The Product Experience

Talking to users is easy. Talking to them in a way that gets you useful information is hard. Using that information in a way that helps align stakeholders and teams on the path to building great products? That’s the hardest of all. Lucky for us, our guest on the podcast this week is Robert Chokr, [...] Read more » The post User Research Interviews – Robert Chokr on The Product Experience appeared...

As we’ve got an Ask Me Anything session with Colin Pal coming up soon (October 14th), we’re re-broadcasting this episode from earlier in the year so that you can get to know Colin and prep some questions for him! The AMA is for Prioritised and MTP Leader members so if you’re not a member yet, [...] Read more » The post Building Products in AsiaPac – Colin Pal and Adrienne Tan on The Product Experi...

In our previous episode, Adam Thomas introduced how he uses a military technique (BLUF) for prioritisation. This week, former US Marine William Treseder – now co-founder and SVP of Product at innovation consultancy BMNT – joins us to talk about how he works with Government, Defense, Academic and Corporate clients to transform their innovation culture. [...] Read more » The post Accelerate Your Pro...

The one thing every product person needs is a new acronym that comes from the military, and Adam Thomas is here to help. Sarcasm aside, Adam’s made good use of the BLUF technique: Bottom Line Up Front, a short template, clearly laying out what the team is working on and how they plan to do [...] Read more » The post BLUF Your Way to Success – Adam Thomas on The Product Experience appeared first on...

Matt LeMay has a problem. He’s a content machine. He’s written 3 books (two books on product and one on the musician Elliot Smith), plenty of music, and much more – which means that he’s prone to going down a rabbit hole before sharing his work with a team. To combat that, he now employs [...] Read more » The post Perfection is the Enemy of Progress – Matt LeMay on The Product Experience appeared...

Product people love to study frameworks, techniques, and approaches that have worked at other companies. In Kate Leto’s new book, Hiring Product Managers: Using Product EQ to go Beyond Culture and Skills, she gives an overview of how to actually use those tools – both in building a team and day-to-day, as a product professional. [...] Read more » The post Using Product EQ to Hire the Best Product...

April Dunford’s mtpcon Digital 2020 keynote on positioning was so good that we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to dig deeper into the topic with her. This is one of the dark arts for many product people, and it has such a deep effect on everything else you do – take a listen to upgrade [...] Read more » The post Obviously Awesome: Positioning Your Product – April Dunford on The Product Experience...

Bugs are the bane of existence for product teams. They frustrate our users, ruin the best-laid plans, and screw up our sprints. Figuring out how to deal with them is a problem for many teams: do we have good acceptance criteria? How do we test? What’s better, unit tests or user acceptance testing? Who has [...] Read more » The post Building Quality Products – Stacy Kirk on The Product Experience a...

Is product management an art or a science? Holly Hester-Reilly, the founder of H2R Product Science and a former Chemical Engineer, uses her background to apply scientific principles and techniques to product development.  She joins us to chat about evidence-based product strategy, continuous discovery & delivery, and empowered teams. In this episode, sponsored by Amplitude, [...] Read more » T...

Just call him Mr Joe. A UK-based consultant, Joe Leech has built a reputation for managing change (for both users and stakeholders) and as the guy to call when a product launch has gone wrong.  Joe gave one of the most entertaining and engaging talks at Mind the Product in London 2018, so we followed [...] Read more » The post Managing Change – Joe Leech on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast] app...

One of our favourite pub discussions after a ProductTank is to try and define the difference between a product and a service. (We’re fun like that.) These days, we’re doing all of our meetups and events remotely, so Andy Budd joined us on the podcast to talk about the difference between product managers and service [...] Read more » The post Service Design and Product – Andy Budd on The Product Ex...

Teaching something is hard – to do it well, you need both an incredible command of the subject and great communication skills. Teaching in the form of a narrative story? That’s another level of difficulty and in her new book, The Team That Managed Itself: A Story Of Leadership, Christina Wodtke does just that. Drawing [...] Read more » The post Leading Teams to Success – Christina Wodtke on The Pr...

All the sexy stories around product management come from startups, or revolve around working like a startup. Working in an enterprise gets much less respect – but being successful in a large firm is no picnic. It takes a very particular set of skills to be able to communicate, influence, prioritise and execute at scale [...] Read more » The post Product In The Enterprise – Alicia Dixon on The Prod...

Nandini Jammi started out in product marketing and growth, but after the US elections in 2016, her career took an unexpected turn when she joined Sleeping Giants, an organisation that aims to make bigotry and sexism less profitable. In this episode of The Product Experience, sponsored by Amplitude, learn how to apply this ethos to [...] Read more » The post Sleeping Giants – Nandini Jammi on The P...

Product people have a lot of things in common: we’re curious, we like connecting the dots, we try to solve more problems than we create, we get bored easily, we’re pretty social (even if we also identify as introverts), and we enjoy looking at things at both a tactical and strategic level. Unfortunately, we’re also [...] Read more » The post You Are the Product – Kristina Walcker-Mayer on The Prod...

Working in product is a dream job for lots of people but sustaining a dream career certainly isn’t without challenges. There are problems around burnout, advancement, the challenges of specialisation, and in being a generalist. Jeff Gothelf has been there. He woke up one day and realised that his path forward as a design leader [...] Read more » The post Forever Employable – Jeff Gothelf on The Pr...

Over the course of lockdown, how we maintain relationships with our nearest and dearest has been tested. But Fabrice des Mazery, CPO at Thiga, suggests the skills we’ve honed during this time can actually be useful in building relationships with our customers. In this episode, sponsored by Amplitude, he draws on his experience at Deezer, [...] Read more » The post Build Relationships With Your Cus...

Berlin-based Product Coach Shaun Russell was always destined to work in Product. He co-founded Audiobubble while still in school and gave himself all the responsibilities of a Product Manager years before ever hearing of the title. In the years since he’s put a lot of thought into the development of his practice and has spoken [...] Read more » The post Breaking Into Product – Shaun Russell on The...

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that predicting the future is hard and in this 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 [...] Read more » The post Making Better Predictions – Margaret Heffernan on The Pr...

One of the critical skills never mentioned in the job description is being a great meeting facilitator. We’ve all been thrust into the situation of trying to wrangle a room full of people into working together to create a strategy, generate a plan, or get past a roadblock. Elena Astilleros has been there, too – [...] Read more » The post The Invisible Leader: Facilitation Secrets – Elena Astillero...

The story of the first ProductTank – held in the back room of a London pub, arranged by Martin Eriksson, attended by a handful of people – has been told many times. And so, to celebrate the 10th anniversary, we wanted to hear from someone else who was there, in the room, when it all [...] Read more » The post World Product Day Special – 10 Years of ProductTank, Arne Kittler & Selena Hadzibabic...

In previous roles, Julia Whitney led teams at WGBH and the BBC, so she’s familiar with rooms full of people in meetings where decisions not only don’t get made, they’re sometimes actively avoided. Now an executive and leadership coach, she’s devoted a lot of time over the last few years to working with teams on [...] Read more » The post Making Decisions That Scale – Julia Whitney on The Product E...

One of the tropes we’ve heard again and again is that product people don’t actually build anything. We’re not designers (except when we are) or engineers (unless we can code) or anything actually, y’know, useful. What that viewpoint misses is that we build understanding, alignment, and purpose – and that our best tool is conversations. [...] Read more » The post Troubleshooting Agile – Jeffrey Fre...

At ProductCamp Southwest UK earlier this year, Adrian Howard ran a session that focused on something he termed ‘Sturgeon’s biases‘ – where he talked about how the experience of being in a community was not evenly distributed, about the fact that like-minded people tend to group together, and that 90% of everything is crap. We [...] Read more » The post 90% of Everything is Crap – Adrian Howard on...

It can be tough, even at the best of times, to remain engaged at work – to find a community of people to share with and learn from. Emily Webber’s seen this in action and has started (and nurtured) successful communities both at work and at home. She joined us to continue where her 2018 [...] Read more » The post Building Communities That Work – Emily Webber on The Product Experience appeared firs...