One Knight in Product

How to Manage Imposter Syndrome in Product Management (with Phyllis Njoroge, author ”From Fraud to Freedom”)

An interview with Phyllis Njoroge. Phyllis is a product manager, cognitive scientist and now author of "From Fraud to Freedom". Phyllis wants us all to know that imposter syndrome is something that can be tackled, and wrote a book to help us examine how to tackle an issue that affects many product managers due to the ambiguity of our roles.
We speak about a lot, including:
Her book, from Fraud to Freedom, and how it digs into what Imposter Syndrome actually is and whether everyone has it
Her journey into product management, and whether going into an industry she had no experience in made her imposter syndrome worse
The problems of getting into self-reinforcing negative feedback loops and the ways you might intervene to stop you sabotaging yourself
How imposter syndrome isn't just in your head but can be imposed on marginalised groups by a society that gives every impression that you don't belong there
How imposter syndrome isn't something that goes away with seniority or perceived success, and how these might even make it worse
Whether her background in cognitive sciences informed the book, and how she used that background to examine the cognitive biases that reinforce imposter syndrome
Whether product managers are more prone to imposter syndrome due to the vague, ambiguous nature of many product management roles
And much more!
Buy From Fraud to Freedom
"From Fraud to Freedom is a book about how we all play a part in contributing to or calming impostor syndrome. It’s a solution-oriented book that discusses methods for individuals, mentors, managers, and friends to manage their own impostor syndrome and helps others in the process too. Even though an estimated 70% of people experience impostor syndrome, the guidance in this book is not one-size-fits-all but filled with a range of intrapersonal and interpersonal methods to achieve your best self."
 
Visit The Book Website for more info.
Contact Phyllis
You can find Phyllis on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Product Leadership is Hard - Let‘s Get Better At It (with Ebenezer Ikonne, author ”Becoming a Leader in Product Development”)

An interview with Ebenezer Ikonne. Eb is an experienced product leader and social scientist who wanted to contribute to the product leadership community. To support this goal, he's recently published a book, "Becoming a Leader in Product Development" which aims to help us all take a long, hard look at our leadership practices and make us the best leaders we can be.
We speak about a lot, including:
How most leaders are winging it, with teams that are successful in spite of the leader in question, and how effective teams can hide ineffective managers
The chain of leadership mediocrity; how people are left to work out leadership on their own, with their only role models being people that were left to work it out on their own
Why the world needed another leadership book and how he sees it as the healthy alternative to "microwave thought leadership" & meaningless leadership memes
Whether we need "assigned leaders" these days in this lean & agile world and whether it's really true that "everyone's a leader"
What good leadership looks like, and why it should be more than whether the job got done but how the job got done
The often discussed, poorly understood concept of servant leadership, what it really means, why it's important and whether it can be taken too far
Why it's so important to take care of yourself as a product leader, how leadership is hard and how you can't be a good leader if you don't take care of yourself
And much more!
 
Buy Becoming A Leader in Product Development
"It is becoming increasingly challenging for product development leaders to effectively lead as workplace demands continue to increase. The rate of change in technology, society, and business places immense pressure on leaders to ensure their groups move in the direction of their goals. What might have worked in the past no longer works."
 
Visit Amazon or Goodreads for more info.
Check out "Joy at Work"
Eb has a YouTube channel! Check it out Joy at Work.
Contact Eb
You can find Eb on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Building Effective Technical Skills for Product Managers (with Irene Yu, founder @ Skiplevel)

An interview with Irene Yu. Irene is a former software developer for up-and-coming everything store Amazon, where she found herself mentoring non-technical product managers to help them get better at tech. Inspired by her success, she left to found Skiplevel, a technical training startup aimed at teach actually useful tech skills to product managers & non tech founders.
We talk about a lot, including:
The mission behind Skiplevel and how she's trying to provide a good and easy place to learn useful technical knowledge for non-engineering tech workers
What being technical means, why being technical is helpful, and the importance of giving PMs and founders confidence to have constructive conversations with engineering
The target audience for Skiplevel and whether it's suitable for the wider business or focused relentlessly on PMs and founders
Why learning to code is not the best way to learn technical skills and how learning a broad set of technical concepts is superior
The four pillars of technical knowledge that Skiplevel teaches and how they contribute to helping people go wide not deep
Whether product managers even need to be technical, whether coding interviews are appropriate, and why companies use them
The potential risks of people knowing enough to contribute but not enough to make decisions, but then trying to make them anyway
And much more!
Check out Skiplevel
If you want to get better at tech & go beyond learning how to code toy apps for the sake of it, why not check out Skiplevel.co?
Contact Irene
You can reach out to Irene on Twitter.

Leading & Evolving Product Teams Through Hyperscale (with Brian Shen, Product Director @ ClickUp)

An interview with Brian Shen. Brian is Product Director and head of Product Ops at ClickUp, an all-in-one productivity platform that you've definitely seen an advertisement for recently. ClickUp are taking aim at JIRA and other productivity platforms and aim to "save you one day a week". The company is on a hypergrowth path and Brian is trying to ensure the team remains effective along the way.
We talk about a lot, including:
What ClickUp does, how it's different from other productivity tools, and how they can "save you one day a week"
How they can avoid becoming the next JIRA, and how they aim to keep UX at the centre & develop a fully integrated solution
How they use Product Ops at ClickUp and whether it's fair to label Product Ops as merely "process people" or whether they're strategic enabler for the business
How using ClickUp within the product team helps them to build a tool that helps product people build products using ClickUp
Some of the challenges of running a product team during hypergrowth & some of the things they've had to change along the way
The problems with "unintentional communication", why you have to vary your message for your audience and the importance of telling a coherent story
How to prepare for a live talk to thousands of people at your company conferences and how stretch experiences like this help you become a better leader
And much more!
Check out ClickUp
If ClickUp sounds good to you, and you want to see if you can save one day a week, why not check out ClickUp.com?
Contact Brian
You can reach out to Brian on LinkedIn.

Breaking Down Silos in Product Development (with Sigurd Seteklev, co-founder @ Kitemaker)

An interview with Sigurd Seteklev. Sigurd is the co-founder of Y Combinator backed Kitemaker, a startup that is trying to enable true cross-team collaboration and empowered product development teams. He is keen to ensure that people have the ability to step beyond JIRA, and boldy claims to be the tool that "people who want to work like Marty Cagan says" should use.
The story behind Kitemaker, the problems they're trying to solve, and why you need to step beyond bug trackers
Why it's critical to empower cross-team collaboration and getting everyone into the same tool so they don't have to log in everywhere
How they're hoping to use Kitemaker to help drive home "proper" product practices but how it's not possible to solve it with software alone
Whether he's trying to force people to work in a very specific way or whether they believe in flexibility in the process
The problem with dogmatically following product processes & going through the motions & the importance of cultural change
How good product development teams all look different, whilst not good teams look similar, and some of the hallmarks of good teams
How you might try to change a company that isn't working the way you want to work, and the importance of matching type of company to your interests
And much more!
Check out Kitemaker
If Kitemaker sounds good to you, why not check out Kitemaker.co and see what the fuss is about?
Contact Sigurd
You can reach out to Sigurd on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Can Sales & Product Really Get Along? (with Brendan McAdams, author ”Sales Craft”)

An interview with Brendan McAdams. Brendan is a long time Enterprise SaaS salesman and author of "Sales Craft", a book he hopes will help salespeople and even tech founders get better at selling their products. Brendan is keen to stand up for the sales team, the value they add to customer relationships, and work out how we can make sure sales & product teams can work together more effectively.
We speak about a lot, including:
His book Sales Craft and how he wanted to write a very practical book to help to take the mystery out of sales
The tension between sales & product management, some of the ways the sales team can bridge the gap, and why sales is a team sport
Why it's important for salespeople to avoid Columbo "One More Thing" features and how they have to be prepared to walk away from a deal
The problems with salespeople being prepared to go out, promise anything the client asks for and dumping a bag of manure on the product team's desk
Why sales is like poker, having to play the hand you've been dealt, and how empowering it can be to say to no to a request you can't serve
How sales discovery intersects with product discovery, the importance of getting product people into the field, and whether salespeople have a wide enough view of the market
What Product-Led Growth means to him as a salesperson, and whether he thinks it's applicable to all stages of a product
And much more!
Buy Sales Craft
"Sales Craft isn't like most sales books. It isn't proposing a new sales process or a system to 10X your income. Instead, it offers up a series of simple but thought-provoking tips and ideas about how to enhance your sales effectiveness."
 
Visit Amazon or Goodreads for more info.
Contact Brendan
You can find Brendan on BrendanMcAdams.com or Twitter

Protecting Vulnerable Users by Designing for Safety (with Eva PenzeyMoog, author ”Design for Safety”)

Trigger warning: Please be aware that this episode contains references to domestic abuse
An interview with Eva PenzeyMoog. Eva is a designer and former volunteer rape crisis counselor, who wants to encourage us all to consider the harm that we may be inadvertently causing through our product design decisions. She's the author of new book "Design for Safety" as well as the founder of the Inclusive Safety Project.
We speak about a lot, including:
The core message of her new book, Design for Safety, and some of the surprising feedback she has gotten so far
Whether there has been any negative feedback for the book from people who don't want to admit that there is any problem at all
How difficult it was to research the book, the importance of validating survivors of abuse and ensuring they can share on their terms
Some of the most common low-hanging fruit that people should look at in their products to start making them safer for users
Whether responsibility for the harm caused by products belongs to the teams building them or the company leaders reaping the rewards
How product teams can do a safety audit and start to bake safety into their ongoing product design processes
How to help product design teams get into the habit of sensitively interviewing the right people to understand the safety implications of their products
Whether there's any hope for big tech firms to self-regulate or whether governmental regulation is the only way
And much more!
Buy Design for Safety
"'How will our product hurt people?' As web workers, we don’t often ask this question—but we should. Too often, we design for idealized circumstances, even though our users bring a range of complicated personal dynamics to every interaction. When we fail to explicitly design for vulnerable users, we unintentionally prioritize their abusers. Eva PenzeyMoog explains how even the most well-intentioned design can be weaponized for interpersonal harm. Through poignant, all-too-common examples, Eva demonstrates how to identify a design’s potential for abuse, how to avoid and mitigate the damage, and how to bake safety into every step of the design process. We can’t build good digital products unless we recognize that our users’ safety, and lives, are at stake."
 
Visit the book website for more info.
If you need further resources on safety
If you want to learn more about some of the issues raised in this episode or in the book, Eva has curated a list of resources for designing for safety & related topics.
Contact Eva
You can find Eva at The Inclusive Safety Project or Twitter

Creating Sustainable Products with Conscious Design (with Ian Peterman, co-author ”Conscious Design”)

An interview with Ian Peterman. Ian is the CEO at Peterman Design Firm, where he aims to help design more sustainable & ethical products. He's also trying to bring this thinking to the world with his podcast and new book, both called Conscious Design. He's also created the Peterman Method, aiming to put a process around the principles and ensure we leave legacies we can be proud of.
We speak about a lot, including:
The goals behind Peterman Design Firm, the problems they solve & why they lean towards physical products
How being a very ethically focused company impacts the types of clients they attract and whether they have to turn anyone down
The importance of enabling companies to take baby steps rather than limiting your impact by only focusing on companies that want to go all in
Why he & his wife decided to write the Conscious Design book, and how their different professional backgrounds contributed to the thinking inside it
What Conscious Design is, and how the four pillars of Conscious Design enable us to assess the environmental & social impact of our products
The Peterman Method that he created and how it enables Conscious Design by putting a process on top of the pillars
Why it's important for companies to be conscious of the legacy the they create for their product, their brand and the impact they have on the world
And much more!
 
Buy Conscious Design
"If you are building products and brands with regeneration and sustainability in mind, we appreciate you! We hope this book will give you some ideas on how to implement Conscious Design by using the Peterman Method with your own project."
 
Visit the book website for more info.
Listen to the Conscious Design podcast
If you have any time after listening to all of my episodes, why not try out Conscious Design Podcast and find out more about Ian's work?
Contact Ian
You can find Ian on Peterman Design Firm or LinkedIn