Product Bakery – The Product Management, UX & Design Podcast

With many years of experience in product management, data, and analytics Ben Yoskovitz joined the Product Bakery to have a conversation about these topics. As a founding partner of Highline BETA a venture studio and venture capital firm, he looks a lot into data and analytics of companies to support business ideas and startups.  In this episode, the product bakers discussed the basics of defi...

The topic of user story mapping has been discussed many times recently. In this episode, the product bakers focused on the counterpart: customer journey mapping. Alex shares his experience and discussed with Christian when and how you should start working with a customer journey map. As always, Christian also tried to better understand how you can combine customer journey and user story mapping. &...

This time Alex came up with "the top of mind topic" of in-house vs. consulting and agency product management. Together with Christian, they've discussed the different focus areas different parties have and what product people need to become for example a good consultant or coach.    Table of content:  00:30 - Intro Alex 02:25 - Differences between in-house, coaching, and agencies 05...

In this episode, Christian and Alex are discussing on top of their minds the topic of "double diamond." They quickly fall into topics of design thinking and process definition and shared some insights and refreshers on how to validate and deliver product ideas.     Table of content: 00:30 - Podcast intro 01:35 - Double diamond and design thinking 04:20 - Setting up a double diamond...

Empirical process control and understanding people were and are Andrea Tomasini's biggest passions. After starting his career as Engineer and leveling up to VP Engineering, Product, and CTO, he reached the point where he wanted to build his own agile organization.  These days Andrea's agile consultancy agile42 operates in more than 13 countries across the globe, helping companies of all sizes...

After studying psychology in the late '90s, Cindy started her product, research, and design career. She has lead many Product, Design, and Research Teams over the last decades. Next to that she wrote and published the book Lean Customer Development .  Cindy speaks in this episode, about how to best do customer research. She shares very practical examples of how to understand customer problems...

As a follow-up on the previous discussion about Design Operations, the Product Bakers invited Pete Fossick, who is a seasoned Design Director, Coach, Trainer, and co-founder of the DesignOps Network & conference to diving deeper into the topic. The whole conversation was around the history of design ops, how the role developed and evolved as well as its specific responsibilities.  At the...

From working in hospitality to building a Design community is a rare transition that Mindaugas Petruitis made. These days Mindaugas is focused on his design fellowship at On Deck (space between On and Deck) as Program Director for the Designer Fellowship. Endless conversations and networking with Product & Design People across the globe motivated and inspired him to come up with this fellowshi...

Jim Semick works for more than 20 years in Product Management. About 8 years ago he was looking for the next big challenge in his life. He quit his full-time job with two kids and no clear business idea. What he had back then was a great and motivated co-founder as well as the vision to make Product Managers' lives easier.  In this episode, Jim talks about the importance of having a clear vis...

This time Christian and Alex sat together to take a deeper look at backlog management. The goal was to clarify common misunderstandings such as who owns the backlog, who is supposed to create tickets, what ticket types are the "right" ones, etc.    Table of content: 2:25 - Frequently asked backlog questions 3:15 - Leonardo Davinci & backlog management 6:00 - Basics of epics & use...

Rich Mironov works for more than +30 years in Product Management. Based on his experience as an Independent Product Consultant & Coach with more than 150 clients he shares his thoughts and observations of Product Teams in B2B enterprise.  In this episode, he talked to the Product Bakers about how to work as a Product Leader with executives, as well as the topic of negotiating and managing...

In this episode, Alex and Christian discuss the new beta social media clubhouse and its future.   Table of content: 1:53 - The clubhouse trend coming to Germany 3:19 - FOMO 4:51 - MVP Mindset 7:50 - The roadmap & snowball effects 10:05 - Clubhouse the next big social network? 12:15 - The trend of broadcasting 13:50 - What’s the problem statement? 17:50 - Clubhouse downsides & future &...

Luca Criscuolo studied initially environmental science and holds a Ph. D. in climate science. Next to all his work and research, he decided at some point to be closer connected to the real world and people building products. From that point on he started working in Product Management and moved his way up to several product leadership roles. With more than 14 years of Product Management experience,...

Ryan Sousa leads data innovation for Research, Hospital, and Foundation at Seattle Children’s. He is a senior leader, entrepreneur, and practitioner and brings more than 25 years of leadership experience in some of the biggest companies such as Amazon, Starbucks, Expedia, and Nokia as well as several successful startups. Next to all the companies that Ryan has seen, he clearly noticed one key fact...

" You learn the most from your mistakes, not your success. ", is a quote that Rory Madden would immediately sign! With more than 16 years of experience as a Consultant, Entrepreneur, and Business Analyst he has a lot of experiences to share.  Rory founded two start-ups that failed, and one of the biggest learnings he made was to talk to customers as early as possible. Based on that learning,...

A long and exhausting year is over! Alex and Christian sat down together one last time in 2020 to wrap up a year of remote work and sharing some morning routine tips in times of home office to not only be productive but also to take care of your physical and mental health. The Product Bakers wish you all a happy new year's eve. Stay healthy, stay conscious. Happy new year! 🎉🥳🎊   PS: The ne...

Could it be a better time to launch the 20th episode on Christmas?! 🎄 We want to thank all our listeners for the amazing support we've got, and wish everyone MERRY CHRISTMAS and happy holidays! In this episode, we're doing a little recap on what has happened this year as well as sharing the first outlook for 2021.  Since the year is coming to an end we also talk about how we prioritize &...

Shruti is a design researcher and interaction designer. She leads the talented team of The Studio at Zalando in Berlin. At the time of recording this episode, she led the product design & user research team at N26. She has also worked in strategic design consulting with IDEO, user experience at Nokia, and with a few other places. Shruti’s goal has been to nurture effective collaboration betwee...

Branding plays a key role in every kind of business. Laura Busche's passion for marketing and brand strategy started in 2008. Since then she focused a lot on working and learning everything about brands until 2013 when she published her amazing book "Lean Branding" as part of the Lean Series from O'Reilly.  Laura consulted Alex and Christian for almost one hour about building up the Product B...

Monica Lent is a passionate Software Engineer & Entrepreneur with more than 10 years of experience. Next to her first startup affilimate.com , she regularly launches new products, services, and communities such as blogginfordevs.com.  Monica shares in this episode many practical tips and examples on how to build up your own community and the need for companies to move beyond acquiring cus...

Both Christian and Alex work on many strategic topics as consultants in their day to day business. What they've observed is that many companies need to rethink their current strategies and adapt to the current situation/crisis. In this episode, Christian talks about how to get started with a product strategy definition based on Alex's business idea about selling Italian premium ties. He focuses on...

Humans love to play games! So does Alex Wheeler , Senior UX Designer at Riot Game . Alex spent many years developing the UX for champions of the most played online game League of Legends .  Alex shares great insights about the whole process of developing e.g. a new champion or changes on the client-side for more than 120 Million active users. He touched all the parts from the discovery and wi...

SaaS products are Markus Hafellner passion. Next to his experience as a Product Manager, he worked many years in the tech industry as a developer & CTO.  In his current challenge at Bitmovin, he focuses a lot on defining and developing a good pricing strategy. Markus shares how the company introduced a big pricing change and the thoughts, planning, and approach behind it as well as great...

After a week-long road trip in Portugal Alex is looking back at all the small invisible experiences he encountered while sitting in the car. It’s things like anticipating and designing for the user's intentions that make an experience really great.   Table of content: 0:30 - Alex road trip in Portugal 2:30 - Air conditioning experience with Volkswagen 4:45 - User experience in cars 6:35 - Und...

Sebastian's role as head of product at the Founders Factory is quite different from most of the jobs. He and the product coaching team help founders and teams build the right product in the right way using their expertise and product coaching framework.  His and the team's thesis is that by both executing on the product as well as coaching founders on what good best practices look like, Found...