One Knight in Product
Episodes
Sunday Feb 28, 2021
Sunday Feb 28, 2021
An interview with Büşra Coşkuner. Büşra is a Product Consultant & Coach who works with organisations and individuals to embed Product Management principles.
We speak about a lot, including:
Practical Product Management - you can't learn all of the frameworks
How her experience in Berlin helped but also hindered her move to a different working culture in Switzerland
The challenge of the acronym "MVP" and how no two people think it means the same thing
Companies where leaders don't have product thinking or worse still think they have product thinking
The importance of demonstrating product thinking not just talking about it and being idealistic
How important No Code solutions are for the Product community and what they unlock for busy Product teams
The challenges of being a woman in tech and seeing things in retrospect, and her trepidation of being a working mum
And much more!
Friday Feb 26, 2021
Friday Feb 26, 2021
An interview with Candice Poon. Candice is a Program Manager at Microsoft (which is really a Product Manager at any other company) working on Microsoft Edge. Candice recently caused a stir on Twitter when she tweeted about her experience being prevented from signing up to Clubhouse because of her name.
We speak about a lot, including:
What it's like working for Microsoft and ensuring Internet Explorer stays in its coffin
Whether being called a Program Manager is confusing and whether she still gets invited to Product Manager parties
How she felt being blocked from signing up to Clubhouse and whether it's happened before
How Clubhouse responded and whether the response was satisfactory
Some of the reasons why people have blind spots when developing products and what we should do to fix them
How Microsoft are promoting diversity & what's left to do
The importance of mixing tech and non-tech skills to further diversify your experience
And much more!
Tuesday Feb 23, 2021
Tuesday Feb 23, 2021
Kate is a consultant who advises organisations how to build Product teams and practices. She is also the author of "Hiring Product Managers: Using Product EQ to go beyond culture and skills", a book that aims to help hire effective Product leaders in the first place, or develop Product leaders that are struggling to make an impact.
We talk about a lot, including:
How her experience hiring Product leaders helped her write a book about it, and how hard it was to keep it succinct
How hot shot VPs / Heads of Product can fail if they rely too much on technical skills, and how as an industry we focus too much on hiring for them
How long to stick with Product leaders before having that difficult conversation about their next move
How new leaders often aren't set up for success through lack of coaching, and just left to get on with it
The importance of a shared understanding of what the job role entails, and not just copying and pasting job descriptions from Google
The problem with "Cultural Fit" and how you need different puzzle pieces and not a stack of the same
How neurodiversity fits into a high EQ world and how to adapt hiring processes to cater for different ways of thinking
What progress we've made with advancing women in Product Management, and what hasn't changed at all
And much more!
Sunday Feb 21, 2021
Sunday Feb 21, 2021
An interview with Deepti Tadala. Deepti is a Technical Product Manager with Synacor, a technology firm based in upstate New York, and a former management consultant with Deloitte. She's also a Founding 200 Member at Product School, former Content Lead for Products by Women, and a member of Toastmasters International.
We talk about a lot, including:
The difference between Technical Product Managers and non-Technical Product Managers
The importance, even as a TPM, of having close contact with customers and considering the market
How working as a Management Consultant for Deloitte prepared her for Product Management, and how it didn't
The troubles of getting that first Product Management job when racing against the immigration clock
Learning to be a Product Manager and the importance of walking the walk
Her passion for education and using her story to inspire others and pay it forward
The importance of learning public speaking skills even if you don't want to speak publicly
The importance of having a platform for women to share experiences and support each other
Her power morning schedule and what it helps her to achieve
Friday Feb 19, 2021
Friday Feb 19, 2021
An interview with Cindy Alvarez. Cindy is Director of Customer Research at GitHub, the world's leading software development platform. Cindy has long experience in customer research with GitHub, Yammer, Microsoft and Kissmetrics. She also wrote the leading book on customer research, 2014's Lean Customer Development which aims to guide teams to build products their customers need.
We speak about a lot, including:
What it's like doing customer research with the world's largest community of software engineers
The importance of testing your customer interview questions and working out what does and doesn't work
The importance of empathy, keeping down-to-earth and being someone customers feel comfortable talking to
Whether a Bachelor's in Psychology helps her to play mind games with her subjects (mwahahaha)
Why she wrote the book, how she did it, and whether she's going to write another one
How to answer some of the common objections to customer interviews, and how ensure you can build a culture of speaking with customers directly
How to optimise for Continuous Discovery and ensure you get a flow of customer feedback and learning
And much more!
Tuesday Feb 16, 2021
Tuesday Feb 16, 2021
An interview with Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia. Carlos is the Founder and CEO of Product School, the global leader in product management training with a community of over one million product professionals. Product School instructors are real-world Product Leaders working at top companies including Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber, and Amazon.
We talk about a lot, including:
How a lack of Product training resources when he started led him to start a Product Management training start up
How he fills his days at CEO of the largest Product Management learning community
How he ensures that, as the leading Product Management learning community, he isn't seen as all size, no quality
His passion for lifelong learning and giving away as much free content as possible
What led him to write The Product Book with Josh Anon and what he expected to achieve from it
How MBAs are great but they don't really prepare people to execute as Product Managers
His and Product School's commitment to inclusion & diversity on their team, their instructors and their attendees
And much more!
Saturday Feb 13, 2021
Saturday Feb 13, 2021
An interview with Melanie McKay. Melanie is the Head of Consumer Product at Rightmove, the UK's #1 property marketplace. She has worked in a number of Product Management roles, and took an interesting move into secondary school teaching in the middle. Since coming back to Product she's gone from strength to strength, including an appearance at Product School's ProductCon.
We talk about a lot, including:
How Product works at the biggest property marketplace in the UK and whether you get loads of weird requests you get when your TAM is pretty much the entire UK population
How she got into Product by mistake, and what she did to get good at it with no good information to lead her
Whether it is in fact harder for new PMs now because there is too much competing information for them
How her passion for education got her into teaching, how it was teaching computing to kids, and why she came back
What her experience of teaching taught her that she can use in her Product Management career
Getting involved with ProductCon and the importance of going outside of your comfort zone
Her well-received take on the classic PM Venn diagram, and how it's gone down with the PM community
And much more!
Wednesday Feb 10, 2021
Wednesday Feb 10, 2021
James is a Delivery Manager for Discovery Inc., a VOD entertainment platform. James is a passionate advocate for using story points for just about everything, and using data to inform delivery decisions. We speak about a few topics, including:
How to bring delivery together across multiple technical streams for a big media company
The interplay between Delivery and Product and the importance of a good Product Manager
How to get Product, Delivery & Engineering to work harmoniously
How story points can save the world and how to use them properly
Whether Scrum is any good and some of the ways to make it work for your business
The tricky balance between Product Delivery and fixing tech debt
How to use the data you already have to help inform future delivery decisions
How to use data to sell your message to the leadership team
How running a band and running Product Delivery are pretty similar
And much more!