Product Bakery – The Product Management, UX & Design Podcast

Both Christian and Alex work on many strategic topics as consultants in their day to day business. What they've observed is that many companies need to rethink their current strategies and adapt to the current situation/crisis. In this episode, Christian talks about how to get started with a product strategy definition based on Alex's business idea about selling Italian premium ties. He focuses on the basic skeleton of information & agenda points a product strategy should consist of as well as how to specify them.   Table of content: 0:30 - Product Vision vs. company vision 4:35 - Product vision statements (GoPro) 8:40 - Defining one “catchy” sentence 9:15 - Getting buy-in from Founders & Senior Management 12:00 - Revisiting the vision statement regularly 17:20 - Vision definition workshop example (how to define a vision) 23:15 - Iterating on the product vision statement 27:05 - Who should drive the creation of the product vision   Christian's free product strategy slide deck template: Slide deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1mLNt7f6CPPa3FzNxnHZAS7pxgp-QDOLL2UtsBe7fcKI/edit?usp=sharing Related article: https://www.christianstrunk.com/blog/product-strategy   Connect with Christian: Website: www.christianstrunk.com Linkedin: @christianstrunk Twitter: @strunkchristian   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Humans love to play games! So does Alex Wheeler, Senior UX Designer at Riot Game. Alex spent many years developing the UX for champions of the most played online game League of Legends.  Alex shares great insights about the whole process of developing e.g. a new champion or changes on the client-side for more than 120 Million active users. He touched all the parts from the discovery and wireframing to the development and rollout.  Next to that, he shared why friction in UX and games is so important. Table of content: 0:30 - Intro Alex Wheeler 4:35 - The addicting nature of computer games 6:45 - Intentional friction the UX 9:45 - Developing champions in League of Legends as UX Designer 15:00 - Persona-based product development 18:00 - Product discovery in gaming & LoL 20:50 - Role & collaboration with Product Managers & Owners 25:15 - When employees are users of your product 30:00 - Using data to design experiences 36:15 - Rolling out updates & new features 39:30 - Designing for 26 countries with different languages & cultures 43:50 - It’s all about documentation 46:10 - Alex 3 key values of designing user experiences 49:00 - Debrief Alex & Christian   Want to learn more about Alex? https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwhlr/ https://medium.com/riot-games-ux-design/ux-design-in-the-games-industry-50b0572631c3   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

SaaS products are Markus Hafellner passion. Next to his experience as a Product Manager, he worked many years in the tech industry as a developer & CTO.  In his current challenge at Bitmovin, he focuses a lot on defining and developing a good pricing strategy. Markus shares how the company introduced a big pricing change and the thoughts, planning, and approach behind it as well as great tips how to align with stakeholders and getting the buy-in from the C-Level/Top Management. Table of content: 0:30 - Intro Markus Haffelner & Bitmovin 4:50 - The challenges of defining prices in B2B 8:55 - Measuring & analyzing data + customer funnels 16:10 - A product-led approach as the foundation for a pricing change 19:05 - Interpreting data & defining 25:20 - Influencing Senior Management & Founders (how to negotiate) 27:35 - Rolling out & communicating price changes 33:35 - Driving pricing topics as a Product Manager and stakeholders 37:00 - Impact of the pricing change at Bitmovin 40:20 - Markus tips to evaluate pricing in a structured way 43:20 - Comparing pricing with competition/market 49:43 - Debrief Christian & Alex   Connect with Markus: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mhafellner/ https://stratelight.substack.com/   Link from John Cutler: Beat the Feature Factory: Run Pre-cap Design Studios   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

After a week-long road trip in Portugal Alex is looking back at all the small invisible experiences he encountered while sitting in the car. It’s things like anticipating and designing for the user's intentions that make an experience really great.   Table of content: 0:30 - Alex road trip in Portugal 2:30 - Air conditioning experience with Volkswagen 4:45 - User experience in cars 6:35 - Understanding & learning from user intentions 10:55 - Jobs to be done 15:55 - UX on purpose or luck? 17:55 - Autonomous driving 22:25 - Ethnographical studies to better understand users   Connect with Alex: Website: www.alexdapunt.com Linkedin: @alexdapunt  Twitter: @alexdapunt   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Sebastian's role as head of product at the Founders Factory is quite different from most of the jobs. He and the product coaching team help founders and teams build the right product in the right way using their expertise and product coaching framework.  His and the team's thesis is that by both executing on the product as well as coaching founders on what good best practices look like, Founders Factory won't only build great products but also great teams and businesses. In this episode, he shares great stories and best practices on what to consider as a fresh startup and how to hire the right people. Table of content: 0:30 - Intro Sebastian Abdy Sabouné & The Founder’s Factory 5:35 - Coaching founders & product people 7:10 - Product development processes in startups 14:25 - 0 to 1, hiring the right people 18:30 - Which roles to hire first in an early-stage startup 21:00 - Recognizing red flags during the hiring process 24:20 - Setting up early product management processes 29:25 - Data-based decision making with no/few clients 32:50 - Experimenting & defining hypothesis 35:00 - First roles & skills needed when you kick-off a project 37:00 - Tips from Sebastian for aspiring CEOs and Product Managers 44:05 - Debrief Alex & Christian   Sebastian's book recommendations: Escaping the build trap Thinking fast and slow Never split the difference Sebastian's articles: Product thinking Product coaching framework ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Urbi realized pretty "fast" that studying business administration isn't the right thing for him. After he moved to computer science he started his career as a QA Engineer and worked his way up. Currently, he works as an Engineering Manager at Trade Republic.  Urbi's mission is to establish a Product and Engineering mindset in the fast-growing Berlin fintech. He shares insights on onboarding processes, the collaboration between product & engineering as well as establishing a culture of open communication.   Table of content 0:30 - Intro Andreas Urban aka Urbi 6:15 - Urbi’s mission at Trade Republic 8:00 - What Engineering needs from Product Managers 10:00 - Transitioning to a scaling Product & Engineering organization 15:25 - Writing documentation to speed up onboarding of new Engineers 17:40 - Early Engineering involvement for better product planning 27:35 - Helping teams to stay focused 30:15 - Company culture vs. processes 33:45 - Collaborating with Product Leads as Engineering Manager 39:22 - Engineering a Product & Engineering organization 44:45 - What Urbi motivated to pick up the hyper-growth challenge 48:40 - Debrief Alex & Christian    ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

People were always a passion for Emilie Lindström.  With a background in HR & recruiting, she moved into Product Management 3,5 years ago and is now building internal tools and processes for Outfittery. As Product Manager, Emilie spends a big part of her day working with Stakeholders to get them involved and manage their expectations along the journey. In this episode, she shares insightful stories as well as tips for everyone working with challenging stakeholders.    Table of content 0:30 - Intro Emilie Lindström 5:55 - What product newbies need to know 9:30 - Getting started with stakeholder management 13:15 - Identifying your stakeholders 18:55 - Treating stakeholders as domain experts & customers 20:25 - Dealing with “tricky” stakeholders 28:05 - Managing people vs. managing stakeholders 33:00 - How to work with customers 36:55 - Negotiating with stakeholders 41:00 - Christian’s stakeholder horror story 46:45 - Emilie’s key takeaways about stakeholder management 49:10 - Debrief Alex & Christian   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

With a master's degree in psychology and many years of experience as a User Researcher, Nikki Anderson moved in 2018 from New York to Berlin. She works currently as User Research Lead at Zalando as well as her own startup the user research academy.   Nikki shares the basics of qualitative user research to be able to get started with it in a fast and effective fashion. Next to that, she talks about when a company should start doing user research and at which point it's worth thinking of hiring a researcher.    Table of content 0:30 - Intro Nikki Anderson 2:46 - Researching the perfect croissant 6:55 - The basics of qualitative research 14:10 - Choosing the right segments to research 15:55 - Kicking off a research project 23:00 - The TEDW framework for user interviews 29:00 - Validating qualitative interview data 35:25 - Hypothesis-driven research (how might we statements) 37:35 - Evaluative research vs. generative research 41:55 - Parallelizing market research & user research 44:30 - When to start doing and hiring for research as a company 51:25 - Nikki’s key takeaways about getting started with research 54:00 - Debrief Christian & Alex   Connect with Nikki: Website: https://www.userresearchacademy.com/ Linkedin: @Nikkianderson-ux Twitter: @productherapist Link to Nikki's research template:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/19_2S5c-LWhwEk86oMxemgwsYHcm6CG_rwut5TLz0byY/edit   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Alex and Christian were brainstorming during brunch about "what makes the perfect croissant so delicious." They came to the conclusion, that they could do research to find the answer. But how much research would they need to do, and would they really find the answer? In this episode, Alex talks about defining good questions and hypotheses to be able to do good research. Besides that, he touches on why many companies are hesitant to do research and how to apply it as a way to not lose speed.    Table of content 0:30 - Can “taste” be researched? 4:00 - Copying ideas doesn’t replace research 5:25 - Acceptance of research on C-Level 10:00 - Getting answers after deploying to production 13:10 - Dual track research 21:05 - Death through research summary   Connect with Alex: Website: www.alexdapunt.com Linkedin: @alexdapunt  Twitter: @alexdapunt   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Liam Murphy is a crypto enthusiast for more than 8 years as an investor and a Product Designer. He shares insights into how to build crypto products that are "more usable" for crypto investment app consumers. These days he's focused on working for crypto communities and talks about how the community decides and builds new features & products.    Table of content 0:30 - Intro Liam Murphy 3:10 - Basics around crypto & decentralized finance (DeFi) 8:00 - Designing crypto products 13:40 - Changing user behaviors about investing 15:24 - Kicking off crypto projects 19:25 - Emerging crypto trends 22:50 - Designing for the crypto community 25:30 - The value of cryptocurrencies vs. fiat currencies 29:25 - Best practices to start developing a crypto project 32:10 - Community-driven development 36:35 - Will crypto become mainstream? 38:50 - Liams biggest challenge as a Designer in the crypto space 42:30 - How to get started in the crypto space 44:15 - Debrief Alex & Christian   Connect with Liam:  Twitter: @lemurf Linkedin:  @liammurphydesign   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/