One Knight in Product

Developer Relations & Product Management - Friends or Foes? (with Tessa Kriesel, Head of Platform DevRel @ Snap & Wesley Faulkner, Head of Community @ SingleStore)

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About this Episode
An interview with Tessa Kriesel & Wesley Faulkner. Tessa & Wesley are passionate advocates for the craft of Developer Relations (DevRel), building communities and supporting users of products aimed at developers.
We talk about a lot, including:
What DevRel is, what they love about it and how there's not one boring DevRel person in the world
Their journeys into DevRel and whether there's a standard career path for people trying to get into the trade
The types of companies that need DevRel teams and how the concept of "developer-first" and "developer plus" products informs when you need to spin up a DevRel team
Where DevRel sits within the organisation, the other functions it intersects with and whether it's really just a part of marketing
Why it matters that business leaders understand the true value of DevRel rather than seeing them as one team to do just about anything that comes up
Whether we need DevRel at all when the vast majority of PMs claim to be technical enough to talk to developers anyway
The ways that DevRel and Product teams can work together, some of the things that DevRel teams need from PMs & what they can give back in return
And much more!
Contact Tessa or Wesley (or both!)
If you want to catch up with Tessa, you can reach out to her on Twitter, on Polywork, at TessaKriesel.com or check out Devocate
If you want to catch up with Wesley, you can reach out to him on Twitter, on Polywork or check out his podcast Community Pulse.

Using Solution Tests to Make Sure You’re Building Products Users Want (with Jim Morris, Founder @ Product Discovery Group)

A message about mentoring
I'm passionate about mentoring & think it is a high leverage activity for product managers as they develop in their careers. I mentored 76 people in Q1 2022 but have realised I don't scale so am working with a buddy to match mentors & mentees. Sign up here to be a mentor, mentee or both!
About this Episode
An interview with Jim Morris. Jim's a product discovery & experimentation coach who wants teams to stop wasting their time with discovery if they're not going to do anything with it. He's currently running Product Discovery Group out in Silicon Valley.
We talk about a lot, including:
The goals of Product Discovery Group, the problems he helps to solve, how he got started as a product discovery coach and that time he hung out with Jeff Bezos
How many companies see funding as the ultimate validation of their idea but forget to talk to their customers and check if the idea is actually viable for the business
Why we need to remember that product discovery is not just there as an artificial stage gate to delay decision making and should always serve the overall business goals
How there are bad product companies with good product managers and good product companies with bad product managers, and how Silicon Valley startups are in the same boat as the rest of us when it comes to good product discovery practices
How we can bed product discovery in with leadership, how to persuade them that there's a different way to lead, and how to skill up product teams that have never done product discovery before
The concept of a Solution Test, the importance of presenting multiple solutions, why you have to get interactive rather than just show stuff, and why you should never concentrate on usability first
How to apply structure to your discovery data collection to make it easier to extract insights from the data and turn them into action
And much more!
Contact Jim
You can reach out to Jim on Twitter, on LinkedIn or check out Product Discovery Group.

Building Life-Centred Products with Collaborative Product Discovery (with Sophia Höfling, Co-founder & Head of Product @ Saiga)

A message about mentoring
I'm passionate about mentoring & think it is a high leverage activity for product managers as they develop in their careers. I mentored 76 people in Q1 2022 but have realised I don't scale so am working with a buddy to match mentors & mentees. Sign up here to be a mentor, mentee or both!
About this Episode
An interview with Sophia Höfling. Sophia is a former Head of Product at Babbel and now co-founder and Head of Product at Saiga, a Berlin-based productivity startup where they're aiming to save people from life admin. Sophia's passionate about life-centred design and collaborative product discovery.
We talk about a lot, including:
The mission behind Saiga and how they have started with a Wizard of Oz product as they try to work out the most important problems to solve
The tricky transition from established product companies to new startup foundership and having to do everything yourself
The concept of life-centred design and why we can't just listen to users but have to consider the holistic impact of our products on all stakeholders
What to do when your customers don't care about the ethical merits of your product but you want to do the right thing anyway
The importance of collaborative, rather than cooperative, product discovery and how to include people from outside the classic product trio in your discovery journey
Whether doing all this discovery slows you down, whether that's OK and the importance of timeboxing discovery efforts to avoid getting caught in an infinite loop
How to get buy-in for product discovery from sceptical leadership and convince them of the benefits of a good discovery flywheel
And much more!
Sophia's on Medium
Check out Sophia's articles on Medium, including
It’s time we move to life-centered product development
The importance of collaboration in product discovery (and how to get it right)
Contact Sophia
If you want to catch up with Sophia, you can reach out to her on LinkedIn.

Using the Power of Community to Grow Your Startup (with Anna Maste, Founder @ Boondockers Welcome & Subscribe Sense)

An interview with Anna Maste. Anna is a software developer turned company co-founder who set up Boondockers Welcome with her mum. Having never owned an RV or had any dealings with the community, Anna engaged with said community via her mum's influencer status and ended up scaling the business and exiting. She's now back with her second company and going for it again in another industry.
We talk about a lot, including:
Explaining what the heck a "boondocker" is to this Brit, the problems they where having that were worth solving, and how they created a mix of Airbnb and Tinder to solve it
Whether starting a company with your mum is the ultimate Mom Test and the pros and cons of working with close family members
How she had no experience with the RV community, but used her RV influencer mum's experience to understand the needs that the community had and how they might solve them
Some of the challenges of creating a digital platform for people that are by definition "off grid" and how the platform grew over time as mobile technology improved
Whether playing the long game and working to build community relationships would have been possible if they'd been forced down the growth at all costs VC route
How their successful exit came about, how they had to pick a company that they could trust to carry on their good name, and whether the community felt it was a betrayal or sell out
How she's started a new company to solve a problem she had in her first company, and how she's going about engaging with a brand new community for the second time
And much more!
Contact Anna
If you want to catch up with Anna, you can reach out to her on Twitter or check out Subscribe Sense.

Pragmatic Digital Transformation in Traditional Industries (with Dan Chapman, Director, Product Line Leader @ Merck)

An interview with Dan Chapman. Dan is a British export to the US where he's busy building internal products to help make smart scientists more successful. Dan's strong on product principles but flexible on the details as he tries to transfer book talk into action for one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
We talk about a lot, including:
His work with Merck, how there are actually two Mercks and a summary of the differences between them and why they diverged
The challenges & opportunities of working in product management when your end users are hardcore scientists, and whether this is the one time you actually do need to be an industry expert to be an effective product manager
Whether situations like the Theranos scandal loom large over the medical research industry, and how "move fast & break things" doesn't work when people's lives are on the line
That tricky balancing act where you're trying to be agile and move fast whilst working for a company (and an industry) that values process, predictability & compliance
Whether working for a big multinational means he's defaulted to having to use SAFe and why legacy waterfall companies are attracted to such frameworks
Whether being an introvert in product management is a barrier or a superpower, and how to survive all the meetings & presentations when your natural tendency is not to want to be in the room
Why idealistic product principles only get you so far, how to work out which ones matter, which don't, and why waterfall might actually be the better option sometimes (🤢)
And much more!
Contact Dan
If you want to catch up with Dan, you can reach out to him on LinkedIn or on Twitter.

Understanding & Interrupting Cognitive Biases in Product Design (with David Dylan Thomas, Author ”Design for Cognitive Bias”)

An interview with David Dylan Thomas. David is a product designer and self-taught expert in cognitive bias. He's now consulting with companies to help them make ethical product design decisions and is the author of "Design for Cognitive Bias", a book that aims to help us all understand the implicit biases that underpin our decision making when we design products.
We talk about a lot, including:
How he got into writing and consulting about cognitive biases in the first place, whether you need to go back to college to learn about this stuff and whether it's intimidating having your work reviewed by academic experts
Why we have cognitive biases, how our brains are constantly lying to us, and how we'd struggle to cope with having to make a trillion decisions a day without them
The importance of taking complicated scientific concepts back to a human level and making sure you can explain things like you would to a five-year-old
How cognitive biases can manifest themselves when we're designing products, the most common biases that we might come across, and why the framing bias is by far the most dangerous bias of all
Why it's sometimes important to insert speed bumps into our products rather than continuously trying to optimise for speedy decision making
Some of the ways to interrupt cognitive biases in product design, including the red team / blue team approach and the Black Mirror test
The importance of participatory design and giving the people most affected by bias the power to decide when something that affects them is actually ready to go
And much more!
Buy "Design For Cognitive Bias"
"We humans are messy, illogical creatures who like to imagine we’re in control—but we blithely let our biases lead us astray. In Design for Cognitive Bias, David Dylan Thomas lays bare the irrational forces that shape our everyday decisions and, inevitably, inform the experiences we craft. "
 
Visit the book website or check it out on Goodreads.
Contact David
If you want to catch up with David, you can reach out to him at https://www.daviddylanthomas.com

Building Disruptive Products by Harnessing Power Users (with Moustapha Seck, Founder @ Fluid)

An interview with Moustapha Seck. Moustapha is a seasoned product professional and entrepreneur who cut his teeth in Canada before being inspired to go back to Africa to use his product management skills to build solutions for the poorest Africans. He's doing this with his new startup, Fluid, which aims to help derisk financial inclusion for marginalised communities.
We speak about a lot, including:
How he started out in engineering and moved into product management after finding that he got more joy out of working with & designing solutions for his users
The core elements of product management, how they're not complicated individually but difficult to execute consistently, and how mentors can help you understand what's OK and what's not
His journey from Canada to Africa to Canada to Africa and how the classic book Zero to One inspired him to tackle meaningful problems for Africa's poorest communities
How Africa has a lot of opportunities to fix things as so many basic things don't work, how he identified the key problem to solve and the research he had to do to validate his idea
The importance of leaving technology out of it when dealing with marginalised communities & how you have to do way more listening than talking in order to build trust
His desire for entrepreneurs and investors to look across Africa, not just concentrate on the biggest markets and how to pick the right markets to enter into there
Why it's important to enlist power users to build advocacy and help you co-create solutions in traditional industries that are not used to trying out new solutions
The need to keep your power users close, but not too close as you try to work out how to build for the wider market and prepare to scale the business
And much more!
Check out Saeed Khan's episode
Moustapha called out some mentors that have shaped his product management career, including my good friend & previous podcast guest Saeed Khan.
Check out Check out Saeed's episode here!
Check out Fluid
If you're interested in Moustapha's company or the mission behind it, you can check out fluidfinance.co.
Contact Moustapha
You can find Moustapha on LinkedIn.

We’re All Responsible For Accessible Product Design (with Holly Schroeder, Senior UX Researcher & Accessibility Advocate)

An interview with Holly Schroeder. Holly is a Senior UX Researcher and passionate accessibility advocate who wants us all to get better at including everyone in our product design choices. She's also a recent contributor to a new UX book, 97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know.
We speak about a lot, including:
Her life as a UX researcher, the tension between business needs & user needs and the need to be pragmatic when finding a balance between the two
Her passion for making sure that we design our products with accessibility in mind, and how come we're still in a situation where people aren't thinking about accessibility as a matter of course
How only 3% of websites have been verified as accessible by the accessibility organisation WebAIM, and how we would feel if only 3% of buildings had ramps or 3% of pavements had dropped kerbs or curb cuts
Some of the worst offenders when talking about (lack of) accessible design, how people are failing to get even the simple things right, how it's not just about screen readers, and how accessibility overlays are just putting lipstick on a pig
Why we shouldn't be surprised that people aren't learning about accessibility when coding courses & boot camps don't even mention accessibility in passing
Whether it's fair enough for startups to make the choice to "go fast and break things" and ignore accessibility, why we might consider slowing things down, and whether this is all the fault of tiresome tech bros
The importance of including people with disabilities in user testing, but how accessibility is everyone's problem and how we shouldn't just rely on disabled people to do our homework for us
And much more!
Buy "97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know"
"Tap into the wisdom of experts to learn what every UX practitioner needs to know. With 97 short and extremely useful articles, you'll discover new approaches to old problems, pick up road-tested best practices, and hone your skills through sound advice."
 
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Check out Holly's extensive library of a11y resources
Holly has collated, and continues to maintain, an excellent list of accessibility resources. Check it out!
Contact Holly
You can find Holly on Twitter.