The Product Experience

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...

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 Tw...

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 Mir...

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...

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 Manag...

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?...

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...

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, Jo...

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...

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...

 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...

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! Fea...

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 d...

 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   Our Hosts Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and g...

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 P...

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)....

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 Linked...

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...

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 | Jan...

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: th...

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...

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 gr...

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 |...

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...

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...