One Knight in Product

Jenny Wanger's Hot Take - Training Courses Are Useless If You Don't Engage Your Team Afterwards (with Jenny Wanger, Product Consultant & Coach)

Jenny Wanger is a product consultant and coach who loves to educate PMs around the world and is doing just that with her product operations course on Reforge.
Her hot take? Product leaders send their teams off for training but then don't do anything when they come back, and nothing changes. This leads them to question the value of the training, but it's almost never the quality of the training that's at fault, it's what they (don't) do with it.
Find Jenny on LinkedIn and remember to check out her course on Reforge.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
A message from this episode's sponsor - Leadfeeder
This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
Related episodes you should like:
The Role of Product Management on Truly Agile Development Teams (Allen Holub, Software Architect, Consultant & Outspoken Twitter Agilist)
Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude)
Escaping the Build Trap with Product Operations and Strong CPOs (Melissa Perri, Product Management Leader, Educator & Author "Escaping the Build Trap")
OKRs: The Gateway Drug to Agility & Good Product Management (Jeff Gothelf, Product Management Consultant & Co-author "Lean UX" )
The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs)
Going Beyond the Dreaded Product Demo and Creating the Perfect Sales Pitch (April Dunford, Author "Obviously Awesome" and "Sales Pitch")
Enabling Strategic Product Decisions through Product Operations and Portfolio Management (Becky Flint, CEO of Dragonboat)
Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")

Reinventing the Future of Customer Success with Human-First AI (with Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight)

Nick Mehta is the CEO of Gainsight, a leading customer and product experience platform that aims to be the operating system for your customer journeys. He's a passionate advocate for Customer Success as a function and as a business strategy, an author of several books on the topic, and recently super-excited about the future of Customer Success in an AI world. We talked about all of these topics and much more.
A message from this episode's sponsor - Leadfeeder
This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
Episode highlights:
 
1. Customer Success is not the same as Customer Support
Yes, they both have the same "CS" initials, and this can confuse people, but it's not the same role. Customer Success conceptually sits somewhere in between Sales and Customer Support and drives customer value and retention. Customer Success is also more than a role, it's a company strategy. It's also part of the product you sell.
2. The end of the zero-interest-rate climate has had a profound impact on Customer Success
These days, CEOs and investors value profit today over profit tomorrow. Retention is a huge driver of pure profit, and it's one of the highest-leverage activities you can invest in for a recurring revenue business. On the flip side, leaders are looking to become as efficient as possible and reduce the human effort to drive this retention, leading to a requirement for digital customer success strategies.
3. Yes, you probably do need a Customer Success team in your organisation
Chris Degnan (CRO at Snowflake) recently opined on the 20VC podcast that he sees no use for Customer Success teams and would immediately get rid of them. That doesn't work for everyone though, and there are many companies that legitimately need Customer Success teams. It's fair enough to say "Customer Success is a strategy" but someone needs to wake up thinking about this and having it as their biggest priority. Customer expectations are rising all the time, and not all products can look after themselves.
4. Product teams and Customer Success teams need to have a good relationship
Too many teams have almost no relationship, or only speak when there's an escalation. Both teams have a legitimate claim to own the customer experience, but they should own it together. The best Customer Success teams don't just bring escalations, or even the "What" but the "Who" and the "Why". This makes the relationship strategic and helps build a great product.
5. AI is going to change everything, but it has to be human-first
If you're not keeping up with AI you're going to be left behind. It's important to focus on the evolutionary and revolutionary changes that you can bring to your product. There need to be guardrails in your product to ensure that the customer experience doesn't degrade, and you need to be sensitive to the fears and paranoia of internal teams that might feel threatened... but it's going to happen so you need a strategy to survive and thrive in the AI-powered future.
Check out "Digital Customer Success"
"In Digital Customer Success: The Next Frontier, a team of trailblazing Customer Success professionals and digital entrepreneurs delivers an insightful discussion of the next stage in Customer Success management. In the book, you'll discover how to design and deploy touchless and automated digital interventions that help your software users learn and grow as they use your product and unlock the value trapped within it — without ever needing to reach out to a live Customer Success Manager. "
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Nick
You can catch up with Nick on LinkedIn or check out Gainsight. You can also check out the blog post that Nick mentions, The One Thing Billionaire Frank Slootman Got Wrong.
Related episodes you should like:
Is Product-Led Growth Really For You? (Leah Tharin, Product-Led Growth Guru & Head of Product @ Jua)
Embracing Change to Innovate in Product Management (Greg Coticchia, CEO @ Sopheon)
The Big Pivot to Reinvent Product Management (Yana Welinder, Founder & CEO @ Kraftful)
Helping Superhero Startup Founders Stay Away from their Kryptonite (Richard Blundell, Founder @ Vencha & Co-author "The Go To Market Handbook for B2B SaaS Leaders")
Andy Walters' Hot Take - We’re Soon Going to be Living in an AI-Assistant-First World (Andy Walters, CEO @ Emerge Haus & Generative AI Expert)
Bjarte Rettedal's Hot Take - AI Models Should Be Under Public Ownership or Completely Transparent (Bjarte Rettedal, UX Designer)
Greg Prickril's Hot Take - AI is going to change everything for Product Managers (Greg Prickril, B2B Product Management Coach, Consultant & Trainer)
Debbie Levitt's Hot Take - Democratising our Work means AI is Going to Steal all our Jobs Sooner (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck")

Rina Alexin's Hot Take - Our Stakeholders Are Just Doing Their Jobs & Product Managers Need To Understand Them Better (with Rina Alexin, CEO @ Productside)

Rina Alexin is the CEO of Productside, a leading product training and consulting company (formerly known as The 280 Group). Rina is passionate about furthering the craft of product management around the world.
Her hot take? Product managers complain about stakeholders, but they're just doing their jobs and we need to spend some of our energy on understanding them and properly collaborating rather than treating them as annoyances.
Find Rina on LinkedIn or check out Productside
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
 
A message from this episode's sponsor - Leadfeeder
This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
Related episodes you should like:
May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport (May Wong, Product Operations Consultant & Coach)
Untrapping Product Teams and Getting Rid of Bullsh*t Management (David Pereira, Author "Untrapping Product Teams")
Dean Peters' Hot Take - There's More to be Said About the Instagram-ification of Product Management (Dean Peters, Principal Consultant & Trainer @ Productside)
John Cutler's Hot Take - The Instagram-ification of Product Management is Driving us Crazy (John Cutler, Product Educator & Author @ The Beautiful Mess)
Build Better Products at Scale with Product Operations (Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles, Product Consultants & Co-authors "Product Operations")
Knowing your Customers, Seeking Evidence and Sticking up for Continuous Discovery (Hope Gurion, Product Leader and Team Coach @ Fearless Product)
Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")
Applying Product Management Principles to Life (Miloš Belčević, Author "Build Your Way")

Andy Walters' Hot Take - We’re Soon Going to be Living in an AI-Assistant-First World (with Andy Walters, CEO @ Emerge Haus & Generative AI Expert)

Andy Walters is a long-time consultant who has recently focused his consulting work on supporting companies with GenAI adoption with his new firm, Emerge Haus.
His hot take? Within the next few years, we're going to be moving to an AI-assistant-first operating model, and we can't stop it. There are too many financial incentives, but it might actually be better for users too; as consumers, but also potentially for their private lives too.
Find Andy on LinkedIn or check out Emerge Haus
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

Bjarte Rettedal's Hot Take - AI Models Should Be Under Public Ownership or Completely Transparent (with Bjarte Rettedal, UX Designer)

Bjarte Rettedal is a photographer-turned looking to take his interest in behavioural economics and systems thinking and pursue a career in UX design.
His hot take? AI models should be under public ownership or at the very least fully transparent. We don't let people release supplements or medicines without extensive testing, so why are we OK with something as potentially high-impact as AI models?
Find Bjarte on LinkedIn or bjarterettedal.com
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

Greg Prickril's Hot Take - AI is going to change everything for Product Managers (with Greg Prickril, B2B Product Management Coach, Consultant & Trainer)

Greg Prickril is a B2B Product Management coach, consultant and trainer who has gone all-in on AI and is bullish about the impact that he thinks it'll have on product management.
His hot take? AI is going to change everything about product management. It's going to mean fewer jobs are required to deliver products, but it also opens up opportunities for business-focused product managers to make a real impact in their jobs, and accelerate them in doing so.
Find Greg on LinkedIn, Prickril.com or https://www.coachpms.com/
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
A message from this episode's sponsor - Leadfeeder
This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.

May Wong's Hot Take - Product Management is a Team Sport (with May Wong, Product Operations Consultant & Coach)

May Wong is a product operations consultant and coach who also runs ProductTO, an in-person product management meetup in Toronto.
Her hot take? Product management is a team sport, and too much product management literature focuses on what the product manager should do, not what the team should do.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
A message from this episode's sponsor - Leadfeeder
This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.

Untrapping Product Teams and Getting Rid of Bullsh*t Management (with David Pereira, Author "Untrapping Product Teams")

David Pereira is a product leader, speaker and regular blogger who loves to contribute to the wider Agile and Product communities with insights from his own career, including some of the mistakes he's made and not just the successes. David was recently tempted into writing a book, the newly released "Untrapping Product Teams" where he provocatively rails against "bullshit management" and tries to inspire us all to affect change in our organisations (but step-by-step). We talked all about themes from the book, as well as what it meant to have an endorsement from Marty Cagan.
Episode highlights:
 
1. When someone starts doing something differently and delivering value, people get curious
Sometimes it can seem almost impossible to change things yourself, but you don't have to change it all at once. If you can start showing the impact of smaller changes that deliver value then you can get both interest and buy-in from stakeholders. This gives you permission to try more things.
2. The more bullshit you handle the less value you create
David coined the term "bullshit management" to represent the work you have to do in many low-performing product companies. Bullshit management is where you spend all your time working on the work around the work, prioritising requirements with no context and being actively prevented from delivering value to your users, and it has to stop.
3. Collaborative flow trumps coordinative flow
Coordinative flow is when you spend more time in meetings about the work and struggle to align people than you do actually doing the work. It's focused on outputs and gives you someone to blame when it goes wrong. Collaborative flow is when teams come together to work on problems... collaboratively and use what they know to uncover what they don't know.
4. You don't need to die on every hill
Sometimes you have to hold your nose and do things in ways that you don't believe are effective, or actively destructive. This is part and parcel of the job and something you have to get used to. As long as you can find small ways to make an impact in some areas, you can give way in other areas. Rome wasn't built in a day.
5. If you really want to make an impact, ask more questions than you give answers
We're all primed to look clever and give answers as quickly as we can but product people need to think deeper than that and ask good questions. Why do we really need that? What does success really look like? What don't we know?
Check out "Untrapping Product Teams"
"Untrapping Product Teams guides you to simplify what gets unintentionally complicated and equips you to overcome dangerous traps while steadily driving customer and business value. This isn't just another book about product management. It's a thought-provoking guide filled with simplicity, encouraging you to act today for a better tomorrow."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact David
You can catch up with David on LinkedIn or check out his website.
Related episodes you should like:
 
Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude)
Build High Growth Products by Following the Product Science Success Path (Holly Hester-Reilly, Founder @ H2R Product Science)
Pragmatic Digital Transformation in Traditional Industries (Dan Chapman, Director, Product Line Leader @ Merck)
Optimising Product Planning with the Quartz Open Framework (Steve Johnson, Product Coach)
Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant)
Surviving a Lack of Product Thinking & Riding the Product Maturity Curve (Nis Frome, VP Product @ Feedback Loop)
Is this Seriously Game Over for Scrum? (David Pereira, Editor @ Serious Scrum)
Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")