Product Momentum Podcast

The role of product leader isn’t just about numbers and KPIs. It’s really setting the stage for your teams to boost their capacity to build customer value, says Megan Murphy. In this episode of Product Momentum, Sean and Paul catch up with Megan Murphy, VP of Product at Hotjar. “What got us to now won’t get us to next,” Megan reminds us. “So my approach to ‘getting to next’ was to tap into different communities and make the team composition feel more ‘diverse.’ That may not be the right word, but I knew I wanted to have a great mix of people from all around the world.” The beauty of diversity is the breadth of perspectives it brings to a team. The power of diversity comes from exposing blind spots that get in the way of honest engagement. “When we’re honest with each other,” Megan remarks, “we can get real work done.” At Hotjar, Megan primes her teams for success by recruiting talent through nontraditional channels to make sure her teams represent a range of perspectives. Tune in to hear more from Megan Murphy. Learn how her interests have expanded beyond the product itself into the go-to market, the category creation, and harvesting the value in the category. She urges us product leaders to ask: are we designing a product for a new category? Or a product that harvests value in an existing category? The post 84 / Diversity Boosts Capacity To Build Customer Value appeared first on ITX Corp..

What is the role of design in product development for startups? And what characteristics do the great designers share? In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, John Zeratsky joins host Paul Gebel to explain – interestingly, using David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers biography as a backdrop. The book “provided this interesting illustration of the difference between craft and invention. Designers,” John says, “obsess about craft. When the Wright brothers were building bikes, they were craftsmen – detail-oriented, patient, and introspective. And they made super high-quality bikes.… But when they invented the airplane,” he continues, “they leveraged those skills to do something very, very different. And that is much more akin to the role of design at startups that are trying to do something new.” John Zeratsky ought to know. With a career journey that includes both craftsman and inventor roles, John is now co-founder and General Partner at Character, where he supports startups with capital and sprints. He and partner Jake Knapp noticed that in the world of venture capital, product was often neglected. Yet product is the foundation of every business; a business cannot be successful without a successful product. “If you’re starting a company, the hardest thing about it – the core thing – is the product,” John says. “If there’s no product, none of the rest matters.” Design’s role is not to answer the what, John adds. It’s the how. “How are we going to figure out this tricky problem? How are we going to figure out what our customers want and describe it in a way that makes sense for them?” Tune in to hear John’s insights about how to improve your team’s design sprint process. And be sure to catch his breakdown of the three levels of the facilitation pyramid, and learn why OATS matters if you’re a startup interested in partnering with Character. The post 83 / Design’s True Purpose: Answer The How appeared first on ITX Corp..

As product managers, we’re taught to prioritize customer needs above all else. If that’s correct, where does threat modeling land in our list of priorities? After all, if we can’t provide a secure solution, our users will go elsewhere. Chris Romeo, CEO and co-founder of Security Journey, suggests we “shift left” to get these concepts into the conversation as soon as possible. In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Chris joins Paul and guest co-host Jonathan Coupal, ITX Chief Security Officer, for an impassioned conversation about Security and Privacy – often-overlooked dimensions of application and system quality. “Security and privacy are rarely written ‘on the same napkin’ as the new product idea,” Chris says. “Lots of times, they end up being added later, resulting in lots of developer rework. So we use this concept of ‘shift left’ to describe the notion of moving that security mindset earlier into the development process.” Chris’ mission is to bring security culture change to all organizations. In this episode, he discusses collaborative threat modeling and other tactics that can feed your organization’s security culture. Intuitively, we already know how to threat model, Chris adds. We just need to adopt this mindset when building our products. Listen in to hear more from Chris Romeo about threat modeling for product managers, including: How security has gained importance over his career How to build a program of security champions The importance of cross-team collaboration The post 82 / Threat Modeling for Product Managers appeared first on ITX Corp..

Gamification mechanics work because they motivate user audiences to participate, engage, and act. Yu-kai Chou, who began work in this space nearly 20 years ago, explains why the application of game technique is so much more than points, badges, and leaderboards. It extracts all the fundamental components in games and applies them to real-world and business activities.  In this episode, Yu-kai breaks down gamification into digestible pieces in a captivating conversation with Paul Gebel and guest host, ITX Senior Product Manager Zack Kane. Yu-Kai is the President of Octalysis Group and the creator of the Octalysis Framework, a human-focused gamification framework. It’s all about motivation and engagement, Yu-kai says. “Gamification is making sure that what we build is not just something that works. It has to be something that motivates us to do things.” Yu-kai Chou discusses explicit versus implicit gamification, as well as white hat and black hat design. Both are useful, he adds, but only when aligned to the product’s design, customer base, and the company’s goals. Tune in to hear lots of examples that your team will find helpful, from Porsche to SEC compliance, to applying game technique principles in your product. Applying these principles will be sure to engage and delight your users. The post 81 / Why Gamification Drives Human Behavior appeared first on ITX Corp..

In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Sean and Paul welcome Ronke Majekodunmi, Senior Product Manager at PayPal, for an inside look at product leadership. Especially during tumultuous times, it’s the leader’s job to acknowledge the context that the team is working in and to support them both personally and professionally. This can be done in big or small ways, and she shares several easy-to-apply examples. Ronke Majekodunmi also points to imposter syndrome as another challenge of product leadership. What if my dev team doesn’t trust me? Am I good enough? What’ll happen if I screw this up? Her advice is not to minimize the feelings or push them aside. But rather to embrace the vulnerability and work through it. “To overcome this, I verbally acknowledge to myself and others, ‘I don’t have all the answers, but let’s go sort it out together,’” she said. “The scary thing is that’s actually become the secret to my success. Recognize you don’t know everything; then go out and learn as much as possible from your team.” Listen in to catch Ronke’s insights about building trust on teams, and how making decisions “within the triangle” helps ensure that your team is working together toward a shared vision. At the end of the day, she says, “It’s everybody’s perspective that makes the product successful.” The post 80 / Lessons in Fearless Product Leadership appeared first on ITX Corp..

Josh Seiden broke into product development from the designer’s perspective, crafting beautiful things he could be very proud of. Sometimes they worked; sometimes they didn’t change human behavior at all. “That deafening silence that comes when no users engage with your product is just a terrible feeling,” he says. So what we’re always trying to do is generate the maximum outcome from the minimum output. In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Josh presents a simple but thought-provoking framework, called The Logic Model. The framework introduces three important levels: outputs, outcomes, and impact. Outputs, Josh adds, are the stuff we make. Outcomes are what we get from having made the stuff. Impact is the change in user behavior that drives business results. To change human behavior, Josh adds, product teams need to do three things: understand how their work aligns with the overall strategy; express that strategy in terms of outcomes – not outputs; and be aware of the big uncertainties that are out there. That requires discovery. “Discovery may reduce your team’s delivery velocity,” Josh says. “But it also means your product development is more efficient. Prioritizing the things that create value…outcomes over outputs. Tune in to catch the entire conversation with Josh Seiden. The post 79 / Create Outcomes That Change Human Behavior appeared first on ITX Corp..

Psychological safety is the great enabler, says Dr. Timothy Clark, founder and CEO of LeaderFactor. In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Tim joins Sean to give us a behind-the-scenes look at his 4 Stages of Psychological Safety and explain why it’s the foundation of all high-performing teams. Product leaders are vital to building that foundation, he adds. When they model and reward “everyday acts of vulnerability,” they guide their teams from Stage 1 (it’s not expensive to be yourself) through Stage 4 (respectfully challenge the status quo). Imagine an environment where you’re free to direct your energies and intellect to solving complex problems — instead of whether your team members will criticize your every suggestion. Acts of vulnerability include asking questions, challenging opinions, offering feedback, and even responding, “I don’t know” – perhaps the epitome of vulnerability. Teams that do this well are on the fast track to building psychological safety and celebrating the innovative creativity that is sure to follow. Tune in to learn more from Timothy Clark, and follow along as he guides us through the 4 Stages. Listen carefully as he clearly defines a glossary of key terms we use regularly in our product space. By simplifying the complex, Tim provides actionable strategies from which we can all benefit. The post 78 / Psychological Safety Inspires Innovation appeared first on ITX Corp..

We product leaders work to solve problems that are fundamentally human, explains Tatyana Mamut. They are by the people, with the people, and for the people. Applying a human-centered mindset is key to creating value for our customers and our teams. An anthropologist by training, Tatyana Mamut, Senior VP of New Products at Pendo, brings her unique perspective to how product people work to understand and relate to the customers and their real-life experience. In addition to anthropology, Tatyana has experience in design, entrepreneurship, advertising, and product innovation. “The key to building good products is understanding that customers are humans,” she explains. “They are not a market. They are not abstract. Customers are people.” When we solve problems for real people, they become evangelists for our product – every product person’s dream. The human experience cannot be captured in a dashboard or PowerPoint presentation, she adds. Only when product leaders immerse ourselves into our customers’ real-life environment can we bring their “life-world” onto our teams. Catch this entire episode of the Product Momentum Podcast to hear Tatyana describe the product leader’s number one challenge, and learn why sharing the broad context that only we have as product leaders is part of its solution. The post 77 / Building Human Solutions for Human Problems appeared first on ITX Corp..

Jay Haynes, founder and CEO of thrv.com, guests on this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast. He and Paul discuss market disruption and the role Jobs-To-Be-Done plays in assessing the risks and optimizing the benefits. Jay learned all about the phenomenon of disruption from the late Clay Christensen; it’s what happens when market leaders become so focused on pleasing their most profitable customers that they overlook the needs of their other segments. We product managers find it tempting to measure our progress based on what we want our products to do rather than on what customers want to get done. Just ask product leaders at Blackberry and Kodak. Resisting the temptation requires fortitude and takes a lot of work, Jay says. But it’s worth the investment. “You have to change an organization’s culture that is product-focused into a culture that is customer-focused,” he adds. That’s a mental leap many are reluctant to take, as it calls for commitment to a vision and leadership to initiate and sustain the transformation. It takes time to realize that the risk of doing nothing is greater than the risk of self-disruption. What type of risk analysis is required to move from the current state of your product to what it could be? Jay explains: “If it’s obvious your product could be better (and every product in the world could be better), you can then go and communicate, ‘We’ve got to avoid this risk.’” Listen in as Jay Haynes explains how to get your organization’s self-disruption plan headed in the right direction and happening faster. The post 76 / JTBD and the Benefits of Self-Disruption appeared first on ITX Corp..

In this final episode of our 3-part series on Self-Determination Theory, Scott Rigby, Ph.D. discusses Relatedness – “the experience of belonging or connection between people.” As product leaders, we feel the power of that connection when a customer says, “Wow, it’s like the people who designed this app were thinking about me when they built it.” Scott ties the three episodes together here, describing what happens when the fundamental human needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are simultaneously met. Quite literally, we create a psychologically safe environment where the art of caring abounds. And where the needs of the business are tended to as well. “I understand we all have business objectives,” Scott cautions, “and that there’s a fundamental nature to how businesses and employees interact.” The good news, he adds, is that one does not stand in opposition to the other. “The key is to demonstrate care for employees and customers for their own sake, not so we can get more out of them,” Scott offers. “As a customer or employee, we’re blown away when a person or a company has put our needs ahead of their own.” We feel the connection; it’s like we belong. Listen in to hear more from Scott about strategies to build relatedness on your teams, how emotional metrics can be measured, and more. Liked this episode? Check out the first two from the series with Scott Rigby on Autonomy and Competence. The post 75 / Relatedness: The Catalyst for Care and Creativity appeared first on ITX Corp..