One Knight in Product

An interview with Jas Shah. Jas is a product consultant who works with fintech firms to help them out where their product teams are maybe lacking, or don't have the time to do the job. Jas predictably believes in outsourcing product management tasks to consultants, but not all of them, and only if it helps bring the team along and develop their skills. We speak about a lot, including: What problems he solves with his consultancy, the types of companies he consults for, and why he prefers startups to big banks Whether fintech is all disruption and sea change or whether there's value in making incremental change The difficulty of selling disruptive change to the mass market, why you have to take it in stages and meet people where they are not where you want them to be The time he felt compelled to leave a product management job because of lack of support for his product, and how long he stuck it out The concept of servitising product management, what that means in practice and what types of task can be servitised The importance of taking the teams along for the journey so they can be self-sufficient after you leave The product management cliché he dislikes the most, and advice for people trying to take their first steps into product management And much more! Contact Jas You can find Jas on Twitter or LinkedIn. You can also check out his consultancy Bitsul.

An interview with Radhika Dutt. Radhika is a product leader, consultant & author of "Radical Product Thinking" who has decided it is time to step away from building products incrementally & flying by the seat of your pants. Instead, she advocated creating a radical product vision, aligning the company around it and defining where you want to go and not how fast you get there. We speak about a lot, including: The story of the book, some of the early feedback she's received and how rewarding it is to see it landing with non-product people and product people alike How she set out to create a book that mixed vision with practicality, and bringing a truly global perspective rather than just another Silicon Valley tech bro book How seeing the same problems again & again led her to create a free framework to help solve them, and how this spurred the need for a book The audience for her book, the vision she had in mind, and how she wants people not to just prioritise the speed of their car but also where they're driving to Whether she has a problem with the Lean Startup (!), whether her book replaces it or is a compliment to it, and why you only really get a few pivots The importance of going beyond the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, creating a detailed vision up front and aligning your team around it The list of "product diseases", whether a radical product vision cures them all, and some examples of how they can afflict a business How to make sure everyone, including leadership, is behind the vision; the tools you can use to drive this, and the concept of vision debt The product hippocratic oath - how we as a product professionals need to ensure we do no harm and actively work to create better change in the world And much more! Buy Radical Product Thinking "Iteration rules product development, but it isn't enough to produce dramatic results. This book champions Radical Product Thinking, a systematic methodology for building visionary, game-changing products."   Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads. Contact Radhika You can find Radhika on Twitter or LinkedIn

An interview with Adam Thomas. Adam is a passionate product leader & product coach who wants to help you drive organisational alignment. By day he's Lead Product Manager for a recruiting platform, and by night he's the hero that Gotham needs with product consultancy Approaching One. We speak about a lot, including: His work with Approaching One and how he's trying to help product managers & product leaders get better How he started out as a mainframe programmer, and ended up falling into product management when a mentor realised how unhappy he was The story of his two startups, whether they succeeded or failed, and some of the lessons he learned from the experience His journey from individual contributor to leadership, the resources he used and how he mixed mentorship with repeated mistakes to get good The importance of driving organisational alignment, the types of negative & positive feedback you can get due to misalignment Why alignment is the product manager's job, how you should never assume anything, and have to do the work Some of the warning signs of misalignment, techniques you can use to get back on track and why you should trust but verify The importance of having a compelling story around your product that you can align your team around Survival Metrics - what they are & how you can use them to decide whether to pivot, double down or give up on an initiative And much more! More on Survival Metrics Why not visit the website to find out more about Survival Metrics? Contact Adam You can find Adam on Twitter. He's also got a Substack mailing list and his website is theadamthomas.com

An interview with Giff Constable. Giff is an entrepreneur and product leader who was most recently CPO at Meetup during the WeWork acquisition & divestment. He's also the author of "Talking to Humans" & "Testing with Humans" - books that aim to help teams make good product decisions. We speak about a lot, including: The origin story for "Talking to Humans", why he wrote it back in 2014, whether he'd change anything now, and whether other books on discovery are riding his coattails Why he felt compelled to write a follow up, "Testing with Humans" and why good experimentation is essential to solution validation How his books made it into the worldwide education system and whether it was just as simple as him putting cartoons in them What life was like during his time at Meetup, a company going through a tumultuous period being acquired (and later divested) by WeWork Some of the challenges when two business cultures collide, and the mistakes he made taking over a dysfunctional team Why you shouldn't go in all guns blazing on day one, no matter what dysfunction you see, and why you need to validate the team first The importance of being transparent, open & honest during testing times, without being so open that you drag everyone down with you The tricky path to product leadership and how prospective leaders need mentoring, coaching and guidance to succeed And much more! Buy Talking to Humans "Talking to Humans is a practical guide to the qualitative side of customer development, an indispensable skill for vetting and improving any new startup or innovation. This book will teach you how to structure and run effective customer interviews, find candidates, and turn learnings into action."   Check it out on Amazon or Goodreads. Buy Testing with Humans "Testing with Humans, the sequel to bestseller Talking to Humans, teaches entrepreneurs, innovation teams, and product teams how to run effective experiments. An experiment is a test designed to help you answer the questions "Should we do this?" or "Am I right about this?" If you are open to learning, the insights from your experiments will help you refine your creation and improve your odds of success."   Check it out on Amazon or Goodreads. Contact Giff You can contact Giff on Twitter or LinkedIn. He also has a blog at GiffConstable.com.

An interview with Natalie Furness. Natalie is a marketing consultant and company founder. Initially frustrated by not being a coder, she embraced the thriving No-Code community and realised that she could solve customer problems and build solutions anyway. Now she's started Minimum Viable Stack as an umbrella firm for a growing number of No-Code products. We speak about a lot, including: How she got started in marketing, where her entrepreneurial streak came from, and whether it's easier to market your own products or products by other people Her constant need to invent new things & how she balances this with focusing on what can truly make an impact The origin story behind Minimum Viable Stack and how she met her co-founder on Twitter (and who has the most followers) How her time marketing blockchain products gave her experience with disruptive tech and ensuring the message was focused on the users not the tech How she thought you needed to be able to code to build a tech business, and how a chance introduction to the No-Code community on Twitter made her realise this was not true The passion for automating repetitive tasks that led her to create two No-Code SaaS solutions, UXFramed and ScopeDone Whether you need to explore the entire universe of No-Code tools & whether she has settled on her own minimum viable stack Any barriers with No-Code solutions, and how working in No-Code has actually helped her learn to code Advice on how to get into building No-Code solutions yourself, and the importance of validating that you're solving real user problems And much more! Contact Natalie You can contact Natalie on Twitter or LinkedIn (although for the latter, please say that you've come from OKIP podcast otherwise she might not accept you!). You can check out her work at Minimum Viable Stack.

An interview with Michele Hansen. Michele is the founder of Geocodio, a startup she founded without taking external funding. She is also the author of "Deploy Empathy", a book that aims to help product teams & founders to get better at user research & get the insights they need. We speak about a lot, including: Why now was the time for a new book on customer interviewing skills, how it's different to other books on discovery How the book has gone down, some of the feedback that she's gotten so far, and how she knew it had done the job she wanted it to How to introduce customer research into companies which aren't currently up for it & sell the idea to leadership Whether the techniques in the book constitute manipulation and whether she's worried they could be used for evil Whether the book teaches you to be truly empathetic or is a guide to fake it till you make it, and whether this matters How you don't need users to have empathy with you, and have to channel your inner rubber duck to make sure they open up to you The importance of validating not just hypotheses but also validating your users by resisting the urge to correct their mistakes Why you shouldn't use customer discovery interviews to try to sneak in sales or directly try to stop people churning And much more! Buy Deploy Empathy "Deploy Empathy will help you learn the skill of talking to your customers—learning to truly listen to them—so that you can pull out their hidden needs, desires, and processes. Empathy is a skill that anyone can learn. Armed with the tactics you’ll learn in this book and the toolbox of scripts and phrases, you'll be able to sell more of your existing product, build the right features that will delight your customers, and stop churn in its tracks."   Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads. Contact Michele You can contact Michele on Twitter or check out deployempathy.com.

An interview with Carlos Lastres. Carlos is the Creative & Marketing Director at Kaiyan Medical, a Chinese company creating light therapy products. Carlos is obviously an advocate for light therapy but also an engineer turned designer who is loving life in China. We talk about a lot, including: Light therapy - what the heck is it? Does it really work? How he became a convert to light therapy by chance when working on a design brief for Kaiyan Medical and why he decided to stay Some of the differences and similarities between creating digital products & hardware products How 3D printing makes all the difference when trying to get an MVP out of a hardware product How his frustration with badly designed software applications as a developer led him to pursue a career in product design How he went from an MBA and software development background to developing the design hard skills he needed How Chinese startups build products and how is it so different from how Western countries do it Whether Chinese users appreciate the constant flow of limited MVPs or whether it limits the ability to truly learn How he got involved with TEDx, how it went, and why you shouldn't follow your dreams And much more! Contact Carlos You can reach out to Carlos on LinkedIn or LastresCarlos.com. You can check out Kaiyan Medical on KaiyanMedical.com.

An interview with Peter Knudson & Braxton Bragg. Peter & Braxton are co-authors of new book "Product Sense", with which they hope to help the next generation of product managers discover their product superpower and land that next big product management role. We speak about a lot, including: Their shared history as product managers in the gaming industry, why Peter stayed in it and why Braxton spread his wings How the book has been received, how they took an iterative approach to book writing, and why they decided to write a book together in the first place How the book is different to some of the other classic "get a product job" books and whether it's a compliment or a replacement The importance of bringing your authentic self to product manager interviews, and whether it's ever OK to fake it till you make it How they define product sense, whether everyone already has it, and whether people who don't have it can be taught it The concept of a product manager superpower, being T-shaped, and using your expertise and passion to stand out from the crowd Why they created the Compass Framework, why it's needed and how it helps give a structured response to interview questions Whether you need an MBA to be a product manager, whether it's totally unnecessary, and how in either case it can be very tricky to get into product And much more! Buy Product Sense "Product Sense is a comprehensive and accessible, guidebook for what it means to solve problems as product manager, and ace complicated PM interviews."   Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads. Contact Peter & Braxton You can contact Peter or Braxton on LinkedIn.

An interview with Rand Fishkin. Rand was the founder and CEO of SEO firm Moz. He documented the highs & lows of VC-backed entrepreneurship in his 2018 book "Lost and Founder", in which he detailed lessons learned, fought back against tech clichés, and pondered how he'd do it differently next time. Now it's next time and he's back with new firm SparkToro, looking to build truly sustainable businesses and a more caring, responsible capitalism. We speak about a lot, including: His new startup SparkToro, what it does, how it's different to his previous firm and how it's going these days Whether calling out thought leaders in his book led to any trouble, and why it's ok to make philosophical enemies How he pushes back against the inevitable retort that, rather than hustle culture being a problem, maybe he's just not that good at it The fallacy of meritocracy and how it's impossible for privileged founders (and the people that back them) to understand that opportunity is not distributed equally How the VC industry is furthering inequality, blinded by survivorship bias, and why it's so important to give underserved groups a hand up How the "growth at all costs" VC culture is forcing founders to make bad product decisions to make the numbers look good, and ignoring the real lifetime value of a user The surprising way that SparkToro handles cancellations proactively, and why churning a few extra % is better than having unhappy, locked in customers The problems with MVP culture, how people have taken the Lean Startup too far, and why great products are rarely minimally viable How founders and product leaders should truly put the customer first, not be blinded by their own egos and defending a possibly meaningless strategic roadmap at all costs And much more! Buy Lost and Founder "Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: a young, brilliant entrepreneur has an cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions and becomes the envy of the technology world. This is not that story."   Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads. Contact Rand You can contact Rand on Twitter or check out sparktoro.com.

An interview with Paul Meinshausen. Paul is the co-founder of Aampe, a startup that uses automated, rapid learning to personalise notifications and drive customer engagement. Paul started out in academia before doing a tour in Afghanistan and using data where the stakes couldn't be higher. He then went on to found and invest in multiple startups. We talk about a lot, including: The mission behind Aampe, the problems they're trying to solve, and the importance of sticking to solving those problems and not getting bogged down building stuff that's already a commodity Whether the company is at product/market fit stage or whether product/market fit is even a thing as far as they're concerned How we need to step away from mobile notifications being a marketing channel, rather a proactive UI and entry point to apps The impact of Big Tech privacy controls on mobile technology, the impact on engagement, and whether it's a threat or an opportunity The journey from academia to multiple entrepreneur, and whether it's unfair to label data scientists as primarily academic with no business sense Some of the ways data scientists can build those business muscles and make sure they are solving real problems in a meaningful way How a tour in Afghanistan shook Paul out of his academic mindset and made him realise that this stuff needs to work in the real world Why it's critically important not to just have data, but to know where it comes from and truly understand how it's feeding your models and algorithms The impact of bad data on your business and how you need to be hypervigilant to make sure you're not caught napping Check out Aampe If you want to find out more about Paul's company, check out aampe.com. Contact Paul You can catch up with Paul on LinkedIn or Twitter.