One Knight in Product

Maintaining Radical Focus and Staying on Strategy with OKRs (with Christina Wodtke, Author "Radical Focus" & "The Team That Managed Itself")

An interview with Christina Wodtke. Christina is the award-winning author of a variety of seminal books, including "The Team That Managed Itself" and "Radical Focus". Christina is passionate about creating empowered, high-performing organisations and helping them to focus on their most important strategic goals using OKRs (Objectives & Key Results).
We talk about a lot, including:
How "Radical Focus" came about in the first place, and why now is the time for the Second Edition
How her book differs from "Measure What Matters", whether John Doerr is riding on her coat tails and whether they talk at parties
How she set out to write a practical OKR playbook rather than a theoretical document, and why she felt the need to put tons and tons of examples in the second edition
The circumstances that led her to realise that OKRs were the way forward and why she became so passionate about teaching them
Why you shouldn't use OKRs to manage everything but use them as a strategic tool to focus on what's most important, and deciding what not to do
Why companies shouldn't just jump straight to OKRs without having some of the prerequisites and a culture to support them
The importance of empowered teams, letting go of micromanagement and thinking that your job is to tell people what to do
Why setting a good OKR review cadence is often more important than agonising over setting perfect OKRs
How the concept of a fixed mindset applies not to just people but companies too, and how companies have to be comfortable with failure
Where you shouldn't use OKRs, the types of team or companies where it just doesn't make sense, and why OKRs aren't just rebadged task lists
And much more!
Buy Radical Focus (2nd Edition)
"The award-winning author of The Team That Managed Itself and Pencil Me In returns with a new and expanded edition of her landmark book on OKRs. Struggling to adopt Objectives and Key Results? Radical Focus teaches you everything you need."
 
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Christina
If you want to catch up with Christina, you can reach her on Twitter or her website wodtke.com.

The Philosophy of Product Design (with Udhaya Kumar Padmanabhan, Global Strategic Design Director at Designit)

An interview with Udhaya Kumar Padmanabhan. Udhaya is Global Strategic Design Director at Designit, a global design firm working in all areas of design. Udhaya is a passionate advocate for good design principles, demystifying design practices and applying form to the formless.
We talk about a lot, including:
His work with Designit, and how the design community is flourishing in Bangalore (the Silicon Valley of India)
How he started out as a computer scientist & mathematician but somehow ended up in design and not data science
The difference between product management, product design and UX design and where it all sits in a good product company
Whether you need specific domain experience to be a product designer or whether any designer can get into product design
The importance of up front collaboration with UX & product design and ensuring you're not just throwing stuff over the wall
How easy it is to rescue bad design that you've inherited, when you need to start again, and what to do if you can't
The importance of stepping back and hearing people out and not just preaching at people, and how design is about being in the relationship business
The importance of "giving form to the formless" and applying good design principles outside of traditional user interfaces
Contact Udhaya
If you want to catch up with Udhaya, you can reach him on LinkedIn.

From Engineer to Product Leader & Getting Away from the "How" (with Rekha Venkatakrishnan, Senior Manager, Group PM @ Walmart)

An interview with Rekha Venkatakrishnan. Rekha is a Senior Manager in Group Product Management for Walmart Global Tech, supporting Walmart offices around the world in building great product experiences. She's also a passionate advocate for advancing women in data, tech & product and a chapter lead for Women in Product in San Francisco.
We speak about a lot, including:
What it's like working in product for a giant like Walmart, in a global, distributed product team
Whether an organisation like Walmart can be truly agile or whether it's stuck in the past
How a move from Walmart to Oracle went wrong and why she ended up back at Walmart
How she started as an engineer in India before starting to query the "What" and the "Why" naturally moved her towards product management
Some of the challenges of going from an engineering mindset to product mindset, and getting away from trying to specify the "How"
How she prioritised practical, hands on experience and hadn't even heard of places like Product School
How her passion for communication & education led her to ironically become a trainer for Product School
Her work with Women in Product and the initiatives she's working on to help support women in the product community
Why it's important to be able to make mistakes as long as you learn from them
And much more!
Contact Rekha
You can contact Rekha on LinkedIn.

Data-Driven Decisions & the Product Engagement Score (with Stephanie Tanzar, Director of PM @ Pendo)

An interview with Stephanie Tanzar, Director of Product Management at Pendo. Stephanie talks about her passion for product management and product analytics, the new Product Engagement Score metric and some great advice for becoming more data-driven.
We talk about a lot, including:
The differences between stages of companies, how she's lived them all and what she prefers now
Whether being in a hypergrowth company with a massive user base makes it easier to say no
What it's like being a product manager at a company that serves a user base of product managers
How a passion for human / computer interaction nearly led to a PhD but instead sparked a passion for product management
Why data is important and the role of gut feel in product management decisions
What the Product Engagement Score is, what it tells you, and whether it's actually useful or just something to get people to use Pendo
Whether Pendo are putting their money where their mouth is and using the score to drive their own decisions
Examples of good decisions that have been made so far using Product Engagement Score as a basis
Whether NPS's time is up or whether it's valuable alongside data such as the Product Engagement Score
Why you don't have to be perfect to be data-driven, and that just taking it one step at a time is still valuable
The different lagging and leading indicators that can be used to drive product decisions
About the Product Engagement Score
Stephanie wants you to start using the PES to measure your product engagement. Find out more about that on the Product Engagement Score website.
Contact Stephanie
If you want to catch up with Stephanie, you can reach her on LinkedIn or go and sign up for Pendo.
PS - If you want check whether Stephanie's answers match up with our previous Pendo guest, check out Christine Itwaru.

Is this Seriously Game Over for Scrum? (with David Pereira, Head of PM @ Virtual Identity, Editor @ Serious Scrum)

An interview with David Pereira. David is Head of Product Management at Virtual Identity, a product development agency. He's also a prolific author and educator, and contributing editor to Serious Scrum.
We talk about a lot, including:
The fun and games when working for a company transitioning from a project to product-led mindset
The importance of meeting in the middle and making iterative progress, not aiming for perfection on day one
How he got his first job as a product owner completely by mistake whilst studying on an English immersion course
How he developed his product skills on the job through making multiple mistakes and iterating
The debate between Product Owner and Product Manager as job titles, and the trend for Product Owners to be hired as order takers in feature factories
How he got into writing over 100 articles and becoming a contributing editor to Serious Scrum on Medium
What he means by "The Game Being Over" for Scrum and some of the problems with the framework
Some of the issues he sees with SAFe as a successor for Scrum, and how it's really waterfall in disguise
The importance of a solid growth mindset and not going stale, and some of the ways he tries to keep ahead of the crowd
Contact David
If you want to catch up with David, you can reach him on LinkedIn, Twitter or read his work on Medium.
 

From Physiotherapist to Product Manager (with Samuel Ogunkoya, Product Manager @ ProducteevTech)

An interview with Samuel Ogunkoya. Samuel is a product management intern at ProducteevTech, a product development agency. Samuel started his career as a physiotherapist before deciding to focus on a different type of user pain, and shares some of his learnings from his journey so far.
We talk about a lot, including:
How he serendipitously landed his first product management job
What made him decide to switch from physiotherapy into product management in the first place
How his passion for people and his broad interest in technology has affected both parts of his career
Whether his interest in product management was useful in his physiotherapy career, and how he treated his services as a product
How his experience with patients and patients' families helped him develop empathy that he now takes forward to his users & stakeholders
How he developed a strong dislike for micromanagement from past experience, and how he pushes against this in his product management career
The resources he used to skill up in product management, and how he prefers hands on sessions to book training
How he explained product management to his friends and family and how they reacted when he told them about the change
Advice for others following him into product management
Contact Samuel
You can find Samuel on Twitter, LinkedIn or Samuel's website.

Product-Led Growth - Game Over for the Sales Team? (with Wes Bush, author "Product-Led Growth" & founder @ ProductLed)

An interview with Wes Bush. Wes is the founder of ProductLed, a company aiming to teach the world how to build products that sell themselves. He's also the author of the book "Product-Led Growth".
We speak about a lot, including:
How a career in B2B SaaS working in demand generation started to make him suspect that there was another way to generate demand
How his passion for simplifying led him to start simplifying product onboarding to allows users to get to value sooner
The problems of moving from sales-led to product-led when you haven't spent any time on your product's UX
The problems of enterprise "whale hunting" leading to products that are overcomplicated and difficult to use
How a desire to get to the heart of the problem, and teach his clients, led to writing a leading book on product-led growth
Whether salespeople should feel threatened by product-led growth, or whether it's an opportunity for them
How product-led growth affects the marketing team and whether it's the end of traditional marketing
Whether some companies are just not ready to become product-led, and some of the reasons it doesn't make sense to be so
How companies know when it's time to transition from sales-led to product-led, and the first steps to take
Whether there are some types of companies that actually want to be sold to and would resist product-led approaches
And much more!
Buy Product-Led Growth
"Discover the fundamentals of Product-Led Growth and how you can turn your product into a growth engine, widen your funnel, and dominate your market while cutting your customer acquisition costs."
 
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Wes
You can contact Wes on Twitter, LinkedIn or productled.com.

Purposeful Product Transformation & Setting Leaders Up For Success (with Stephanie Leue, CPO @ MindEx & Product Leadership Coach)

An interview with Stephanie Leue. Stephanie is a product leadership coach, and became CPO of MindEx since our interview. Previously she worked in a variety of roles after starting out at PayPal after being coached by Marty Cagan.
We talk about a lot, including:
Her leadership coaching, being an invisible companion and sparring partner
How she tries to set people up to not need her services, rather than continuously coaching them forever
Her passion for hypergrowth startups, and the difference between a startup and an unsuccessful small company
How a workshop with Marty Cagan left her realising that she had been a product manager all along
How PayPal was a launchpad for her career, and some surprising information about their waterfall practices when she joined
The challenges in transforming companies from waterfall to an agile product organisation
How product managers might not be able to change the entire organisation but that their mindset is still key to drive transformation
Whether lack of product thinking is the preserve of big companies alone, or if small startups can show the same behaviours
The importance of making conscious decisions about the type of company you are - marketing-led, sales-led or product-led
How she's not always been a good boss, thought she used to be terrible, and how she's using that to teach others to be better
The impact of holding back too long and not making timely decisions
And much more!
Contact Stephanie
You can reach out to Stephanie on LinkedIn or Twitter.