The Product Experience

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 Sain...

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 Ex...

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 Th...

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 Produ...

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 E...

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: Facil...

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...

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...

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 Produc...

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...

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 Wal...

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 Experienc...

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 f...

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 T...

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 P...

“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 Care...

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...

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 Experi...

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 Pro...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 a...

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 » T...