One Knight in Product

Product Management Lessons from a PM Turned Teacher Turned PM (with Melanie McKay, Head of Consumer Product @ Rightmove)

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!

Data-driven Product Delivery & Story Points on Everything (with James Rooney, Delivery Manager @ Discovery Inc.)

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!

How to Build an Effective Product Organisation (with Marty Cagan, author of Inspired & Empowered)

An interview with Marty Cagan.
Marty is a renowned Product Management thought leader. He has had an illustrious career at Netscape, eBay, his own original startup (acquired by IBM) and then founding the Silicon Valley Product Group consultancy. He has worked with hundreds of companies to help them build products right. He's also a widely read blogger, and author of a best-selling book on how to build products; "Inspired - How to Create Tech Products Customers Love". Now he's back with co-author and SVPG partner Chris Jones, with "Empowered - Oridinary People, Extraordinary Products" which aims to do for organisations what Inspired did for teams.
I could have spoken to Marty for hours, but here are the highlights:
How come Marty started SVPG after working for some of the best tech companies
How he got good at Product, and the role of luck in that journey
Why he started blogging and how that helped him get his thoughts in order for his books
How he's such a Product Guy that he evens writes his books iteratively
How come the 2nd edition of Inspired was basically a total rewrite, and whether the 1st edition has anything useful in it
Some of the challenges that companies face when trying to be truly Product-led
What to do when your company really doesn't get Product
How to persuade the leadership team that maybe this stuff actually does work
Why he is so passionate about inclusion & diversity in tech, and how he's trying to help
And much more!

Scaling your Product Team with Product Operations (with Christine Itwaru, Senior Director of Product Operations @ Pendo)

An interview with Christine Itwaru. Christine is Senior Director of Product Operations at Pendo. Christine is a problem-solving, Product-obsessed New Yorker who has swapped the Big Apple for the City of Oaks as Senior Director of Product Operations for Pendo. We talk about the fundamentals of Product Ops, how it works at Pendo, the types of people you need, what they can do for you, and when you need them.
We talk about a lot:
How she traded the Big Apple for the City of Oaks, moving to Raleigh, North Carolina to work with Pendo
The exciting challenges and opportunities of working for a hypergrowth SaaS company
What Product Operations is and how it can help a company as it scales, and how Christine made it happen
The core skills and mindset needed to work in Product Operations
The difference between being data-driven & data-informed, or whether there's any difference at all
The importance of cross-functional communication for Product Ops, and Product teams in general
Some of the challenges being a woman in tech and how she's trying to help solve them
And much more!

How to Crack your Product Management Career (with Jackie Bavaro, co-author of Cracking the PM Interview & Cracking the PM Career)

An interview with Jackie Bavaro. Jackie started her Product Management career as a Program Manager at Microsoft, before joining Google's Associate Product Manager programme and then getting hired as the first Product Manager at Asana. Back in 2013, she collaborated with Gayle McDowell to write the best-selling book "Cracking the PM Interview", which inspired a generation of Product Managers to get their first jobs. Jackie and Gayle are back with "Cracking the PM Career" which explains how to get good at it once you're in.
Understandably, we cover a lot, including:
How Jackie got into Product in the first place, and why Microsoft calls Product Managers Program Managers
The pros and cons of working for Google versus a new startup
How she met and decided to collaborate with Gayle McDowell and how they write together
How the FAANG companies reacted to her giving away all their secrets
Excellent advice on how to make an impact in your new PM job
How to avoid the dreaded Feature Factory, build a strategy and sell it
Why it's important to look outside your Product bubble for inspiration
And much more!

Redefining Product-Led Growth (with Heather James, Founder @ Product-Led Alliance)

An interview with Heather James. Heather is the Founder of The Product-Led Alliance, providing a community, events and materials fora community of passionate product professionals, obsessed with Product-Led Growth. We talk about...
What the Product-Led Alliance is and what it offers
Why Heather is so passionate about Product-Led Growth and some of the challenges in getting there
How she defines Product-Led Growth and how it differs from the dictionary definition
What made her start the Product-Led Alliance when she did
How a community with so much free content pays the bills
How they had to pivot because of COVID-19
What makes her most proud of the Product-Led Alliance so far
Future ambitions to take over the world
Shock horror ... a rival podcast! mumble grumble
And much more!

Product Management in Lockdown & the Perils of Hustle Culture (with Jack Stevens, Senior PM @ Publicis Sapient)

An interview with Jack Stevens. Jack is Senior Product Manager for Publicis Sapient, a product consultancy that helps large companies with their digital transformation. Aside from his day job working on a secret project that he can't tell us about, Jack was also featured in a BBC article last summer "Stress, burnout and redundancy: Tough times in IT". I spoke to Jack about a few things:
His work with Publicis Sapient and how they work really hard to be a flat, open company at scale
How SAFe and other scaled agile approaches (probably) can't work
How he got onto the BBC article in the first place, and how the reaction has been
How hustle culture is toxic, mainly a lie, and we just see the survivors who probably succeeded partially through luck
How it's OK for some people to just be OK and not everyone has to change the world to be successful
How his employer reacted after seeing the article, and the support they gave him
How personal hardship has driven his ambitions to work in financial services to ensure people have the right tools to make good financial decisions
And much more!

Product Marketing & the Importance of Pirate Metrics (with Abby Hehemann, Senior Product Marketing Manager @ GetResponse)

An interview with Abby Hehemann. Abby is Senior Product Marketing Manager for GetResponse, a full stack marketing platform. She's passionate about Product Management and Product-Led Growth, and using data to monitor and inform Product Marketing decisions. Abby is also a features speaker with Product-Led Growth Hub.
The role of Product Marketing and importance of getting close to the Product team
Pirate metrics (AARRR!) and how you can use them to monitor the health of your funnel
The concept of Product-Led Growth and how companies can take their first steps to being Product-Led
The importance of communication and collaboration between functions
How she got involved with Product-Led Growth hub and their future collaboration plans
Whether Product Marketing should report to the VP of Marketing or the VP of Product
Most importantly, whether you can get get good nachos in Poland
And much more!