One Knight in Product

Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (with Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary)

Jennifer Yang-Wong is a product leader who formerly worked at Uber, before moving into the rarified heights of Venture Capital. But, not as an investor but as the VP of Product for a tech-led VC firm. We spoke about why a VC firm needs a VP of Product as well as numerous reflections on the trouble that we can have when trying to apply product thinking and move beyond founder-led decision-making.
Episode highlights:
 
1. There's no one way to do product management, and no one's doing it "right".
There's no one way to do product management, and no one's doing it "right". It all depends on what you need for your stage of company, and whether you're sales-y, ops-y, or product-y in mindset.
2. There's no "number" or formula you can apply to decide whether to blow up your roadmap.
In a sales-led organisation, it's common for big deals to torpedo the best-laid plans. Your appetite to do this work will vary, but it's not as simple as saying "X% of revenue and we do it!" But, whatever the number is, it should be really, really high.
3. It can be tricky to know when to bring on the first product hire and move away from founder-led product management
One of the founders is generally the de facto "head of product", often with no specific product training. They do many of the same things that the product team would do, but not necessarily in the same way, and with less process. This can cause clashes when the first PM comes in.
4. Getting a super process-oriented PM in as the first PM might exacerbate the issue
You do need some rigour from the PM you bring in, otherwise, what's the point of bringing them in? But, if you bring someone in who is too dogmatic or has worked for much larger organisations, you may find a cultural mismatch and inevitable clash when everything they do seems to slow you down.
5. In some companies, it might be the second "first product manager" that succeeds
Founders may mis-hire if they don't have a strong understanding of what product managers bring to the table, or how they want to work. It's unpleasant to think of, but sometimes the first PM takes the hits, moves on and is replaced by a second PM who can start to make progress since the founders have a better idea of what they'll get the second time around.
Contact Jennifer
You can connect with Jennifer on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

Connecting Product Management to Business Goals by Mastering your Product Strategy (with Gabrielle Bufrem, Product Leadership Coach & Advisor)

Gabrielle Bufrem is a product leader and product coach who comes highly recommended by Sir Marty Cagan himself. She's passionate about developing product managers and product leaders, as well as helping them be true strategic partners to the business. We spoke about product vision, what to do when it's not there, the importance of product principles and much more.
A quick message from Saeed Khan and me.
My former podcast guest, Saeed Khan and I are thinking of putting together a B2B Product Management cohort course on Maven. Our goal is to help B2B PMs make peace with the differences between B2B product management and much of the classic product literature, and enable them to be true business partners rather than stuck in a remorseless feature factory. We're assessing interest right now, so if this sounds good, please fill in our course questionnaire. Thanks!
Episode highlights:
 
1. A product strategy is the highest leverage artefact any product leader can have
But it's also one of the hardest to do. It's serious, serious work, which is why so many product teams just end up with a list of tasks, or a "pizza strategy" (pepperoni! chicken! M&Ms!)
2. A lot of problems stem from being people pleasers
No one wants to say "no" and people can suffer from the fear of missing out. People can be afraid to take a stance. But, it's essential to narrow your focus to the absolute essentials if you want to make any progress at all.
3. It's hard to push back on pre-agreed feature requests if you don't have a plan
Product leaders need a deep understanding of their users and customers, but also of the wider business context. You need to be conscious of what the company (and the board) wants.
4. Sometimes companies don't have strategies either
It's easy to get dragged into a neverending feature list, prioritising whatever the next thing is. Product leaders need to work with wider leadership to identify broad goals, how they can get there & what the 3-5 year plan is.
5. Product managers are there to represent the business
UX designers are there to look after the users and the engineering team is there to look after the tech. It's absolutely essential for PMs to be trusted business partners if they want to make a big impact.
Contact Gabrielle
You can connect with Gabi on Twitter or on LinkedIn. Or, check out her website.

Taking Control of your Career with Life-Changing Conversations (with Julie Starr, Author ”The Coaching Manual”, ”The Mentoring Manual” & ”Brilliant Coaching”)

Julie Starr is a renowned coach and mentor, and author of several books on the topics. We had a deep and meaningful chat about the differences between coaching and mentoring, what it takes to be a good coach or mentor, and the impact of AI on coaching.
Episode highlights:
 
1. The expectations we have of leaders have changed
We're slowly moving away from Taylorist, resource-focused management to a less-directive style of leadership. Not all companies are there yet, but even laggards are seeing what other organisations are doing and the benefits it brings.
2. Coaching is a 1:1 relationship focused squarely on the person being coached
Coaches facilitate conversations of inquiry and aim to support their clients to take action, evolve and, ultimately, empower them to be the change they want to see in themselves.
3. Coaches do not need to be functional experts
At the heart of coaching is the art of coaching, not reflecting your own biases and life story onto people. A good coach can use fundamental coaching skills to coach anyone, whatever their life situation or career niche.
4. Mentoring is not the same as coaching, but it's also not binary
It's less useful to look at the specific behaviours and more at the dynamics of a mentoring relationship; that of benevolence from and respect for a more senior practitioner who has seen your situation before.
5. Not everything that counts can be measured
It's traditionally hard to attribute specific metrics to coaching or mentoring relationships, but that doesn't mean the effect isn't there. It's not always easy, but we can use qualitative data to show the impact of our efforts.
Buy Julie's Books
"Julie Starr’s books on coaching and mentoring are recommended reading on development programmes around the world."
Check out all three books at Starr Coaching, or wherever you get your books.
Check out Julie's free resources
Julie has a huge amount of free resources at LearnStarr (free registration required). Make sure to check it out.
Contact Julie
You can connect with Julie on LinkedIn. You can also check out the Starr Coaching website.

Designing Conversations that Matter with the Conversation OS Canvas (with Daniel Stillman, Executive Coach & Conversation Designer @ The Conversation Factory)

Daniel Stillman is a former industrial designer turned conversation designer, who wants to help leadership teams and entire organisations stop wasting their time having ineffective conversations. We spoke about the concept of Conversation Design, the Conversation OS Canvas, and the perils of "Sheep Dip" organisational transformations.
Episode highlights:
 
1. Sheep-dip organisational transformation doesn't work
You can't send everyone on a 1-hour course, not talk about it afterwards or have any kind of follow-up, yet somehow expect to sustain organisational change. Transformation takes sustained effort & you need to keep talking.
2. All conversations are inherently designed, even the ones that aren't
There's an implicit design in any conversation. You should use whatever works for you, but being aware of what isn't working allows you to re-design the conversations that don't work and get better results.
3. Leadership is the ability to create the conditions for a transformational conversation
If everyone's stuck, leaders can help people get unstuck by getting people to ask the right question to offer the right insight in service of what we want to create more of in the world.
4. We all have a mental OS running on a mental CPU
And, like all software, and all CPUs, there could be problems with clock speed, or bugs in the system that prevent us from getting to where we want to go. Thoughtfully designing conversations allows us to iron out the bugs.
5. Active Listening is a great hack to help design conversations
Getting away from the desire to respond within 200ms, not tuning people out because you're formulating your next thought & playing back people's words can really help change your conversations for the better.
Buy "Good Talk"
"Life is built one conversation at a time. Learn which conversations matter, how to transform those conversations, and balance them all while leading change. Human beings are conversational animals. Every day we're in constant communication with ourselves, other people and the world around us, and while not all conversations may seem important, they all have the potential to transform our personal, professional and cultural lives for the better. This book explains how conversations work and offers practical advice on how to improve the quality of our exchanges."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Daniel
You can catch up with Andres on LinkedIn, or visit his website or The Conversation Factory.

Product Managing APIs - What’s Different and What’s the Same? (with Deepa Goyal, Product Strategy Lead @ Postman & Author of ”API Analytics for Product Managers”)

Deepa Goyal got excited when she saw her first API product and has been working in API products ever since. She's worked for companies like Twilio and Paypal and is now Product Strategy Lead for Postman. She was disappointed at the lack of PM-specific resources, so decided to solve this with her new book "API Analytics for Product Managers". We spoke about API product management in general, and what it takes to be successful with API products.
Episode highlights:
 
1. APIs are technical but there's a user-centric way to explain them
APIs at their heart are simply the way that different applications talk to each other. For example, Uber talking to Google Maps or talking to PayPal. They enable seamless integration of a product ecosystem.
2. Yes, APIs need Product Managers (even internal APIs)
It's important to have a customer-centric approach & strategy for APIs. You need to make sure that they're discoverable, useful & provide value. This is also true for internal APIs... internal users are your customers too!
3. There are definitely differences when managing API products
For example, you can't track people's user journeys as easily. You often don't have the same visibility. It can also take a long time to go from initial discovery to actually receiving value from your product.
4. It's important to define API product value and measure it
Sometimes value is obvious and sometimes it's not, but it's important to define what "value" means for your users (it's probably not just "number of API calls") and work out ways to measure that so you can optimise it.
5. There are differences in API product management, but your basic job is the same
You're still speaking to users, focusing on their use cases & delivering value. The way that you express this may be different but, ultimately, an API product manager is still a product manager!
Buy "API Analytics for Product Managers"
"API Analytics for Product Managers takes you through the benefits of efficient researching, strategizing, marketing, and continuously measuring the effectiveness of your APIs to help grow both B2B and B2C SaaS companies. Once you've been introduced to the concept of an API as a product, this fast-paced guide will show you how to establish metrics for activation, retention, engagement, and usage of your API products, as well as metrics to measure the reach and effectiveness of documentation—an often-overlooked aspect of development."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Deepa
You can connect with Deepa on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

Build Better Products Faster by Embracing Continuous Delivery (with Dave Farley, Consultant & Co-author of ”Continuous Delivery”)

Dave Farley is a consultant and renowned thought leader in the software development world, and a strong advocate for ensuring that our software is always releasable. He's co-authored a book and runs a popular YouTube channel, both called "Continuous Delivery". We spoke about what continuous delivery is, why it's important, the barriers to implementing it, and how product managers can help.
Episode highlights:
1. Continuous delivery is what the best software organisations in the world do
It's unambiguous. It's backed by data. It's the best way to build quality products. Applying these techniques means your software is always releasable, and every change is safe
2. But, this doesn't mean you need genius developers
Any team can adopt continuous delivery. It's not a factor of 10x "rock star" developers, but empowered teams of developers working together, collaborating and *talking* to each other.
3. You build quality software by going fast
Continuous feedback based on small changes, constantly validated, ensures high-quality products. You don't want to go back & fix it later. You can't inspect quality into a system at the end of a development cycle. Build it in upfront.
4. Just because you can release continuously doesn't mean you have to
What you release to customers is a business decision. This isn't about throwing half-finished features at users but having software that you know works. You can use feature flags to manage availability.
5. Many product managers need to check themselves
We need to move away from PMs giving developers human-language representations of code and telling them to convert it for a computer. The best devs are problem solvers and should be involved in working out the best solution.
Buy "Continuous Delivery"
"Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process.This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours―sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base."
Check it out on Amazon.
Check out Dave's course
Dave has a course out that helps people get good at all the stuff we talked about in the podcast. If you're interested, check the course out here.
Dave also mentioned a talk by his co-author Jez Humble. I'm not 100% sure if this is the one, but it looks pretty good anyway. Check it out.
Contact Dave
You can connect with Dave on Twitter. You can also check out the Continuous Delivery YouTube channel.

The Big Pivot to Reinvent Product Management (with Yana Welinder, Founder & CEO @ Kraftful)

Yana Welinder is the CEO of Kraftful. We spoke a year ago on this podcast about her mission to help solve usability in IoT startups, but she's since gone all-in with a hard pivot to build an AI-powered product co-pilot. The company's growing like crazy and we caught up to talk about what's changed since our last interview.
Episode highlights:
 
1. Pivoting was hard but the time (and tech) was right
Yana was solving a problem she deeply cared about, but when ChatGPT hit primetime she realised she could solve an even more important problem. She dreaded sending the email to existing users, but everyone was super-positive.
2. It's important to validate your pivot ahead of time
Yana did some background research by stealthily positioning herself at conferences as the founder of a startup solving the new problem. People were super-keen to share feedback and this gave her confidence in the pivot.
3. Kraftful will replace a lot of PM tasks, but not PMs
There's still plenty of room for product managers in an AI-powered world. The best PMs will use smart technology to automate away necessary, but ultimately lower leverage tasks, and enable PMs to concentrate on strategy.
4. There is a possibility of dependency on AI-powered tools, but that's OK
Is there a danger that people forget how to do PM work without AI tools? Sure, but Yana likens the situation to using Google Maps. How many people know how to get where they're going without assistance?
5. Hallucinations are going away soon
There are well-known issues with inaccurate text coming out of LLMs, but the tech is developing fast. It's possible to mitigate the worst of the effects by including deep context & narrowing focus rather than using LLMs as a Swiss Army Knife.
Contact Yana
You can catch up with Yana on Twitter or check out Kraftul at Kraftful.com.

Landing That Perfect Role by Finding Your Inevitable Edge (with Erika Klics, Job Search Strategist & Founder @ ErikaKlics.com)

Erika Klics is a former talent manager who worked for companies like Snap Inc and Zapier to help them build their teams. She started to see certain patterns in recruiting that made her realise that there was a bigger problem to solve on the candidate side and started her own consultancy to help goal-driven professionals achieve their career aims. We spoke about her work, and some general do's and don'ts of job hunting.
Episode highlights:
 
1. Everyone has an Inevitable Edge
Your Inevitable Edge is the thing that makes you unique. No one else brings it to the table. Everyone has a juxtaposition of skills & experiences that makes them unique. It's important to identify & leverage it to be successful when job hunting.
2. Be intentional with your job search criteria
Don't just make a list of literally every job that matches a search term & scroll through it one by one. You need to understand what company profiles are truly a fit for you and avoid spraying and praying.
3. Get your story straight
It's all about positioning - we should be good at this! Being able to tell your unique story is important, but make sure you pitch it at the right level, set appropriate context & don't go too deep on interesting, but ultimately irrelevant, stories.
4. Companies don't hire people, humans do
You need to make a human connection with everyone you meet during the interview process. Build empathy with them and work out what they care about, why they're asking the questions they're asking and listen between the lines.
5. Don't "settle" for a job you don't want
When times are hard, it's easy to cast your net out for unsuitable/too-junior jobs. You'll get interviews because they're curious, but you won't get hired. This will knock your confidence. If you do get the job, you'll probably hate it.
Contact Erika
You can catch up with Erika on LinkedIn or visit her website, ErikaKlics.com.