An interview with Richard Awe. Richard is a Senior Business Analyst with the European Central Bank who got bored writing all those requirements documents & user stories, and decided to build a tool to help him do that at scale. He's now here with Requstory, a platform that aims to help people write user stories fast. A day in the life of a business analyst at the European Central Bank, the sorts of projects he's working on, and whether banks can ever be truly agile How he moved from training as a scientist and wannabe process engineer to business analyst because he loved being close to the users & engineers What a business analyst actually does and how similar it is or isn't to being a product manager or product owner on an agile team How working on a big project & having to write loads of user stories led him to build a no-code tool to help him do that quicker.. and how interest from friends & colleagues made him decide to make it ready for primetime How he's managing the user feedback and trying to keep focused on delivering real value rather than any niche feature that comes up Some of the characteristics of a good or bad user story and how the ultimate point is always to be something that starts off a discussion When user stories might not work for you, the different types of stories you can use, what some of the alternatives might be & whether they're really just interchangeable And much more! Contact Richard You can reach out to Richard on Twitter or check out Requstory.

An interview with Melissa Perri. Melissa is a product leader, educator, board member, consultant, coach and also the author of one of the best books on product management, "Escaping the Build Trap". These days she's an evangelist for the role of product operations and setting up CPOs for success in the executive suite. We talk about a lot, including: Revisiting Escaping the Build Trap, what the build trap is, why people find themselves there and why they struggle to get out How her thinking has evolved since the book, and why she believes that product operations is a critical lever for scaling organisations What product operations is, how it enables you to scale, and the three pillars of product ops transformation that companies tend to go through Whether it's fair to label product operations as the revenge of process people or whether that's a total misrepresentation Why we should always be looking to optimise how we're working, not just sticking to what has worked in the past because it worked in the past The need for strong CPOs so that product teams have a seat at the top table, why this is essential for product led companies and at what stage you need them What the CPO role actually involves, what product people need to do to get good at it, and the tendency for product people to lack the confidence for the top table And much more! Buy Escaping the Build Trap "To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. " Check it out on Amazon, or on Goodreads. You can also check out book website. Melissa's new book "Product Operations" Melissa is writing a new book on product operations with her friend & colleague Denise Tilles. Check out the progress on ProductOperations.com. Contact Melissa You can reach out to Melissa on Twitter or check out MelissaPerri.com.

An interview with Katerina Suchkova. Katerina is a product leadership coach with Ahead of Product. She's passionate about helping people up the product management career ladder, and helping them work out how to be their real selves. We talk about a lot, including: Her journey into coaching and how much joy it gives her to watch people getting better at what they do and elevating their confidence at work The product management career ladder, the transition points along the way and whether the ladder actually exists in most companies Whether the lack of real definition or understanding of the value of product management is actively blocking the existence of such a ladder The importance of taking a step back and understanding what your own motivations are, being what you want to be not what you think people think you should be How to manage the transition into product leadership, identifying your strengths & weaknesses and how to handle the conversation with your manager The importance of widening your perspective to make sure people see your potential for leadership rather than just seeing you as a good individual contributor The things you need to let go of to be a good leader, what you need to forget and let go of if you want to enable your teams to be the most effective they can be And much more! Contact Katerina You can reach out to Katerina on LinkedIn or check out Ahead of Product.

An interview with Holly Hester-Reilly. Holly is the founder of H2R Product Science, a consultancy that aims to help companies large & small build high growth products by following a scientific approach to product development. We talk about a lot, including: The mission behind H2R Product Science, her belief that there's a science to building products and the types of problems she can help to solve How she got a gig as Head of Product & Engineering at YourBase, whether she thinks CPTOs are a positive trend and whether there are disadvantages to having combined tech & product leadership The five step Product Science success path, what those steps looks like and how not all companies start at the first step The timescale for impact from the Product Science process, how it's not a quick fix, and whether it fits with all companies' timescale expectations The need for strong product leadership to take up the baton when she moves on, and how Holly jumped the product leadership leadership chasm herself How life isn't like the books & whether product managers should just get on with it or try their best to drive transformative change through the companies they work for Using the "Built / Learned / Planning" product demo format to help build a ripple effect through the whole company and bed in the concept of a learning organisation And much more! Holly's book recommendation Holly's all about product discovery, but she hasn't written a book yet! I asked her to recommend a book on product discovery that was not Teresa Torres's book Continuous Discovery Habits. Holly recommends that book but also Lean UX. She also promises to write her own book one day. Contact Holly You can reach out to Holly on Twitter or check out H2R Product Science.

An interview with Derek Osgood. Derek is a former Playstation product manager who turned to product marketing and realised that there was a big problem keeping aligned with product management around go-to-market launches. He's now started Ignition, a go-to-market platform aiming to help solve this problem and get teams releasing products more effectively. We talk about a lot, including: The mission behind his conpany Ignition and how they're trying to solve the problems many product marketing teams have getting products out to market How he chose the features for the MVP of his product, how he realised that this limited feature set wouldn't do the trick and why he had to go wide to cover a variety of smaller pain points to really win in the market Why he advocates white glove treatment and eschewing product led growth for early products in order to get good early customer feedback, but how you should still follow PLG principles to ensure you have a compelling user experience Why we still need go-to-market plans even when we're living in an agile world, and how product marketing is necessarily more waterfall Why it's so important to get product marketing up front to the beginning of the product development process so they know what's coming and why, and aren't just thrown a grenade at the last minute The impact that a lack of launch planning can have on a release, how people can end up spending too much or too little time on the wrong things, and the importance of having a coherent launch process What a perfect product launch plan looks like and why it involves the product marketing teams doing their own research to optimise their messaging, not just rewriting other people's product specs in a different style And much more! Contact Derek You can reach out to Derek on LinkedIn or check out his company Ignition.

An interview with Merina Khanom. Merina is a Product Manager at BBC iPlayer, which she boldly names as the inspiration for Netflix, and a passionate advocate for increasing diversity & inclusion within product companies as well as the wider product community. We talk about a lot, including: Her work for BBC iPlayer, how she took her passion for mobile solutions into product management, and whether mobile product management is easier or harder than other types of product management How her CV doesn't look like anyone else's, how she took a non-linear path in product management, and the challenges of getting past recruitment filters when you have a different-sounding name How she felt when she found out she was the only hijab-wearing Muslim woman in the history of BBC iPlayer, and why it's reductive and lazy to blame that on a pipeline problem The problems with breaking into tech when you have no role models that look like you, and the problems you can have getting taken seriously if people have never seen someone that looks like you working in the role How the killing of George Floyd affected her personally & gave her the energy to speak up & take a stand for racial equality at work, and some of the challenges marginalised people can have opening up when they've been bullied into submission Some of the initiatives she helped kick off at work, and how she tried to work with product conferences & communities to challenge the lack of diversity on their rosters Why a lack of diversity & inclusion is everyone's responsibility, not just something for marginalised people to sort out or advocate for alone And much more! Contact Merina You can reach out to Merina on LinkedIn.

An interview with Crystal Parker. Crystal is a Product Manager at Spear Education and an entry-level career coach. She's using her personal experience of getting into product management to help others do the same through her coaching, where she aims to map out a strategy and work out their golden path to that first product management role. We talk about a lot, including: The mission behind Spear Education, what it's like building an analytics platform for dentists and how she built up her dental domain knowledge How she got into product management in the first place, why it's the perfect job for her and how she got past the interview process given that she had zero product management experience How she upped her product management game once she got in, how she managed to "finesse the rest", and the resources she used to build her product management skills Her passion for mentoring others & how it led her to start coaching those following her and help get people from non-traditional backgrounds into tech careers where they belong How she gets strategic with the people she's coaching to map out their path to success and how that's informing a new e-book which will allow the wider world to follow the Crystal Parker approach (™?) The sorts of things you shouldn't really waste your time on when trying to get that first product management role, and where to best focus your efforts instead Some of the gateway positions you could consider to get into a product company, get close to the product management team & eventually transfer into the role you're after And much more! Contact Crystal You can reach out to Crystal on Twitter or check out her website crystalaparker.com.

An interview with David Bland. David is a Lean consultant who aims to help you make good business decisions by testing your business ideas and making sure they're worth pursuing. He's doing this through his day job as founder of Precoil, and also as the co-author of "Testing Business Ideas", a desk reference with 44 different experimental techniques you can use to do the same. We talk about a lot, including: The story behind "Testing Business Ideas", the idea behind the visual design, and how it's part of a box set that will make you the ultimate businessperson Whether there's anything he would have change from his book based on his work since, and whether there are any new techniques that people should be considering Some of the preconditions you need to have in your organisation to enable an experimentation culture, and whether this can work at all stages of a company How to tackle the reluctance to experiment with customers, either because they're seen as too important or because the company leadership think they already know what they want The importance of ethical experiments, and making sure you're working with customers & not on them or against them How assumption mapping can help land the idea of risk of desirability, feasibility, viability risks and how this framing can help pierce leaders' reality distortion fields The importance of balancing discovery & delivery and ensuring that discovery & validation is part of the work, not an optional extra And much more! Buy "Testing Business Ideas" "7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder’s global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas."   Check it out on Amazon or Goodreads. Contact David If you want to catch up with David, you can reach him on Twitter or LinkedIn. You can also check out his work at Precoil.

An interview with Dan Balcauski. Dan is a pricing & packaging consultant who is aiming to demystify the world of high-volume SaaS pricing and support this via his own consultancy, Product Tranquility. We talk about a lot, including: The mission behind Product Tranquility, the problems they solve and some of the ways they can help you get your product packaging & pricing strategy right The pros & cons of the three main pricing models; cost plus, competition based pricing and value based pricing Why it can be dangerous to "herd", where everyone is following everyone else's pricing models but no one's done the research to see if that pricing's right Some of the early warning signals of bad pricing that you can look out for before you go bankrupt The 4-step plan a company should go through to identify its target market, the value the product brings, the competitive alternatives & the pricing model that can support it The importance of keeping packaging simple so that customers can understand what they're going to get & salespeople are able to sell it effectively Why freemium pricing is "almost always a bad idea" - some of the downsides of this approach and what you can do instead And much more! Contact Dan You can reach out to Dan on LinkedIn or check out his pricing blog on Product Tranquility.

An interview with Richie Lokay. Richie is the VP of Product Design & Services at Wunderkind, a "one-to-one performance marketing engine". Richie is passionate about the field of performance design and driving for a world where user experience meets customer experience. We talk about a lot, including: The mission behind Wunderkind, how they're balancing white glove services with products & tools to enable them to scale The importance of mixing big picture strategy with an understanding of how the sausages are made, and knowing when to hand over to people with more suitable skills The importance of having a good working dynamic between product, design & engineering teams, with each contributing their own unique skills to the mix Why you need to get designers up the front of the funnel and make them true partners, and how to weigh up strategic decision making with actually having time to do the design Whether it's possible for designers & developers to work well together in an agile, iterative fashion The importance of good design systems as enablers for scale and how they can enable the big picture work The concept of pioneers, settlers & town planners, what kind of mix you need in your team and who thrive in which environment And much more! Contact Richie You can reach out to Richie via email of all places richie@wunderkind.co. He's social media averse!