Product Momentum Podcast

Christine Itwaru, Principal Strategist at Pendo, shares insights on the importance of the human connection in product management, transitioning to business strategy, the role of product ops in keeping teams healthy, and defining innovation.

Working in a startup brings the concept “CEO of the product” to a whole new level. Suddenly, as Gigantic CEO Michael Sacca and COO Chloe Oddleifson know well, you’re responsible for every aspect of your product’s development, launch, promotion, sales – and everything in between. Fun fact: there’s plenty to take away from the startup mindset for all us product managers. In this episode of Product Momentum, Michael Sacca & Chloe Oddleifson share their journey, from 6 years of working together at Dribbble to now building Gigantic from the ground up. Gigantic is a product- and marketing-focused training institute that aims to fill knowledge gaps through perpetual learning. “Michael and I were coming from a place where we knew our jobs inside and out,” Chloe says. “We knew exactly how to be useful, exactly how to bring value. And then we started Gigantic and moved into a world where it’s just us. There are no processes, there are no rules, nothing is set in stone, and there are no clear answers. We just have to pick up and figure it out.” “It doesn’t take long to see the power of a brand,” Michael adds. “I don’t think I ever respected it before as much as I do today. We can have a better product than the competition out there, but it’s so much harder to get people’s attention” when you’re just starting out. “We can build whatever we want,” he adds, but getting the attention and going to market are much different and much harder. “If someone wants to be the CEO of the product internally…,if you really want your head of product to be the CEO of the product, then they really need to understand those other disciplines and they need to be able to do them,” Michael says. In many ways, that mindset becomes easier to execute when the culture that nurtures it is founded in joy. “As we started thinking about the type of company we wanted to build, the type of culture we wanted to infuse, and the type of experience we wanted for our customers, joy was the term that best described it,” Chloe explains. “We should be able to find joy at and in the work we do because life is just too short for it to be any other way.” Catch the entire conversation with Michael Sacca & Chloe Oddleifson to learn even more about that journey and their plans to deepen Gigantic’s impact. The post 121 / A Gigantic Vision: Infusing Joy into Workplace Culture, with Michael Sacca & Chloe Oddleifson appeared first on ITX Corp..

When we’re afraid to have difficult conversations, we hold ourselves back and create more frustration and work in the long run, says Marsha Acker, founder and CEO of Team Catapult. “We spend a lot of time trying to avoid conflict and the things that make us feel uncomfortable. And yet in our attempts to avoid all that, I think we create a lot of extra work for ourselves,” Marsha adds. In today’s episode of Product Momentum, Paul and Marsha go deep on the topic of communication and leadership, exploring the structure of our communication and the role it plays in effecting personal and organizational change. Marsha is a coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and podcaster whose work is focused on communication in leadership. “Communication sits at the core of our ability to lead,” Marsha says. We don’t all see the world in the same way, leading to gaps in understanding, she adds. “What I’m articulating here is how I believe change happens,” Marsha explains. “When we communicate with one another, the words that we say, it’s like putting a train on a track. [That communication] moves us forward, propels us back, or just kind of keeps us stuck in a place. So I think it’s about how we communicate with one another and having a language to make sense of it that makes the difference.” Leadership range and communicative competence are cornerstone concepts that Marsha uses to analyze the way successful leadership is measured. There’s a very specific way she helps people self-assess not only their ability to bring a variety of different communications into a conversation, but also to examine the breadth of their leadership style. Listen to hear more from Marsha Acker in today’s episode of Product Momentum. The post 120 / Understanding Communication Structure To Effect Positive Change, with Marsha Acker appeared first on ITX Corp..

Alla Weinberg, CEO of SPOKE & WHEEL, discusses the importance of having conversations that prioritize people over work to foster psychological safety in the workplace. She emphasizes the role of leaders in creating a safe environment and highlights the significance of emotions in decision-making and building connections. The chapter also explores stress assessments, the importance of candor, and building resilient organizations and safe cultures.

Success as a product manager requires finding the right balance between solving user problems and meeting rigid business demands. For Devan Goldstein, a Group Product Manager at Trello (an Atlassian product), “product management’s fundamental accountability is to ensure that the business gets what it needs out of the teams it has put in place to do the work.” That means making sure users are getting what they need out of the product such that, in a perfect world, what they need is something that drives product market fit. “It can’t be something they need that doesn’t create a sustainable business,” Devan says. “It can’t be something they need that is ancillary to the business’ reason for existing.” How do we get there? Devan Goldstein believes we solve this challenge by adopting a service orientation, aiming above all to help users, the business, and the team. “Having this sense of omni-directional caring and empathy – not just for users, which is the one we talk about the most, but for your partners, for the teams that work with your partners, and for your stakeholders – helps us understand how all those overlapping needs intersect as inputs to the strategic and prioritization decisions we have to make,” he adds. Tune in to hear Devan’s comments on the critical traits that all product managers should possess in this episode of Product Momentum: Empathy for both your users and co-workers. Intentionality in your day-to-day interactions; nothing happens by accident. Integrity and humility, even when they might compete. The post 118 / Empathy, Transparency, and Intentionality in Product Management, with Devan Goldstein appeared first on ITX Corp..

Vision and Strategy are terms often used interchangeably. It’s easy to do, especially when the future is racing toward us. But when we conflate the notion of vision and strategy — as Eastman Kodak learned the hard way years ago — we confuse our objective with the path to achieving it. We can we adjust our mindset to think in terms of re-imagining the future of our products in a way that helps us avoid this trap, Erica Orange explains in today’s episode of Product Momentum. Erica Orange is the Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer of The Future Hunters, one of the world’s leading futurist consulting firms. Erica uses futures thinking to help us understand the pace of change and evaluate trends in a rapidly changing world. By slowing things down, the future’s unknowns feel less ominous, more approachable. We get better at becoming comfortable with the ambiguity we confront every day.   Erica explains how successful companies adapt their vision-driven strategies in real-time to fit uncertain, rapidly evolving markets. “As we go into the future, successful companies need to begin with a blank slate for each strategy and reimagine what is appropriate and effective for each,” she says. “It goes back to the things that are all tried and true. Companies that do their future and their vision and their strategies in terms of the correct mental math will be the ones that get it right.” Hold your vision near, Erica adds, and keep multiple strategies close by. This can make it easier to abandon the ones that aren’t working. Be sure to catch the entire episode with Erica for a fresh take on the future!  The post 117 / Re-Imagining the Future of Product, with Erica Orange appeared first on ITX Corp..

It can be overwhelming to think about all of the impacts – both positive and negative – that our products might have on those who use them. In this episode of Product Momentum, Paul is joined by Matt Bernius, friend of ITX and Principal User Researcher at Code for America. Matt discusses trauma-informed design in an approachable way that will change how you think about your work. Awareness should be your first step in working toward being trauma-informed and trauma-responsive, Matt offers. The simple act of listening to this episode puts you squarely on the right path. Matt Bernius explains that experimentation that brings about even incremental changes can make a difference and be truly innovative. When we improve products for users who have experienced trauma, he says, we make them better for everyone using or building the product, regardless of their life experiences. Through trauma-informed individuals we can build more resilient organizations. “It’s a responsibility of the organization to create an environment that doesn’t require extreme resilience,” Matt adds, “not the fault of an individual for not being resilient.” Matt points out. We can all work toward developing resilience in ourselves and each other and, in the process, can create psychologically safe organizations where innovation thrives best. Catch the whole episode to hear more of Matt’s practical tips and impactful insights: About half of adults in the U.S. have experienced trauma of some form or another. Trauma “lives in the body.” Re-traumatization – when your body re-lives a traumatic experience – has long-term adverse impacts. Listen to your innermost feelings, even in situations where you’re trained to be objective. The post 116 / Innovate with Empathy: Unpacking Trauma-Informed Design, with Matt Bernius appeared first on ITX Corp..

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..