Product Momentum Podcast

For years product management’s “hard skills” have gotten much of the spotlight, maybe because they’re easier to get our arms around. But as product management coach and consultant Kate Leto explains, the conversation seems to be shifting toward product leadership’s more elusive collection of “soft skills,” which she refers to as emotional intelligence. In this episode of Product Momentum, Kate emphasizes the need to develop aptitude around empathy, conflict resolution, resilience, and maintaining a positive attitude. Her first book, Hiring Product Managers: Using Product EQ to go beyond culture and skills, discusses how the human approach to product leadership often makes the difference in individual, team, and product success. Sharpening our product technique and functional skills remains vital, she explains. “But we need to reframe the narrative and realize that things like emotional intelligence are important skills sets as well.” All these soft skills come together to form Product EQ, really bringing emotional intelligence front and center into the product community, Kate adds. Catch the entire episode with Kate Leto, and be sure to listen for her insights on hiring and team building that go beyond the functional proficiency, especially: The Role Canvas. A collaborative approach to creating a meaningful role. The Product EQ Wheel. A self-reflection exercise designed to help you understand and assess your product EQ. Sphere of Influence. Understanding that our ability to truly control behaviors and outcomes is limited. The post 115 / How Emotional Intelligence Drives Product Success, with Kate Leto appeared first on ITX Corp..

Imagine a world where you can just be yourself. Where you can be safe and be expressive and be just how you want to show up and not be worried about being judged for it. This is the sort of community that Landing product designer Alex Crandall is helping to build. It’s a refreshing world far removed from where many Gen Z users cut their teeth. In this episode of Product Momentum, Alex joins co-hosts Paul Gebel and Mimi Ace, a Sr. UX Designer at ITX, to explore how Gen Z is embracing new communities that support creative inspiration while rejecting the inauthenticity of the social media platforms they grew up with. “We don’t need to get into all the statistics of how negatively social media has impacted and has spiked anxieties with younger generations,” Alex says. “But I think many are realizing – having grown up in this toxic culture – that the so-called ‘authenticity’ that people are playing at and presenting on social media is not what they want.” Today’s mainstream platforms goad their users into to being confrontational and adversarial. “It’s staged. It’s bought. It’s rented,” he explains. “And it’s not true to who anyone actually is.” Today’s users totally recognize when people aren’t being their most authentic selves. And they’re turning away, demanding to go back to a time when they can simply, safely, be themselves. Tune in to learn more about the many communities that are sprouting up. Like the one Alex Crandall is helping to build and like so many of the insights he shares here, they’re uplifting and hopeful, offering a new direction and a sense of renewal. Imagine that. The post 114 / Building Authentic Communities: Gen Z Leads the Way, with Alex Crandall appeared first on ITX Corp..

The myth of product management is that human complexity can be reduced to a manageable framework, one that lets us show up for work feeling confident and comfortable and ready to take on the world. Not so fast, says Matt LeMay, internationally recognized product leader, consultant, and author of Agile for Everybody and Product Management in Practice, 2d. “There are a lot of people who really want to cling to this notion that there’s a single right way to do product management,” Matt continues, “and that once all the messy human complexity disappears you’ll be guaranteed success.” Matt LeMay recalls his early days as a product manager, initially believing that some secret knowledge would magically transform his complex role into a series of straightforward tasks. Over time, he realized that success requires product managers to be constantly listening, learning, and adapting their practices. “When I see product managers failing, it’s not because they lack some specific competency, but rather because they’ve become entrenched,” Matt adds. “They are defending some particular position rather than opening themselves up to changing their own position.” Humility, he adds, emerges as a crucial trait for all product leaders. “It’s the only way I feel confident doing my work because I know there’re a lot of folks who know things that I don’t know, have learned things I haven’t.” Coupled with a healthy dose of intuition, we can protect ourselves from an over-reliance on select pieces of quantitative data. Good product management is hard work that embraces human complexity. It doesn’t try to reduce it into tiny little data points armed with magical powers. The post 113 / Embracing Human Complexity in Product Management, with Matt LeMay appeared first on ITX Corp..

Product teams emerging from 3 years of remote-work hibernation are now living through what Gavin Deadman calls the “handoff culture.” Acquisition marketer turned product management coach, Gavin supports a product team of 150 product managers and product leaders within the division of Flutter International and Flutter Entertainment. A prolific blogger, Gavin’s writing is must-read content for product managers, marketers, makers, and leaders. In a pre-pandemic workplace, core product development functions were typically co-located in the same office space, Gavin explains. So collaborating with designers, engineers, and the rest of the business was pretty straightforward. “When you’re actually working with human beings in the flesh, understanding why you’re solving particular problems becomes quite natural,” he adds. But the Covid-driven disruption not only created a physical disconnect between product managers and their teams; it also forced us to create new, specialist-type roles and applications to do smaller parts of the job relative to collaboration. Over time, we figured out how to untangle that web. We got really good at having conversations; we established ways of working that actually accelerate decisionmaking; and, maybe because some of those decisions went sideways, we learned to iterate more quickly. Over the past 3 years, we’ve formalized processes that have driven much of the pre-pandemic inefficiencies from our work. Now, we find ourselves with a new code to crack: How do we move from the sterile efficiency of the handoff culture to build back some of the “healthy friction” occurring organically as product teams return with new energy to their workspaces? Have the skill sets we expect from product managers, designers, and engineers changed? If so, how do we reassess them? In this dynamic new workplace, where does the role of “servant leader” fit into the product manager job description? Catch the entire Product Momentum conversation with Gavin Deadman to hear his insights. The post 112 / Beyond the Handoff Culture: How To Collaborate in a Post-Pandemic World, with Gavin Deadman appeared first on ITX Corp..

The world may be shrinking, but it doesn’t always feel that way. As product design leaders Krissi Xenakis & Jocelyne Dittmer explain, it’s more important than ever to get aligned around culture and craft, balancing the needs of the business with the needs of the team. Especially with remote and distributed teams, collaboration around complementary skills is essential. One of the most important areas of collaboration for design leaders today is with data scientists and data teams. In this episode of Product Momentum, Krissi Xenakis & Jocelyne Dittmer join co-hosts Paul Gebel and Freddy Romano, a UX Design Lead at ITX, using their journey to share how maintaining a community of collaboration helps overcome both distance and professional disciplines. “The design practice continues to evolve,” Jocelyne says. “As it does, similar advances in data science have created an intersection point, making it crucial for these two disciplines to work together so that we can create meaningful experiences for users and drive better outcomes.” Data is a really big word, adds Krissi. “People assume that if I’m talking about ‘data,’ I must be referring to quantitative metrics or user insights. And I touch on the aspects of qualitative and quantitative in my talk, but it’s less about qualitative vs. quantitative; it’s more about choosing the right research program based on what you need to learn.” Designers, she continues, sometimes fall into the same trap as other makers when it comes to building a solution before they’ve defined the problem. “It’s wrong to jump in and say, ‘okay, today we’re going to do user testing’ before making sure that user testing will give us the answers we need. There are so many different ways to learn, just like there are so many different ways to design.” The connection between design and data will become even more important over time, especially with the emergence of AI and other advanced technologies, these experts agree. Designers need to be able to react to that, but also have the foresight to think about what comes next. “Designers want to be part of the conversation, and if we’re not, we need to inject ourselves into it,” Jocelyne says, “to make sure we’re thinking about desired outcomes and not just about, ‘here’s the data we have today.’” Want to hear more from Krissi Xenakis and Jocelyne Dittmer? Grab your tickets now for ITX’s 2nd annual Product + Design Conference, June 22-23 in Rochester, NY. Learn more. The post 111 / Using Data to Inform Design, with Krissi Xenakis & Jocelyne Dittmer appeared first on ITX Corp..

For more than a decade, Futures Design thinker Phil Balagtas has been developing tools for fusing the concepts of strategic foresight and speculative design with traditional design strategy. On June 22-23 at the ITX Product + Design Conference, he’ll share many of these insights. In a Day 1 workshop and Day 2 keynote, Phil will show us how we might envision our future, considering all those things that demand our attention: our users, our businesses and current strategies, and our impact on society – through the lens of design. In this episode of Product Momentum, Phil describes his work to build and support a community of futures thinkers, insisting that the community formed through a series of ‘right time, right place’ events. Using terms like speculative design, strategic foresight, and traditional design strategy, he talks about how the power of community has been crucial to creating the momentum that drives innovation. The futures design vocabulary avoids words like predict or forecast, instead preferring foresight and possibility to answer “what if?” types of scenarios, Phil explains. But the cool part is that this practice is not dissimilar from current business strategy approaches. “We did similar things before, looking at alternate possibilities of the future,” he adds. “But now we have very rich visions and scenarios, and we use them to explore how we want to operate in that world, how we create innovations and pioneer new markets. “We’re a future-minded species. Naturally, we’re always thinking of the future. ‘What if this happens? What do I do then?’ What I’m working on is a new set of tools that help us do what we’ve always done, now aiming them at business and product strategy applications.” Listen to the entire pod – or check out the ITX Product + Design Conference – where you can learn more from Phil Balagtas about the fresh perspective futures thinking and speculative design bring to the conversation – issues that don’t always come to mind in traditional business methods, but are gaining importance every day. The post 110 / Futures Thinking and UX Design, with Phil Balagtas appeared first on ITX Corp..

Though product management remains a relatively young profession, the pandemic-induced digital transformation has accelerated its maturation at a rate far faster than it would have otherwise. Yuting Chu believes this phenomenon has positioned product managers to take a more entrepreneurial approach to product development – one that incorporates the experiences of all stakeholders, called co-creation. In this episode of Product Momentum, Paul chats with Yuting Chu, a veteran product manager and consultant. Though his background rests in quantitative methods, Yuting also brings a human-centered, empathetic perspective to problem-solving. Product managers are naturally collaborative, he says. As the pandemic has accelerated the growth of digital products, the importance of co-creation is greater than ever before. “Co-creation means surfacing the various perceptions, hypotheses, and experiences that all stakeholders have,” he adds. “By linking them together, we demonstrate that they’re just different parts of the same puzzle.” One thing we’re able to recognize through co-creation, Yuting continues, “is that just because I disagree with you doesn’t mean you’re wrong. And just because everyone agrees with me doesn’t mean I’m right. The world’s far too complex for that.” Catch the entire conversation with Yuting, and learn about The Partner Happiness Framework – a powerful quantitative tool to help product managers surface stakeholders’ pain points and develop an action-oriented mindset for converting problems into solutions in the most targeted and helpful way. The speaker line-up for ITX’s Product + Design Conference 2023 is set! June 22-23 in Rochester, NY. Learn more! The post 109 / Co-creation in the Age of Digital Transformation, with Yuting Chu appeared first on ITX Corp..

The recent acceleration of artificial intelligence into the product + design space may spark more answers than questions. But the questions that persist are big ones. In this episode of Product Momentum, Aaron Usiskin, Director of UX/UI Enterprise Incubation and Enablement at Zelis, explores this philosophical head-scratcher: with AI/ML, are we at risk of losing the humanity from our human-centered design practice? Aaron guides host Paul Gebel and guest co-host Brian Loughner, a Lead UX Designer at ITX, through his multi-level response. “There are so many ways that AI and ML have already streamlined our process as designers and UXers,” Aaron says, “that we shouldn’t step away from it. We really should embrace it even more than we do today.” At the same time, he concedes, “AI is based only on the things that people have done on a website or a mobile app. Plus, it’s really hard to understand how one person or a group of people are going to use your system, regardless of how much research or AI you do. “If you really want to understand people, you have to be among them. You have to be learning with them, interacting with them, communicating with them, interviewing them. And when you’re interviewing them, it’s not writing down their answers. It’s looking into their eyes, understanding the facial recognition of what they’re doing.” There’s no AI that’s going to be able to tell you if someone’s paying attention, he adds. “I don’t think it’s ever going to take away the humanistic factor of design out of it.” We’re looking to a future that combines the power of AI with the fundamentals of human-centered design. Thank goodness; that sounds like a winning combination. Be sure to catch the entire conversation with Aaron Usiskin: learn how to apply AI/ML to streamline the design process – but only after you have the fundamentals of user experience in place. Join Jesse James Garrett, Rich Mironov, and Radhika Dutt at ITX’s Product + Design Conference, June 22-23 in Rochester, NY. Final 3 speakers to be announced soon. Learn more. The post 108 / The Human Reality of User Experience, with Aaron Usiskin appeared first on ITX Corp..

The journey of Kax Uson from employee #1 at an e-commerce start-up in the Philippines to Head of Product at Adevinta looks familiar to the path so many product managers have taken. At every turn, she’s learned the processes and tools that come with the role – and then unlearned the ones that became a burden to her effectiveness in it. In this episode of Product Momentum, Kax guides us along her journey and offers a primer on what it means to be a successful product manager in the 21st century. “When users look at the products we build,” she says, “they don’t care whether it was built using Kanban or Scrum or Waterfall. Our users see only the product and feel the experience we’ve delivered for them. The process that we use to get there is not relevant.” There’s a lot of focus in the product space on ‘getting these things right versus actually getting things done.’ The outputs over the outcomes, Kax adds. “Things to do. Rules to follow as product managers. When really, that’s just a very small part of how to build products. I feel that we’re favoring more these tools and these frameworks, rather than learning how to work with people in order to build good products. “Our contribution [as PMs] to product building is very intangible. Our role is to bring people together, to rise through the uncertainty and make sense of things, so that other people can actually understand what’s going on and bring trust inside the room. That’s a skill that you cannot learn from school, or any camp probably…it’s a skill that you learn by practice and by getting feedback and failing in some cases. Be sure to catch the entire pod conversation with Kax Uson; so many more nuggets to share. Is this a reunion of Product Momentum alumni? Not quite. It’s ITX’s Product + Design Conference 2023. June 22-23 in Rochester, NY. Featuring Radhika Dutt, Jesse James Garrett, Rich Mironov – additional speakers coming soon! Learn more. The post 107 / A Lesson in Product Management: Outcomes > Outputs, with Kax Uson appeared first on ITX Corp..

Product and UX professionals want their product to be ‘the next big thing.’ Right? But Google’s Neha Bansal reminds us that designing a product with everyone in mind ignores the adage, “aim small, miss small.” Instead, Neha recommends narrowing your target market to what Andrew Chen calls atomic networks. “The broader your market, the harder it is to find product-market fit,” Neha says. “Starting small allows you to analyze the root cause when something isn’t working; when you have a small base of users – an atomic network – you can pick up the phone and ask about what you can do better.” Neha Bansal is a product leader, angel investor, and mentor to dozens of startups. She currently heads Merchant Growth and Monetization for Google’s B2B commerce business. In this episode, Neha and Paul discuss Chen’s The Cold Start Problem and how product leaders can apply the atomic network mindset to find product-market fit. Atomic networks help you gain traction and work through problems, Neha explains. When you know your audience intimately, it is easier to connect with them and work through the barriers and frustrations they are experiencing. Neha describes this as turning ‘zero’ moments into ‘magic’ moments. Catch the entire episode to hear Neha describe how Facebook, Uber, and Bank of America identified and expanded their atomic networks first to find product-market fit on their way to becoming household names. Neha also shares key metrics that will let you know when you’ve discovered your own. Jesse James Garrett and Rich Mironov to keynote at ITX Product + Design Conference 2023. June 22-23, in Rochester, NY. Early-bird tickets available until April 21. Learn more! The post 106 / Using Atomic Networks to Find Product-Market Fit, with Neha Bansal appeared first on ITX Corp..