One Knight in Product

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!

James is a Delivery Manager for Discovery Inc., a VOD entertainment platform. James is a passionate advocate for using story points for just about everything, and using data to inform delivery decisions. We speak about a few topics, including: How to bring delivery together across multiple technical streams for a big media company The interplay between Delivery and Product and the importance of a good Product Manager How to get Product, Delivery & Engineering to work harmoniously How story points can save the world and how to use them properly Whether Scrum is any good and some of the ways to make it work for your business The tricky balance between Product Delivery and fixing tech debt How to use the data you already have to help inform future delivery decisions How to use data to sell your message to the leadership team How running a band and running Product Delivery are pretty similar And much more!

Renowned Product Management thought leader Marty Cagan discusses starting SVPG, blogging, book writing, challenges in being Product-led, promoting diversity in tech, and more in a captivating interview.

An interview with Christine Itwaru. Christine is Senior Director of Product Operations at Pendo. Christine is a problem-solving, Product-obsessed New Yorker who has swapped the Big Apple for the City of Oaks as Senior Director of Product Operations for Pendo. We talk about the fundamentals of Product Ops, how it works at Pendo, the types of people you need, what they can do for you, and when you need them. We talk about a lot: How she traded the Big Apple for the City of Oaks, moving to Raleigh, North Carolina to work with Pendo The exciting challenges and opportunities of working for a hypergrowth SaaS company What Product Operations is and how it can help a company as it scales, and how Christine made it happen The core skills and mindset needed to work in Product Operations The difference between being data-driven & data-informed, or whether there's any difference at all The importance of cross-functional communication for Product Ops, and Product teams in general Some of the challenges being a woman in tech and how she's trying to help solve them And much more!