49: Understanding Leadership Principles and Taking the Working Backwards Approach

In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board member Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Nate Westheimer (Amazon) to talk about leadership principles. Identifying structures that work best for you and your product goals is the best step to finding success. This includes the skills to handle escalations within the team and how to escalate fast to not lose momentum. 

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
• 06:19 4 things you can learn from Amazon
• 10:05 Handling an escalation
• 17:33 The working backwards principles
• 21:47 The PR FAQs approach
• 31:02 You can’t be inflexible 
• 38:51 Sometimes thinking ahead is extremely helpful  
• 43:55 Read The Cold Start Problem
• 47:15 Concluding thoughts