“Your business applications should be just as intuitive as every other app or website or anything else that you're engaging with in your day-to-day lives”. That’s the product-led approach that Jon Walton took as an engineering leader at Red Bull, where he spent nearly a decade working on the apps that help the energy drink maker run the extreme sports competitions and spectacles it's known for.On this episode, Jon argues that this product-led philosophy is the way all organizations should manage any technology strategy. He also explains why Red Bull’s special events needed special custom-built software, and how the company improved the way it built software in the first place by embracing principles like lean, agile, and pair programming that transformed the team in ways they never anticipated.This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

Tommi Forsstrom, a product management executive, specializes in helping companies navigate the growth stage. He discusses the challenges of scaling a business, including killing features and transitioning to a standard payment system. He also shares insights on job hunting as a sales process and lessons from Stripe's growth stage success.

“The number one thing we offer our customers is the feeling of not being in an airport.” PS operates a VIP luxury terminal at LAX, with more airports coming soon. Their travelers enjoy high security, luxurious lounges and private suites, great food, and a ride across the tarmac directly to their first-class seats on their commercial flight. But in order to do that, PS needs to coordinate with 70 different airlines, TSA, customs, and all their service staff to make the experience completely seamless. And that takes the kind of precision that only custom software could manage. As CEO Amina Belouizdad Porter puts it: “We are a just-in-time business, and it takes a really complex orchestra to make it happen.”In this episode, Amina and Leigh Rodwick, PS’s VP of Technology and Analytics,  describe the feelings they hope to evoke, the complex operations that happen out of customer view, and why they had to build custom software and learn agile software development techniques to power it all.This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products and the people who make them. At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

There’s turmoil in tech right now, so here’s a special episode for job-seekers looking for their next great gig. On this episode of Crafted, Alex Maher, Director of Talent at Artium, shares tips on how to position yourself, how to talk to recruiters, what *not* to put on your resume, and so much more. Plus, she’ll share her philosophy on talent acquisition and why remembering that we’re human is at the center of it all. Crafted is a show about great products and the people who make them. At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

“There was just no way I could say no”. That was how Sonali Zaveri felt about working with Ideas42 Ventures, after learning about the first cohort of entrepreneurs she would advise. Ideas42 Ventures is a venture studio that aims to solve massive social problems by helping founders with lived experience launch companies that address issues like poverty and inequality. The founders are selected based on their potential, their passion, and their lived experience – and unlike other venture studios they don’t necessarily need a tech background, nor even a product idea on day one. On this episode of Crafted, Design and Operations Lead Sonali Zaveri shares how she coaches these founders, as well as why entrepreneurship is such a “privileged sport” — and what she’s doing about that. We also discuss how Ideas42 Ventures uses behavioral science to design products that make lasting impact and why founders should be embarrassed by their first product. This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them. At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

For those of you who are brand new to Crafted, this week we’re revisiting our very first episode where we featured experimentation master, Lean Startup Pioneer Andres Glusman:“It's a crime. It's such a waste of time.” That’s how Andres Glusman feels about so many of the tests product teams run. That’s why the former head of product at Meetup founded DoWhatWorks, a company that enables you to see – and learn from – the A/B tests that other companies are running. Rather than test button color for the umpteenth time, Andres wants you to test something that will really move the needle. After more than a decade of running product and strategy at Meetup.com, and a lifetime of being fascinated by experiments, Andres is passionate about helping others learn. In this episode, Andres shares what he’s discovered about testing and human behavior, and why running experiments is critical, but also when it’s not. This is Crafted from Artium; a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we build incredible products and recruit high performing teams. Check us out at thisisartium.com. 

How Jon Walker spotted a trend, validated an opportunity, sold his solution before even building it, and created a multi-billion dollar company via the “unfair advantage” of rapid iteration. Back in 2007, Jon saw desktop software everywhere… at restaurants, doctors’ offices, the gym…and he realized it was all gonna move to the web. “So what’s the opportunity here?” On this episode of Crafted, we’ll hear how Jon and his co-founder homed in on property management as their target market and validated their solution with just four slides. We’ll also learn why rapid iteration is absolutely essential, why the secret to great talent management lies in lessons from basketball and fishing, and why Jon thinks artificial intelligence is the wave that AppFolio should ride for the next two decades.This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

Jamiel Sheikh is the founder of three different companies all serving the crypto space: Chainhaus, CBDC Think Tank, and most recently, Instamint, which he says will do for tokens what Stripe did for payments, i.e. make it super easy. In this episode we talk about the “unsexy” problems Instamint is solving for enterprises that want to leverage the blockchain, what it takes to build a great API-first company, and why he only sees demand for crypto solutions growing, despite the recent turmoil in the markets.  Our interview with Jamiel comes from a special Artium event that we hosted at Rise, Created by Barclays, an incubator for fintech startups. This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them. At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

It’s not every day you meet someone who gets ultra excited by the legislative process, but Yemi Adewunmi finds it inspiring: “Why be an innovator if you're not going to be optimistic?”. And that’s one of the reasons she founded Civic Eagle, a startup that helps policy professionals and lobbyists track and collaborate on bills as they wind through Congress or state legislatures on their way to becoming laws…or dying in committee. Either way, Civic Eagle wants to make that journey more transparent, make it easier for advocates to collaborate, and improve democracy in the process.On this episode of Crafted: Civic Eagle’s founder and Chief Operating Officer, Yemi Adewunmi tells us how her former career as a policy analyst at the New York state legislature set her on a winding path toward establishing Civic Eagle. And hear how a failed app, and a lot of UX learning helped Yemi and her team arrive at Civic Eagle, and a huge vision for growth.This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them.  At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com

This special episode of Crafted was recorded live at Rise, Created by Barclays, an incubator for fintech startups. In this fireside chat, we speak with Ainslie Simmonds, President of PershingX at Bank of New York Mellon, and D. Orlando Keise, head of Banking Foundational Platform at UBS. Ainslie is building a modern wealth management platform and D. Orlando is building a digital bank from the ground up.  We’ll discuss what it takes to innovate at big financial institutions and hear their advice for fintech startup founders.On this episode of Crafted: Ainslie and D. Orlando discuss their time at startups, big banks, and “startups inside big banks.” Both are building very ambitious products at very big, very old banks — and we discuss how they’ve challenged the status quo. We also dig into why the data layer and foundational platform on which new products are built are so critical if you want to innovate. Plus, the two share advice for fintech founders who are on a mission to democratize finance, as well as what to know when working with — or after you get acquired by — a big company. This is Crafted from Artium: a show about great products, and the people who make them. At Artium, we help startups and enterprises build incredible products, recruit high-performing teams, and achieve the culture of craft they need to build great software long after we’re gone. Check us out at thisisartium.com