One Knight in Product

An interview with Rekha Venkatakrishnan. Rekha is a Senior Manager in Group Product Management for Walmart Global Tech, supporting Walmart offices around the world in building great product experiences. She's also a passionate advocate for advancing women in data, tech & product and a chapter lead for Women in Product in San Francisco. We speak about a lot, including: What it's like working in product for a giant like Walmart, in a global, distributed product team Whether an organisation like Walmart can be truly agile or whether it's stuck in the past How a move from Walmart to Oracle went wrong and why she ended up back at Walmart How she started as an engineer in India before starting to query the "What" and the "Why" naturally moved her towards product management Some of the challenges of going from an engineering mindset to product mindset, and getting away from trying to specify the "How" How she prioritised practical, hands on experience and hadn't even heard of places like Product School How her passion for communication & education led her to ironically become a trainer for Product School Her work with Women in Product and the initiatives she's working on to help support women in the product community Why it's important to be able to make mistakes as long as you learn from them And much more! Contact Rekha You can contact Rekha on LinkedIn.

An interview with Stephanie Tanzar, Director of Product Management at Pendo. Stephanie talks about her passion for product management and product analytics, the new Product Engagement Score metric and some great advice for becoming more data-driven. We talk about a lot, including: The differences between stages of companies, how she's lived them all and what she prefers now Whether being in a hypergrowth company with a massive user base makes it easier to say no What it's like being a product manager at a company that serves a user base of product managers How a passion for human / computer interaction nearly led to a PhD but instead sparked a passion for product management Why data is important and the role of gut feel in product management decisions What the Product Engagement Score is, what it tells you, and whether it's actually useful or just something to get people to use Pendo Whether Pendo are putting their money where their mouth is and using the score to drive their own decisions Examples of good decisions that have been made so far using Product Engagement Score as a basis Whether NPS's time is up or whether it's valuable alongside data such as the Product Engagement Score Why you don't have to be perfect to be data-driven, and that just taking it one step at a time is still valuable The different lagging and leading indicators that can be used to drive product decisions About the Product Engagement Score Stephanie wants you to start using the PES to measure your product engagement. Find out more about that on the Product Engagement Score website. Contact Stephanie If you want to catch up with Stephanie, you can reach her on LinkedIn or go and sign up for Pendo. PS - If you want check whether Stephanie's answers match up with our previous Pendo guest, check out Christine Itwaru.

An interview with David Pereira. David is Head of Product Management at Virtual Identity, a product development agency. He's also a prolific author and educator, and contributing editor to Serious Scrum. We talk about a lot, including: The fun and games when working for a company transitioning from a project to product-led mindset The importance of meeting in the middle and making iterative progress, not aiming for perfection on day one How he got his first job as a product owner completely by mistake whilst studying on an English immersion course How he developed his product skills on the job through making multiple mistakes and iterating The debate between Product Owner and Product Manager as job titles, and the trend for Product Owners to be hired as order takers in feature factories How he got into writing over 100 articles and becoming a contributing editor to Serious Scrum on Medium What he means by "The Game Being Over" for Scrum and some of the problems with the framework Some of the issues he sees with SAFe as a successor for Scrum, and how it's really waterfall in disguise The importance of a solid growth mindset and not going stale, and some of the ways he tries to keep ahead of the crowd Contact David If you want to catch up with David, you can reach him on LinkedIn, Twitter or read his work on Medium.  

An interview with Samuel Ogunkoya. Samuel is a product management intern at ProducteevTech, a product development agency. Samuel started his career as a physiotherapist before deciding to focus on a different type of user pain, and shares some of his learnings from his journey so far. We talk about a lot, including: How he serendipitously landed his first product management job What made him decide to switch from physiotherapy into product management in the first place How his passion for people and his broad interest in technology has affected both parts of his career Whether his interest in product management was useful in his physiotherapy career, and how he treated his services as a product How his experience with patients and patients' families helped him develop empathy that he now takes forward to his users & stakeholders How he developed a strong dislike for micromanagement from past experience, and how he pushes against this in his product management career The resources he used to skill up in product management, and how he prefers hands on sessions to book training How he explained product management to his friends and family and how they reacted when he told them about the change Advice for others following him into product management Contact Samuel You can find Samuel on Twitter, LinkedIn or Samuel's website.

An interview with Wes Bush. Wes is the founder of ProductLed, a company aiming to teach the world how to build products that sell themselves. He's also the author of the book "Product-Led Growth". We speak about a lot, including: How a career in B2B SaaS working in demand generation started to make him suspect that there was another way to generate demand How his passion for simplifying led him to start simplifying product onboarding to allows users to get to value sooner The problems of moving from sales-led to product-led when you haven't spent any time on your product's UX The problems of enterprise "whale hunting" leading to products that are overcomplicated and difficult to use How a desire to get to the heart of the problem, and teach his clients, led to writing a leading book on product-led growth Whether salespeople should feel threatened by product-led growth, or whether it's an opportunity for them How product-led growth affects the marketing team and whether it's the end of traditional marketing Whether some companies are just not ready to become product-led, and some of the reasons it doesn't make sense to be so How companies know when it's time to transition from sales-led to product-led, and the first steps to take Whether there are some types of companies that actually want to be sold to and would resist product-led approaches And much more! Buy Product-Led Growth "Discover the fundamentals of Product-Led Growth and how you can turn your product into a growth engine, widen your funnel, and dominate your market while cutting your customer acquisition costs."   Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads. Contact Wes You can contact Wes on Twitter, LinkedIn or productled.com.

An interview with Stephanie Leue. Stephanie is a product leadership coach, and became CPO of MindEx since our interview. Previously she worked in a variety of roles after starting out at PayPal after being coached by Marty Cagan. We talk about a lot, including: Her leadership coaching, being an invisible companion and sparring partner How she tries to set people up to not need her services, rather than continuously coaching them forever Her passion for hypergrowth startups, and the difference between a startup and an unsuccessful small company How a workshop with Marty Cagan left her realising that she had been a product manager all along How PayPal was a launchpad for her career, and some surprising information about their waterfall practices when she joined The challenges in transforming companies from waterfall to an agile product organisation How product managers might not be able to change the entire organisation but that their mindset is still key to drive transformation Whether lack of product thinking is the preserve of big companies alone, or if small startups can show the same behaviours The importance of making conscious decisions about the type of company you are - marketing-led, sales-led or product-led How she's not always been a good boss, thought she used to be terrible, and how she's using that to teach others to be better The impact of holding back too long and not making timely decisions And much more! Contact Stephanie You can reach out to Stephanie on LinkedIn or Twitter.

An interview with Kim Scott, author of "Radical Candor" and "Just Work". Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. Earlier in her career Kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow. We speak about a lot, including: How she's already getting feedback on the book, not just complements, but people taking action based on it Whether she's got any negative feedback from the types of people who complain about political correctness How she knew she was onto something when her dad's friends had a lightbulb moment discussing the book How she felt revisiting painful experiences from her past, and whether this was a positive or negative experience for her Whether strategic swearing in books is a positive or negative when trying to land a message How she got feedback from a black female executive that being radically candid doesn't work for everyone, and how this spurred her to write her new book Whether she felt she was an imperfect messenger for the themes in this book given that she is herself privileged How we all used biased language, how words matter and why it's important that we all work on it How to point out people's biased, prejudiced and bullying behaviour without getting their defences up and shutting you down How to be an upstander not a bystander, and building this into the culture of your company What to do when the problems in your company are systemic, from the CEO downwards, and the importance of checks and balances Buy Kim's books "We―all of us―consistently exclude, underestimate, and underutilize huge numbers of people in the workforce even as we include, overestimate, and promote others, often beyond their level of competence. Not only is this immoral and unjust, it's bad for business. Just Work is the solution." Just Work   "Radical Candor is about caring personally and challenging directly, about soliciting criticism to improve your leadership and also providing guidance that helps others grow. It focuses on praise but doesn't shy away from criticism ― to help you love your work *and* the people you work with." Radical Candor   Get in touch with Kim You can check out Kim's work on the Just Work website, or follow her on Twitter.

An interview with Polina Marchenko. Polina is a self-described geekette, product leader and multiple startup founder. Polina saw the dark side of startup life in Berlin, suffering burnout due to the intense hustle culture. She has since moved to the US, and is now focusing her efforts on her new startup whilst ensuring that she does it in a sustainable manner. We talk about a lot, including: How she developed a passion for entrepreneurship from an early age and through higher education What it was like being a junior PM at a startup and whether it helped her build her hard skills Her struggles with hustle culture, unrealistic expectations and inevitable burn out How she used the lessons from her first startup to make sure she didn't make the same mistakes again How she accidentally moved to Silicon Valley and ended up in a hacker house with 14 other hustling entrepreneurs The problems with hustle culture and why she's actively trying to get her friends to step out of it How a passion for community building and desire to connect led her to create 3 new startups in a pandemic How she used her past startup experience to decide it was time to park a couple of startup ideas and concentrate on one How she's helping people unleash their potential, fight imposter syndrome, and how important this is to her values Try SIDE PRJCT "Resumes are overrated, show me what you've built" Check out the SIDE PRJCT website. Contact Polina You can reach out to Polina on LinkedIn.

About the Episode An interview with Nacho Bassino. Nacho is CPO for Best Day Travel Group and the author of new book "Product Direction", which is a practical playbook for product strategy. Nacho is a passionate supporter of the Latin American product community, and host of a Spanish-language product podcast. We speak about a lot, including: How writing a book is a great way to really learn about the topic you're writing about Transitioning from project-led to product-led, how to do it at scale and manage complicated dependencies without SAFe What it's like interviewing holidaymakers, and how you can always get a captive focus group when you need one Gathering insights to help define product strategy, reducing them and synthesising them into the iniatives that matter The importance for product teams of building for the future and not concentrating on short term thinking Important principles for building an effective roadmap to support the product vision Driving alignment with multiple stakeholders and avoiding an information gap How to avoid OKRs becoming just a big "to do" list via peer review and collaboration The importance of investing in and providing local language content for the Latin American product community Buy Nacho's Book Nacho's book, "Product Direction" is available in all the usual places. Check it out! Product Direction website. Conversaciones de Producto If you speak Spanish, why not try Nacho's podcast Conversaciones de Producto. Contact Nacho You can reach out to Nacho on LinkedIn or Twitter.

An interview with Nis Frome. Nis is the co-founder and VP of Product at Feedback Loop, an agile research platform. Nis took over as VP of Product after wearing many other hats. He's also a mentor and podcaster, with a keen interest in sharing with the community and helping to inspire other product managers with thought leadership. We talk about a lot, including: What made him go into entrepreneurship straight out of college Why he took over the product function and whether it was a classic case of executive swoop in How real world product management can differ so much from what's in the books How to avoid getting depressed if everything's not like the books on day one How to land the message about good product management practices with execs who haven't read said books Whether a product manager on the ground can fix a poorly performing organisation on their own The importance of connecting the dots and understanding how a product manager's decisions drive outcomes How different people and teams in a company can be on different parts of the product maturity curve and whether this matters Effectively segmenting your customers and working out how to prioritise when their needs are different And much more! Listen to Nis's podcast It's ok, we can have an open relationship. Check out Nis's podcast This is Product Management. Contact Nis You can reach out to Nis on LinkedIn or Twitter.