Podcasts

Upasna Gautam

Guest: Upasna Gautam - Product Manager at CNN. Upasna leads the team responsible for CNN's content management system and is pivotal in integrating product management within newsrooms, leveraging her experience as a meditation and mindfulness teacher. Key Takeaways: Adaptability in Chaos: Product managers in news must thrive in chaotic environments, often needing to pivot plans quickly due to breaking news. Building in buffers and backup plans is crucial. Mindful Communication: Practicing equanimity, or mental calmness, helps manage emotional reactions and improves stakeholder management, team morale, and user feedback translation. Structured Collaboration: CNN employs a structured approach to product development with weekly demo days, working sessions, breaking news dress rehearsals, and office hours to maintain open communication with journalists. Integration of Engineering: Involving engineers early in the product discovery process enhances understanding and efficiency, fostering a partnership rather than viewing them as mere resources. Meditation as a Tool: Regular meditation enhances clarity and decision-making, with simple practices like mindful tooth brushing being a practical starting point. Topics Covered: Breaking news adaptability, mindfulness in product management, CNN's product development process, collaboration with journalists, meditation benefits in professional settings.

Patrick Campbell

Guest: Patrick Campbell - Founder and CEO of ProfitWell. Patrick bootstrapped ProfitWell and sold it for over $200 million without any external funding. He is highly regarded for his insights on pricing, retention, and team building in SaaS businesses. Key Takeaways: Team Building: Focus on defining who you are for and who you are not for. Values should include trade-offs to ensure alignment and effectiveness within the team. Bootstrapping vs. Funding: Bootstrapping is ideal for lifestyle businesses, but if aiming for a billion-dollar exit, consider raising funds to accelerate growth. Pricing Strategy: Implement a pricing committee and make changes at least once a quarter. Focus on the pricing metric/value metric as it significantly impacts revenue and retention. Retention Tactics: Differentiate between strategic and tactical retention. Simple improvements in payment failures and cancellation flows can reduce churn by 25-40%. Shipping and Tempo: Establish a clear tempo framework for shipping products. Define what good looks like in terms of frequency and align teams around this. Topics Covered: Team building, bootstrapping, pricing strategy, retention tactics, shipping and tempo, first principles thinking, customer research, competitive intelligence, local strategies, middle-of-the-funnel strategies.

Christine Itwaru

Guest: Christine Itwaru - Product Ops Leader at Pendo. Christine transitioned from product management to product ops and has been instrumental in shaping the role at Pendo, offering deep insights into its functions and importance. Key Takeaways: Role Clarity: Product ops is both a system and a role that supports product managers by handling processes, data synthesis, and internal alignment, allowing PMs to focus on customer interaction and product strategy. Emergence and Need: The rise of product ops is driven by the need for better internal alignment and transparency, especially in rapidly growing companies or those adopting product-led growth strategies. Core Responsibilities: Product ops focuses on voice of customer management, tooling optimization, and content strategy, ensuring that product teams are aligned with customer needs and internal stakeholders are well-informed. Career Path: Product ops roles are ideal for those who enjoy creating efficient systems and cross-functional collaboration, often attracting individuals from product management, customer success, and management consulting backgrounds. Strategic Impact: Successful product ops teams evolve from managing processes to becoming strategic advisors, helping product leaders make informed decisions based on comprehensive data insights. Topics Covered: Product ops role definition, internal alignment, voice of customer management, tooling optimization, content strategy, career path in product ops, strategic impact of product ops, transparency in product development.

Gaurav Misra

Guest: Gaurav Misra - Co-founder and CEO of Captions. Gaurav was an early employee at Snap, leading the design engineering team, and has extensive experience in building successful consumer AI products. Key Takeaways: Weekly Shipping Cadence: Every engineer at Captions is expected to ship a marketable feature weekly, focusing on cutting scope rather than quality to maintain rapid iteration and innovation. Secret Roadmap Strategy: Captions maintains a "secret roadmap" of innovative features that users haven't asked for but could revolutionize user behavior, alongside a public roadmap of user-requested features. Technical Debt as Leverage: Misra views technical debt as a strategic tool for startups to move faster than larger companies, with a focus on paying it down during specific periods like Q4. Design-Led Innovation: Inspired by Snap's approach, Captions often starts with design to uncover unique product ideas, emphasizing the importance of cross-functional understanding among team members. AI in Marketing: Misra predicts AI-generated content will dominate marketing, offering cost-effective and scalable solutions for localization and creative testing. Topics Covered: Rapid product iteration, secret roadmap, technical debt management, design-led product development, AI in video and marketing, Snap's product strategy, future of AI-generated content.

Keith Yandell

Guest: Keith Yandell - Leader at DoorDash. Keith has held multiple leadership roles at DoorDash, including leading the legal, HR, marketing, and customer support teams. Before DoorDash, he led litigation at Uber. Key Takeaways: Empathy in Leadership: Keith emphasizes the importance of understanding motivations and creating empathy among team members to facilitate decision-making and resolve conflicts. Scaling Culture: Keith created a "How to Work with Keith" document to communicate expectations and feedback mechanisms, which has been instrumental in scaling DoorDash's culture. Career Development: He actively helps his team members find their next roles, even if it means leaving DoorDash, fostering loyalty and transparency. Crisis Management: Tough times can strengthen a company by weeding out those not aligned with the mission and forcing operational discipline. Product and BD Synergy: Effective BD requires close collaboration with product teams, focusing on building scalable platforms and testing hypotheses operationally before committing resources. Topics Covered: Empathy in leadership, scaling company culture, career development, crisis management, product and business development collaboration, fundraising challenges.

Marty Cagan

Guest: Marty Cagan - Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group. Marty has over 20 years of experience helping product teams and managers improve their craft and has authored influential books in the field of product management, including INSPIRED and EMPOWERED. Key Takeaways: Many companies overhired and created unnecessary roles during the pandemic, leading to inefficiencies and what Marty calls "product management theater." Product managers should focus on delivering outcomes rather than just output, emphasizing value and viability. Empowered product teams are given problems to solve rather than a list of features to build, enabling them to deliver real value. The rise of generative AI and other macro factors are pushing companies to reevaluate their product management practices. Individuals in feature teams have the agency to upskill and push for a transformation towards empowered product teams. Topics Covered: Overhiring and inefficiencies in product roles, distinction between feature teams and empowered product teams, impact of generative AI on product management, skills needed for effective product management, transformation to a product operating model.

Marily Nika

Guest: Marily Nika - Product Lead at Meta. Marily is a seasoned expert in AI and product management, having taught the most popular course on AI and product management on Maven. She has extensive experience at Meta and Google, where she worked on cutting-edge projects like Google Glass and machine learning for speech recognition. Key Takeaways: Avoid the "shiny object trap" in AI; ensure there's a real problem to solve before implementing AI solutions. AI PMs should focus on identifying the right problems to solve rather than just building products. Use AI tools like ChatGPT to enhance your work, such as improving mission statements or creating user segments. Understand the fundamentals of AI and machine learning, even if you're not technical, to better collaborate with research scientists. For early-stage AI projects, focus on MVPs without AI to validate ideas before investing in complex AI solutions. Topics Covered: AI in product management, avoiding the shiny object trap, using AI tools like ChatGPT, AI product management lifecycle, training AI models, data requirements for AI, transitioning into AI PM roles, building and maintaining AI products, Marily's AI course.

Eeke de Milliano

Guest: Eeke de Milliano - Head of Product at Retool. Eeke was one of the first PMs at Stripe, where she helped build foundational products like Stripe Checkout and Stripe Radar. Key Takeaways: Process as a Double-Edged Sword: Process reduces variance but can also stifle top performers. Introduce the minimum viable process and allow escape hatches for creativity. Fostering Innovation: Encourage big thinking by normalizing failure, providing more opportunities for experimentation, and creating structured moments for ideation, like Retool’s "Crazy Ideas" doc. Launching Multiple Products: Start small with dedicated teams for each project, treat them like startups, and keep them separate initially to maintain focus and agility. Product Talent Portfolio: Balance your team with diverse skill sets, mixing homegrown talent with experienced hires from other companies to create a well-rounded team. Customer Proximity: Use tools like Slack for direct customer feedback and ensure PMs are technically proficient to understand and anticipate customer needs effectively. Topics Covered: Innovation and big thinking, process management, product launches, team structure, customer engagement, product management philosophies, balancing product and sales-led growth.

Zoelle Egner

Guest: Zoelle Egner - Head of Marketing and Growth at Block Party. Zoelle was one of the earliest employees at Airtable, where she led their early marketing and customer success teams, helping the company grow significantly. She has also advised numerous startups on marketing and growth strategies. Key Takeaways: Punching Above Your Weight: Small startups can appear larger and more credible by focusing on high-quality, polished communications and branding. This includes well-crafted emails, landing pages, and even strategic use of billboards to signal legitimacy. Customer Success as a Growth Lever: Investing early in customer success can drive significant growth, especially in B2B SaaS. It helps in building champions within companies who can evangelize the product internally. Effective Use of Templates: While templates can narrow the surface area for users and aid in customer success, they should not be relied upon solely for top-of-funnel acquisition unless there's a robust SEO strategy in place. Strategic PR and Launches: PR should be used strategically for credibility, particularly in hiring and improving cold outreach response rates. Launches should focus on creating momentum and staying top of mind rather than just media coverage. Invest in Community and Profession Elevation: Instead of creating a new product category, focus on elevating a profession, which can create a strong community and brand loyalty. Topics Covered: Airtable's growth strategy, customer success, marketing tactics, PR and launches, the importance of templates, investing in community, and profession elevation.

Vijay

Guest: Vijay Iyengar - Head of Product at Mixpanel. Vijay has a robust background in engineering and product management, having transitioned from an engineering manager to a product leader at Mixpanel, where he has spearheaded the company's focus on core analytics. Key Takeaways: Focus on Core Product: Vijay emphasizes the importance of investing in your core product to avoid disruption. He advises using profits, not people, to explore new ventures, ensuring the core remains competitive. Planning and Prioritization: Mixpanel uses a six-month planning cycle, focusing on "bets" that are problems to solve with a hypothesis and a plan. They prioritize by initially ignoring confidence and effort to focus on high-impact ideas. Customer Proximity: Mixpanel maintains a culture where engineers directly interact with customers to understand their problems, fostering a product mindset across the team. Server-Side Tracking: Vijay advises against client-side SDKs for analytics due to data quality issues, recommending server-side tracking for better accuracy and control. Data Warehouse Integration: The rise of data warehouses as central data hubs is a significant trend, allowing for comprehensive, cross-functional analytics. Topics Covered: Product focus, planning cycles, customer engagement, product analytics setup, data warehouse trends, prioritization frameworks, engineering to product transition.

April Dunford

In this episode, April Dunford, a leading authority on product positioning and author of 'Sales Pitch,' discusses effective strategies for pitching and selling products. She shares insights from her extensive experience in marketing and emphasizes the importance of storytelling in sales pitches, aiming to help listeners improve their sales techniques.

Ravi Mehta

Guest: Ravi Mehta - Co-founder and CEO of Outpace. Ravi has held significant product leadership roles at Tinder, Facebook, and Tripadvisor, and is known for his contributions to product strategy and leadership education through Reforge. Key Takeaways: Product Strategy Stack: Ravi introduces a framework to clarify the relationship between mission, strategy, product strategy, roadmap, and goals. This helps teams align on priorities and make informed decisions. Vision in Strategy: Emphasizes the importance of visualizing the product vision with wireframes to ensure team alignment and clarity. Understanding Goals: Ravi suggests focusing on understanding and execution risks before setting outcome-based goals, especially in uncertain areas. Product Management Competencies: Ravi outlines 12 competencies across execution, customer insight, strategy, and leadership, crucial for PM growth and effectiveness. Selective Micromanagement: Encourages leaders to engage deeply and temporarily when teams are off track, providing frameworks to guide them back to autonomy. Topics Covered: Product strategy stack, vision and wireframes, goal setting and understanding risk, product management competencies, selective micromanagement, AI in coaching, differences between startup and big company PM roles.