Lessons In Product Management

There are great frameworks for prioritizing features, but what if prioritizing features isn't the right approach? We dig into why opportunity costs are the most underrated variables in prioritizing Product decisions.

This week's lesson in product management is brought to you by Derek Osgood, Founder and CEO of Ignition. If your product launches are less than ideal, you should listen to what Derek has to say. Even if you're launches go well, there are great tips on how to optimization the success of your launches. 

0:00-0:32 - Podcast intro

0:32-2:30 - Derek’s Intro

2:30-4:15 - Who is Ignition for?

4:15-4:40 - Where to find Ignition

4:40-8:40 - The PM/PMM Disconnect

8:40-10:23 - Aligning PM/PMM Teams

10:23-13:10 - Overlooked aspects of product launches

13:10-18:30 - Why Run Betas in B2B?

18:30-21:20 - How to price your new product?

21:20-24:00 - The future of software for PMs and PMMs

24:00-25:00 - Podcast Outro

As you wrap up the last 30 days of your 30, 60, 90-day onboarding, it's time to start drafting strategy. In this episode I break down how to do that with a simple framework and how to shrink the timeline if you don't have 90 days to get it done in a new position. 

Many answers to the question of "why do you want to be a product manager" have some variation of "ideation." While ideation and solutioning are definitely part of product management, it's by far NOT the most important thing to get right.

On today's episode, Eva Beasley shares her experience before and after getting into Product Management. One of the things she noticed about some of the PMs she interacted with was an anti-pattern that needed to be addressed, so we did so here.   

Eric Perkins is the Director of Product at Entrata. And as Eric describes his career, it feels like he has a rocket attached to his back. In this discussion, Eric and I talk through how he got into product management, how he quickly rose into a leadership role, and what he's learned along the way.   

On today's episode, I had the immense pleasure of speaking with Etienne Garbugli, Founder & CEO of Lean B2B and Author of Lean B2B, Solving Product, and Find Your Market. 

Etienne is a brilliant product thinker and author with a varied and diverse background, all in and around product management. Etienne joined me to shed light on the Growth section of his book, Solving Product. He answered some of my questions, clarified my understanding, and dropped knowledge bombs the entire episode. Enjoy!

On today's episode, we have JJ Rorie, CEO of Great Product Management and Author of 5 Immutable Truths of Great Product Management, and you're in for a treat! Don't miss out on this great episode as we dive deep into building high customer intelligence, the first Immutable Truth of Great Product Management

Nico joined the show to share his advice and experience on building strong product team relationships.   

Making the transition into product management can be hard. Larry Imgrund shares how he did it, and he offers advice for anyone looking to get into Product or anyone who has recently made that transition.  

Should users or customers drive your roadmap decisions? The answer is yes AND no. Like everything in product management, it depends... and Matt and I dive deep into the topic. 

On this episode, we get "out of the building" to start learning about our customers and the markets we serve and want to serve. After understanding your business, objectives, and strategy, this is the next step before being ready enough to start mapping out a strategic direction for your team or organization. 

Getting back to the basics of product management, my goal in this multi-part series is to demystify product management for new and aspiring product managers.  

So, today, I’m really excited for you to hear this conversation, because I have Irene Yu, Founder of Skiplevel, joining me to talk about how to become technical as a product manager. Irene was formally a developer at Amazon where she uncovered a pretty big problem that Skiplevel is helping to tackle.

On today's episode, we have the pleasure of learning from Tony Poon, Chief Product Officer at R-Zero. We tackle the difficult topic of ego, where it comes from, what the symptoms are, and what the effects of ego come to be. 

However:

It’s pointless to argue as a product manager. We have zero power, and we need allies across our company in order for our team’s work to be successful.

Next time you get tempted to argue, remember those six tips:

I hope these tips are helpful as you go about your week, and I’ll see you next week for another lesson in product management.

You need experience to land a product job, but how do you get it? In this episode, I unpack two feasible ways of gaining and documenting tangible experience to help create your own path to product. 

There is no easy path into product management, but there are 4 simple steps to get you there. We cover step 1 in today's lesson in product management, and it's all about learning first. Before you can do the job, you need to learn what the job entails and how to execute different skills within it. In today's episode, I share some free and inexpensive places to acquire the knowledge you'll need as a foundation for your path to product management. 

In this episode, I share 3 tactics for making better decisions in a group setting. Help your team and your organization take your decision-making capabilities to the next level. Your company and your customers will thank you. 

There's no shortage of debate as to whether individual or group ideation yields better results. We're not going to take sides. What we're going to do is explore how to make better decisions by generating better ideas, regardless of the setting you're in. In Part 1, we examine a few ways you can increase your decision success rate by generating better ideas.

Most features never get adopted, and I'm betting these three tips will help shift your success ratio upward. 

Be sure to rate and review the podcast!

I get asked a lot about whether aspiring PMs need an MBA to land a Product Management job. The simple answer is no. But we dive into the nuance of why MBAs are valuable. 

Today’s Lesson in Product Management comes from Jonathon Hensley, Co-Founder and CEO of Emerge Interactive and Author of Alignment: Overcoming Internal Sabotage and Product Failure. When I first heard about Jonathon’s book, I ordered it immediately. Alignment is one of the hardest parts of my job as a product manager, and I’ve enjoyed putting his advice and frameworks into practice. In this conversation you’ll get to hear the origin story that drove Jonathon to write the book, how to build the foundations of alignment in your own company, and the pitfalls that you should be aware of as you do. And Be sure to grab the link to Jonathon’s book in the show notes before you close the podcast app.

Here's what we discussed:

1:18 Johnathon's Introduction

2:24 Origin story of Alignment

4:34 How Jonathon defines Alignment

6:45 The importance and definition of vision

8:35 How to build the foundation of alignment

11:05 Three themes of the book: Assumptions, Communication, and Strategy

13:24 The difference between reality and truth

17:30 The danger of the “fail fast fail often” mantra

19:57 The pillars of good strategy

25:08 Product Management hack to get unique customer insights

30:45 The four levels of alignment

32:00 Where alignment falls apart

38:30 The impact of written communication and documentation

43:00 Grab Jonathon’s book Alignment: Overcoming Internal Sabotage and Product Failure

It’s funny how first releases have become synonymous with MVPs, but how many first releases have you seen that are able to stand on their own and sustain a business? In the early days it’s about testing and learning. You want Minimum TESTABLE Products

If you wait until you have something you think is a fully coded up MVP with what you believe to be the features that make the product minimally viable, you’re almost guaranteed to be wrong.

On today’s episode you’ll hear from Pranav Desai, Chief Product Officer at Reputation. We covered a ton of ground in the thirty minutes or so we talked, so don’t feel bad if you have to listen twice to take it all in. You’ll hear us talk about:

And so much more.

There's an age-old debate about what's more important, a good product or great marketing? Brian Yam, Head of Marketing at Paragon, and I look to settle that debate. The answer might surprise you.

You hear product people talk about feasibility, usability, and viability all the time as the three core variables product managers should care about. The typical definition of viability looks a lot like ROI, but today we challenge that narrow view of viability and expand the definition.

On today's episode, we discuss the difference between doing strategic analysis and developing strategy. Too many people conflate and confuse the two things as one, but they are not. 

Welcome back to Lessons in Product Management. I’m your host, John Fontenot, and today we have a bit of a different episode, but it’s soooo relevant. With the pandemic, working from home, and Zoom fatigue, our jobs are hard enough but how do you know when it’s time to call it quits? John Garret, Product Manager at Therapixel, and I talk through all of this and more.

As we wrap up season 4 of Lessons in Product Management, we’re going to hear from Henry Latham, Founder and CEO of ProdMBA. Before starting ProdMBA, Henry served in UX and Product leadership roles for a variety of companies and has taken his experience and used it to produce a great book, “Product Leadership Starts With You,” as well as launch ProdMBA to fast track your career from PM to head of product. On this episode Henry and I break down product strategy and how it works in conjunction with product discovery. We’ve looked at product discovery from so many angels this season, and I’m excited to wrap it up with Henry and discuss one of my favorite topics, product strategy.

Welcome back to Lessons in Product Management. it is November 22nd, 2021, and today we are chatting with Taylor Heyman, Product Manager at Lendio. Yes, we are co-workers, but I learned a lot about Taylor and his career in product that I didn’t know before this discussion. You see, Taylor’s PM career started in startups but how he get his start might surprise you.

Taylor’s shares his unique experience running discovery in startups and what he learned from those experiences and how to balance the need for discovery with the need to deliver value, while keeping in mind the law of unintended consequences.

On today’s episode, I sat down with Elena Leonova, VP of Product at BigCommerce. With a decade of product management experience, I really wanted to get Elena’s take on Product Discovery and how it’s perceived from a product leadership point of view

We discussed how Elena got into Product by accidentally taking a Business Analyst role. And after reading Marty Cagan and getting inspired, Elena decided she’d make a pivot from BA to PM. Now as a product leader, Elena works to create space for her PMs to focus on the important work of product discovery. We talked through what discovery is, why we should do it, and what gets in the way.

On today’s episode we get to hear from Duy Pham, Product Manager at HREasily. We’ll hear about Duy’s really interesting path into product, how to create organizational alignment through discovery, and the 4 quadrants of discovery that need to be considered to get a holistic picture of your customer and the market at large.

On today's episode, we get to learn from Austin Yang, Sr. PM at Landbot. Austin shared his journey from SDR to Sr. PM, his perspective on discovery, and the differences he's seen in Discovery between being a Core PM vs a Growth PM. 

Jon shared a ton of great insights about discovery. Here are just a few of the points covered in this episode:

Starting fast in your career or at a new company require you to know where to start. Join me in this episode to learn best practices on how to approach your first 30, 60, and 90 days as a PM at a new company. 

To craft better solutions to customer problems, we have to precisely define the problems first. We discuss how to do this and why you need to tie the problems you choose to solve to the business objective you need to achieve. 

You don't manage stakeholders, but you NEED to management information and expectations. Period. 

Is the dev team confused about the PRD you just handed them? Is what gets built different than what you intended? Either way... it's YOUR fault. It's our responsibility to ensure what we intend to communicate is received as intended. In this episode, I talk through some of the reasons why developers don't interpret requirements as you intended and what you can do about it. 

After the last two Monday episodes, I saw a gap in the discussion on "Testing in Production." This episode should close the loop by giving another view into productive ways to ship and test in a production environment. 

Deepti and I chat through our paths to product and how there's not one singular path to breaking into the field and how varied the role of product management can be.  

Ever feel like your roadmap prioritization keeps getting upended due to feedback from customers and stakeholders? Don't let it. 

This is the announcement of Season 3 of Lessons in Product Management! 

This episode is an excerpt from the Product Strategy Development course I built and published inside of the Path2Product platform. Enjoy!

As we celebrate International Women's Day today, I'm super excited to have a woman on the podcast who is making waves in the world of Customer Success. On this episode of Lessons in Product Management, I have Bhavika Kochhar, a Customer Success Manager at Algonomy and she has been in similar roles for the last 5 years. She also a founder at IncustomerSuccess, CSLadies, the Bhavika&Lotte CS Chat Show and has many other initiatives in the works in her continued dedication to the field of Customer Success. And today, we're going to discuss how impactful it can be when CS Managers and Product Managers collaborate well together

Here's what we discussed:

Identifying gaps in the market and building solutions to fill those gaps to solve customer problems is a key part of product management. On today's episode, Heather James, Founder of the Product-Led Alliance, dropped by the pod to share how and why she Founded the Product-Led Alliance, the gap she saw in the market, and how she and the PLA team are filling those gaps.

Here's what we discussed:

On part 1 of "Never Assume Competitors Are Correct", I'll discuss the pitfalls of copying competitors and why it's never a good idea. 

Sign up today for the INDUSTRY conference and get 20% off using promo code: path2product20

You've heard it said that Product Managers and Companies as a whole should be data-driven, but did you know that too much data isn't a good thing? It's like a good wine. The right amount leads to a good time, but having too much can leave you drunk and hungover. On today's episode, Emily Reid, Product Manager at AgeRate comes on the pod to share the difference between being data-driven and data-drunk and how the difference will impact your business.

Here's what we discussed:

You always hear that Product Management requires leadership through influence, but have you ever considered being asked to influence the processes of other departments or the tools each department might use to get their jobs done? Well, on today's episode we get to hear from Tunde Oke, Product Manager of Developer Enablement & DevOps Experience @ Dell. Before working on Developer Enablement, Tunde was brought into Dell to lead and product manage a company-wide digital transformation And he came on the pod to share that experience with us.

Here's what we discussed:

Connect with Tunde:

Huge shout out to this episode's sponsor, Jacobs Creative Services. Check them out at:

Whether you're thinking about your target market or your target persona and their problem(s), coming to a precise definition of what problem you're trying to solve and who has that problem is absolutely key for developing concrete, valuable solutions. 

That's what Aazar and I talk about on this episode, but here's some of the other things we discussed:

Connect with Aazar:

Here's what we discussed:

Connect with Anthony:

Here's what we discussed:

Check out the book recommendations from Randy!

On today's episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Kayla Lee. Kayla is currently a Growth PM at IBM working in IBM's Quantum group and we had a great discussion on how IBM approaches go to market with cutting edge technologies like quantum computing and how reducing the barriers to entry is one of the most critical aspects of scaling adoption. 

Here's what we discussed:

Check out the book Kayla recommended:

On today's episode, I spoke with Thane Ringler, speaker, author, podcast host, and development coach. Thane is a good friend, but this conversation isn't going to be your typical product management discussion. Thane doesn't have a PM background, but what he's about to share absolutely applies to you as a product manager. If product launches fail, it's on us and we MUST take ownership of the success or failure of our products. And we exist to make the lives of our customers and users better, so we should never settle for "okay" or "good enough". 

Here's what we discussed:

Check out Thane's books and courses:

On today's episode, I got to speak with Peter Knudson, Manager of Product Management at Unity. Before Unity, Peter was a PM at both Zynga and Activision, pretty much spending his entire career as a Product Manager. Peter shares his product career journey and some great lessons he's learned along the way. 

Here's what we discussed:

On today's episode, I sat down with Preethi Sekar, Product Manager at L&T Technology Servies. On this episode Preethi shares the dangers of taking product requirements from internal stakeholders and not including users in the research and feedback to determine what those product requirements should be. Preethi's story highlights how industry experience does not guarantee you understand your customer.

Here's what we talked about:

Join us on one of the most active Facebook groups out there:

On today's episode, I sat down with Evan Groom, Product Manager at Audio Technica. Throughout this series on why products fail, we've looked through the lens of startup founders and their experiences. Today, Evan shares lessons he's learned in a global company and industry leader. We talk about what pitfalls you might run into in well-established organizations that could inhibit the success of your product launches or kill them altogether. Excited for you to hear what Evan has to say, so let's get started. 

Here's what we discussed:

On today's episode, I sat down with Vytenis Pakenas, CEO of Lucid Agreements. His 15-year journey from multi-time startup founder to CEO is pretty amazing. Today, Vytenis stopped by the podcast to share some key learnings from his JobRely startup experience. From business model fit to finding the right value metrics to track, there's so much to take away from this conversation, so let's get started. 

Here's what we discussed:

Here's what we discussed:

Welcome back to Prodcast as we continue our "Why Products Fail" series. On today's episode, I spoke with Aditya Kakrania, multi-time startup founder. We talked through Aditya's first startup, Foomore, how it grew through clever growth hacks and community building but how timing and environmental issues brought Foomore to its knees. This is a great lesson in why startups need to consider the fragility of its business, especially when the business is overly reliant on a very specific market. We also talked about the important topic of knowing when to give up pivot or persevere and the importance of having a strong founding team to navigate what could be a very emotional and challenging decision. Let's get started. 

Here's what we discussed:

Connect with Aditya:

This is episode two of the Why Products Fail series and on this episode, I sat down with Max de Melo and Patrick Niederdrenk, Co-Owners of America One Luxury Real Estate, to talk about how to successfully break into crowded markets and why so many fail trying. Whether you're launching a startup or in a product team trying to introduce a new product into an existing and crowded market, you'll be glad you took the time to listen. 

Here's what we talked about:

Connect with Max and Patrick:

On today's episode, I sat down with Kevin Garret, Founder and CEO of Food4All. What started out as volunteer work in urban farming turned into a passion-based business to help lower-income families develop a livelihood around the world. Kevin learned many lessons on his startup journey, and what he learned from key, early failures helped to shape his startup's success today. 

Here's what we talked about:

Follow Kevin and Food4All: 

On today's episode, I sat down with Kristy Olinger, Portfolio Optimization Manager at Citizens Bank, and former SVP of Product at Bank of America. In Kristy's experience, with or without direct authority, it's vital for Product Managers and Product Leaders to gain buyin through influence, and Kristy has found storytelling to be the #1 tool for earning company-wide buyin. That's what we're going to dig into today, so let's get started.  

Here's what we talked about:

On today's episode, I sat down with Nikki Anderson, User Research Lead at Zalando and Founder of User Research Academy. Nikki started her user research career about 7 years ago, with a foundation in quantitative research but has since shifted focus to specialize in qualitative user research where Nikki has worked in B2B, B2C, B2B2C and has both worked as a freelancer and worked in corporate settings. After having started her career in New York, Nikki has since moved to Germany where Zalando is based. With such a robust and diverse background in user research Nikki had a ton of great advice and insight to share. 

Here's what we discussed:

Here's the resources:

On today's episode, I sat down with Nick Sonnenberg, CEO of Leverage. getleverage.com Before Leverage, Nick was a high frequency trader on Wall Street, building algorithms to programmatically trade stock at micro-second speed. Back in May, Nick published an article on Inc. called "How to remove emotion from your decision making". I loved the article and thought of how relevant it was to product management so, I had to have Nick on to dive a bit deeper into the topic. 

Here's what we discussed:

Check out the book on decision making that Nick recommended:

https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Solved-Decisions-Confidence-Conviction/dp/163265086X 

On today's episode, I sat down with Tommi Forsstrom, VP of Product @ Teachable. While working in Venture Capital with growth-stage companies, Tommi discovered the power of having a strong sales organization and the need for product management to collaborate closer with sales

Some of the topics we cover include:

On this episode of Prodcast, I sat down with Susan Stavitzski, Director of Product @ Hatch! 

Susan shared how and why she made the transition from Product Marketing to Product Management and how her background as a product marketer has not only helped in her roles in product, but it's also given her a unique perspective on the relationship between the two roles. 

She also explained the three different types of product managers:

- Technical PM

- User-Focused PM

- Business-Minded PM

Susan believes that regardless of what your background is, being a product manager is ultimately about having vision and the ability

to execute on that vision. 

She shares the differences between product marketing and product management and what the 

ideal working relationship looks like between the two roles

And if you're not sure where to start in bridging the gap between your team and product marketing, invite your product 

marketer to be part of your processes early on. It actually makes their job easier, not harder. 

Lastly, we talked about how user-experience is everyone's job, and tighter cross-functional collaboration helps to 

improve the overall user experience. 

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