The Product Experience

For most of us, the way that we conduct user research has been different during a year of lockdowns.  Not so much for Anna Lee Anda, UX Research Manager at Zendesk — as someone with a global customer base, she’s been working with these techniques for ages. She joined us on the podcast to talk [...] Read more » The post Remote Research – Anna Lee Anda on The Product Experience appeared first on Min...

We all know that we need to measure what matters; that if it’s not measured, then it’s not managed. We know that we need to have a North Star; that we need to run A/B tests; and that A/B tests are awful. We also know there’s a massive difference between what we read in the [...] Read more » The post Metrics of Success – Rik Higham on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product . Our...

How much should you be charging? Are you leaving money on the table, or are you scaring away potential customers? Pricing strategy can be one of the biggest challenges for product people, so we asked Founders Factory coach Fanni Fejes to share some of the lessons she teaches founders. In this episode, sponsored by Hotjar, listen [...] Read more » The post Pricing Strategy for Product Dummies – Fan...

Estimation is a dark art — get it wrong, and your stakeholders will never forget (or forgive). We talked with agile consultant Liz Keogh about how to get this right, who estimates are for, her invaluable scale for estimating complexity, and how to pronounce the word Cynefin. In this episode, sponsored by Hotjar, listen to learn [...] Read more » The post Estimating Complexity – Liz Keogh on The Pr...

There’s no glory in working on internal tools – no one ever gives you credit for success, it’s almost impossible to recruit for, and there’s never enough time to fix all of the things that are needed. It’s no wonder that we don’t talk about it very often. But they’re the key to making lots [...] Read more » The post Managing Internal Tools – Emily Patterson on The Product Experience appeared first...

One of the key things to do in any product lifecycle is to review if it’s meeting your user’s needs. The last time we sat down to do this for the podcast, we decided to use the Jobs To Be Done approach, which led to a key question: how might we power up our JTBD [...] Read more » The post Getting Started with JTBD – Mike Belsito on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product . Our Ho...

We all know what OKRs are. Most of us use them or have tried to at some point. But it’s a much smaller group that have used OKRs well, and for their intended purpose. Natalija Hellesoe, co-author of OKRs at the Center, joins us on the podcast to chat about taking your practice to the [...] Read more » The post Putting OKRs at the Centre – Natalija Hellesoe on The Product Experience appeared first...

Accessibility is one of those things that we all know we should do, but are rarely confident that we’ve done it well.  To get over that hump, we talked with Prof Jonathan Hassell about how and when to embed and test for accessibility (or a11y!), when you can skip it, and how to convince stakeholders [...] Read more » The post Building Accessible Products – Jonathan Hassell on The Product Experienc...

Over the last decade in the public sector, there’s been a global explosion in citizen and resident-centered design and development, with movements in the UK, Estonia, Australia, Canada, USA, and many more strengthening their approaches. Where it’s been done well, it’s made a huge difference.  At the same time, civil services are always facing budget [...] Read more » The post Public Service Produc...

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...