One Knight in Product

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.

Doing the Splits to Accelerate your Product Growth (with Andres Glusman, CEO @ DoWhatWorks & A/B Test Enthusiast)

Andres Glusman is the Cofounder and CEO of DoWhatWorks. Prior to DoWhatWorks he led product and growth at Meetup where he was a pioneer in the lean startup movement. He has been running tests online since the late 1990s and is passionate about human behaviour. We spoke about the power of split testing, when you can do it, and when you can't.
Episode highlights:
 
1. Split tests are a great way to work out how to grow
Otherwise known as A/B tests, split testing involves systematically varying a user experience for different groups of users & then comparing the end result to see how those changes impacted behaviour for better (or worse).
2. Four out of five split tests fail to move the needle
These are terrible odds, but the good news is that terrible odds aren't hard to make a little better. It's important to get as much signal from as many sources as possible upfront so you have the best chance of success.
3. These signals can come from anywhere
Split-testing is a great way to learn, but it's not the only way to learn. Make sure you use a mixture of experiments, surveys, qualitative inputs, feedback and any other data source you can get your hands on. It's all signal.
4. There's only so much juice you can squeeze from a lemon
You need to be careful that you're going overboard. It's possible to test too much & get caught in eternal loops. It comes down to fear of mistakes but, unless you're putting medicine in someone, you can make a mistake.
5. Yes, B2B people can do split-tests too
You don't have to have a mass-market B2C app to get good tests going. There's scope to experiment in B2B but you need to do your homework, get as much data as you can upfront & make sure you put your chips on the right part of the table.
Contact Andres
You can catch up with Andres on LinkedIn.

Moving to Customer-Led Growth by Forgetting the Funnel (with Georgiana Laudi & Claire Suellentrop, Founders @ Forget the Funnel)

Georgiana (Gia) Laudi and Claire Suellentrop are both experienced SaaS product marketing leaders who spotted the same things again and again whilst trying to help companies grow. They decided it was time to join forces and persuade marketers around the world that the sales funnel is dead, and we need to try a different approach. They founded Forget the Funnel, a consultancy aiming to help people do just that, and have recently launched their new book of the same name.
A message from this episode's sponsor - My Mentor Path
This episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!
Episode highlights:
 
1. The Funnel is no longer fit for purpose
Marketers have been trying to cram leads into the top of the funnel for 100 years but it doesn't serve the needs of modern marketers in recurring revenue SaaS businesses. We need to consider the customer journey pre and post-acquisition
2. Forgetting the Funnel is a company mindset shift
Business leaders can lose sight of the market & the product vision as companies evolve. They need to forget the funnel & empower their marketing teams to do the same & focus relentlessly on customers, not inward-facing metrics.
3. You're going to need to pay off your Revenue Debt
As companies evolve, they can end up with a very fragmented set of customers that don't form a coherent ICP. To succeed with customer-led growth you need to work out who your best customers are and optimise for them.
4. Companies often have remarkably similar marketing problems
How these problems manifest themselves may be different, but there's generally some low-hanging fruit that can be picked straight away. Progress on harder problems can be stymied by unclear ownership or responsibility
5. There's no point spending a dime on marketing until you've fixed your fundamentals
If you don't focus your marketing on your best-fit customers and optimise everything to speak to them, you're just throwing your money away trying to scale marketing up. Fix the basics first!
Buy "Forget the Funnel"
"Your product is great. So why is marketing it so hard? Many SaaS companies struggle with marketing. Teams try everything they can to drive more traffic, leads, and signups. Yet revenue growth remains... lumpy. Slow. Frustratingly inconsistent. If this sounds familiar, the problem isn’t you or your ideas; it’s that you’re guessing at what resonates with your target customers. In Forget the Funnel, Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop share the Customer-Led Growth Framework they've developed to help companies of all sizes solve their product marketing struggles and hit ambitious targets. This framework helps you get inside your customers’ heads, map and measure your customers’ experience, and uncover which tactics will actually move the needle for your company."
Check it out on Amazon. You can also check out the book website
Contact Gia & Claire
You can catch up with Gia and Claire on Twitter (Claire, Gia), LinkedIn (Claire, Gia) or visit their website, Forget the Funnel.