One Knight in Product

Welcome to CPO Stories! In this new "podcast within a podcast", I'll be speaking to executive product leaders from the UK's biggest companies as well as up-and-coming stars of the future. I'll be digging into how they approach product management within their organisations, how they approached the leap into executive product leadership and trying to get some deep insights into how they view product...

Returning guest Rich Mironov is a B2B product management legend, long-time blogger and author of "The Art of Product Management". He's recently moved to Portugal to sample the best of European product culture, and is currently actively coaching and mentoring product leaders. His goal is to help them understand what business leaders really care about and ensure that they make an impact by speaking...

Tami Reiss (aka "Tami from Miami"!) is an executive leadership coach, corporate trainer and upcoming author of a children's product management book. Tami's hot take? That all product managers are leaders, even if they don't feel like it. As a PM, whatever your situation (and however high or low your sights) it's your job to inspire the team and influence your colleagues. Find Tami on LinkedIn: htt...

Alexandar Murauski is an expert in all things related to product localisation and the CEO of Alconost, a platform that aims to help product teams unlock global growth through AI-enhanced localisation. Alexander's hot take? That the language your product "speaks" is a fundamental part of the product's user experience, and is often left lacking. It's important to consider localisation upfront, and e...

Andriy Burkov is a renowned machine learning expert and leader. He's also the author of (so far) three books on machine learning, including the recently-released "The Hundred-Page Language Models Book", which takes curious people from the very basics of language models all the way up to building their own LLM. Andriy is also a formidable online presence and is never afraid to call BS on over-the-t...

Sam Greenwood is an emotional resilience coach who works with product managers to help them survive at the intersection of emotional stress and product leadership. His goal is to help product managers build EQ, communication and leadership and AI-proof their careers. Sam's hot take? That we are on the cusp of societal collapse and product managers, as well as people in tech in general, have taken...

Olha Yohansen-Veselova is a product growth and product optimisation expert who has now gone solo and is helping companies with their onboarding. Olha is also a startup mentor and advisor, and is passionate about product managers living up to their full potential. Olha's hot take? That product managers need to beyond being facilitators and unblockers, and move towards being true growth partners to...

About the Episode Elena Verna is a renowned growth consultant who has worked at and with a glittering array of well-known tech companies. She's a strong advocate of career optionality and solopreneurship, as well as the author of a popular growth newsletter, Reforge instructor and popular LinkedIn content creator with her insightful posts and searing memes. Just don't call her an influencer. Episo...

Zoe Laycock is the Product Marketing Lead for Diffblue, an AI-powered testing platform, and is passionate about promoting and elevating the role of product marketing, as well as advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the tech sector. Zoe's hot take? That product people need to get serious about ethical AI, and put people, processes and protections in place to ensure that AI produ...

Myles Sutholt is a Germany-based product leader working for an Africa-based startup where he's helping to digitise the health supply chain across the continent, with a "laser focus" on creating user value alongside business value and fostering motivated, dynamic teams. His hot take? That leaders too often rely on gut feel and recency bias when performing performance reviews, relying on point-in-ti...

Martin Eriksson is the co-founder of Mind the Product, and co-author of the "Product Leadership" book. Martin has worked with a multitude of companies and has been heavily involved in the VC side of product management. These days, he's advising and coaching companies as well as trying to help us all make good decisions by writing a new book, "The Decision Stack", alongside its supporting website....

Martijn Versteeg is the founder of Group Effort, an organisation that fosters connections & facilitates the growth of scale-up leaders through peer groups, offsites and workshops. His hot take? That product people should stop looking for the "golden nugget" of knowledge. Martijn argues that instead of seeking a single breakthrough insight, product managers should focus on consistent iteration...

Martijn Moret is the founder of DataSquirrel.ai , a company focused on leveraging AI to humanise and simplify data analysis for product managers and non-tech managers. His hot take? Most product managers neglect data—not because they dislike it, but due to a lack of time and skills, which can lead to wrong priorities and poor decision-making. He also highlights the current limitations of AI in dat...

🎄 Deck the Halls with Go-To-Market! 🎄 I spoke with Maja Voje for a convivial Christmas chat about all things product and growth. We discussed: 2024 Retrospectives and 2025 Predictions Product Management and Go-To-Market Strategies AI in Workflows and Whether Product Management is Dead 💀 LinkedIn Growth Strategies Balancing Opportunities and When To Say No Networking and Community Building This...

Adam Dille is the SVP of Product Engineering at Quantum Metric , a company specialising in experience analytics for some of the world's biggest brands. Despite his engineering roots, Adam's relentless curiosity about the WHY behind building products led him to embrace product thinking and how to build products better. His hot take? The traditional product trio - PM, design, and engineering - isn't...

Grace Yusuff is a London-based "reluctant product manager" and introvert who thought she could never do the job. She has since fallen in love with the role and now works as a product manager and early-career mentor, helping others get into tech. Her hot take? That introversion is a superpower for product managers and something to be embraced rather than overcome. She is a strong advocate for peopl...

Assaph Mehr is an Australia-based product & people leader as well as a published fantasy author, who also uses his writing chops to produce a newsletter, "Rise of the Product Leader". His hot take? That LLMs and other generative AI tools are the equivalent of an angle grinder. For those who don't know, angle grinders have big, spinning metal discs that make them ideal tools for certain use cas...

Matt Maier is a product marketer and AI enthusiast from Irvine, California, with a background spanning the Air Force, aerospace, healthcare, and startup consulting. His hot take? Within 5 years, employment as we know it will sharply decline. Matt predicts that advancements in AI will render traditional employee-employer relationships obsolete, because why would companies hire people to do easily a...

Yael Mark is a behavioural scientist turned product manager, who is passionate about helping others unlock the power of user-centred product design by embracing behavioural science. She believes that understanding human behaviour and cognitive biases can drive better product decisions and stakeholder alignment, as well as make sure we do it ethically. Episode highlights:   1. Behavioural science h...

Returning guest Eisha Armstrong is the co-founder of Vecteris and author of books like "Productize" and "Fearless", which talk about that tricky journey from a professional services to product organisation. She's back to talk about her latest book, "Commercialize", which gives us the skinny on how to monetise, sell, and market productised offerings in transforming B2B professional services firms....

Andy Budd is a designer-turned-venture partner who founded one of the UK's first UX agencies before pivoting to help early-stage startup founders make good product decisions and get to product/market fit. He's recently released "The Growth Equation", a book that distils some of the common themes he sees across early-stage companies and aims to give them the best chance of success. We spoke all abo...

Jas Shah is a fintech product consultant based in London who helps small startups and management services organizations build winning products, whilst keeping his pulse on the fintech scene. His hot take? That product management is one of the least glamorous functions in an organisation. It's often portrayed as a sexy role where you're the "CEO of the product" with autonomy and responsibility, but...

Victoria Sakal is a growth and go-to-market expert who loves to turn customer, market and competitor insight in product, brand and business growth strategies. Her hot take? That companies are either paying the "research tax" - spending too much time and money on research and never making a move - or the "stupid tax" - making decisions based purely on gut feel and no evidence. Both of these taxes c...

Boluwaji Alepaye is a product manager who works for Moniepoint, a Nigerian fintech firm that aims to power financial dreams in emerging markets. He's also an active mentor, aiming to help Nigerian product managers thrive. His hot take? That the classic product management advice that comes out of the US and Western Europe just doesn't apply to Nigeria, where market dynamics mean that you have to ma...

Christina Wodtke and Danielle Barnes join me to talk about their new book "Present Yourself" and their work with Women Talk Design, an organisation aimed at increasing diversity in public speaking. We went deep on public speaking, the importance of authenticity, storytelling, and finding your unique voice as a speaker. We also talked about the value of diverse perspectives in public speaking and t...