

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

Nov 19, 2021 • 38min
What the heck is a value journey?
There isn't just one type of buyer's journey, there are three: trust journey, relationship journey and analytical journey. During this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews pricing expert Mark Stiving, chief pricing educator at Impact Pricing. Not only does he explore the three types of buyer's journeys in-depth, but he also gives listeners the one question they should ask to quickly identify which journey their customer is on. He also explains the value map and why you should always assume your buyer is on a trust journey until proven otherwise.

Nov 12, 2021 • 26min
Flashback Friday - Planning and Prioritizing your Product Roadmap
“The roadmap really should be a conversation” - Jim Semick, founder and chief strategist of Product Plan.
Are you curious what the best framework is to plan and prioritize a product roadmap? Are you a Product Manager that wonders how often to update this tool? Listen in as Rebecca Kalogeris is joined by Jim Semick to discuss Product Plan’s annual survey results, his tried and true method of ‘value vs effort’ and his advice on updating and maintaining roadmaps that work.
Jim explains that updating roadmaps often keeps the product conversation open, and that for how many hours product managers spend managing the roadmap each week that it’s important to share them with their teams frequently so there’s a level of transparency and understanding when something changes. Roadmaps are embodiment of strategy, building the roadmaps are a part of how you define and share that strategy across the organization.

Nov 5, 2021 • 52min
How VRBO and Taskrabbit Increase Customer Retention and Engagement
(This episode was recorded during our recent Product Chat)
During this episode, Lindsay Hunt, director of product at TaskRabbit shares insights on customer and revenue retention and how to build products and services that keep your market coming back. She teaches how to navigate when you have two users in a marketplace, strategic angles to entice and delight customers and opportunities for revenue growth by nurturing relationships and creating products people want to buy.

Oct 29, 2021 • 28min
Using Strategic Storytelling to Shape What You Do in The World
This episode is for anyone trying to figure out how to leverage storytelling in their role as a product manager or product marketer. The VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute and host, Rebecca Kalogeris, interviews Matthew Woodgett, founder and CEO of Go Narrative who explains that a story isn't an artifact or finished product like a book or movie, but instead, using is a way of communicating.
He explains how stories help companies prioritize, connect departments and gain buy in for roadmaps. During the conversation, Matthew outlines an efficient and effective way to think about storytelling when you're a busy professional, which he describes as the 3D framework: Desire, difficulty and denouement.

Oct 22, 2021 • 30min
How to Systematically Approach Competitive Objections
In this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, hosts Erin Neal Enterprise Account Executive at Klue. Erin explains how to systematically approach objections to win customers who are talking with the sales team. The approach taught in this episode shows how to be collaborative rather than combative when approaching objections. Erin and Rebecca also cover how to provide sales with the tools they need to be successful in their objection handling with prospects.
Klue is company that provides market and competitive intelligence software that enables competitor research and delivery of sales battlecards to B2B Sales teams.

Oct 9, 2021 • 33min
How to Integrate Culture and Brand
Mark Miller and Ted Vaugh, authors of Culture Built My Brand: The secret to winning more customers through company culture, join Rebecca Kalogaris, VP of marketing at Pragmatic Institute to talk about the intersection of culture and brand. They outline the 5 pillars of the brand, which include culture, products and services, the story of the company, user experiences and identity. They also explore the frustration that emerges when different departments and different people own different parts of the brand because it becomes complicated to shape culture. The conversation includes tips on how to address culture as someone who isn’t a leader at the organization. Mark and Ted explain that a marquee culture drives performance, but a bad culture can kill the brand.

Oct 1, 2021 • 34min
How to Create Team Culture in 2021
Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute and Cindy Cruzado, certified instructor at Pragmatic Institute, discuss how to build a company culture that is healthy and creative especially in remote and hybrid working environments. Cynthia shares how to make disagreement comfortable and common as a way to support different ideas. They both agree that having fun along the way supports all of the team-building initiatives, and they include some game ideas that their teams find engaging.

Sep 27, 2021 • 1h 3min
How Forbes Creates Innovative Leadership Tactics and Product Approaches Without a Model
(This episode of Pragmatic Live was captured during our recent Product Chat session)
How do product pros deliver innovative solutions to users, leverage technology and develop tactical plans without a prior blueprint or example to follow?Ebony Shears, VP of product at Forbes, to the Product Chat shared how she gains team enthusiasm and buy-in, and how she determines what opportunities are worth pursuing at the 103-year-old institution.

Sep 17, 2021 • 34min
How to Facilitate Product-Led Communication
In this episode, Andrew Wale, the chief revenue officer at Twintag, meets with Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, to discuss how to use a great product as a vehicle to engage with customers and enhance their experience. He explains how to give customers information when they need it and in a user-friendly format with tools like QR codes. When customers have to navigate robust websites, they might get lost in their search for an answer. He shows how product-led communication breaks down these types of barriers and improves customer retention.

Sep 10, 2021 • 27min
How Product Teams Can Measure Success Using a Differentiated Strategy
We are going to be a product excellence team, so how do we measure how effective we are?" - Sherwin Damdar
Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute interviews Sherwin Damdar, director of product management and innovation at Garlock, and he shares how he uses the sales of differentiated products to measure his teams' success. He says that differentiated products must meet three criteria: They must be unique, valuable and proven. Together they talk about how product managers can find areas of opportunity by evaluating problems customers have and the solutions they are willing to pay for.