One Knight in Product

About the Episode An interview with Gibson Biddle. Gib is the former VP of Product Management at Netflix, and former CPO of Chegg. Nowadays, he's a coach and teacher who gave 140 talks over the last year. He's also recently started a mailing list, "Ask Gib" where he answers some of the top voted questions every week. We understandably speak about a lot, including: His new newsletter "Ask Gib", and why you should subscribe to it Whether he's gotten any difficult questions he couldn't answer How he manages to do 140 events and how he optimises the format How to make an impact in your first 90 days as a product leader The importance of moving quickly to make an impact, and striking whilst the iron is hot What to do if you aren't passionate about the company you work for, and when to leave How to handle M&A as part of your product strategy & why not to worry about the valuation The pros & cons of using different frameworks to teach product leadership practices Treating yourself as a product, and experimenting with your career choices to help build your intuition and business maturity The importance of taking risks, both for mature businesses as well as in your career Whether Gib could have saved Blockbuster, why he thinks they ultimately failed, and how the Innovator's Dilemma loomed large And much more! Sign up to Ask Gib Gib answers the most upvoted questions once a week on his newsletter, Ask Gib. Sign up here and never be bereft of content again. Please rate Gib's interview Gib loves NPS and uses it to optimise his content and make sure he can continue to improve it and excite his audience. Please take a second to rate his interview! Contact Gib You can contact Gib on Twitter, LinkedIn or gibsonbiddle.com.

An interview with Nichole DeMeré. Nichole is CMO at Reeview, a new eCommerce video review platform, as well as Taggg, a calendar scheduling solution. Nichole is a passionate growth marketer, consultant, community builder and mentor. We talk about a lot, including: The story behind Reeview, how they're looking to revolutionise eCommerce, and some of the early traction they're getting Why Nichole prefers working with early stage start ups and getting in on the ground floor, and thriving in chaos The difference between growth hacking techniques & general marketing, and which strategies & tactics to use How businesses seeking growth need to get ready to experiment and test their most important hypotheses The importance of having both qualitative and quantitative data, and their preference for having conversations with people Why it's important to focus your growth strategy and not try to hit too many channels at once Whether Nichole is up with all the new trends in tech or their own worst nightmare when it comes to marketing The importance of mentorship and paying it forward and their advice for the next generation of SaaS marketers How someone starts out in a one horse town and takes over the world of B2B Marketing More about Reeview You can find out about Reeview on Reeview's website or Reeview @ Product Hunt. Contact Nichole You can find Nichole everywhere. A few places included Product Hunt, LinkedIn, Twitter or their own website nicholeelizabethdemere.com

An interview with Paul Ortchanian. Paul worked for many years in Silicon Valley before moving back to Montreal. He got bored of working for a services firm there and decided to take his SV experience into his own startup, Bain Public, aiming to foster Product Hygiene in Canadian firms and beyond. We talk about a lot, including: How a lack of product thinking in Montreal and experience in Silicon Valley led him to create a consultancy to fix it How his great experience in Silicon Valley and imbibing the product culture there was an advantage The challenge of "Moses syndrome" from CEOs who think they're the second coming because they have secured funding The trouble with traditional startup mentors not coming from digital backgrounds How and why they invented the SOAP methodology to help Product Managers understand what they should be working on and when Some of the troubles that mixed mode product / service companies have How to arm yourself against short term thinking and sales-led feature development The importance of using data to justify your product decisions The importance of being able to handle rejection and people saying no How to take control of the discussion with sales & marketing and not just blame them And much more! Bain Public If you want to find out more about Paul's company, you can check out the Bain Public website and find out more about the SOAP methodology. Contact Paul You can connect with Paul on LinkedIn.

An interview with Emily Reid. Emily is a Product Manager for FCT, a Canadian insurance company, as well as consulting for AgeRate, a healthtech startup. Emily is passionate about demystifying data and is leading FCT's charge towards being a data-driven, API-enabled company. We talk about a lot, including: The most important question - is it "this data" or "these data"? The pros & cons of working for a big, established firm and the imperative to move to a more agile mindset Why she moved from banking into product management, and the misogynistic attitudes she was trying to get away from How she skilled up in product management hard skills, as well as data science fundamentals The importance of embracing not being the smartest person in the room How a background in biotech at uni helped her really explain complicated concepts The importance of picking good product metrics & why you need stats knowledge to be an effective PM How data science isn't the be all and end all, how to factor failure into the process, and why we might see a new breed of data science specialist product managers Why unsolicited internet advice is never welcome and people should just stop How she has been judged and patronised as a young, up and coming, blonde woman in technology And much more!

An interview with Moshe Mikanovsky. Moshe is a Senior Product Manager for Procom, a Canadian-based recruitment company, as well as a blogger and budding podcaster. We speak about a lot, including: His journey from developing software for the Israel Defence Force to Product Management, how agile the army was, and what it taught him The difference in working cultures between Israel, the USA and Canada, and how he has navigated them His side hustle as a product consultant for a "social media for content creators" His passion for transforming companies, and bringing in agile processes & practices What do do when Agile transformation doesn't work and how to keep it relevant The importance of building his personal brand, and his plans for a new podcast focused on "Products for Product Managers" His plans to pay it forward by writing blogs, appearing on webinars, and sharing his expertise with others And much more!

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!