Product Thinking

Latest Episodes:

Don’t Just Tick the Product Management Boxes, a Conversation with Kate Leto Mar 03, 2021

Show notes

Kate Leto is an organisational design consultant, coach and product advisor with a 25 year track record helping to build product teams that thrive. She joins Melissa Perri today to talk about some of the challenges in filling product management roles that companies run into all the time – and how to overcome them. Ultimately, Kate believes that growth mindset – both of leadership teams and product managers themselves is what makes the difference between success and failure. is a career coach who specializes in hiring product managers and organizational design. Here are some key points from Melissa and Kate’s conversation: There are two high level motivations for hiring a product manager. This first is because it ticks a box, the second because you need to make meaningful change. [Listen at 04:45] How Kate has learned to hire great product managers, and strategies for doing so that she helps her clients implement. [Listen at 07:30] The role of emotional intelligence in product management and organizational design, and the key trait that indicates someone will be successful. (Listen from 12:00] The Story of Pete – the team member we’ve all worked with who is technically excellent – but not so strong on the human skills. [Listen at 14:45] How to identify and call out the specific issues when you get the feeling that something is off during the interview process. [Listen from 22:30] What is the mindset you need for success, and what happens when someone doesn’t have it. [Listen from 28:00] The diversity problem plaguing many organizations in tech and other industries; Kate and Melissa talk about how to get out of the trap of hiring the same person over and over again. [Listen from 29:40] Hiring for senior and director level positions, and making sure you’re attracting a diverse array of applicants. [Listen from 43:45] Resources Kate Leto KateLeto.com | Twitter | LinkedIn

Dear Melissa - Answering Questions About Starting a Career in Product Management Feb 24, 2021

Show notes

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about transitioning into product management. Q: What can I do to prove to potential employers that I have what it takes to be successful as a product manager, even though I don’t have experience? How do I write my resume? A: Right now, companies are looking for senior product managers to balance out their teams, since they have mostly trained juniors. You should look for a company on LinkedIn that will invest time and resources into training you. Investigate their product leader: if they are very experienced, they will likely know how to train people and be more willing to find people to work with. For resumes, I recommend highlighting your achievements in previous jobs that are affiliated with product management, such as doing customer interviews and creating personas. Pull out what’s relevant and tell the story the way you want to tell it. Q: Do you need an MBA to become a product manager? A: MBA’s typically help product managers in leadership positions, but it’s not a requirement for transitioning into the field. Q: What steps should a senior product manager take to move into a director role if he or she has not had the opportunity to manage people? A: What I’ve seen that helps people move into that role is showing that you can be strategic and think outside the box. Additionally, you have to be more business-focused; while we want to ruthlessly prioritize the user and their needs, you also have to figure out how to prioritize that within the frame of your company strategy. Think about what the company strategy is and then take every chance you get to explain to the leaders how your product can help achieve those goals. Q: How do I evaluate a company's maturity and practice in modern product management? What should I look for before and during the interview process? A: Here are some questions I ask product management leaders to gauge the company’s maturity, and what the responses indicate. What are your most important business goals? What are your most important product goals? What are you working on now and why? If they can't tell me the story behind that, it means that there's no strategy in the organization or that there's misalignment. If you get to meet the head of sales or the head of engineering, ask them about product management to see if they have a good understanding of it. If the rest of the organization doesn't know what you do, you're probably gonna have a hard time executing and doing your job there. Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com

Thinking Through Product Strategy with Barry O’Reilly Feb 17, 2021

Show notes

Creating great products is about the systems, processes and culture in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. On the Product Thinking Podcast, host Melissa Perri interviews the thought leaders in product development and answers your pressing questions to help you think like a great product leader. This episode is all about strategy: what it is vs what it isn’t, and how to create a good one. The expert Melissa turns to for strategy advice is Barry O’Reilly, entrepreneur and business strategist who has “pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design and culture transformation.” Barry is also the author of two seminal books on product strategy and development - Unlearned: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, and The Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. These are some highlights from Melissa and Barry’s conversation: Learn about the pitfalls that growing companies often experience when they lack clear strategy. [5:15] Strategy is making choices. Barry and Melissa talk about defining your expectations for the outcome, and how to measure the effectiveness of your decisions. [14:40] Bad strategy sounds like fluff, so Barry shares what makes a strategy great. [23:15] Strategy evolves over time - you make choices, execute, evaluate and iterate based on what you learn. [33:10] Barry explains why cross-functional teams are the best way to approach creating strategy. [38:50] Product management is a creative skill. Melissa and Barry discuss why making space for thinking is important for product leaders. [45:20] Resources BarryOReilly.com Barry O’Reilly on LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results The Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

How to Succeed as a Senior Product Leader with Georgie Smallwood Feb 17, 2021

Show notes

Creating great products is about the systems, processes and culture in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. On the Product Thinking Podcast, host Melissa Perri interviews the thought leaders in product development and answers your pressing questions to help you think like a great product leader. Melissa continues the conversation about strategy, this time from the perspective of the senior product leader. What does it take to be a good CPO? What role does a product manager play in setting strategy for the company? What’s the difference between company strategy and product strategy? Melissa poses these questions to this week’s guest, Georgie Smallwood. Georgie is the Chief Product Officer at Tier Mobility, and the former CPO of N26. She has deep insights into what it takes to create and successfully implement product strategy, and why that is important for autonomy. Here are some key points from Melissa and Georgie’s discussion: Your strategy is the connector between your mission and achieving that mission. It narrows your frame of work and space you can operate in, Georgie says. [6:04] “Creating the strategy is just one part of it. You have to over-communicate all the time. Everything has to come back to it,” Georgie points out. [9:45] Melissa and Georgie discuss the differing ideas around the concept of autonomy. Should there be autonomy without constraints? What is privileged autonomy? [11:42] No product strategy framework is better than any other one. What matters, Georgie says, is how effectively you use them and what you do with them. [20:00] “If you want to change the way that people are doing things in the future, no amount of data is really gonna help you; because there are some leap of faith assumptions that you need to take.” [22:53] If you want to be a senior leader you need to be an expert in something. You need both hard skills and soft skills to be effective. [35:25] Georgie answers a Dear Melissa submission. [35:53] Resources Georgie Smallwood on LinkedIn | Twitter | Medium

Dear Melissa - Answering Questions About Strategy Feb 17, 2021

Show notes

Creating great products is about the systems, processes, and culture in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. On the Product Thinking Podcast, host Melissa Perri interviews the thought leaders in product development and answers your pressing questions to help you think like a great product leader. In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about strategy. Q: How do you convince the CTO of the value of working towards understanding problems rather than defining pre-made solutions? [1:54] A: Sometimes you just have to demonstrate to them what the customer discovery process is, how it works and why it's valuable, which means you'll have to go out and do it. Figure out how you can define that value, package that up into something that will work for your CTO, and then present it. Start small and demonstrate success. Q: Do you have any tips for a product leader to make sure that their team gets the big picture and has visibility and ownership end-to-end, including the business success? [9:00] A: There is often a misalignment of business goals across multiple levels of organizations, which indicates that something is wrong with the product strategy. [I suggest] you over-communicate and ensure that the product strategy is well deployed. Everyone needs to understand what problems they are facing and what goals they are trying to achieve. Q: What’s your recommendation on building a product strategy at small scale within the product team and leveraging that strategy up to get broader visibility, and buying from leadership and other stakeholders? Does that work? [13:55] A: Yes, it does work. I would start by finding out if there’s a product strategy that’s been poorly deployed. Figure out the goals that the executives want to achieve, use that opportunity to define said goals, and build your product strategy. Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com

Introducing Product Thinking with Melissa Perri Jan 21, 2021

Show notes

Product management has been adopted all over the world in the last decade. But despite its popularity, great product management is still hard to come by. The Product Thinking podcast is setting out to change that. This show will cover: How product leadership influences organizational systems so that product management can thrive. What the role of a product manager looks like at every level. How to invest in yourself as a product manager at every stage of your career. Product Thinking will have two different kinds of episodes - Dear Melissa, a direct line to Melissa to pose your biggest product management questions, and deep-dive conversations with industry leading experts who are pushing the boundaries of what it looks like to excel in this industry. Melissa Perri is a product management leader turned educator and author who has trained hundreds of people around the world to think like great product leaders. Learn more at Produxlabs.com.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected