Is Work Life Balance Really What We Should Be Targeting?

In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Kavita Kamani (Microsoft) and Howard Ro (Tesla) to discuss the life cycle of product development, where to focus your attention to in whichever product development phase, identifying what should be considered valuable and what’s not, and tackling product management while maintaining a work-life balance.

Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 02:27 The importance of the product development life cycle
• 06:29 Two points of view on the general concept of a product life cycle
• 09:09 Five D’s of a product life cycle
• 15:25 Asking a lot of questions help determine exactly where to focus on
• 17:57 Getting a clear idea if a problem is worth solving
• 19:47 Initial ideation and operating without boundaries
• 21:14 When there is tension and no easy answer
• 27:12 Different organizations have different structures and different expectations
• 31:11 Within the applications, what is truly valuable and what is not?
• 34:22 Focus on what's the core problem and what you're going after
• 39:26 Ensure that everybody is aligned to the common goals
• 43:16 Find a balance between the user outcome and stakeholder outcome
• 48:51 Bringing focus back to what you need to do
• 51:05 Work-life balance: assess or associate your happiness with impact
• 58:52 If you want to succeed as a PM, own the job
• 01:00:04 Don’t try to be everything for everyone