Masters of Product Management

Why Some Products Fail While Others Succeed, with Justin Bauer, SVP of Product at Amplitude

If you’re familiar with the game of baseball, you know the saying “batting a thousand”. It means getting a hit every single time you go up to bat. And no one bats a thousand - at least over the course of any real number of at-bats. Here’s the truth about product management - no one bats a thousand here either. Many products fail - or at least fail to fully meet their goals. And while we may not be able to “bat a thousand”, many companies - and product managers - are embracing techniques an...

How Behavioral Science Can Make You a Better Product Manager, with Kristen Berman, CEO Irrational Labs

Understanding customers is a bedrock of successful product management. But it is a lot easier to say than do. Truly understanding customers entails a deep knowledge of their motivations and behaviors. And, frankly, many product managers are not properly equipped to keenly grasp the nuances of customer behavior. On this episode Kristen Berman, CEO and co-founder of Irrational Labs, discusses ways that product managers can use use behavioral design to develop and design solutions that change...

Getting Us All on the Same Page: Telling Complex Stories to Various Audiences, with Deepti Tadala, Senior Product Manager, Paypal

We, in product management, live in complex worlds. We are often solving complicated problems. We are often using sophisticated, complex technologies or engineering solutions to solve those problems. We have various audiences to which we must communicate.  Effectively communicating to these various audiences and especially making complex situations understandable and relevant to each is one of the most important skills a product manager has in their professional toolbox. Deepti Tadala, Se...

What’s Wrong with Being Timeline Focused? Everything! Now, Let’s Fix It. - a conversation with Janna Bastow

Anyone who has been in product management knows that a timeline is part of everyday life. Frankly, it’s hard for a lot of people to imagine not living in this timeline-driven world. But why are timelines so important? More often than not, they are arbitrary and not tied to any real customer or market need. It’s not to say we should just take our sweet time and be lackadaisical, we still need to meet customer needs in a timely manner and beat the competition in providing value. But are time...

How Product Managers Can Go From Good to Great, a conversation with Carlos Gonazalez de Villaumbrosia

In this episode, JJ Rorie, VP of Sequent Learning Networks and Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, CEO and Founder of Product School, discuss how product managers can move from *bad* - to good - to great!, and how the product community can help us all on this lifelong learning journey.

The Five Immutable Truths of Great Product Managers(TM)

Regardless of industry, type of product, educational background, or development methodology, there are five commonalities among great product managers. In this episode, we discuss these common traits and how you can build your skillset around these 5 "truths".

Continuous Discovery Habits with Teresa Torres

The bedrock of successful product development is a deep understanding of what customers really need. In this episode, I speak with internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach Teresa Torres about Continuous Discovery Habits.

A Seat at the Table: The Chief Product Officer Role, with Navya Rehani Gupta, CPO at Peek.com

The Chief Product Officer (CPO) role is still a fairly new role. I get asked quite often where product management should sit within an organization. Historically, it has typically reported up through either marketing or technology, but more and more, organizations are realizing the value of having a product leader at the executive level, having a seat at the c-suite table when all important decisions are being made. The CPO is often that executive.  In this episode, Navya Rehani Gupta, Chi...

Product Management with Remote Teams, with Kevin Urrutia, co-founder of Voy Media

There is a lot of discussion about whether co-location / in-person work is best for product management and innovation or if remote work can be just as effective. Maybe there is no one right answer there, and certainly there are pros and cons to both. This episode is a conversation about being successful in product management with remote teams.

The Importance of User Interviews and Customer Research, with Keerthi Hoback, Senior Director of Product Management, Major League Baseball

There are few things that can make a bigger impact on the ultimate success of a product than a true, deep understanding of customer needs. Without this understanding of customers, their problems, situations, environments, needs, it is really just a matter of luck if we end up with a successful product. This episode features Keerthi Hoback, Senior Director of Product Management at Major League Baseball, discussing the importance of user interviews and customer research in order to set that fo...

Building More Equitable Products | A Conversation with Carey Jenkins and Amanda Di Dio of Substantial

For those of us who build products for a living, how do we ensure that our products are equitable, inclusive, and are leaving a positive impact on customers and the world around us? This episode discusses how can organizations - and product people - can build equitable products.

The SIX Tips for Finding Product-Market Fit, with Kandis O’Brien, Co-Founder of The SIX

Product-Market Fit essentially means having the right product to meet a market demand. Here’s the deal… if you don’t first understand what customers need and will buy AND the dynamics and attractiveness of the market in which your customers live and/or work, then it’s really quite difficult to build something that will achieve product-market fit.

What Product Managers Can Learn from Entrepreneurs and Startup Founders, with Ryan Frederick, CEO of AWH and Author of The Founder’s Manual

Having an “entrepreneurial mindset” is a very beneficial trait for product managers. It will help them think and act in a way that drives ownership, accountability, leadership, strategic thinking, and other aspects of “owning the business of their product”.  This episode is is all about what product managers can learn from entrepreneurs and startup founders… regardless of what type or size of company a product manager works in, there are insights to be gleaned from entrepreneurs.

The Democratization of Design, with Florian van Schreven, co-Founder and COO of Uizard

Design, of course, is a critical part of product development. It’s where the ideas in our heads start to take shape in the real world. These days, there are still the proverbial - and literal - ideas sketched on napkins, but technology is making it so that even the non-designers can express ideas in effective mockups and prototypes. While the expertise of designer and UX professionals is still paramount, everyone in the product management ecosystem can and should be a part of the critical fu...

The Importance of Innovation for Legacy Products and Brands, with Ebony Shears, Vice President of Product, Forbes

All products have a lifespan. Some products live for a year or so. Some products - especially those attached to iconic brands - can live for decades or longer! Legacy products and brands - those that have stood the test of time and carved a place for themselves in their marketplaces -  often have a built-in credibility and can even have a sort of product folklore about them, but just like every product, these legacy products still must from time to time reinvent themselves to ensure they are...

How Being a Standup Comedian Taught Me How to Be a Great Product Manager, with Deepak Paramanand, Product Lead at Hitachi Europe

Many experiences can help product managers hone their skills... including stand-up comedy! In this episode, Deepak Paramanand shares how learning how to find jokes that will land with his audience helped him become a better product manager.

Getting Started with Jobs to be Done, with Mike Belsito, co-Founder of Product Collective

Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) has become one of the most discussed frameworks among product people. Yet while it's simple in nature, JTBD is often misunderstood, making it difficult for some to begin applying it. In this episode, we'll discuss what JTBD is and how to get started.

The Product Leader's Role in M&A, with Jodi McDermott, Chief Product Officer at Dude Solutions

An organization’s product leader plays a significant role in mergers and acquisitions activities - from both the buy side and sell side. In this conversation, Jodi McDermott shares her experience as a product executive during multiple acquisitions.

The Role of Product Manager for Non-Software Products

Is the product manager role different for a physical product than for a software product? My answer is that most of the role is the same, but there are some real nuances that matter. In this episode, I discuss a couple of differences that product managers who own physical products encounter and ways they can be successful.

The Superpower of Neurodiversity & How It Can Make Every Product Team Better

Neurodiversity - having a team whose minds and brains work differently from each other - can be a superpower for organizations, leading to more innovation and better products. Marton Gaspar, The Product Whisper, joins us on this episode to discuss what companies can do to leverage this superpower. More information on neurodiversity in tech and product at product-whisperer.com.

We All Start Somewhere - Carving Your Career Path in Product Management, with Mamuna Oladipo, SVP Product, Design, & Engineering, Kickstarter

While there are a few product management degrees popping up in universities these days - which is great, by the way - generally speaking, none of us get a degree in product management and then start our careers in a product manager role straight out of university. We start from somewhere else… be it sales or marketing or engineering. Or we have a completely different path like this episode's guest, Mamuna Oladipo, SVP of Product Design & Engineering at Kickstarter. We discuss how to move i...

Before you Build Great Products, Build You: The Product! A conversation with Vivek Bedi

Building Your Startup Without Being a Tech Whiz, with Tara Reed, CEO of Apps Without Code

Interview with Arlan Hamilton, author of It's About Damn Time: How To Turn Being Underestimated Into Your Greatest Advantage.

The Important Relationship Between Product Manager and Technology Lead, with Blair Winston, Director of Product & Strategy at Hilton

Product management is innately cross-functional. There are many key partners that help build and support products… product management, technology, sales, marketing, finance, supply chain, operations, and the list goes on. One of the most important relationships a product manager has is with his or her technology lead. As a product manager, it is our job to uncover customer problems. It’s the job of our technology lead and team to help find creative solutions for those problems. The tech l...

The Importance of Product Communities, with Clement Kao, Product Manager at Blend and Co-Founder of Product Manager HQ

Driving Your Products and Supporting Your Customers During a Pandemic, a conversation with Vidya Dinamani

It’s early 2020 and the world has been drastically affected by the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. While the health and safety of employees should be the top priority for all businesses, of course, frankly we still must try to keep the customers we have and find ways to help those customers weather this storm. At this time, it’s even more imperative that product managers are in touch with their customers to uncover needs and problems and help solve those problems if possible. After all, yo...

Building Internal Human Resources Products, a conversation with Hannah Bertiger, Product Manager at Walmart

When we think of the role of product manager, we mostly think of building products for external customers. Those people or businesses or governments that buy our product. But there are many, many product managers who build products for internal customers – other employees of their organization. It’s often said that an organization’s most important asset is its people, so these product managers who build products to attract better talent, to retain great people, and to help those people do th...

MPM 057: Keeping Scope Creep Under Control, with Jonathan Soares, CEO of Agency Labs

Scope creep – every product manager and engineer’s favorite thing. Scope creep is, of course, when, after we’ve finalized the scope for a project or release, the requirements for that release somehow keep increasing. Whether it’s an idea for a new feature, updated customer feedback on how something should work or a just more requirements, the scope of our development work can sometimes feel quite fluid and is something that must be acutely managed. While some of this new feedback can actuall...

MPM 056: How an Inclusive Culture Leads to Better Innovation, a discussion with Jennifer Brown

Study after study show that diversity is good for business. According to McKinsey, companies in the top quartile for gender diversity outperform their competitors by 15% and those in the top quartile for ethnic diversity outperform their competitors by 35%.  Diverse teams, those made up of people from different races, genders, sexual orientations, backgrounds, and experiences lead to more creativity, a variety of thought and more empathy for customers. And as we all know, when it comes to i...

MPM 055: Jobs to Be Done, a conversation with Brian Rhea

You’ve likely heard of the Jobs to Be Done theory, popularized by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Jobs to Be Done is a framework for better understanding customer behavior.  The theory being that customers don’t buy products, they hire those products to do a job. As Theodore Levitt said in the 1960s, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.”

MPM 054: Product Research for B2B Companies, Insights from Yana Welinder, CEO of Kraftful

Regardless of industry, size or age of an organization, or the type of products built, understanding customers and markets is the bedrock of successful product management for any company. Without that understanding, frankly it doesn’t really matter how good they are at the rest of product development and management, because they aren’t getting to the heart of problems to be solved and needs to be met. However, there are some different dynamics in product research for B2B or Business to Bu...

MPM 052: Building Consumer Subscription Products into Successful Businesses, featuring Gyanda Sachdeva, VP Product at LinkedIn

Consumer subscription business models are sometimes quite difficult. Consumers – and we’re all guilty of this – expect so much for free these days when it comes to content, technology and online services, that it can be a steep mountain to climb for subscription products to become economically successful. The value must be proven initially in order for consumers to take that first step into paying for a product, but then we have to continue to show value for users to keep subscribing. This c...

MPM 053: Gamification and Product Management: Best Practices, a conversation with Heather Browning, VP Product of Ria Health

Gamification is the application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, etc.) to other areas, such as business, marketing, healthcare, or education for the purposes of changing behavior for positive outcomes. Heather Browning, a growth product leader with a background in game design, cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shares her insights on how to build products aimed at sustained behavior change with a focus on improving engagement and re...

MPM 051: Cybersecurity Trends in Product Management, with Kanika Thapar Mehta, Group Product Manager, Cisco

Cybersecurity is a scorching hot topic these days. Of course, there are products out there singularly focused on cybersecurity, but the impact of cyber threats goes far beyond the target of those products and touches a plethora of others. Think of all the connected products that you own… your Alexa or Google Home, your garage door opener may be on an app, your refrigerator may be able to tell you if you have milk or not. Now think of all the medical devices in hospitals that are connected to...

MPM 050: The Evolution of User Empathy, with Ashley Wali, VP of Product with Discuss.io

Empathy is a critical ingredient in successful product management. It affords us the ability to get in the shoes of our users and customers. It helps us feel their pain, celebrate their wins and feel a deep sense of commitment to help them solve their problems and be successful. Every great product manager has a deep sense of empathy. But empathy is one of those things that’s not easily defined or at least concretely described in context. Our guest on this episode, Ashley Wali, VP Product...

MPM 049: Scaling Product Management Teams, with Jessica Hall, VP Product Strategy & Design with 3Pillar Global

For most of us who have led product teams, scaling the team as you grow brings unique challenges. It’s a good problem to have, as they say. It means the organization and products are growing, but we must be diligent as we scale to maintain process consistency, product quality and team culture. While speed is important when you need more resources… skillset, mindset and cultural fit are of utmost importance and simply can’t be short-changed in the process. So it takes diligence, patience and...

MPM 048: Customer Feedback: What B2B Companies Can Learn from the B2C World, with Rebecca Nathenson, Senior Director of Product Management for Jobvite

Probably the most significant aspect of product management is the ability to gather feedback from customers and use that feedback to uncover core needs. While we all likely understand the importance of this activity, frankly most organizations don’t do it very well.  Generally speaking, Business to Consumer (or B2C) companies seem to have figured this out a little better than most Business to Business (B2B) companies. While there may be myriad reasons for that, there is a lot to be learne...

MPM 047: Rebuilding Century Old Products for the Modern Consumer, Lessons from Insurtech: a conversation with Kate Terry, Co-Founder & COO of Surround Insurance

There are many products that stand the test of time and become embedded in consumers’ lives. Think banking, healthcare, insurance or, depending on where you live, taxi cabs. For decades at a time, consumers are content in how they interact with these products, until someone comes along and disrupts the experience in ways consumers didn’t even know possible.  This episode is about the strategy and process of rebuilding century old products for the modern consumer.

MPM 046: Driving Innovation in a Fast-Growing Industry: The Importance of Organizational Collaboration, with Kevin Wunder, Senior Director, Product Management of Loveland Innovations

Succeeding in product management and innovation while our industries and markets are changing around us is something we deal with every day. As the saying goes, “The only constant is change.” That’s what it feels like sometimes as product managers and product leaders. We rarely have the luxury of a slow-moving market. We must constantly be on top of changing market dynamics and evolving customer needs while still trying to manage the day-to-day process of developing and supporting products. ...

MPM 045: Product Management and AI, an interview with Chris Butler, IPSoft’s Chief Product Architect

We hear a lot about AI – artificial intelligence – these days. According to McKinsey, AI technologies are projected to increase labor productivity by up to 40% and Executives are highly optimistic in its potential—80% believe artificial intelligence improves worker performance and creates jobs.  Frankly not all of us know a lot about AI and specifically how we in product management will need to understand, embrace, and utilize it. Chris Butler is an expert on AI and he will share his though...

MPM 044: How Design Thinking Can Help Your Product Management Team, with Bob Burgarino, EVP with Apiture

Iterative planning & design, also known as design thinking, is a process and philosophy that centers around deeply understanding customer problems, then designing solutions and testing those prototyped solutions in an iterative way, continuously getting real feedback from customers and improving the solution along the way. If there’s one key tenet of product management, it’s that uncovering and truly understanding the core need of the customer is crucial, and design thinking is a great tool ...

MPM 043: Bringing Product Manager skills to Non-Product Roles, a Conversation with Michael Smith, Practice Manager UPMC Susquehanna

On this podcast, we discuss how skills that are critical to Product Managers - skills such as influencing others, initiative, a sense of ownership and empowerment, and many others - can be taken into other roles.

MPM 042: The Intersection of Product Management & Talent Development, with Hawley Kane, Head of Organizational Talent & Leadership Development, Saba Software

Organizations are keenly focused on developing their most important asset... their people. Talent Management and Learning & Development are strategic functions within best-in-class organizations, and they partner with Product Management groups to ensure Product Managers have the unique skills needed to be successful.

MPM 041: Products & Services in the Connected World, an interview with Mark Karasek, EVP & CTO of The Chamberlain Group

Many physical product companies are finding themselves dealing more and more with technology and the connected world… that is, their products must interact with many other products, platforms and technologies. Think about all the products in and around your home. We’re asking Alexa or Google to tell us what the weather will be like today. Our refrigerators are reminding us we need milk. We can control our thermostats and light bulbs from our phone. This is our world today. These formerly mun...

MPM 040: Winning at Global Product Management, with Colleen Knuff, Senior Director, Global Product Management Wolters Kluwer

Launching and managing products across various global regions takes a special mindset and process. Whether it’s differing laws and regulations or differing cultural aspects, there are nuances that must be accounted for in every new market entered. We can’t just throw products into new markets without a lot of investigating and preparation.

MPM 039: How to Raise Your Product Management Acumen

Sometimes we need to be reminded of what's needed to be a successful product manager. In this episode, Steven Haines reinforces the key constructs required to be a successful product manager.

MPM 038: Optimizing Cross-Functional Collaboration, with Jonas Klink, VP Shopping Experience Product at Jet.com

Product Management, by its very nature, is collaborative and cross-functional. On a daily basis, we work closely with engineering, marketing, sales, finance, operations, etc. Product Managers have many partners, and we need them all to be successful.

MPM 037: How to Use Soft Skills to Influence Others

Episode 37 - How to Use Soft Skills to Influence Others: It’s amazing how often the topic of influencing and using soft skills comes up. As most of us know, product managers are supposed to influence those who don’t work for them, yet they’re accountable for so much! This episode is geared to those who need a little extra advice on how to influence others using softer skills.

MPM 036: Riding High - a Conversation with Ruth Zukerman - Co-Founder of Flywheel

Episode 36 - Riding High - a Conversation with Ruth Zukerman - Co-Founder of Flywheel: Product managers can learn a lot from entrepreneurs. In this episode, Steven Haines talks with Ruth Zukerman, author of the upcoming book “Riding High: How I Kissed SoulCycle Goodbye and Co-Founded Flywheel, and Built the Life I Always Wanted.” Ruth shares her remarkable story of how she translated her passion and creativity to build a remarkable company and a loyal following. Hosted by Steven Haines o...