One Knight in Product

Latest Episodes:

Effective Hiring for Product Managers & Building Diverse Teams (with Kate Leto, Product Consultant & Author "Hiring Product Managers") Feb 23, 2021

Show notes

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!

From Management Consultant to Product Manager (with Deepti Tadala, Technical Product Manager @ Synacor) Feb 21, 2021

Show notes

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

Building a Culture of Continuous Discovery (with Cindy Alvarez, Author "Lean Customer Development" & Director Customer Research @ GitHub) Feb 19, 2021

Show notes

An interview with Cindy Alvarez. Cindy is Director of Customer Research at GitHub, the world's leading software development platform. Cindy has long experience in customer research with GitHub, Yammer, Microsoft and Kissmetrics. She also wrote the leading book on customer research, 2014's Lean Customer Development which aims to guide teams to build products their customers need.

We speak about a lot, including:

What it's like doing customer research with the world's largest community of software engineers
The importance of testing your customer interview questions and working out what does and doesn't work
The importance of empathy, keeping down-to-earth and being someone customers feel comfortable talking to
Whether a Bachelor's in Psychology helps her to play mind games with her subjects (mwahahaha)
Why she wrote the book, how she did it, and whether she's going to write another one
How to answer some of the common objections to customer interviews, and how ensure you can build a culture of speaking with customers directly
How to optimise for Continuous Discovery and ensure you get a flow of customer feedback and learning

And much more!

Lifelong Learning for Product Managers (with Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, Founder & CEO @ Product School) Feb 16, 2021

Show notes

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!

Product Management Lessons from a PM Turned Teacher Turned PM (with Melanie McKay, Head of Consumer Product @ Rightmove) Feb 13, 2021

Show notes

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!

Data-driven Product Delivery & Story Points on Everything (with James Rooney, Delivery Manager @ Discovery Inc.) Feb 10, 2021

Show notes

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!

How to Build an Effective Product Organisation (with Marty Cagan, author of Inspired & Empowered) Feb 05, 2021

Show notes

An interview with Marty Cagan.

Marty is a renowned Product Management thought leader. He has had an illustrious career at Netscape, eBay, his own original startup (acquired by IBM) and then founding the Silicon Valley Product Group consultancy. He has worked with hundreds of companies to help them build products right. He's also a widely read blogger, and author of a best-selling book on how to build products; "Inspired - How to Create Tech Products Customers Love". Now he's back with co-author and SVPG partner Chris Jones, with "Empowered - Oridinary People, Extraordinary Products" which aims to do for organisations what Inspired did for teams.

I could have spoken to Marty for hours, but here are the highlights:

How come Marty started SVPG after working for some of the best tech companies
How he got good at Product, and the role of luck in that journey
Why he started blogging and how that helped him get his thoughts in order for his books
How he's such a Product Guy that he evens writes his books iteratively
How come the 2nd edition of Inspired was basically a total rewrite, and whether the 1st edition has anything useful in it
Some of the challenges that companies face when trying to be truly Product-led
What to do when your company really doesn't get Product
How to persuade the leadership team that maybe this stuff actually does work
Why he is so passionate about inclusion & diversity in tech, and how he's trying to help

And much more!

Scaling your Product Team with Product Operations (with Christine Itwaru, Senior Director of Product Operations @ Pendo) Feb 03, 2021

Show notes

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!

How to Crack your Product Management Career (with Jackie Bavaro, co-author of Cracking the PM Interview & Cracking the PM Career) Jan 29, 2021

Show notes

An interview with Jackie Bavaro. Jackie started her Product Management career as a Program Manager at Microsoft, before joining Google's Associate Product Manager programme and then getting hired as the first Product Manager at Asana. Back in 2013, she collaborated with Gayle McDowell to write the best-selling book "Cracking the PM Interview", which inspired a generation of Product Managers to get their first jobs. Jackie and Gayle are back with "Cracking the PM Career" which explains how to get good at it once you're in.

Understandably, we cover a lot, including:

How Jackie got into Product in the first place, and why Microsoft calls Product Managers Program Managers
The pros and cons of working for Google versus a new startup
How she met and decided to collaborate with Gayle McDowell and how they write together
How the FAANG companies reacted to her giving away all their secrets
Excellent advice on how to make an impact in your new PM job
How to avoid the dreaded Feature Factory, build a strategy and sell it
Why it's important to look outside your Product bubble for inspiration

And much more!

Redefining Product-Led Growth (with Heather James, Founder @ Product-Led Alliance) Jan 26, 2021

Show notes

An interview with Heather James. Heather is the Founder of The Product-Led Alliance, providing a community, events and materials fora community of passionate product professionals, obsessed with Product-Led Growth. We talk about...

What the Product-Led Alliance is and what it offers
Why Heather is so passionate about Product-Led Growth and some of the challenges in getting there
How she defines Product-Led Growth and how it differs from the dictionary definition
What made her start the Product-Led Alliance when she did
How a community with so much free content pays the bills
How they had to pivot because of COVID-19
What makes her most proud of the Product-Led Alliance so far
Future ambitions to take over the world
Shock horror ... a rival podcast! mumble grumble

And much more!

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected