With many years of experience in product management, data, and analytics Ben Yoskovitz joined the Product Bakery to have a conversation about these topics. As a founding partner of Highline BETA a venture studio and venture capital firm, he looks a lot into data and analytics of companies to support business ideas and startups.  In this episode, the product bakers discussed the basics of defining good metrics & KPIs as well as the history and future trends of data-driven work and mindsets.      Table of content:  00:30 - Intro Ben  03:50 - The rise of data awareness 05:20 - Working with & defining data 06:55 - Leading vs. lagging KPIs 11:25 - Defining one metric that matters (North Star) 16:30 - Measuring wrong data 19:45 - Complexity of quantitative data & vanity metrics 27:10 - Establishing a data mindset in startups & teams 30:20 - Understand the big picture as a Leadership Team 32:30 - Defining assumptions & hypothesis 37:30 - Dealing with legacy data infrastructure  38:30 - Ben's outlook for the future of working with data 41:20 - Debrief Alex & Christian   Follow Ben's work: Twitter: @byosko Linkedin: @byosko Book: Lean Analytics Website: https://highlinebeta.com/   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

The topic of user story mapping has been discussed many times recently. In this episode, the product bakers focused on the counterpart: customer journey mapping. Alex shares his experience and discussed with Christian when and how you should start working with a customer journey map. As always, Christian also tried to better understand how you can combine customer journey and user story mapping.   Table of content: 00:30 - Intro by Christian 01:10 - What is customer journey mapping about? 04:00 - Structuring a journey map 05:45 - When to map out a customers journey 07:20 - Customer journey map vs. user story map 09:45 - Speeding up the product discovery  13:40 - Death through perfectionism   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

This time Alex came up with "the top of mind topic" of in-house vs. consulting and agency product management. Together with Christian, they've discussed the different focus areas different parties have and what product people need to become for example a good consultant or coach.    Table of content:  00:30 - Intro Alex 02:25 - Differences between in-house, coaching, and agencies 05:30 - When should I choose and do what? 07:55 - Training and educating people (coaching) 09:10 - Deep-dive into working as agency/project team 12:05 - Interims VP jobs 13:45 - Freelancing with no experience 16:30 - Why Alex moved from consulting back to in-house   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

In this episode, Christian and Alex are discussing on top of their minds the topic of "double diamond." They quickly fall into topics of design thinking and process definition and shared some insights and refreshers on how to validate and deliver product ideas.     Table of content: 00:30 - Podcast intro 01:35 - Double diamond and design thinking 04:20 - Setting up a double diamond process 06:05 - Research & delivery aren't linear processes 08:10 - Adjusting the process 09:25 - Iterating, iterating, iterating 10:40 - Don't be too religious about it    ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Empirical process control and understanding people were and are Andrea Tomasini's biggest passions. After starting his career as Engineer and leveling up to VP Engineering, Product, and CTO, he reached the point where he wanted to build his own agile organization.  These days Andrea's agile consultancy agile42 operates in more than 13 countries across the globe, helping companies of all sizes to establish an agile mindset. Even the Product Bakers have been trained and coached by Andrea already. In this episode, Andrea shares his wide and deep experience and best practices on where to start with an Agile transition and what pitfalls to avoid.    Table of content: 0:30 - Intro Andrea 08:40 - People over processes & tools 14:45 - Organic agility & understanding people/culture 24:25 - Becoming more agile as a Leader 28:31 - Experimenting in safe to fail environments 33:25 - Trust as the basis for change & transformation 42:15 - The 3 focus areas to introduce agility 45:05 - 3 biggest mistakes leaders do 48:25 - Debrief Alex & Christian   Get in touch with Andrea: Linkedin: @andreat Twitter: @tumma72 Website: https://www.agile42.com   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

After studying psychology in the late '90s, Cindy started her product, research, and design career. She has lead many Product, Design, and Research Teams over the last decades. Next to that she wrote and published the book Lean Customer Development.  Cindy speaks in this episode, about how to best do customer research. She shares very practical examples of how to understand customer problems without interviews, and best practices to understand what customers really want and need. One of her key messages is that asking questions is not only important for customers, it also helps inside companies to better understand each other.    Table of content: 0:30 - Intro Cindy Alvarez 3:20 - Day to day business as Customer Researcher 5:05 - Doing research on Twitter, Reddit, and co. 10:25 - Building stakeholder relationships to push research 13:25 - How to get started with research in your company 16:15 - Reducing and avoiding bias 19:15 - Talking and negotiating with customers 21:50 - Understanding customer problems 24:20 - Customer research vs. user research 27:40 - Handling design critiques with founders and managers 31:15 - Stock questions to understand the “why” 36:15 - Documenting research outcomes (TL;DR) 39:25 - The biggest mistakes leaders do about research 42:25 - Debrief Christan & Alex   Cindy on the internet: Linkedin: @cindyalvarez Website: https://www.cindyalvarez.com Cindy's book: Lean Customer Development   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

As a follow-up on the previous discussion about Design Operations, the Product Bakers invited Pete Fossick, who is a seasoned Design Director, Coach, Trainer, and co-founder of the DesignOps Network & conference to diving deeper into the topic. The whole conversation was around the history of design ops, how the role developed and evolved as well as its specific responsibilities.  At the end of the conversation, they've discussed how to accelerate innovation with an operations team as well as how to hire for such positions.     Table of content:  0:30 - Intro Pete Fossick and how got into Design 9:00 - Fixing problems vs. symptoms 11:50 - Responsibilities of Design Ops people 18:25 - Design Ops is a matter of company size 22:05 - The evolvement and mitosis of Design Ops 27:25 - How the role developing in the market 30:50 - Skills needed to be a good Design Operations Manager 35:35 - How Pete helps the Design Community to level up 38:20 - Design Ops collaboration with Product Managers 44:30 - Biggest mistake companies make in projects 46:50 - Driving innovation with Innovation Ops 50:35 - How to hire Design Ops as a company 53:20 - Where to find skilled people 56:25 - How agile governments work 58:40 - Pete’s gift to the audience (you) 60:00 - Debrief Christian & Alex    Pete on the internet: Linkedin: @peterfossick Website: https://www.factotum-design.co.uk/ Design Ops Conference: https://designops-conference.com/    ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

From working in hospitality to building a Design community is a rare transition that Mindaugas Petruitis made. These days Mindaugas is focused on his design fellowship at On Deck (space between On and Deck) as Program Director for the Designer Fellowship. Endless conversations and networking with Product & Design People across the globe motivated and inspired him to come up with this fellowship. In this episode, the product bakers and Mindaugas look at the evolvement of design communities as well as the challenges they are facing.     Table of content: 00:30 - Intro Mindaugas Petrutis 05:45 - The biggest challenges the Design Space is facing 11:00 - Bringing different functions together 14:30 - The On Deck Design Leadership Fellowship 16:55 - From IC to becoming a Leader 18:45 - The importance of mentoring 24:30 - When networking starts to pay-off 27:05 - The Importance of community building 30:40 - Different types of communities 34:20 - Communities aren’t sales channels 37:40 - Mindaugas’ research for On Deck 41:15 - The biggest trends in the Design Space 44:00 - Debrief Alex & Christian   Mindaugas on the internet: Linkedin: @mindaugaspetrutis Twitter: @MindaugasLT On Deck: https://www.beondeck.com/designers  ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Jim Semick works for more than 20 years in Product Management. About 8 years ago he was looking for the next big challenge in his life. He quit his full-time job with two kids and no clear business idea. What he had back then was a great and motivated co-founder as well as the vision to make Product Managers' lives easier.  In this episode, Jim talks about the importance of having a clear vision of how to build a company with your co-founder before you even have a business idea. Next to that, Jim shared what he did to identify a problem that was worth solving which later translated into his company ProductPlan.    Table of content: 0:30 - Intro Jim Semick 3:40 - From Product Manager to founder 6:20 - Evaluating & entering markets 13:45 - Dealing with uncertainty as a founder & former PM 15:30 - 30 in-depth customer interviews 17:20 - Bootstrapping instead of raising money? 19:50 - Reducing uncertainty the lean way 25:50 - Making the first hire to build a new product 28:05 - Why you don’t need to raise money 33:00 - Two things you should know when you’re working on an idea    Jim on the internet: Website: https://www.jimsemick.com/  Jim's books & articles: https://www.jimsemick.com/writing/ ProductPlan: https://www.productplan.com/ Linkedin: @jimsemick Twitter: @jimsemick   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

This time Christian and Alex sat together to take a deeper look at backlog management. The goal was to clarify common misunderstandings such as who owns the backlog, who is supposed to create tickets, what ticket types are the "right" ones, etc.    Table of content: 2:25 - Frequently asked backlog questions 3:15 - Leonardo Davinci & backlog management 6:00 - Basics of epics & user stories 12:40 - Who should write tickets? 14:25 - Empowering teams to work on the backlog 19:00 - The role of the definition of ready 20:30 - How to take over an existing backlog 23:10 - Keeping the backlog clean   Christian's article & course: Article: https://www.christianstrunk.com/blog/user-stories-and-epics-for-the-win Email course: https://www.christianstrunk.com/courses/backlog-management    ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/