Product for Product Management EP 129 - Digital Transformation with Kiron Jones
May 16, 2025
53:15
Digital transformations are hard! But they are a necessary need in our era for any organization who wants to keep their competitive edge, adapt to changing environments, build moats against new disruptors, and grow their market share. And more complex the organization structure and ecosystem are, the more challenging said transformation, hence the need for tools and frameworks to help us.
On the show today we met with Kiron Jones, Group Product Manager at Springer Nature, the world's largest academic book and journals publisher. The organization was created by a merger and acquisition of multiple publishers. This created a complex technical environment of many systems to support the business, publish the books and journals, and access the market.
In addition, the entire academic publishing sector has moved into a new open access model. Where in the past, libraries had to buy subscriptions to give access to readers for the materials, these days the access to the materials is free, and the authors are the ones charged to publish. Servicing this changed model has challenged the industry to come up with new solutions for the new clients, while still supporting high quality publications.
Product management in such an environment, as we learn from Kiron, is a challenging and rewarding task. The tools he and his team are using, and in some cases still on the lookout for, are helping them with stakeholder communication, prioritization and roadmapping, and so much more.
Join Matt and Moshe as we chatted with Kiron about:
Note: any views mentioned in the podcast are the sole views of our hosts and guests, and do not represent the products mentioned in any way.
Please leave us a review and feedback ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
On the show today we met with Kiron Jones, Group Product Manager at Springer Nature, the world's largest academic book and journals publisher. The organization was created by a merger and acquisition of multiple publishers. This created a complex technical environment of many systems to support the business, publish the books and journals, and access the market.
In addition, the entire academic publishing sector has moved into a new open access model. Where in the past, libraries had to buy subscriptions to give access to readers for the materials, these days the access to the materials is free, and the authors are the ones charged to publish. Servicing this changed model has challenged the industry to come up with new solutions for the new clients, while still supporting high quality publications.
Product management in such an environment, as we learn from Kiron, is a challenging and rewarding task. The tools he and his team are using, and in some cases still on the lookout for, are helping them with stakeholder communication, prioritization and roadmapping, and so much more.
Join Matt and Moshe as we chatted with Kiron about:
- How he got into product management
- Digital and product challenges from Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A)
- Dealing with shifting ecosystem that changes the Product-Market Fit, the user and buyers personas, their user journey, and the tools needed to create value for them
- Dealing with challenges when not knowing who your users are
- Some of the tools and methods he is using to help with these challenges
- Opportunities for new tools that can solve more problems
- CMS as a tool both for users and for product people
- Some success and failure stories with tools adoption
- How AI can help in elevating some of the work
- And much more!
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kironjones/
- If you are in London, at local product meetings
- Product for Product Podcast - linkedin.com/company/product-for-product-podcast
- Matt Green - linkedin.com/in/mattgreenproduct/
- Moshe Mikanovsky - linkedin.com/in/mikanovsky/
Note: any views mentioned in the podcast are the sole views of our hosts and guests, and do not represent the products mentioned in any way.
Please leave us a review and feedback ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️