One Knight in Product

In this enlightening discussion, Steve Portigal, a seasoned user research consultant and author of "Interviewing Users," explores the crucial role of user research in today's landscape. He addresses common misconceptions about its necessity, emphasizing that feedback from sales and teams should only be the starting point. Steve delves into the balance between continuous and point-in-time research, highlighting their unique advantages. He also discusses cognitive biases and offers strategies to mitigate their effects, ultimately stressing the importance of effectively translating research into impactful action.

Richard Blundell is a serial entrepreneur and startup advisor who helps B2B startups win by getting them uncomfortably narrow and solving critical problems. He also believes that startup founders are heroes, and recently published a book trying to help them avoid common mistakes and have the best chance of putting a dent in the universe. We discussed his approach, and what on Earth he's got against product managers. A message from this episode's sponsor - SuperProduct This episode is sponsored by SuperProduct. Have you ever wished you could simplify competitive research, and reduce time commitment and effort but still get extraordinary insights? Well, have I got news for you! You can try SuperProduct's new course which teaches you how to unlock the potential of AI-powered insights about your competitors and about your market. This course demystifies AI and teaches you how to be the mega prompt maestro that will transform ChatGPT into your personal research assistant. Check the course out here, and make sure to use code KNIGHT to support this podcast. Episode highlights:   1. Your best chance to win in B2B is to get "uncomfortably narrow" and solve a visceral problem Startup founders often start off spraying and praying, hoping to get any traction at all and start to build their revenue. This is understandable, but generally a mistake. It's important to start off way more narrow than feels comfortable and have a really solid plan to get your next 25 customers. Everything else can follow. 2. It's easy to get misaligned and lose sight of your core value proposition Even when organisations start off with a solid value proposition, this can change over time. But, in any case, one of the main problems with startups slowing down (or failing to scale up) is often not a lack of sales ability, but a lack of fundamental GTM narrative. You need to fix it upstream. 3. Startup founders are heroes... Startup founders put everything on the line to bring a sometimes impossible-seeming vision to fruition. It's easy to criticise them when things are going wrong, but no one has invested more time and effort into their startup than them. 4. ... but even heroes have weaknesses It's important for founders to be self-reflective and understand their own weak spots. In some cases, this is the first leadership position they've ever held. In other cases, they'll have glaring gaps based on their own past experience. It's OK to have gaps! But, it's important to be honest about the gaps and get the right people to help you. 5. Your first hire at a B2B startup shouldn't be a Head of Sales (or a Product Manager!) It's tempting to get a seasoned seller into the business to get the numbers in but, actually, there's an even more crucial role that you need to hire first. Listen to the episode to find out who, but it's not a product manager - this can come later after you've got a foothold in the market and the founder can no longer scale. Buy "The Go To Market Handbook for B2B SaaS Leaders" "There are few people we admire more than the Founders and Leaders of software companies who have the courage, determination and, some might say, sheer madness to put their livelihoods and reputation on the line, to leave their own ‘dent in the universe’. It's a day to day, up at dawn, pride swallowing siege to lead such a business. And we know this for a fact because we’ve walked in your shoes many times. Over the last 25 years, we’ve been involved in the start-up, scale up and exit of several successful technology businesses, that between them have realized close to billion dollars of shareholder value. But along the way we've also had more than our fair share of disappointments and have the mental scars and bruising to prove it. We’ve made mistakes and fallen in what felt like bottomless pits. But fascinatingly enough, we learned as much from the ones that didn’t work, as we did from the successes. It’s these lessons which we thought we'd share in this book." Check it out on Amazon. Contact Richard You can catch up with Richard on LinkedIn or visit Vencha.

Petra Wille, author of 'Strong Product People' and 'Strong Product Communities', discusses the benefits of forming communities of practice for product managers. These communities lead to better teamwork, knowledge sharing, and breaking down of silos. Each community is unique and valuable in its own way. Petra also highlights the challenges of establishing and maintaining these communities.

April Dunford, world-renowned expert in product positioning, shares insights on creating a winning sales pitch. Topics include the lack of a standard sales pitch approach, the importance of grounding the pitch in positioning, and organizing product demos around differentiated value.

Maja Voje, growth strategy expert, shares insights on achieving product/market fit. Collaboration is crucial for success. Product/market fit involves building a sustainable business, not just delivering value. Startups should pick a niche, define ideal customers, and stick to the plan.

Eisha Armstrong is a company founder, digital transformation consultant and author of "Productize" and new book "Fearless". This new book goes deep on the cultural underpinnings of productisation, and how company leader can align their teams and quell their own fears. Episode highlights: 1. Many leaders are afraid of productisation... Leaders want the benefits of productisation, but are afraid to jump in because of the investment required, and whether the bets are going to pay off. 2. ... But their employees are afraid too Employees are afraid that they are going to lose their jobs, that their skills and knowledge will become less valuable, or that the client they have invested time in will reject the new model. 3. It's important to sell the vision and the "why" behind productisation It's no surprise that products need a vision, but it's even more important to explain the "why" of productisation, and to connect an aspirational vision to the hard business metrics and KPIs that resonate with a service-mindset organisation. 4. The hallmarks of a successful services firm can kill a product-friendly culture Eisha talks about the four horsemen of product-friendly culture: Knowing, Perfectionism, Scarcity Mindset and Individual Heroics. Productisation changes the game and these traits can sink productisation efforts. The company needs to shift mindset and probably needs to bring in new expertise. 5. Product leaders in service-mindset organisations have to be different Product leaders in transforming organisations are not the same as product leaders in tech-first product organisations. Technical chops are secondary, and they need to have much better stakeholder management and communication skills to succeed. They need to ensure there is no tissue rejection by an organisation that just doesn't understand. Buy "Fearless" "Transforming a B2B services business model to a more scalable, profitable, productized company can have many points of failure - but the biggest and most underserved is the cultural transformation required to support successful productization. The encore book from Eisha Armstrong and her team at Vecteris, Fearless tackles this frequent point of failure and dives deep on the change management required to build a Product-Friendly Culture." Check it out on Amazon. You can also check out the book website Buy "Productize" "More and more traditional professional services firms are turning to "productization" as a strategy to grow, improve valuations, and to fend off new digital-first competitors. However, many of them will fail and waste a lot of money in the process. Productize first outlines the "Seven Deadly Productization Mistakes" made when pursuing a product strategy, then provides the blueprint for overcoming each of these missteps. It is designed to be a practical playbook for any leader of a professional services business who wants to successfully accelerate growth." Check it out on Amazon. You can also check out the book website Contact Eisha You can catch up with Eisha on LinkedIn.

Saagar Bains is a fractional product leader and product advisor who started out digitally transforming his family's wholesale business and launching its e-commerce site before moving into consulting and into startups. One of those startups was The Body Coach, started by celebrity fitness guru Joe Wicks, where Saagar had the job of translating their vision into scalable reality. For this episode, we travelled to Saagar's hometown of Birmingham for a LIVE interview and Q&A about the pros and cons of building for celebrity creators. Episode highlights:   1. Being an early entrepreneur can really help your product management game Product managers often get tied up in the craft of product management and the latest frameworks, but Saagar started out working for his family business and had to work out everything as he went. This gave him an incredible bias for action, to do things that don't scale and to get scrappy where needed. These are traits that many PMs should develop rather than getting precious about process. 2. Product Management is all about the "Why" Saagar spent some time working for Deloitte Digital and, in many cases, building stuff without being told why it was being built. This left him feeling unsatisfied, and like he wasn't doing "Proper Product". Luckily, even though The Body Coach started building with an external agency, the "why" was so strong from the founders that Saagar could take over something that made sense. 3. Creator-led businesses have a built-in audience, which means that "move fast and break things" doesn't work If you have millions of users with a direct relationship with the brand upfront, you can't just throw anything out the door. There's an incredible amount of brand equity and trust that needs to be satisfied, and there is a higher quality bar. That said, you still have to pick your battles, and there's still good product prioritisation work to be done. 4. All founders are going to come with feature requests, and smart PMs are going to do some of them When you have an incredibly well-respected founder who lives and breathes the product, you're going to get requests. Some of them will even make sense. But, product people who don't have evidence against the requests, or a better plan in general, are going to get overridden and they only have themselves to blame. That said, it's important not to rail against feature requests just because they're from a founder. 5. Building proper, trusting relationships with the founders is incredibly important When working with creators with a massive following, who have invested so much of themselves into a company, the worst thing you can do is just walk in expecting them to bend to the awesome power of product management. Saagar spent several hours walking and talking with the founders before even getting the job, to understand their motivations and forge a bond. This ultimately helped him be more successful. Contact Saagar You can connect with Saagar on LinkedIn.

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.