – Josh is a respected author, speaker, trainer, and consultant, and the book is a fantastic read.  As a [...] Read more »The post Outcomes Over Outputs – Josh Seiden on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Rich Mironov got his start in product with a a single, very demanding customer: Apple.  Realising it would be safer to diversify, he’s gone on to spend the last 30-plus years working with more than 90 organisations across the world in interim leadership roles and consulting.  He’s seen it all, and he shares his experience [...] Read more »The post The Product Mensch – Rich Mironov on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

After leaving the Navy and working on nuclear submarines, Dan Olsen embarked on a career that has spanned enterprises and start-ups, consulting, speaking, writing, and running the Lean Product & Lean UX meetup. He joined us to talk about product/market fit: what it is, how to know when you have it, and how to achieve [...] Read more »The post Lean Mean Product Machine – Dan Olsen on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Lucie McLean started on mobile products before the launch of the iPhone – she once held a phone for an illustration in a BBC article, and as a result, has some of the most famous hands on the internet. She joined us to talk about some of the things she’s learned from her long career at [...] Read more »The post Hedging Your Bets – Lucie McLean on the Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Egyptian-born Abdelrahman (Abdo) Wahba co-founded popular Arabic audiobook site Iqraaly – but it wouldn’t have seen its current success unless Abdo had taken the time to analyse deeply what made customers stay loyal. To do that, he had to get to his “Aha moment”. Now based in Berlin as the Head of Product for the [...] Read more »The post The Aha Moment – Abdelrahman Wahba on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

The Head of Product at Wildbit, Rian van der Merwe has spent his career being crazy busy – and he’s had enough of it. He joined us to talk about slowing down to speed up, making sure your team(s) are productive, and managing yourself to provide the most value to everyone around you. Quote of the [...] Read more »The post Crazy Busy Product People – Rian van der Merwe on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Ashwini Asokan, CEO and co-founder of intelligent retail automation platform VUE.ai, is working to evolve the world of retail, making shopping more of an entertainment experience. She’s spent a lot of time thinking about artificial intelligence and she sat down with us to go beyond the hype – and give us some practical advice about [...] Read more »The post Beyond the Hype on AI – Ashwini Asokan on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Ash Williams (Evil Dead); Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita and Little Rock (Zombieland); Shaun (Shaun of the Dead); Alice (Resident Evil); Lisa Long (ProductTank).  All have killed zombies, and entertained us as they did so…  but only Lisa did so on stage at London’s ProductTank, giving us practical advice on how to kill off zombie features and [...] Read more »The post Killing Zombies – Lisa Long on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

In 2017, Teresa Torres gave one of our favourite talks on the Mind the Product stage, introducing the concept of Opportunity Solution Trees.  Simple, powerful, and immediately useful, it’s been a critical part of our toolkits ever since. When we started this podcast, Teresa was one of the people we simply had to talk to [...] Read more »The post Discover Everything – Teresa Torres on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Ryan Jacoby is an expert on innovation, but not, perhaps, on optimising book titles for SEO – his book, Making Progress, is a guide on how to ensure that your team is open to and successful at innovation. Ryan has been working in the field since his undergraduate days, when he became the first person [...] Read more »The post How to Innovate – Ryan Jacoby on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

From humble beginnings with 25 people in the back room of a pub in London in May 2010 looking for a group therapy session, the ProductTank meetups have grown to over 180 cities with hundreds of thousands of people signed up.  We grabbed co-founder Martin Eriksson and Dallas organiser Emily Tate (now also US General [...] Read more »The post World Product Day special – Martin Eriksson & Emily Tate on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Melissa Perri is the product manager’s product manager—she’s able to do the job, explain it, and teach you how to do it better. So when we got her on this week’s podcast, we covered everything…including Japanese deployment strategies, Marmite and peanut butter, product leadership and team organisation, how companies scale, how to pick the right [...] Read more »The post The ABCs of Product – Melissa Perri on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Over the course of her career, Donna Lichaw has moved from Design and UX to Product – consulting with teams, giving keynotes and working with leadership groups – but what she’s always focused on is storytelling.  Now an executive coach  – “I just won’t help people build products, I help them build themselves,” she says [...] Read more »The post Tell Better Stories – Donna Lichaw on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Debbie Madden wants you to make better teams – but because she knows what she’s doing, she gave her book the attention-grabbing title Hire Women. The founder and CEO of NYC-based Stride Consulting, Debbie offers practical advice for hiring managers, anyone looking for a new job, or who wants to change the culture in their current [...] Read more »The post Hire Women! – Debbie Madden on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Few people have more experience in leading product teams than Joff Redfern. Now the VP of Product at Atlassian, he’s held similar roles at LinkedIn, Yahoo!, and Fidelity Investments. Joff’s team at Atlassian creates the products that many of us use to manage our own product and development processes; he’s got a unique viewpoint on the [...] Read more »The post A Better Shipyard – Joff Redfern on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Just call him Mr Joe. A UK-based consultant, Joe Leech has built a reputation for managing change (for both users and stakeholders) and as the guy to call when a product launch has gone wrong.  Joe gave one of the most entertaining and engaging talks at Mind the Product in London 2018, so we followed up [...] Read more »The post Managing Change – Joe Leech on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Kai Haley is Google’s Lead of Design Relations, but in her spare time she also looks after the company’s internal Design Sprint Academy. Jake Knapp (late of Google Ventures/GV) may have written the book, but Kai has run the sprints, trained the trainers, and has spent the last few years in the trenches. We had a [...] Read more »The post Mastering Design Sprints – Kai Haley on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Prior to taking on the role of COO and CPO at Singapore-based financial portal MoneySmart, Nick Ramsay was a strategy consultant and product manager. In the last year, he’s grown the product team there from one to 10 product managers, and has been working on changing the culture and attracting the right kind of talent to [...] Read more »The post Creating a Product Culture – Nick Ramsay on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Before financial software provider Aquila Heywood transformed how it approaches prioritisation, it had a backlog that was more than 20 years long and its projects took about seven years to release.  Product Director Holly Donohue was part of the team that changed how the business approaches its work, so that it now sees value being [...] Read more »The post Take Control of Prioritisation – Holly Donohue on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Tim Herbig has made many mistakes (who hasn’t?). Fortunately for us, Tim not only owns up to his mistakes, he’s written a book to help the rest of us avoid making the same ones.  We’ve all had issues with how to work best – not only within our individual teams, but with the rest of [...] Read more »The post How to Influence Without Power – Tim Herbig on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

If you’re active on Product Twitter, then you already know John Cutler.  It’s not just that he’s extremely prolific – it’s the quality and depth of his tweets (and his longer essays) that reach deep into the heart of what we’re struggling with on a daily basis – especially his post 12 Signs You’re working in [...] Read more »The post Podcast: How to get Your Team to do Their Best Work with John Cutler appeared first on Mind the Product.

Bruce McCarthy was the president of the Boston Product Management Association, is the founder of consultancy Product Culture and co-wrote the book on roadmapping, Product Roadmaps Relaunched.  He joined us live at the Mind the Product Leadership Forum to chat about how he builds his own roadmaps, prioritisation, product vision, OKRs and quite a bit more. Quote [...] Read more »The post Podcast: Roadmaps, OKRs, Vision and Prioritisation with Bruce McCarthy appeared first on Mind the Product.

Marty Cagan recently called her an “exceptional discovery coach”, but we’ve known that Petra Wille is special for a long time. One of the co-organisers of the MtP Engage conference in Hamburg (and a featured speaker at the Leadership Forum this year), she gave a talk a while back on Egoless Product Development. We wanted to [...] Read more »The post Podcast: Don’t Worry About Being Cool with Petra Wille appeared first on Mind the Product.

Ken Norton needs no introduction. Now Senior Operating Partner at GV (we still slip up and call it Google Ventures), Ken was a CTO and CEO/founder before he joined Yahoo! to run its Product organisation.  He then joined Google, where he worked on Maps, Calendar and Docs. Ken has also been a keynote speaker, giving [...] Read more »The post Podcast: Too Many Product Managers with Ken Norton appeared first on Mind the Product.

Christopher Nheu (Head of Product at Australia-based Mad Paws) came to our attention after speaking at ProductTank Sydney. His presentation, Product Thinking for Marketplace Startups, does an amazing job of documenting the differences between pipes and platforms, the three fundamental forces of marketplaces, and the specific challenges of catering to customers concerned with the well-being of [...] Read more »The post Podcast: Marketplace Thinking and Fur Babies with Christopher Nheu appeared first on Mind the Product.

The founder and CEO of NYC-based Motivate Design, Mona Patel, first came to our attention after appearing on another great podcast, Jonathan Courtney and Jake Knapp’s Product Breakfast Club.  She spoke about running and scaling an agency, which was interesting – but what really got us was her unique take on the Discovery process.  Her [...] Read more »The post Podcast: Breaking the Rules and Generating Insights with Mona Patel appeared first on Mind the Product.

Ben Newell was the first guest we got by recommendation. After giving a talk on persuasion techniques at ProductTank Dallas-Fort Worth, it was a no-brainer for us: this is a key skill for anyone whose job includes wrangling tricky stakeholders, herding teams or presenting to senior management – an area where in which we’d all like [...] Read more »The post Podcast: How to Persuade People with Ben Newell appeared first on Mind the Product.

Thor Mitchell knows his bones – he’s an ex-Google product manager (Maps and Google+ APIs) and was most recently the Chief Product Officer at Crowdcube. Following a talk at ProductTank Bristol, he joined us to chat about the advice he gives both to aspiring product managers and to those angling for leadership positions. Quote of [...] Read more »The post Podcast: Moving Up the Career Ladder with Thor Mitchell appeared first on Mind the Product.

Earlier this year, I had the chance to speak at Mind the Product/Engage in Hamburg. It was a fantastic experience, and an opportunity I didn’t want to waste. In preparation, I took the chance to give the talk a few dry-runs at ProductTanks across the UK – and I learned something that was obvious, but [...] Read more »The post Ear Worm: the Product Experience Podcast is here appeared first on Mind the Product.