One Knight in Product

An interview with April Dunford. April is a Positioning Consultant and author of 2019's "Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It". We speak about a lot, including: The origin of "Obviously Awesome", why she self published and how publishers don't like "doing" books How taking over a failing product and repositioning made it a success, and showed her the power of good positioning for the exact same product How conferences and publishers reacted in horror at the concept of positioning content, and how it's swung back into fashion these days The shocking story of what happened when she asked a real author for advice and what they said about her book The problem with "fill in the blanks" positioning statements and why they won't help, and might harm The importance of positioning against your actual competition and not just your direct competitors Why Product Market Fit doesn't exist, isn't operationally useful, and is a VC pipe dream The importance of creating a market point of view story to help land your positioning and drive alignment across the organisation How you can use the POV story to help people buy your offering over that of your competitors And much more!

An interview with Yoav Farbey. Yoav is a Senior Product Manager at PARK NOW, an international company aiming to find you parking spaces and ensure you don't have to fumble around for spare change when you get one. Yoav has travelled from Computer Science to foundership, Product Analyst, Product Consultant and now leading teams and pushing design thinking. We talk about a lot, including: The age old battle about whether "Product Owner" should be a job title of its own, and how it differs from being Product Management Starting his own startup because engineering wasn't for him, how it went and why he called it quits Getting into Product Analytics as a first step, how it helped him be better Product Manager What it was like working for a consultancy, and how he managed to keep engaged when the client relationship is so transitory Using design sprints in the wild, getting engagement and how to get buy in and demonstrate their value What to do when you can't get a design sprint going, and how to use the best aspects in shorter sessions How to help large corporations make products effectively and communicate efficiently How SAFe isn't all that bad really (the humanity!) And much more!

An interview with Petra Wille. Petra is a Product Leadership Coach and author of the new book "Strong Product People - A Complete Guide to Developing Great Product Managers". We speak about a lot, including: How a desire to affect change at scale moved her away from individual coaching to coaching Product Leaders How she happened upon Product Management by being the best communicator on the development team How a desire for a practical Product Leadership playbook led her to write her own The importance of setting expectations and making incremental progress and not always aiming for perfect The challenges of selling good Product thinking to senior management and some approaches to do it The challenge of getting good management experience and becoming a good people manager without focused coaching Some of the challenges facing women Product Leaders and if it's getting better or worse Whether it's necessary to have a background in development to be an effective PM, or if it's even desirable When to stick at a Product job and try to make it better, and when it's time to leave The importance of making time for people development amongst all of the urgent day-to-day work And much more!

An interview with Büşra Coşkuner. Büşra is a Product Consultant & Coach who works with organisations and individuals to embed Product Management principles. We speak about a lot, including: Practical Product Management - you can't learn all of the frameworks How her experience in Berlin helped but also hindered her move to a different working culture in Switzerland The challenge of the acronym "MVP" and how no two people think it means the same thing Companies where leaders don't have product thinking or worse still think they have product thinking The importance of demonstrating product thinking not just talking about it and being idealistic How important No Code solutions are for the Product community and what they unlock for busy Product teams The challenges of being a woman in tech and seeing things in retrospect, and her trepidation of being a working mum And much more!

An interview with Candice Poon. Candice is a Program Manager at Microsoft (which is really a Product Manager at any other company) working on Microsoft Edge. Candice recently caused a stir on Twitter when she tweeted about her experience being prevented from signing up to Clubhouse because of her name.  We speak about a lot, including: What it's like working for Microsoft and ensuring Internet Explorer stays in its coffin Whether being called a Program Manager is confusing and whether she still gets invited to Product Manager parties How she felt being blocked from signing up to Clubhouse and whether it's happened before How Clubhouse responded and whether the response was satisfactory Some of the reasons why people have blind spots when developing  products and what we should do to fix them How Microsoft are promoting diversity & what's left to do  The importance of mixing tech and non-tech skills to further diversify your experience And much more!

Kate is a consultant who advises organisations how to build Product teams and practices. She is also the author of "Hiring Product Managers: Using Product EQ to go beyond culture and skills", a book that aims to help hire effective Product leaders in the first place, or develop Product leaders that are struggling to make an impact. We talk about a lot, including: How her experience hiring Product leaders helped her write a book about it, and how hard it was to keep it succinct How hot shot VPs / Heads of Product can fail if they rely too much on technical skills, and how as an industry we focus too much on hiring for them How long to stick with Product leaders before having that difficult conversation about their next move How new leaders often aren't set up for success through lack of coaching, and just left to get on with it The importance of a shared understanding of what the job role entails, and not just copying and pasting job descriptions from Google The problem with "Cultural Fit" and how you need different puzzle pieces and not a stack of the same How neurodiversity fits into a high EQ world and how to adapt hiring processes to cater for different ways of thinking What progress we've made with advancing women in Product Management, and what hasn't changed at all And much more!

An interview with Deepti Tadala. Deepti is a Technical Product Manager with Synacor, a technology firm based in upstate New York, and a former management consultant with Deloitte. She's also a Founding 200 Member at Product School, former Content Lead for Products by Women, and a member of Toastmasters International. We talk about a lot, including: The difference between Technical Product Managers and non-Technical Product Managers The importance, even as a TPM, of having close contact with customers and considering the market How working as a Management Consultant for Deloitte prepared her for Product Management, and how it didn't The troubles of getting that first Product Management job when racing against the immigration clock Learning to be a Product Manager and the importance of walking the walk Her passion for education and using her story to inspire others and pay it forward The importance of learning public speaking skills even if you don't want to speak publicly The importance of having a platform for women to share experiences and support each other Her power morning schedule and what it helps her to achieve

Cindy Alvarez, Director of Customer Research at GitHub, talks about customer research with software engineers, testing interview questions, importance of empathy, writing a book on Lean Customer Development, objections to customer interviews, and optimizing for continuous discovery.

An interview with Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia. Carlos is the Founder and CEO of Product School, the global leader in product management training with a community of over one million product professionals. Product School instructors are real-world Product Leaders working at top companies including Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber, and Amazon. We talk about a lot, including: How a lack of Product training resources when he started led him to start a Product Management training start up How he fills his days at CEO of the largest Product Management learning community How he ensures that, as the leading Product Management learning community, he isn't seen as all size, no quality His passion for lifelong learning and giving away as much free content as possible What led him to write The Product Book with Josh Anon and what he expected to achieve from it How MBAs are great but they don't really prepare people to execute as Product Managers His and Product School's commitment to inclusion & diversity on their team, their instructors and their attendees And much more!

An interview with Melanie McKay. Melanie is the Head of Consumer Product at Rightmove, the UK's #1 property marketplace. She has worked in a number of Product Management roles, and took an interesting move into secondary school teaching in the middle. Since coming back to Product she's gone from strength to strength, including an appearance at Product School's ProductCon. We talk about a lot, including: How Product works at the biggest property marketplace in the UK and whether you get loads of weird requests you get when your TAM is pretty much the entire UK population How she got into Product by mistake, and what she did to get good at it with no good information to lead her Whether it is in fact harder for new PMs now because there is too much competing information for them How her passion for education got her into teaching, how it was teaching computing to kids, and why she came back What her experience of teaching taught her that she can use in her Product Management career Getting involved with ProductCon and the importance of going outside of your comfort zone Her well-received take on the classic PM Venn diagram, and how it's gone down with the PM community And much more!