The Product Experience

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...

Back in the dark ages of web design — back when the job title Webmaster was a thing — every team included someone who specialised in Information Architecture (IA). These days, that work is often considered to be part of UX, but that can mean that we're not doing the job well enough. Abby Covert joins us on the podcast to chat about why IA is important, how and when we should work with Informa...

We always encourage people to experiment with their product development techniques - but experimenting with your team can be a step too far.  We talked with Monzo Chief Product Officer Mike Hudack (ex-Facebook, Deliveroo) about how he approaches this: what's worked and what hasn't, avoiding cross-team dependencies, communication & collaboration, and much more. Featured Links: Follow...

We've all had the experience of presenting to the leadership team - but what do they say about you when you leave the room?  What's it like to work at that level? And how do you get promoted to the C-suite? We talked with experienced product & boardroom vet Tanya Cordrey about all of this - and much more - for this week's podcast. Featured Links: Follow Tanya on LinkedIn and Twi...

When we sat down with Roll20.net Product Director Kenton Hanson for this week's podcast, we were hoping to hear tales of how he and his  product team (or band of adventurers!) went on quests to conduct user research. We wanted to hear about dodging orcs and dragons (stakeholders) while collecting  treasure (insights). Instead, we learned that it's only Roll20's marketing team that c...

We all want more customers - but being able to understand who your best customer segments are, prioritise for them, and then land more of them?  That's a game-changer. We talked with Tamara Grominsky (Unbounce's VP of Strategy) about some easy-to-implement techniques that will help you do just that. Featured Links: Follow Tamara on LinkedIn and Twitter | Tamara's Website | Unbounce...

There's nothing more useless to a Product team than a big backlog.  Bringing backlogs to life - making them usable, relevant, and getting value from them - is something that transforms ordinary teams into extraordinary ones.  To guide us on how to do that, we asked Jeff Patton - creator of User Story Mapping - to join us on the podcast. Featured Links: Follow Jeff on LinkedIn and Twitter | Je...

There's no better training ground than working in Emergency Services for learning how to  deal with stress, uncertainty, prioritisaton with imperfect information, and challenging stakeholders - all skills that are key to working in Product.  Nathan Henry joins on the podcast this week to chat about how he levereges the skills he developed as a 911 Operator.  Featured Links: Follow Nathan on L...

As product people, it's important for us to love our products, our customers, and the problems we're trying to solve. (though not in that order!).  A lot of the time, though, we're not really working on something truly important. That's not the case for Randeep Sidhu—he got a call to help rescue the UK's Covid-19 app, dropped everything, and dove in. In this episode sponso...

Over the last 15 years, Merissa has gone from New York media to Australian finance to German fintechs - with a number of stops in between.  She joins us on the podcast to talk about what she's learned along the way, including:  from working in different cultures & industries,  influencing executives, knowing if you want to be a people manager, and more! Featured Links: Follow Merissa on L...