LaunchPod | Product Management Podcast

Today, we’re talking with Mikal Lewis, a Digital Product Executive at Whole Foods who drove hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue over the course of his career. In this episode, Mikal talks about: Why you should absolutely (ethically) cheat to get outsized results for your product His framework that drove a quarter of a billion dollars in additional revenue for Nordstrom’s online store How to use four types of luck to optimize for opportunity And, how to build a quiet portfolio so that you can choose your own career moves Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikalfm/ How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg: https://www.amazon.com/How-Google-Works-Eric-Schmidt/dp/1455582328 The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs by Andrew Chen: https://andrewchen.com/the-law-of-shitty-clickthroughs/ Pretentiousness: Why it Matters by Dan Fox: https://www.amazon.com/Pretentiousness-Why-Matters-Dan-Fox/dp/156689428X Chapters 00:00 Intro 01:02 Learning Product from Windows to Whole Foods 03:53 The Four Types of Luck by Eric Schmidt 07:30 Applying Type Four Luck to Product 16:53 Breaking into Product Management at Microsoft 22:58 Transforming Nordstrom's Digital Product Experience 34:23 Professional vs. Non-Professional Product Management 37:06 Outro Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today.

Today, we’re talking with Kevin Wang, Chief Product Officer at Braze, a platform that enables businesses to build meaningful, personalized relationships with their customers across multiple channels. In this episode, Kevin talks about: How you can pair high-velocity market innovation with a long-term, consistent vision to beat competition year after year Why you should build durable teams, over agile org structures, to drive long-term success And, a process to partner with early adopters to get the best market insights for your product Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-wang-96131916/ Chapters 00:00 Intro 00:56 Kevin Wang’s Career at Braze 03:11 Understanding Selling to Marketers in SaaS 03:37 Braze's Customer Engagement Platform 08:03 The Evolution of Marketing Teams’ Product Needs 13:25 Braze's Future-Forward Product Vision and Strategy 37:04 The Role of Durable Teams in Startups 39:07 AI and the Future of Customer Engagement 44:12 Outro Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today.

Today, we’re talking with Adam Schoenfeld, CEO at Keyplay, a SaaS solution to help B2B marketers make GTM more efficient. In this episode, Adam talks about: How he built 3 startups to over $1m ARR His process that’s allowed him to reliably reach Product Market Fit again and again And the critical mistakes founders always make...and how you can avoid them Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamschoenfeld/ Chapters 00:00 Intro 01:19 Adam Schoenfeld's Journey to Keyplay 01:59 How to Build A Startup 02:33 Building a Product Audience and Discovering Problems 02:50 From PeerSignal to Keyplay 03:17 Monetizing the Discovery Process 04:05 Finding Product Market Fit 07:11 The Role of Design Partners 13:36 Early Product Traction and Validation 17:49 Challenges in Scaling 19:12 Challenges of Founding a SaaS Company 21:34 Adapting Sales Processes and Proving Value 23:29 Understanding Market Changes and Effective Marketing 28:59 Lessons from Past Ventures and Scaling Challenges 34:19 Insights on Product Market Fit and Distribution 36:57 Navigating Acquisitions and Future Outlook Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today.Special Guest: Adam Schoenfeld.

Today, we’re talking with Andy Boyd, CPO of Appfire, which provides a portfolio of over 100 collaboration solutions. In this episode, Andy details: His no-fail growth formula from driving product-led growth (PLG) at IBM Watson Learn from Andy's product-lead growth examples from his book, Enterprise Growth Playbook The ways he uses data to drive experimentation velocity and avoid decision paralysis How he’s slingshotted his career by focusing on working with great people, rather than chasing titles or compensation - and why you should too! Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyfboyd/ Website: https://andyfboyd.com/ Appfire: https://appfire.com/ Enterprise Growth Playbook: https://andyfboyd.com/enterprise-growth-playbook/ Chapters 00:00 The Data Dilemma: Product Decision-Making 00:15 Intro 01:16 The Introduction of Product-Led Growth at IBM Watson 02:19 Driving Monthly Active Users: Strategies and Successes 03:16 Understanding Growth: Product vs. Marketing 04:01 The Early Days of PLG at IBM 05:20 From Developer to Product Manager 08:13 Launching Growth Teams Across IBM 11:39 Key Learnings from Developer-Focused Projects 14:51 The Power of Simplicity in Growth Strategies 16:46 Writing the Enterprise Growth Playbook 20:21 The Silver Bullet Myth in Growth Strategies 21:22 The Magic of Compounding Growth 22:31 Data-Driven Decision Making 26:29 Transitioning to Appfire 28:23 Scaling and Hypergrowth at Appfire 31:42 Effective Customer Feedback Mechanisms 35:31 Career Advice: From IBM to Appfire 40:23 Outro Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today.Special Guest: Andy Boyd.

On today’s episode of LaunchPod, Jeff Wharton talks to Sean Lorenz, Senior Director of Product at Altoida, using augmented reality and AI to radically improve neurologic diagnostics In this episode, we talked about: How to adapt product to find viable markets The importance of matching product capabilities with market timing and realistic go-to-market strategies How to deal with a product that is ahead of market readiness Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thenanyu/ Twitter: https://x.com/thenanyu?lang=en Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:09 Essential Tools for Product Managers 03:19 Career Highlights and Organizational Design 03:49 The Heirloom Tomato Analogy 04:18 Conway's Law and Communication Structures 06:11 Focus and Prioritization in Startups 06:53 Lessons from Everlane 13:23 Challenges in Organizational Design 24:02 The Dangers of Learned Helplessness in Engineering Teams 25:19 High Output Management: Key Principles 27:32 Team Structure and Soft Boundaries 31:07 The Aladdin Principle: Breaking Social Boundaries 31:49 Balancing Core Business and Checkbox Requirements 34:45 Linear's Unique Approach to Project Management 43:42 The Concept of Work Trials at Linear 47:00 Outro Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today.

Today, LogRocket’s VP of Marketing, Jeff Wharton, talks to Elizabeth Van Bergen, who leads product experience at Phillips, a global high-end auction house. In this episode we talked about: Creating a product experience for both tech novices and early adopters “One of our big things is always creating parity between experiences. We always want to create the journey for the client, we want to show people what they can do, not force them. We've really been able to also bring that online and offer them the digital space from a product standpoint. Some people just always prefer that personal high touch. But the idea for us is to be able to create an experience where for 80% of the clients it’s not necessary. So the 20% of the market that we're looking towards, the ultra-high net worth individuals, we will always be able to service them. But by being able to solve for the 80%, it gives our team the bandwidth and ability to focus on the ultra-high net worth individuals, whereas our tools help those early adopters." How the traditional auction industry went digital overnight “[The pandemic] was a reckoning for the whole world, but I think for an industry that is so rooted in tradition, like the auction world, it was the catalyst that drove everyone to really be interested in the change. It wasn't that people didn't know that it needed to happen, that we didn't need to change our digital offerings; it just wasn't the core of what we were doing. Changing something within the auction world can sometimes be like trying to move a mountain. You're trying to explain something that is maybe very foreign to what our specialists are used to doing; this is how we've done it for 20, 30 years. So the pandemic was great because it changed everybody's minds and it rerouted how people were thinking about things like 'What can I do for this client or what can I offer them digitally?'” And why the digital experience is as important as the functionality itself “Relationships within our industry are key. So you want people to keep coming back because, whether someone is a consigner or a buyer, both are clients. Either way, the company is making money and it's important to service both of those clients. So you always want people to be coming back. If you have a happy buyer, they come back, let's say maybe five, 10 years later and they sell, you have a happy consigner. So you also develop a brand loyalty and that trust is really key. So even though some of what we do is still, and will always be, in person, that digital aspect of it, if someone's trying to WhatsApp someone after a meeting and now all of a sudden that share option isn't providing the correct metadata that's supposed to be there, that can be really frustrating, and can also not always look as nice, and sometimes it just needs to look nice too." Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethvanbergen/ Chapters 00:00 Intro 00:54 Elizabeth Van Bergen's Background and Career Journey 02:15 The Art of Productizing Taste 03:22 Digital Transformation in the Auction Industry 05:17 Creating Seamless Digital Experiences 12:10 Navigating the Pandemic and Embracing Change 16:29 Leveraging Social Media and Data 21:36 Balancing Functionality and Experience 28:27 Collaborative Efforts and Future Directions 32:09 Outro Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today.Special Guest: Elizabeth Van Bergen.

Today, our guest is Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear, a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Prior to working at Linear, Nan worked at Mode, Abstract, Everlane, and Bank of America. On today’s episode, Nan talks to LogRocket’s VP of Marketing, Jeff Wharton, about: Why the only thing that matters is the next category launch — even if it’s held together with duct tape "You can have everything held together with duct tape and it's okay. And I think that's an uncomfortable sort of mindset for people to adopt really. At Everlane, the only thing that was important was the next category launch launch. You can sacrifice everything else. If the next category launch goes well, numbers go up, we raise more money, we get more customers. That's the only thing that matters." Why it’s important to have conviction in making decisions — even if the market slaps you in the face "But at the end of the day, you know, as a leader, you own the decisions that they're making. As a leader saying, 'Here's where we're going to be great and really differentiate and rise above the market.' And I could be wrong, right? I could be aggressively, tragically wrong, and that's fine. That's actually probably better, right? You want to know for sure that you're wrong and that you can switch directions; failing fast is a thing that we want to do. It's not like, 'Oh, well, we're gonna wait and see.' No, have some conviction around something, focus on it, and let the market slap you in the face if it's not correct." Why engineering teams can sometimes suffer from learned helplessness, and why it’s detrimental to product innovation "You see teams where there's a product manager per five or six engineers. And engineers will tend to check out a little bit from understanding how the product actually works, understanding the customer, because, well, we got this PM senior right here. It's not out of laziness necessarily, it's more like, well, this is someone's job description, so it wouldn't feel right for me to do that. And then you start having this learned helplessness. So I think that dynamic is probably way more dangerous than a product manager being overworked. If you end up in a state where your engineering team is like disengaged and they have learned helplessness, good luck trying to unwind that. That is a cultural change that you're not going to observe until it's too late, and it's very difficult to to reverse and it takes a long time." Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thenanyu/ Twitter: https://x.com/thenanyu?lang=en Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:09 Essential Tools for Product Managers 03:19 Career Highlights and Organizational Design 03:49 The Heirloom Tomato Analogy 04:18 Conway's Law and Communication Structures 06:11 Focus and Prioritization in Startups 06:53 Lessons from Everlane 13:23 Challenges in Organizational Design 24:02 The Dangers of Learned Helplessness in Engineering Teams 25:19 High Output Management: Key Principles 27:32 Team Structure and Soft Boundaries 31:07 The Aladdin Principle: Breaking Social Boundaries 31:49 Balancing Core Business and Checkbox Requirements 34:45 Linear's Unique Approach to Project Management 43:42 The Concept of Work Trials at Linear 47:00 Outro Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today.Special Guest: Nan Yu.

Today, our guest is Oji Udezue, AI product expert, author, and an innovation-focused, multi-disciplined business leader. Oji has had an extensive and successful career, spanning his time as CPO of Typeform, Head of Product for Creation and Conversation at Twitter, CPO of Calendly, and Head of Product at Atlassian. Key takeaways: The “Zone of Benefit,” which helps assess market disruptiveness and emphasizes the need for a high value to price ratio to drive change in customers The concept of “forest time,” a practice of stepping back to gain strategic perspective Insights on product-led growth (PLG), emphasizing the importance of solving customer problems and adaptive business strategies. Links “Building Rocket Ships”: https://shop.damngravity.com/products/building-rocketships-udezue Writing: https://ojiudezue.substack.com/ Consulting: https://productmind.co Twitter: https://x.com/ojiudezue LinkedIn: https://linkedin/in/ojiudezue Leader Spotlight: Taking advantage of how humans behave, with Oji Udezue: https://tinyurl.com/bdhwkj5t Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:19 The Multifaceted Role of Product Management 04:48 Importance of Frameworks in Product Management 06:36 Adapting Frameworks to Different Companies 11:15 Understanding the Zone of Benefit 17:12 The Unicorn Framework for B2B SaaS 21:30 Building Rocket Ships: A Book for Senior Product Managers 25:32 Calendly's Success Story 30:00 Discovery: Finding Big Problems in Workflow 31:12 Simplifying Solutions with Slack 33:27 The Creators Initiative at Twitter 40:26 Forest Time: Gaining Perspective 46:14 The Importance of Listening to Your Team 48:06 Product-Led Growth (PLG) in Today's Economy 55:14 A/B Testing: When and How to Use It 59:31 Outro Follow LaunchPod on YouTube! Did you know we have a new channel dedicated to LaunchPod? Check it out and subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@LaunchPod.byLogRocket What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today.Special Guest: Oji Udezue.

Today, our guest is Julie Acosta, Director of eComm and Marketing Analytics at NOBULL, a fast-growing Boston-based footwear and apparel brand. For Julie, curiosity has a funny way of making you change course. As she originally set out to avoid numbers by going to university for marketing, but as she began developing her career, she found that understanding and working with data made her more effective at understanding her customer base. It was at AutoZone, where her path really changed, as Julie went from merchandising to building AutoZone’s first eCommerce Analytics team from the ground up. By bridging the digital and in-store experiences, her team altered the company’s understanding of how the two were linked, including how new product lines can grow existing lines and how online customer behavior influences in-store purchases. Other key takeaways: How to balance data with usability and how analytics can’t always tell you everything How B&M and e-commerce are inextricably linked and by synchronizing the two you can create a cohesive customer journey strategy How to solve perceived customer cannibalization Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-acosta-89846b11/ Spotlight interview: https://shorturl.at/Md6SR Chapters 00:00 Intro 03:31 From AVL Boeing to AutoZone 04:09 Merchandising and Marketing at AutoZone 05:33 Building AutoZone's E-commerce and Analytics Team 07:05 The Importance of Curiosity and Team Building 16:23 Balancing Data and Customer Insights 20:43 Understanding the Human Element in Data 21:02 Hands-On Experience at AutoZone 22:07 Challenges and Innovations in E-Commerce 25:14 Performance Parts and Customer Insights 30:19 Balancing Online and Offline Metrics 35:38 Transition to NOBULL and New Challenges 40:30 Outro Follow LogRocket on TikTok! Love LaunchPod and the rest of LogRocket's great content? Follow us on TikTok for interview clips, UX tutorials, and more! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today.Special Guest: Julie Acosta.

On today’s episode of LaunchPod, Jeff Wharton talks to Lauren Creedon, VP of Product at Goldcast, who formerly led product at Drift and Hudl. In this episode, we talked about: How to be a PM who thinks like a GM Her 1-5-50 product launch process, going from friendly alpha to open beta And the real-life lesson of what happens when you launch a product no one’s ready to sell—or buy Chapters 00:00 Intro: Meet Lauren Creedham 01:29 Lauren's Career Journey and Insights 02:50 The Importance of AI in Product Management 04:20 Revenue-Driven Product Management 14:06 The 1-5-50 Product Launch Process 17:26 PM Lessons from the Field 21:28 Building the Right Operating Culture 24:20 Measuring Success and Future-Proofing Your Career 32:25 Outro Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurencreedon/ Follow LogRocket on TikTok! Love LaunchPod and the rest of LogRocket's great content? Follow us on TikTok for interview clips, UX tutorials, and more! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today.Special Guest: Lauren Creedon.