Progression Podcast

Jackie Bavaro was most recently Head of Product Management for eight years at Asana, the well-loved work management software, where she joined pre-launch as the first PM. During her tenure, she grew the PM team to over twenty amazing people, helped Asana's go from $0 to more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue, and launched Asana's associate product manager program. Jackie has since written two fantastic books on PM careers - 'Cracking the PM career' and 'Cracking the PM interview'. In this episode we talk about Jackie's growth as a PM at Asana, defining impact in role, working with founders, navigating feedback and her 'Do, Try, Consider' framework which we've now implemented at Progression. Links Jackie on Twitter Jackie on Amazon Jackie's tweet referencing the framework we talk about in the podcast Jackie's interview on Lenny's pod Do, Try, Consider Jonny can be found at https://twitter.com/jonnyburch Who else should we be speaking to? Be on the pod! Tell us about someone great! Just email hello@progression.co and tell us more. Rate us! It really helps if you rate us on iTunes. You can do that right here. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/progression-podcast/id1435509539 Progression is free for your first team of 10 Sign up at progression.co

This week Jonny chats to Steve Bianchi, CHRO and COO of talent operating system Beamery. A real futurist and systems thinker, Steve gets into the future of the people team, why people leaders make good Chief Operating Officers and imagines a future where we’re hired not based on our university and CV but by our skills and ambition. Links: Steve on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenbianchi Beamery: https://beamery.com/ Jonny can be found at https://twitter.com/jonnyburch Who else should we be speaking to? Be on the pod! Tell us about someone great! Just email podcast@progressionapp.com and tell us more. Our lovely sponsor: Progression! We're tackling meaty problems around career growth and hiring engineers and designers at the moment. Read more and find our open roles on our careers page: progressionapp.com/careers Rate us! It really helps if you rate us on iTunes. You can do that right here. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/progression-podcast/id1435509539

In this episode Jonny chats to Lucas Coelho — VP of design at Roam Digital — about growing as a leader, his thoughts on how to build a bench of good junior folks, being honest and learning from failure and his experience building progression frameworks and using Progression. Lucas is a Progression customer, but we try and steer well clear of that until the very end. Lucas Links: https://lucascoelho.co/ https://twitter.com/coelholucas Lucas's talk at Figma Config: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCsSKDh8gBg Jonny can be found at https://twitter.com/jonnyburch Who else should we be speaking to? Be on the pod! Tell us about someone great! Just email podcast@progressionapp.com and tell us more. Our lovely sponsor: Progression! We're tackling meaty problems around career growth and hiring engineers and designers at the moment. Read more and find our open roles on our careers page: https://progressionapp.com/careers Rate us! It really helps if you rate us on iTunes. You can do that right here. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/progression-podcast/id1435509539

In this episode, Jonny chats with Brian about the rise of the very senior IC (Individual Contributor) - a subject close to our heart at Progression. We also go into the process of creating a startup and Brian's experience building and exiting Spectrum, his mixed feelings about how much we should be optimising for titles and putting yourself out there on the internet. Brian is a designer at Github, co-host of the very popular Design Details podcast and most recently published a collection of interviews with senior designers on staff.design. Brian Links: https://brianlovin.com/ https://twitter.com/brian_lovin https://staff.design/ https://designdetails.fm/ https://nav.al/principal-agent <- the article that Brian references that we're now obsessed with Jonny can be found at https://twitter.com/jonnyburch Who else should we be speaking to? Be on the pod! Tell us about someone great! Just email podcast@progressionapp.com and tell us more. Our lovely sponsor: Progression! We're tackling meaty problems around career growth and hiring engineers and designers at the moment. Read more and find our open roles on our careers page: https://progressionapp.com/careers Rate us! It really helps if you rate us on iTunes. You can do that right here. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/progression-podcast/id1435509539

In this episode, Sarah Clatterbuck, Senior Director of Engineering at Google sits down with Neil to discuss a whole range of topics including: What is was like in the LinkedIn engineering team as they grew from 300 to 3000 How Sarah recommends startups and scale-ups think about rolling out progression frameworks for the first time How to think about and reduce unconscious bias and anti-patterns in frameworks Links: Sarah on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahclatterbuck/ Sarah on Twitter https://twitter.com/girodchatterbox Neil on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ncameron Who else should we be speaking to? Be on the pod! Tell us about someone great! Just email podcast@progressionapp.com and tell us more. Our lovely sponsor: Progression! We're tackling meaty problems around career growth and hiring engineers and designers at the moment. Read more and find our open roles on our careers page: https://progressionapp.com/careers Rate us! It really helps if you rate us on iTunes. You can do that right here. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/progression-podcast/id1435509539 Image credit: Kevin Scott

This episode, Jonny chats to Jessie Hayes, VP People and Talent at Whereby, the London video platform.  As one of the first 'People people' on the pod, Jessie goes through her personal career journey to get to Whereby, through large companies (Goldman Sachs, Box) to small, then we dig into how to treat your people function like a product which your employees subscribe to (very novel and clever) and then get Jessie's thoughts on progression frameworks, where they've succeeded and failed and what they're doing about it at Whereby today as they scale to 160+. Jessie's links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicamayhayes/ https://twitter.com/hijessiemay https://www.jmh.fun/ Jonny: https://twitter.com/jonnyburch Who else should we be speaking to? Be on the pod! Tell us about someone great! Just email podcast@progressionapp.com and tell us more. Our lovely sponsor: Progression! We're tackling meaty problems around career growth and hiring engineers and designers at the moment. Read more and find our open roles on our careers page: https://progressionapp.com/careers Rate us! It really helps if you rate us on iTunes. You can do that right here. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/progression-podcast/id1435509539

In this engaging discussion, Gonçalo Silva, CTO at Doist, shares insights on crafting a progression framework for a distributed team of 100. He elaborates on the nine-month journey of building this framework transparently, iterating with team feedback. Gonçalo highlights the challenge of aligning compensation with performance and the role of continuous self-assessment. Additionally, he emphasizes the importance of nurturing an inclusive culture and transparent communication tools like Twist and GitHub to support remote collaboration.

It's been a while since Jonny and Neil sat down to talk through Product progress, plans and strategy. This somewhat unplanned ramble-chat covers how we're thinking about high touch vs low touch go-to-market, COVID impact, honing the problem we're solving and for who. Of course, Neil also reviews a biscuit. We have no new guest interview episodes planned (it's been a busy few months) but if you like these team chats please let us know and we can do more of them! Anti-racism statement During this episode we reference a statement on anti-racism and our stance, that we planned to be an intro to the episode but we decided to make it its own episode. The audio and transcript of that is here: https://www.progressionapp.com/posts/anti-racism-statement/ — please do give it a listen, we're learning and would love your feedback. Other links As always, you can give Progression a try at https://progressionapp.com All previous episodes now available on our blog: https://progressionapp.com/blog Jonny on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonnyburch Neil on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ncameron

A statement about our Anti-racism stance and plans for making Progression an anti-racist product and business. Read the full statement and more detail on our action items here: https://progressionapp.com/posts/anti-racism-statement/

Cap Watkins is CXO at Primary, where he's responsible for Design, Product, People and engineering (oh my!). In the recent past, he was a professional leadership coach and organizational consultant at Practical Works, helping senior contributors, first-time managers and managers-of-managers grow and evolve in their roles. Previously, he was VP of Design at BuzzFeed, where he managed Product Design.  While at Buzzfeed Cap also created one of the most popular design frameworks on progression.fyi – https://www.progression.fyi/f/buzzfeed, which he then blogged about warning people not to use it directly. We talked about that along with several of his blog posts, including: https://capwatkins.com/blog/skip-the-shortcuts https://capwatkins.com/blog/two-questions I'd been following and nagging Cap for an interview for months, so it's funny that it then took me six months to get the resulting interview out. It's a great and very much evergreen interview though, so lots to dig into. Find cap on: https://capwatkins.com/ https://twitter.com/cap Who else should we be speaking to? Be on the pod! Tell us about someone great! Just email podcast@progressionapp.com and tell us more. Our lovely sponsor: Deliveroo Our wonderful sponsor Deliveroo is looking for loads of designers, researchers, writers as well as leaders and managers. Go check them out at https://deliveroo.design Join the waitlist We’re aiming to launch soon, but if you want to jump the gun or just be in the loop, get involved in our waitlist. progressionapp.com Rate us! It really helps if you rate us on iTunes. You can do that right here. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/progression-podcast/id1435509539