

Product Chats Podcast
Pragmatic Institute
Pragmatic Live’s Product Chat is a podcast focused on tackling the biggest challenges facing today‘s product management, product marketing, and other market and data-driven professionals with some of the best minds in the industry.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Feb 4, 2022 • 30min
How a 90-Second Launch Story Highlights Purpose and Establishes Focus
Product teams build impressive and detailed launched strategies. But, how do you get an entire organization to execute a coordinated effort that results in a successful launch?In this episode of Pragmatic Live, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews interviews Pragmatic instructor Todd Middlebrook about the 90-second launch story.They discuss:
The complicated process of a launch
The value of having clarity on the end goal
The components of a 90-second story
Additional Resources
There is a new course update to Market. This course **helps you gain a thorough understanding of your buyers and how they like to buy so you can build the product marketing strategies that deliver results. Learn More
Want to learn more about effective launches?
Launch is a course that helps you create a more strategic approach to exceed your business objectives. Learn to execute successful launches that align your entire organization around the same strategies and goals. Enroll Today

Jan 28, 2022 • 29min
How Optimizing Communication Helps Bring a Product From Brain to Screen
Product professionals are tasked with taking what they learn from the market and making it a reality. But, to do that, you have to communicate effectively with the people building the product.
In this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute interviews Jonathan Lucky, scrum master at Dazn, and they talk about how to bring information to the engineering team that is digestible and usable.
Jonathan discusses:
The value of shortening the feedback loop between the engineers and customers
Why you should include the engineers in the buyer persona creation process to create an environment where insights are jointly-owned
Effectively building teams and optimizing communication
Additional Resources:
[Article] Using Data-Driven Personas to Boost Business
[Article] 7 Buyer Persona Generators and Templates
Knowing who buys your products is one thing. Becoming an expert on your buyers and using that knowledge to create product marketing plans that impact the bottomline is something else.
Market is a course that helps you gain a thorough understanding of your buyers and how they like to buy so you can build the product marketing strategies that deliver results. >> Enroll Today (edited)

Jan 21, 2022 • 22min
How Fathom.Video Validated a Market Problem and Built a Notetaking Solution
Listening to your market might lead your efforts in a new direction. That's what happened when Richard White, founder and CEO of Fathom, began talking to his audience about the challenges of scheduling customer interviews. While scheduling was a problem, the bigger challenge was the massive time investment required to capture insights from each interview.
During this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of Marketing and Product Strategy interviews Richard about how he and his team discovered and validated a market problem and then designed an innovative solution.
Richard's solution, Fathom.Video, is a Zoom app that allows you to record and highlight notes during zoom meetings in real time. Those highlights can be assembled into a video you can share with your team. The initial waitlist for Fathom.Video is over 70K strong, but Pragmatic Institute listeners get to skip the waitlist and go directly to the front of the line: fathom.video/pod.
Listen now to learn more.

Jan 14, 2022 • 26min
How to Add Value After the Sale
In this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews Rod Griffith, chief client officer at MarketReach on how to help current customers discover new value in a product. Rod discusses how personal benefits can be a strong differentiator, especially when the competition focuses on business benefits. He explains how to uncover and leverage unrecognized benefits, unrecognized beneficiaries and unrecognized uses. They also explore how to remain authentic in the sales process by indirectly highlight personal benefits through conversation and questions.

Jan 7, 2022 • 33min
How Product Teams Should Tackle Responsible AI
Guest host Michael Li—the founder and president of The Data Incubator—sits down with Aishwarya Srinivasan, an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Innovation Leader at IBM. Aishwarya works cross-functionally with the product team, data science team and sales to research AI use cases for clients at IBM Data & AI. In her role, she conducts discovery workshops and builds assets to showcase the business value of the technology. Aishwarya holds a postgraduate degree in data science from Columbia University.
The two data science experts discuss the importance of building responsible AI systems that aren't harmful to society, citing examples in the media. Aishwarya shares the responsibilities of roles like AI ethicists, UX researchers, data scientists and cybersecurity officers in upholding responsible AI standards. She also highlights the key issues organizations will have to grapple with as AI continues to evolve, and she shares key takeaways for leveraging machine learning and AI to create business value. Find links to resources shared in this episode:
Trusted-AI/AIF360 via Github
"Adversarial attacks in machine learning: What they are and how to stop them" via VentureBeat
"What is Adversarial Machine Learning?" via Towards Data Science

Dec 31, 2021 • 23min
Throwback - The Modern Data Scientist at Netflix
We're throwing it waaay back to 2019 if you want to listen to one of our most popular episodes to date. While the conversation was a couple years ago, the information remains incredibly relevant.
Netflix is one of the biggest, most recognizable names in the world, and it’s one of the biggest, most recognizable names in data science. But what does that really mean to be a data scientist in a big company like Netflix? Senior data scientist at Netflix, Dr. Becky Tucker, joins our podcast to share her experience learning data science and working at Netflix.
Want to learn more about data science and how you can use it in your business? Check out our Business of Data Science course, designed for business leaders looking to become more data driven. If you’re looking to take data science training like Dr. Becky, check out our TDI data science courses. And make sure you listen to our other great podcasts, and join us for the best product training in the world.

Dec 24, 2021 • 41min
Throwback - How to Identify Rockstar Product Professionals During an Interview
A throwback this week because we want to end the year thinking about how to grow product teams in 2022. First step: Interviews.
The wrong hire can negatively affect the entire department and the product long into the future, so getting the right people for the job is critical. Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews Pragmatic Instructor, Paul Young, about Product Manager X-Factors—or the skills that make a product manager excel.
He explains that being a product manager requires a diverse set of skills including soft skills like leadership, curiosity, listening, pitching and building consensus across the organization. During the conversation, Paul dives deep into some of these characteristics including why they matter and how to spot them during a job interview.

Dec 17, 2021 • 28min
Why You Should Use the “Jobs to be Done” Segmenting for Buyer Personas
"How many buyer personas should you have?” This is the most common question companies ask when refining or starting their first persona project. In this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing at Pragmatic Institute, asks Adrienne Barnes, founder of Best Buyer Persona, that question. And she answers. This conversation is all about buyer personas including, how to research, how to create meaningful segments with the jobs-to-be-done method, and whether or not you should name them.

Dec 10, 2021 • 29min
Thinking of Customer Success as a Discipline
Customer success isn't just a department, especially in subscription businesses.
In this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews Kirsten Butzow, senior VP of customer operations at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who explains why companies have to earn their customers business on a regular basis and how to do it.
They discuss that even know the product team understands the market problems, it's the customer success team that will reveal whether or not the product team hit the mark. They also outline the natural checkpoints along the way to know if the organization is staying grounded in the problems and personas.

Dec 3, 2021 • 50min
How Offerpad Uses Market Visits to Influence Roadmaps
How often should you conduct market visits? What data should you gather? And, where does discovery fit within the product roadmap cycle? This episode is a recording from the latest Product Chat featuring Ted Best, senior vice president of product at Offerpad. During his expert presentation, he answers these common market visit questions and explain how to implement a continuous discovery strategy. He also provides an approach to using market visits to answer the “why” of the roadmap, not just the “what” and the “when.”