Product Love

I asked Scott Belsky the age-old product cliché — is product management a science or an art? His answer was that it’s clearly both. Sure, product management has scientific themes — there’s the experimentation, testing, and data. But it also calls on some things that are more qualitative, like empathy for the user and the creativity necessary to stay competitive. Before he was the chief product officer at Adobe, he was the CEO and founder of Behance, a platform that allows creatives to share their portfolios. He also had a brief stint as an entrepreneur and investor, and wrote two books: Making Ideas Happen, and The Messy Middle. This week on Product Love, Scott and I talked about the science and art of product management.

This week on Product Love, I talked to Tatyana Mamut, the Head of Product at Nextdoor. Nextdoor is a social networking site for neighborhoods. Before that, she advised and consulted in the blockchain space for a year. She’s led the product team at Amazon Web services, Salesforce, and has even led a bunch of innovation products at IDEO. But her resume doesn’t stop there, she also has her PhD in economic and cultural anthropology. On this episode of Product Love, Tatyana and I talked about building a team, evangelizing for customers, and the impact of a wildly successful product.

This week on Product Love, I talked to Christian Idiodi, a partner at Silicon Valley Partner Group. Silicon Valley Partner Group was created to share senior level experience and best practices with technology companies. At SVPG, Christian stays engaged with the product community by mentorship. He works closely with two student-led startups every year.  Like most people, Christian stumbled into product management unintentionally.  When he worked at CareerBuilder, he won an annual competition where individuals could submit their entrepreneurial ideas. If they won, they could get funding and time to work on it. Spoiler: He won the competition. So what does he do with a massive check and a responsibility to run a business? In some ways, product management probably called out to him first.  To this day, he's been a product leader for over 15 years and has launched over 120 products.  On this week’s episode, we talked about customer-centric product managers, and his favorite interview question.

This week, Product Love hosts Nir Eyal, author of Hooked. Nir and I talk about how to build engaging products, ways to fight back against distractions, and why humans make terrible life choices.

This week, Product Love hosts Alok Pareek. Alok Pareek is a founder and EVP of products at Striim, and is also a long-time friend of mine. He’s a passionate product person, and also has a unique perspective on what it takes to build products that last. I loved chatting with Alok in San Francisco about what rituals and cultural customs can teach us about building tech products that stick. We also talked about what Alok looks for in a product manager (passion, a questioning character, and ethics), advice

Eric Boduch and Dan Olsen chat about his experiences building products, trends in product management and his advice for young and aspiring product managers. Oh and we chat about DURF, we can't forget about that.

This week on Product Love we interview Greg Coticchia. Greg is the executive director of the Masters of Science in product management program at Carnegie Mellon University. Greg has been in fourteen start-ups and founded three, and worked in organizations, from '$0M to over $1B' in revenue.

This week, Product Love hosts Sam Boonin from Zendesk. Sam and I talk about all kinds of things product from how to scale product organizations at fast growing companies to the value of go to market skills in a product organization.

This week on Product Love, I sat down with Jorge Mazal, director of product management at Duolingo, the world's most popular way to learn a language. We talked about how to structure a product manager interview, building user frameworks and a shared vocabulary around users, and how behavioral psychology impacts his work.

This week on Product Love, I sat down with Rohini Pandhi, a product manager at Square, the payments giant. We talked about introverted product management, time management, metrics, and startups.