The Product Experience

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 Chamb...

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 ep...

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...

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...

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. Featu...

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...

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 appeare...

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 [Rebroadc...

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...

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 app...

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 Venka...

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 strat...

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 stag...

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 Cognitiv...

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...

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 f...

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 Min...

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 . Our...

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 – Fan...

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 Pr...

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...

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 . Our Ho...

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...

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 Experienc...

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 Produc...