Product to Product

Good product managers are customer-obsessed. They build products and features that will solve their customers' problems. But Peter Yang from Reddit argues that great product managers focus on how products make customers feel. Dive into this episode with us as Peter teaches us all about the emotional wheel and how PMs can learn a thing or two from gaming. Want all the highlights quickly? We've got them for you here: https://roadmunk.com/guides/podcast-product-to-product-peter-yang-emotions-optimized/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Is product sense a superpower? In this candid conversation, Webflow PM Frank Ramirez, details the tough transition he made into product management, the mistakes early PMs make, and much more. This episode may even help you discover your PM superpower!  Want all the highlights quickly? We've got them for you here: https://roadmunk.com/guides/podcast-product-to-product-frank-ramirez-webflow-pm-product-sense-roadmap/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's always a good idea to talk to your customers. But Hinge's Chief Product Officer, Michelle Parsons, thinks we're looking for the wrong things in our user interviews. In this episode of Product to Product, Latif and Michelle dissect how a good product sense might actually make you prioritize quantitative data over qualitative data. Michelle brings a wealth of experiences from her time at Netflix, Spotify, and Kayak. You might want to share this episode with your product friends. Want all the highlights quickly? We've got them for you here: https://roadmunk.com/guides/podcast-product-to-product-michelle-parsons-are-user-interviews-a-waste-of-time/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Product sense is more than a gut feeling or intuition. Avrum Laurie, VP of Product at Wealthsimple, walks us through a scientific approach to employing product sense predictably and effectively.  In this episode of Product to Product, Avrum shares example after example of how he and his team think about product sense. Latif uncovers how Wealthsimple ships impactful products loved by Canadians from coast to coast. Pull out a notepad for this one, you'll want to take notes! Want all the highlights quickly? We've got them for you here: https://roadmunk.com/guides/podcast-product-to-product-avrum-laurie-scientific-approach-product-sense See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Data is important but it's only one piece of the puzzle. Kristin Chen, the CEO of Top.gg, reminds us that data can only show us where a fire is but not what caused it.  In this episode of Product to Product, Kristin guides Latif through her most noteworthy product management experiences from Soundcloud, Pinterest, and Twitch. Now, as she leads Top.gg, you'll learn how she's deploying product sense as a startup CEO. Want all the highlights quickly? We've got them for you here: https://roadmunk.com/guides/podcast-product-to-product-kristin-chen-product-sense-startup-insights-from-ceo/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Don't get too comfy once you've found product-market fit! Our guest today, Ramli John, warns companies that if they don't keep their thumb on the pulse of their customers they could lose their market. On this inaugural episode of Product to Product's season 8, Latif and Ramli dive into what product sense looks like in a number of contexts. Throughout this conversation you'll hear them cover a range of topics; from customer stories to product-led growth. Want all the highlights quickly? We've got them for you here: https://roadmunk.com/guides/podcast-product-to-product-ramli-john-balance-data-customer-stories/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

(Disclaimer: These episodes were recorded prior to the coronavirus outbreak as well as the Black Lives Matter marches.) For Abhi Bhatt,  Head of Product at Alexa Identity, who’s worked on innovative and category shaping products (like the first generation Motorola Razr phone and North’s AR smart glasses), early adopters and laggard customers give the most insightful feedback.  He says product teams need to work backwards when building something that hasn’t been done before. You’ll need to figure out the segmentation and what the customer base will look like. Also, find out what these customers care about. Based on the psychographics and demographics, choose a segment that has the most resonance. Ultimately, product teams should be spending a lot of time with their customers, to the point that they become your “partner” in development. When it comes to customer feedback, Abhi says quantitative data is like looking in the rear-view mirror. It’s already happened! It reflects on how people are behaving in the sandbox you’ve created. On the other hand, qualitative data points to understanding why they are behaving this way and the motivations behind it. This set of data also pressure tests if you’ve built the right thing for customers. Both lenses need to be applied to your product, whether it’s early and innovative or a mature product. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

(Disclaimer: These episodes were recorded prior to the coronavirus outbreak as well as the Black Lives Matter marches.)  Shopify Product Lead Sarah Pyo says it’s crucial for PMs to be close to user feedback; by joining customer calls, reviewing feedback channels and blocking out time with the customer success team. These sessions, called “bridge the gap” meetings at Shopify, remind PMs that empathy is the core of user-centric products. It’s easy to lose sight of this as you’re working with various stakeholders on day-to-day tasks, Sarah cautions. Sarah also says that, for product people, the user is your BOSS. Creating an experience that resonates with them should be prioritized. If you build it, they will come. Likewise, if you build a product users love, you will reap the benefits for your company, she adds. Sarah advises that, in order to ensure your metrics give you real feedback instead of setting up vanity metrics you can gamify, PMs need to have requirements in place while chasing a product company’s ultimate North Star. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

(Disclaimer: These episodes were recorded prior to the coronavirus outbreak as well as the Black Lives Matter marches.)  Ditch the MVP, embrace the MLP and listen to your users, says Veronica Hudson, senior PM at Twilio at the time of the interview (She’s now at ActiveCampaign in the senior PM role.). A product can be viable, but are customers going to use it? She says PMs should figure out what the problem you’re solving is and pinpoint who you can solve it most widely for. The goal of an MLP is to be able to release an open beta and not feel like there needs to be a gatekeeper of who can use it, Veronica adds.   Also in this episode, listen to how Veronica, who originally worked in NYC’s book publishing industry, finds the evolution of female pop stars like Jennifer Lopez and Robyn to be inspirational. For Veronica, quantitative and qualitative feedback work hand in hand. She suggests PMs spend time with support teams to learn what hacks they’re teaching users and you’ll find underlying customer problems that the data can’t tell you. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

(Disclaimer: These episodes were recorded prior to the coronavirus outbreak.)  Fire the customer if you need, says Asheesh Birla, Ripple’s SVP of Product, when talking about the importance of customer segmentation. Asheesh says if your company is going after the wrong customer and fixated on why they’re unhappy, it’s time to re-evaluate if they’re a fit for your product. Instead, the winning Venn diagram in his opinion is this: a customer segment whose pain points your product can easily solve. Also in this episode, find out how early in Asheesh’s career he volunteered to carry luggage on a work trip for Thomson Reuter’s COO (who was 20 levels higher than him on the org chart at that time!) and how he was able to gain a mentor through that. For Asheesh, product teams who are too tactical in their daily triage miss the forest for the trees. He says you need to understand whether the landscape is changing in a macro way or if a new competitor is coming in. Your product org may be making incremental changes, but startups need to make massive changes to be successful, he adds. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

(Disclaimer: These episodes were recorded prior to the coronavirus outbreak.)  Build a product that’s 10X better than your competition, said Jeetu Patel, Box’s Chief Product and Chief Strategy Officer, in the new episode of Roadmunk’s Product to Product podcast. Jeetu says in order to do this, a product company shouldn’t obsess about the competition, but should focus on their customers. He adds that if you’re just replicating another product, a user won’t see the value in switching their behaviour since it doesn’t solve their problems any differently. Also in this episode, find out how Jeetu went from making $4.25 an hour as a waiter to investing in his first company at age 22 with a $250,000 loan in hand and then moving onto being a senior technology executive whose company has 70M users and 100,000 customers.  Jeetu also cautions teams to avoid the shiny object syndrome where they’re chasing the thrill of new features. There’s a balance, but make sure your core product is given the love it needs too, he warned.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

(Disclaimer: These episodes were recorded prior to the coronavirus outbreak.) We’re back with another episode of Product to Product, a podcast brought to you by Roadmunk. In this episode, Christine Yoon, a Product Manager within Hubspot’s Business Enablement team, says having a solid mission is critical to justifying why an idea is prioritized. This mission is what makes it easier to say no to requests that don’t fall directly inline with the goal. As a PM, Christine likes to start by using customer journey maps to understand the daily friction points that a user will face. With this understanding, she believes it helps product teams gain empathy when making decisions. Her process with feedback and idea management is to analyze the feedback using a product prioritization matrix and then using an additional filter of weighted scorecards to validate the importance with stakeholders.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey product people,  (Disclaimer: These episodes were recorded prior to the coronavirus outbreak.) We’re back with another episode of Product to Product, a podcast brought to you by Roadmunk. In this episode, Niki Agrawal, a PM at Bumble, says while users influence most of the problems Niki’s team looks to solve, it’s up to the PMs and stakeholders that have influence to determine what will actually be shipped. With Niki’s team, they also take the input from their BI (business intelligence) group that has more insight into user feedback.  She adds that their product team collects data through monitoring social media and app store reviews as well as outbound user research. One of the Bumble features Niki helped launch was photo verification, which came from users wanting to make sure they were safe when meeting people from the app. The process of creating the photo verification feature included receiving feedback through user testing. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

(Disclaimer: These episodes were recorded prior to the coronavirus outbreak.) Season 6 of Product to Product is back with episode 2. This season, we’re talking about feedback and idea management. In this episode, Rose Yao, a Senior Director of Product at Google Maps Platform, says feedback and idea management is part science and part art. PMs can look at data to determine the ROI and impact the feature will have, but it’s also important to seek out patterns, she says. Propose big questions like: “Where is the world going?” and take it from there. Rose adds that in order to get insightful feedback, you should design the user study just as thoughtfully as you’re designing your product. Otherwise, you’re creating an echo chamber of what you think is important instead of focusing on the user. She says that when it comes to collecting feedback, there’s nothing more powerful than talking to the users of your product. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Season six of Roadmunk’s Product to Product podcast is back and we’ve given it a refresh! A new format, host and style. Thank you so much for following along and listening to our previous episodes. We really appreciate it. This season, we’re talking about feedback and idea management. How does your team go from feedback to feature? And that isn’t the only new thing at Roadmunk. We’re also super excited to share the feedback and idea management suite we just shipped. Now with Roadmunk, you can: Capture, manage and analyze customer feedback in one organized place Create a backlog of customer-validated product ideas  Systematically surface high-impact ideas using built-in prioritization templates Commit to ideas by promoting them to your roadmaps In this season’s kick off episode, Roadmunk’s own co-founder and CEO Latif Nanji chats about how our new feedback and idea management suite will help product teams.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

During rapid growth, a company runs the risk of creating silos and diminishing overall productivity. There needs to be a balance between being independent, yet engaged with company’s business goals, which sometimes means a complete reorganization of the company’s org structure.  In this episode, Nick Caldwell, Chief Product Officer at Looker, shares three items in his tool kit for hyperscaling. He says although the tool kit isn’t prescriptive, you can pick and choose what fits best for your company. If you liked what you heard, please rate, review and subscribe! Find us oniTunes,Google Play orSpotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or get the latest episodes delivered right to your inbox by subscribinghere. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After the long, stressful and expensive process of hiring and onboarding a new employee to your team, what comes next is retaining the all-star you’ve just hired. Product companies with a low talent churn creates stronger company culture as well as loyalty. However, building a retention culture isn’t easy and it often takes up a lot of the PM’s time.  In this episode, David Cutler, a Product Director at Spotify, says you need to extract the highest value from someone in your product company by figuring out how each individual thrives at work.  If you liked what you heard, please rate, review and subscribe! Find us oniTunes,Google Play orSpotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or get the latest episodes delivered right to your inbox by subscribinghere. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Getting stakeholder alignment is an idea in the product world that seems like an obvious objective, but it’s often one of the toughest parts of a PM’s job. It’s worth investing the time to make sure everyone’s on board with your business objectives even if it feels redundant.  In this episode, Priya Wellington, the Group PM at Medium, says over communicating is key to aligning stakeholders, especially at media companies where the editorial department is a major stakeholder. She adds that frequent communication, in-person or online, allows people to know they're being heard, even if the ideas aren't acted on right away. If you liked what you heard, please rate, review and subscribe! Find us oniTunes,Google Play orSpotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or get the latest episodes delivered right to your inbox by subscribinghere. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nobody likes to be in debt and technical debt, the deliberate shortcuts made to ship your product faster, but that end up taking more time to fix, is no different. In this episode, we talk to John Hung, a PM from Asana, about how he makes the business case to stakeholders to clean up tech debt. John adds that ignoring tech debt will only lead to “death by a thousand paper cuts” and hinder your product org’s scalability. If you liked what you heard, please rate, review and subscribe! Find us oniTunes,Google Play orSpotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or get the latest episodes delivered right to your inbox by subscribinghere. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We recently hosted a panel discussion with two veteran PMs in Toronto as part of our Product 2 Product event series...and we recorded it!  In this episode, Shopify’s VP Product & GM of Platform, Brandon Chu, and Christina Perdikoulias, DigitalEd’s President and CEO, talk about how to set the strategy and culture in the early stages of a product team. Brandon says that you need to trust the PMs you’ve hired, otherwise, why hire them at all? (Sometimes, you need to learn to let go!) Christina thinks product management is born out of chaos and that adaptability as well as resiliency is paramount to product companies scaling successfully. If you liked what you heard, please rate, review and subscribe! Find us oniTunes,Google Play orSpotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or get the latest episodes delivered right to your inbox by subscribinghere. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.