One Knight in Product

Namrata (Nam) Sarmah is CPO at INTO University Partnerships and the founder of Women in Product UK, a community through which she hopes to build a pipeline of female product management talent and finally put to bed the excuses that hiring managers currently fall back on when challenged on their female talent acquisition. She's also passionate about making sure we get more product people into the C-suite, and will soon be launching the CPO Track community to support this. We chatted about all this, and much more. Episode highlights:   1. You don't need an MBA to get into product, but it's not unhelpful There's a lot of controversy about the merits (or lack of) of MBAs in product management. MBAs are not essential, but they can be helpful when trying to crack the C-suite as you've already spent a lot of time working on your business sense. There are other ways to get this though; the most important thing is to develop that business sense one way or another. 2. Just because you're great a product management, doesn't mean you'll be a great CPO It's hard to land a Chief Product Officer job, and even harder to stay in there. You require a mix of skills, and just being the best at product management doesn't help. It requires a mix of business acumen, executive presence (sad, but true) and the ability to tell a story in terms that resonate with your leadership peers. 3. Building a community is hard, but you can treat it like a product Community-building is not an easy skill to teach someone; it requires a certain mindset and certain instincts. There are different types of people in the world, and some of them are natural "connectors" who just know how to join the dots and get people together. 4. Women in Product UK is its own thing, and its superpower is diversity There are various communities around the world that support product managers, or female product managers specifically, but a lot of them have quite a narrow focus on certain job levels or roles. Having top female CPOs available for free in a community is a superpower. 5. The name of the game is pipeline building, and allies are welcome Some sad sacks will sit and grumble about having a "women in product" group rather than just a generic "people in product" group. but the numbers don't lie. Women are still underrepresented in senior positions, and it's easy for companies to blame "pipeline problems". So let's all build the pipeline, so they don't have an excuse anymore. Contact Nam You can connect with Nam on LinkedIn or check out Women in Product UK, where you can interact with the community and get onto the WhatsApp group.

Renowned fintech thought leader Duena Blomstrom discusses tackling organizational problems, the importance of psychological safety, and the concept of Human Debt. She emphasizes the need for teams to take measurable steps for transformation, challenge the status quo, and address issues like Impression Management. All companies accumulate Human Debt like tech debt, requiring attention for survival in the business landscape.

Jennifer Yang-Wong is a product leader who formerly worked at Uber, before moving into the rarified heights of Venture Capital. But, not as an investor but as the VP of Product for a tech-led VC firm. We spoke about why a VC firm needs a VP of Product as well as numerous reflections on the trouble that we can have when trying to apply product thinking and move beyond founder-led decision-making. Episode highlights:   1. There's no one way to do product management, and no one's doing it "right". There's no one way to do product management, and no one's doing it "right". It all depends on what you need for your stage of company, and whether you're sales-y, ops-y, or product-y in mindset. 2. There's no "number" or formula you can apply to decide whether to blow up your roadmap. In a sales-led organisation, it's common for big deals to torpedo the best-laid plans. Your appetite to do this work will vary, but it's not as simple as saying "X% of revenue and we do it!" But, whatever the number is, it should be really, really high. 3. It can be tricky to know when to bring on the first product hire and move away from founder-led product management One of the founders is generally the de facto "head of product", often with no specific product training. They do many of the same things that the product team would do, but not necessarily in the same way, and with less process. This can cause clashes when the first PM comes in. 4. Getting a super process-oriented PM in as the first PM might exacerbate the issue You do need some rigour from the PM you bring in, otherwise, what's the point of bringing them in? But, if you bring someone in who is too dogmatic or has worked for much larger organisations, you may find a cultural mismatch and inevitable clash when everything they do seems to slow you down. 5. In some companies, it might be the second "first product manager" that succeeds Founders may mis-hire if they don't have a strong understanding of what product managers bring to the table, or how they want to work. It's unpleasant to think of, but sometimes the first PM takes the hits, moves on and is replaced by a second PM who can start to make progress since the founders have a better idea of what they'll get the second time around. Contact Jennifer You can connect with Jennifer on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

Gabrielle Bufrem, highly recommended by Sir Marty Cagan, discusses the challenges of product strategy, the importance of focus, and pushing back on feature requests. They also touch on leadership buy-in, effective communication, and the role of product principles in decision making.

Julie Starr is a renowned coach and mentor, and author of several books on the topics. We had a deep and meaningful chat about the differences between coaching and mentoring, what it takes to be a good coach or mentor, and the impact of AI on coaching. Episode highlights:   1. The expectations we have of leaders have changed We're slowly moving away from Taylorist, resource-focused management to a less-directive style of leadership. Not all companies are there yet, but even laggards are seeing what other organisations are doing and the benefits it brings. 2. Coaching is a 1:1 relationship focused squarely on the person being coached Coaches facilitate conversations of inquiry and aim to support their clients to take action, evolve and, ultimately, empower them to be the change they want to see in themselves. 3. Coaches do not need to be functional experts At the heart of coaching is the art of coaching, not reflecting your own biases and life story onto people. A good coach can use fundamental coaching skills to coach anyone, whatever their life situation or career niche. 4. Mentoring is not the same as coaching, but it's also not binary It's less useful to look at the specific behaviours and more at the dynamics of a mentoring relationship; that of benevolence from and respect for a more senior practitioner who has seen your situation before. 5. Not everything that counts can be measured It's traditionally hard to attribute specific metrics to coaching or mentoring relationships, but that doesn't mean the effect isn't there. It's not always easy, but we can use qualitative data to show the impact of our efforts. Buy Julie's Books "Julie Starr’s books on coaching and mentoring are recommended reading on development programmes around the world." Check out all three books at Starr Coaching, or wherever you get your books. Check out Julie's free resources Julie has a huge amount of free resources at LearnStarr (free registration required). Make sure to check it out. Contact Julie You can connect with Julie on LinkedIn. You can also check out the Starr Coaching website.

Daniel Stillman is a former industrial designer turned conversation designer, who wants to help leadership teams and entire organisations stop wasting their time having ineffective conversations. We spoke about the concept of Conversation Design, the Conversation OS Canvas, and the perils of "Sheep Dip" organisational transformations. Episode highlights:   1. Sheep-dip organisational transformation doesn't work You can't send everyone on a 1-hour course, not talk about it afterwards or have any kind of follow-up, yet somehow expect to sustain organisational change. Transformation takes sustained effort & you need to keep talking. 2. All conversations are inherently designed, even the ones that aren't There's an implicit design in any conversation. You should use whatever works for you, but being aware of what isn't working allows you to re-design the conversations that don't work and get better results. 3. Leadership is the ability to create the conditions for a transformational conversation If everyone's stuck, leaders can help people get unstuck by getting people to ask the right question to offer the right insight in service of what we want to create more of in the world. 4. We all have a mental OS running on a mental CPU And, like all software, and all CPUs, there could be problems with clock speed, or bugs in the system that prevent us from getting to where we want to go. Thoughtfully designing conversations allows us to iron out the bugs. 5. Active Listening is a great hack to help design conversations Getting away from the desire to respond within 200ms, not tuning people out because you're formulating your next thought & playing back people's words can really help change your conversations for the better. Buy "Good Talk" "Life is built one conversation at a time. Learn which conversations matter, how to transform those conversations, and balance them all while leading change. Human beings are conversational animals. Every day we're in constant communication with ourselves, other people and the world around us, and while not all conversations may seem important, they all have the potential to transform our personal, professional and cultural lives for the better. This book explains how conversations work and offers practical advice on how to improve the quality of our exchanges." Check it out on Amazon. Contact Daniel You can catch up with Andres on LinkedIn, or visit his website or The Conversation Factory.

Deepa Goyal got excited when she saw her first API product and has been working in API products ever since. She's worked for companies like Twilio and Paypal and is now Product Strategy Lead for Postman. She was disappointed at the lack of PM-specific resources, so decided to solve this with her new book "API Analytics for Product Managers". We spoke about API product management in general, and what it takes to be successful with API products. Episode highlights:   1. APIs are technical but there's a user-centric way to explain them APIs at their heart are simply the way that different applications talk to each other. For example, Uber talking to Google Maps or talking to PayPal. They enable seamless integration of a product ecosystem. 2. Yes, APIs need Product Managers (even internal APIs) It's important to have a customer-centric approach & strategy for APIs. You need to make sure that they're discoverable, useful & provide value. This is also true for internal APIs... internal users are your customers too! 3. There are definitely differences when managing API products For example, you can't track people's user journeys as easily. You often don't have the same visibility. It can also take a long time to go from initial discovery to actually receiving value from your product. 4. It's important to define API product value and measure it Sometimes value is obvious and sometimes it's not, but it's important to define what "value" means for your users (it's probably not just "number of API calls") and work out ways to measure that so you can optimise it. 5. There are differences in API product management, but your basic job is the same You're still speaking to users, focusing on their use cases & delivering value. The way that you express this may be different but, ultimately, an API product manager is still a product manager! Buy "API Analytics for Product Managers" "API Analytics for Product Managers takes you through the benefits of efficient researching, strategizing, marketing, and continuously measuring the effectiveness of your APIs to help grow both B2B and B2C SaaS companies. Once you've been introduced to the concept of an API as a product, this fast-paced guide will show you how to establish metrics for activation, retention, engagement, and usage of your API products, as well as metrics to measure the reach and effectiveness of documentation—an often-overlooked aspect of development." Check it out on Amazon. Contact Deepa You can connect with Deepa on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

Dave Farley is a consultant and renowned thought leader in the software development world, and a strong advocate for ensuring that our software is always releasable. He's co-authored a book and runs a popular YouTube channel, both called "Continuous Delivery". We spoke about what continuous delivery is, why it's important, the barriers to implementing it, and how product managers can help. Episode highlights: 1. Continuous delivery is what the best software organisations in the world do It's unambiguous. It's backed by data. It's the best way to build quality products. Applying these techniques means your software is always releasable, and every change is safe 2. But, this doesn't mean you need genius developers Any team can adopt continuous delivery. It's not a factor of 10x "rock star" developers, but empowered teams of developers working together, collaborating and *talking* to each other. 3. You build quality software by going fast Continuous feedback based on small changes, constantly validated, ensures high-quality products. You don't want to go back & fix it later. You can't inspect quality into a system at the end of a development cycle. Build it in upfront. 4. Just because you can release continuously doesn't mean you have to What you release to customers is a business decision. This isn't about throwing half-finished features at users but having software that you know works. You can use feature flags to manage availability. 5. Many product managers need to check themselves We need to move away from PMs giving developers human-language representations of code and telling them to convert it for a computer. The best devs are problem solvers and should be involved in working out the best solution. Buy "Continuous Delivery" "Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process.This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours―sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base." Check it out on Amazon. Check out Dave's course Dave has a course out that helps people get good at all the stuff we talked about in the podcast. If you're interested, check the course out here. Dave also mentioned a talk by his co-author Jez Humble. I'm not 100% sure if this is the one, but it looks pretty good anyway. Check it out. Contact Dave You can connect with Dave on Twitter. You can also check out the Continuous Delivery YouTube channel.

Yana Welinder is the CEO of Kraftful. We spoke a year ago on this podcast about her mission to help solve usability in IoT startups, but she's since gone all-in with a hard pivot to build an AI-powered product co-pilot. The company's growing like crazy and we caught up to talk about what's changed since our last interview. Episode highlights:   1. Pivoting was hard but the time (and tech) was right Yana was solving a problem she deeply cared about, but when ChatGPT hit primetime she realised she could solve an even more important problem. She dreaded sending the email to existing users, but everyone was super-positive. 2. It's important to validate your pivot ahead of time Yana did some background research by stealthily positioning herself at conferences as the founder of a startup solving the new problem. People were super-keen to share feedback and this gave her confidence in the pivot. 3. Kraftful will replace a lot of PM tasks, but not PMs There's still plenty of room for product managers in an AI-powered world. The best PMs will use smart technology to automate away necessary, but ultimately lower leverage tasks, and enable PMs to concentrate on strategy. 4. There is a possibility of dependency on AI-powered tools, but that's OK Is there a danger that people forget how to do PM work without AI tools? Sure, but Yana likens the situation to using Google Maps. How many people know how to get where they're going without assistance? 5. Hallucinations are going away soon There are well-known issues with inaccurate text coming out of LLMs, but the tech is developing fast. It's possible to mitigate the worst of the effects by including deep context & narrowing focus rather than using LLMs as a Swiss Army Knife. Contact Yana You can catch up with Yana on Twitter or check out Kraftul at Kraftful.com.

Erika Klics is a former talent manager who worked for companies like Snap Inc and Zapier to help them build their teams. She started to see certain patterns in recruiting that made her realise that there was a bigger problem to solve on the candidate side and started her own consultancy to help goal-driven professionals achieve their career aims. We spoke about her work, and some general do's and don'ts of job hunting. Episode highlights:   1. Everyone has an Inevitable Edge Your Inevitable Edge is the thing that makes you unique. No one else brings it to the table. Everyone has a juxtaposition of skills & experiences that makes them unique. It's important to identify & leverage it to be successful when job hunting. 2. Be intentional with your job search criteria Don't just make a list of literally every job that matches a search term & scroll through it one by one. You need to understand what company profiles are truly a fit for you and avoid spraying and praying. 3. Get your story straight It's all about positioning - we should be good at this! Being able to tell your unique story is important, but make sure you pitch it at the right level, set appropriate context & don't go too deep on interesting, but ultimately irrelevant, stories. 4. Companies don't hire people, humans do You need to make a human connection with everyone you meet during the interview process. Build empathy with them and work out what they care about, why they're asking the questions they're asking and listen between the lines. 5. Don't "settle" for a job you don't want When times are hard, it's easy to cast your net out for unsuitable/too-junior jobs. You'll get interviews because they're curious, but you won't get hired. This will knock your confidence. If you do get the job, you'll probably hate it. Contact Erika You can catch up with Erika on LinkedIn or visit her website, ErikaKlics.com.