One Knight in Product

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.

Aligning Teams with Data & Finding Your Second Product/Market Fit (with Matt Arbesfeld, CEO & Co-Founder @ LogRocket)

An interview with Matt Arbesfeld. Matt is a Thiel Fellow and founder of LogRocket, a platfom that helps you understand problems affecting your users, so that you can get back to building great software & great products. Matt is passionate about using data to drive product decisions & helping to align all of the parts of the product trio around what's important for the product.
We talk about a lot, including:
The mission behind LogRocket, how they started out building a tool for developers before realising that product managers were coming and using it too
How he went from a tech internships into company foundership, how this wasn't his first rodeo and how he's known his cofounder since he was 1 month old
Whether they had trouble taking a developer-focused tool, abstracting just the right level of data for non-developer users, and why good UX isn't just for B2C apps
How they validated the need for the product management use case and whether they tried to build everything with the same team or split everything by value stream
The importance of being able to have data to monitor your product feature launches and the types of decisions you can quickly make if you have that data available
How having one source of truth on your product can help to align all parts of the product trio and allow you to make good product decisions
The story behind Thiel Fellowships and whether they help or hinder the tendency for tech firms to hire out of the same exclusive circles
And much more!
Check out LogRocket
If you like the sound of LogRocket and want to check it out, try the LogRocket website?
Contact Matt
You can reach out to Matt on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Supporting Product Managers & Standing Up for the Value of Product Management (with Princess Akari, founder @ PeopleInProduct)

An interview with Princess Akari. Princess is a product manager at Brass where she's helping to disrupt the Nigerian banking industry. She's also passionate about supporting local product managers & standing up for the very value of product management via her community PeopleInProduct, the "Alcoholics Anonymous of Product Management".
We talk about a lot, including:
Her day job as a product manager building mobile applications for a disruptive fintech, and how they're taking on the banking industry in Nigeria
Why someone who starts out with a degree in civil engineering and a job as a structural engineer subsequently moves into product management
Her journey into product management, how it was difficult to get community support to ease the transition and how this gave her the idea to start up her own community
The mission behind PeopleInProduct and how they aim to be a warm, inclusive community where people can share their issues & doubts but also celebrate their successes
The problem with many Nigerian product companies not really understanding the value of product management, and how that manifests itself in the financial packages and the respect they're given
How she feels that there's a need product managers to be more explicit about the value they're creating for the company & standing up for themselves
How everything's always worse for women, how they're discouraged from coding or design and forced into "easy" product management jobs, and then struggle to get their voices heard once they're in there
And much more!
Check out PeopleInProduct
If you like the sound of PeopleInProduct and want to join in, or maybe use it as inspiration to set up your local version, why not check out PeopleInProduct?
Contact Princess
You can reach out to Princess on Twitter, LinkedIn. She also writes on Medium.

Adventures in Product Management (with Dan Olsen, author ”The Lean Product Playbook”)

About the Episode
An interview with Dan Olsen. Dan's a product consultant, text adventure & interactive fiction fanatic and author of 2015's "The Lean Product Playbook", a book that aimed to help people innovate faster with minimum viable products and rapid customer feedback.
We talk about a lot, and try to get as many tenuous 80s gaming references in as possible:
Whether "The Lean Product Playbook", published in 2015, still holds up and how a new generation of product managers are finding it for the first time, and why it wasn't published as a Choose Your Own Adventure book
Given that software is eating the world, whether it's good software and good product companies doing the eating, or whether there's a dastardly bad product Pac-Man on the loose
How his passion for interactive fiction & text adventures was good practice for getting deep into the problem space, and whether product managers even belong there
The need to develop a common vocabulary with users, being able to use the right words and ask the right questions to get the results you need from discovery and prototyping
The key attributes you need on your Character Sheet to be a good product manager, and how a wide dynamic range of abilities can help you succeed in your quest
What to do to battle HIPPOs when they come crashing through the door trying to derail your roadmaps and why it all stems from starting the quarter at 120% capacity and having no protection from incoming Asteroids
The types of tasks that product managers should carry in their limited inventory, and why they need to advocate for the value of hiring other disciplines and not just fill in gaps
And much more!
Buy The Lean Product Playbook
"The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice.."
 
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads. 
Contact Dan
If you want to catch up with Dan, you can reach him on Twitter or his website dan-olsen.com.

Getting On Top Of Your User Stories & Requirements (with Richard Awe, founder @ Requstory)

An interview with Richard Awe. Richard is a Senior Business Analyst with the European Central Bank who got bored writing all those requirements documents & user stories, and decided to build a tool to help him do that at scale. He's now here with Requstory, a platform that aims to help people write user stories fast.
A day in the life of a business analyst at the European Central Bank, the sorts of projects he's working on, and whether banks can ever be truly agile
How he moved from training as a scientist and wannabe process engineer to business analyst because he loved being close to the users & engineers
What a business analyst actually does and how similar it is or isn't to being a product manager or product owner on an agile team
How working on a big project & having to write loads of user stories led him to build a no-code tool to help him do that quicker.. and how interest from friends & colleagues made him decide to make it ready for primetime
How he's managing the user feedback and trying to keep focused on delivering real value rather than any niche feature that comes up
Some of the characteristics of a good or bad user story and how the ultimate point is always to be something that starts off a discussion
When user stories might not work for you, the different types of stories you can use, what some of the alternatives might be & whether they're really just interchangeable
And much more!
Contact Richard
You can reach out to Richard on Twitter or check out Requstory.

Escaping the Build Trap with Product Operations and Strong CPOs (with Melissa Perri, author ”Escaping the Build Trap”)

An interview with Melissa Perri. Melissa is a product leader, educator, board member, consultant, coach and also the author of one of the best books on product management, "Escaping the Build Trap". These days she's an evangelist for the role of product operations and setting up CPOs for success in the executive suite.
We talk about a lot, including:
Revisiting Escaping the Build Trap, what the build trap is, why people find themselves there and why they struggle to get out
How her thinking has evolved since the book, and why she believes that product operations is a critical lever for scaling organisations
What product operations is, how it enables you to scale, and the three pillars of product ops transformation that companies tend to go through
Whether it's fair to label product operations as the revenge of process people or whether that's a total misrepresentation
Why we should always be looking to optimise how we're working, not just sticking to what has worked in the past because it worked in the past
The need for strong CPOs so that product teams have a seat at the top table, why this is essential for product led companies and at what stage you need them
What the CPO role actually involves, what product people need to do to get good at it, and the tendency for product people to lack the confidence for the top table
And much more!
Buy Escaping the Build Trap
"To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. "
Check it out on Amazon, or on Goodreads.
You can also check out book website.
Melissa's new book "Product Operations"
Melissa is writing a new book on product operations with her friend & colleague Denise Tilles. Check out the progress on ProductOperations.com.
Contact Melissa
You can reach out to Melissa on Twitter or check out MelissaPerri.com.

Climbing the Product Management Career Ladder ... and Working Out if it’s For You (with Katerina Suchkova, Founder @ Ahead of Product)

An interview with Katerina Suchkova. Katerina is a product leadership coach with Ahead of Product. She's passionate about helping people up the product management career ladder, and helping them work out how to be their real selves.
We talk about a lot, including:
Her journey into coaching and how much joy it gives her to watch people getting better at what they do and elevating their confidence at work
The product management career ladder, the transition points along the way and whether the ladder actually exists in most companies
Whether the lack of real definition or understanding of the value of product management is actively blocking the existence of such a ladder
The importance of taking a step back and understanding what your own motivations are, being what you want to be not what you think people think you should be
How to manage the transition into product leadership, identifying your strengths & weaknesses and how to handle the conversation with your manager
The importance of widening your perspective to make sure people see your potential for leadership rather than just seeing you as a good individual contributor
The things you need to let go of to be a good leader, what you need to forget and let go of if you want to enable your teams to be the most effective they can be
And much more!
Contact Katerina
You can reach out to Katerina on LinkedIn or check out Ahead of Product.