The Product Bakery Podcast

Ryan Sousa leads data innovation for Research, Hospital, and Foundation at Seattle Children’s. He is a senior leader, entrepreneur, and practitioner and brings more than 25 years of leadership experience in some of the biggest companies such as Amazon, Starbucks, Expedia, and Nokia as well as several successful startups. Next to all the companies that Ryan has seen, he clearly noticed one key factor that drives success and innovation in companies which is empowering people! Many companies focus too much on deadlines, pressure from investors, and other things, and lose track of the main thing which is people. To be product and not project-driven, it's crucial to share a problem instead of solutions.  In this episode, Ryan talked about the key points a leader needs to understand to empower teams instead of micromanaging them to be successful.    Table of content: 0:28 - Intro Ryan Sousa 5:20 - Paradigm shift: User centricity 7:38 - Evolvement of the health care industry 9:20 - Processes vs. company maturity 17:15 - Restructuring organizations with the right mindset 22:35 - Organizational structure to empower (product) people 28:30 - Establishing open & direct communication as a Leader 30:00 - Enabling people to be innovative 42:50 - Planning frameworks on steroids 47:55 - The value of Hackathons 49:00 - 3 things that Ryan would have done differently 10 years ago Ryan's book recommendations: No Rules Rules The Art of Action Think Like a Rocket Scientist Connect with Ryan: Email: ryan.sousa@seattlechildrens.org   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

"You learn the most from your mistakes, not your success.", is a quote that Rory Madden would immediately sign! With more than 16 years of experience as a Consultant, Entrepreneur, and Business Analyst he has a lot of experiences to share.  Rory founded two start-ups that failed, and one of the biggest learnings he made was to talk to customers as early as possible. Based on that learning, he founded the UXDC (User Experience & Developer Experience) Conference. The mission of the conference is to help people to learn about customer and data-driven agile methodologies to not make the same mistakes as he did.  In this episode, we talked to Ryan about how he "developed" the conference and how the way they interact with his community is shifting in the current health crisis. Table of content: 0:28 - Intro Rory Madden 6:05 - Moving from a project to a product mindset 8:10 - Definition of ”developer experience” 10:50 - Birth of the UXDX idea & community 16:00 - Finding the right speakers & supporters 22:30 - Health crisis as a big challenge 29:15 - Online vs. offline events 41:26 - Building the UXDX platform product 48:00 - 3 key learnings Rory made   Rory on the internet: Linkedin: @Rorymadden Website: https://uxdx.com/   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

A long and exhausting year is over! Alex and Christian sat down together one last time in 2020 to wrap up a year of remote work and sharing some morning routine tips in times of home office to not only be productive but also to take care of your physical and mental health. The Product Bakers wish you all a happy new year's eve. Stay healthy, stay conscious. Happy new year! 🎉🥳🎊   PS: The next interview will be published on the 7th of January.    Check out our website update: https://www.product-bakery.com/episodes Want to learn to meditate? The Headspace app: https://www.headspace.com/ ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Could it be a better time to launch the 20th episode on Christmas?! 🎄 We want to thank all our listeners for the amazing support we've got, and wish everyone MERRY CHRISTMAS and happy holidays! In this episode, we're doing a little recap on what has happened this year as well as sharing the first outlook for 2021.  Since the year is coming to an end we also talk about how we prioritize & set goals for the next year. This includes a deep-dive into self-organization, tooling, and a couple of book recommendations. #planning Tools we love to use for self-organization: Pen & Paper Google Calendar Evernote Workflowy Our book recommendations: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Lean UX The Bullet Journal Method Hooked The Future of Capitalism High Output Management Pitch Anything The Prosperous Coach Atomic Habits Live hack: Listen to podcasts & educational videos at 1.5x/2x speed 🤶🎄 Follow The Product Bakery Podcast 🎄🎅    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Shruti is a design researcher and interaction designer. She leads the talented team of The Studio at Zalando in Berlin. At the time of recording this episode, she led the product design & user research team at N26. She has also worked in strategic design consulting with IDEO, user experience at Nokia, and with a few other places. Shruti’s goal has been to nurture effective collaboration between design, research, product management and engineering to deliver customer-focussed solutions – building the capabilities and processes that enable all disciplines to do their best work. In this episode, she talks with Christian and Alex about the role of Design & Research Ops, amongst other things, that help build an effective integrated design team.   Table of content: 0:28 - Intro Shruti Ramiah 1:45 - How Product Design functions @N26 5:05 - Design collectives & Design Ops 7:05 - Collecting customer & stakeholder feedback 10:10 - The role & mission of Design Ops 21:40 - Solving symptoms or problems with Design Ops? 24:00 - How to hire the right people for a Research Team 28:00 - Collaboration between Product Managers, Designers, & Researchers 39:40 - Integrating Design in cross-functional teams 43:20 - Things Shruti would love to have known at the beginning of her career 47:31 - Debrief Alex & Christian   Find Shruti on the internet:  Website: https://shrutiramiah.com/  Linkedin: @shrutiramiah  Twitter: @itursh   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩        👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery     📸 Instagram: @productbakery     🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20     🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Branding plays a key role in every kind of business. Laura Busche's passion for marketing and brand strategy started in 2008. Since then she focused a lot on working and learning everything about brands until 2013 when she published her amazing book "Lean Branding" as part of the Lean Series from O'Reilly.  Laura consulted Alex and Christian for almost one hour about building up the Product Bakery brand and community. She shared how to use a storyboard to define the brand values and target audience.   Table of content: 0:28 - Episode summary 0:59 - Intro Laura Busche & her book launch 6:35 - How to brand a product podcast (live coaching by Laura) 8:55 - Lean branding strategies 10:30- The brand storyboard 17:15 - How to identify organic growth channels & strategies 23:25 - Driving branding & storytelling in organizations 28:25 - Value proposition vs. brand recognition (brand messaging) 35:25 - Laura’s brand strategy for her own book 39:25 - Thoughts on Google’s rebranding (icon redesign) 44:35 - 3 Tips from Laura if you launch a new brand/brand heavy product 48:50 - Debrief Christan & Alex   Follow & Connect with Laura:  Website: https://laurabusche.com/  Linkedin: @laurabusche  Twitter: @laurabusche  Her book: Lean Branding    ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍 Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Monica Lent is a passionate Software Engineer & Entrepreneur with more than 10 years of experience. Next to her first startup affilimate.com, she regularly launches new products, services, and communities such as blogginfordevs.com.  Monica shares in this episode many practical tips and examples on how to build up your own community and the need for companies to move beyond acquiring customers and connecting closer to their audiences.   Table of content: 0:30 - Intro Monica Lent 3:50 - 12 Startups in 12 months 6:25 - How she got started with her first paid community 8:50 - Community vs. customer base 13:30 - Importance of communities for businesses 18:35 - Launching fast vs. researching too long 20:10 - Learnings on starting with SaaS product 33:30 - Mistakes to avoid when starting with a SaaS product 39:30 - Bootstrapping vs. funding 42:50 - Monica’s top 5 tips to successfully build a community   Wanna connect with Monica? https://monicalent.com/ https://twitter.com/monicalent https://bloggingfordevs.com/   Monica's reads & recommendations:  https://rosie.land/ https://nathanbarry.com/wealth-creation/ https://robwalling.com/2015/03/26/the-stairstep-approach-to-bootstrapping/ https://stackingthebricks.com/why-you-should-do-a-tiny-product-first/   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Both Christian and Alex work on many strategic topics as consultants in their day to day business. What they've observed is that many companies need to rethink their current strategies and adapt to the current situation/crisis. In this episode, Christian talks about how to get started with a product strategy definition based on Alex's business idea about selling Italian premium ties. He focuses on the basic skeleton of information & agenda points a product strategy should consist of as well as how to specify them.   Table of content: 0:30 - Product Vision vs. company vision 4:35 - Product vision statements (GoPro) 8:40 - Defining one “catchy” sentence 9:15 - Getting buy-in from Founders & Senior Management 12:00 - Revisiting the vision statement regularly 17:20 - Vision definition workshop example (how to define a vision) 23:15 - Iterating on the product vision statement 27:05 - Who should drive the creation of the product vision   Christian's free product strategy slide deck template: Slide deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1mLNt7f6CPPa3FzNxnHZAS7pxgp-QDOLL2UtsBe7fcKI/edit?usp=sharing Related article: https://www.christianstrunk.com/blog/product-strategy   Connect with Christian: Website: www.christianstrunk.com Linkedin: @christianstrunk Twitter: @strunkchristian   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Humans love to play games! So does Alex Wheeler, Senior UX Designer at Riot Game. Alex spent many years developing the UX for champions of the most played online game League of Legends.  Alex shares great insights about the whole process of developing e.g. a new champion or changes on the client-side for more than 120 Million active users. He touched all the parts from the discovery and wireframing to the development and rollout.  Next to that, he shared why friction in UX and games is so important. Table of content: 0:30 - Intro Alex Wheeler 4:35 - The addicting nature of computer games 6:45 - Intentional friction the UX 9:45 - Developing champions in League of Legends as UX Designer 15:00 - Persona-based product development 18:00 - Product discovery in gaming & LoL 20:50 - Role & collaboration with Product Managers & Owners 25:15 - When employees are users of your product 30:00 - Using data to design experiences 36:15 - Rolling out updates & new features 39:30 - Designing for 26 countries with different languages & cultures 43:50 - It’s all about documentation 46:10 - Alex 3 key values of designing user experiences 49:00 - Debrief Alex & Christian   Want to learn more about Alex? https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwhlr/ https://medium.com/riot-games-ux-design/ux-design-in-the-games-industry-50b0572631c3   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

SaaS products are Markus Hafellner passion. Next to his experience as a Product Manager, he worked many years in the tech industry as a developer & CTO.  In his current challenge at Bitmovin, he focuses a lot on defining and developing a good pricing strategy. Markus shares how the company introduced a big pricing change and the thoughts, planning, and approach behind it as well as great tips how to align with stakeholders and getting the buy-in from the C-Level/Top Management. Table of content: 0:30 - Intro Markus Haffelner & Bitmovin 4:50 - The challenges of defining prices in B2B 8:55 - Measuring & analyzing data + customer funnels 16:10 - A product-led approach as the foundation for a pricing change 19:05 - Interpreting data & defining 25:20 - Influencing Senior Management & Founders (how to negotiate) 27:35 - Rolling out & communicating price changes 33:35 - Driving pricing topics as a Product Manager and stakeholders 37:00 - Impact of the pricing change at Bitmovin 40:20 - Markus tips to evaluate pricing in a structured way 43:20 - Comparing pricing with competition/market 49:43 - Debrief Christian & Alex   Connect with Markus: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mhafellner/ https://stratelight.substack.com/   Link from John Cutler: Beat the Feature Factory: Run Pre-cap Design Studios   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

After a week-long road trip in Portugal Alex is looking back at all the small invisible experiences he encountered while sitting in the car. It’s things like anticipating and designing for the user's intentions that make an experience really great.   Table of content: 0:30 - Alex road trip in Portugal 2:30 - Air conditioning experience with Volkswagen 4:45 - User experience in cars 6:35 - Understanding & learning from user intentions 10:55 - Jobs to be done 15:55 - UX on purpose or luck? 17:55 - Autonomous driving 22:25 - Ethnographical studies to better understand users   Connect with Alex: Website: www.alexdapunt.com Linkedin: @alexdapunt  Twitter: @alexdapunt   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Sebastian's role as head of product at the Founders Factory is quite different from most of the jobs. He and the product coaching team help founders and teams build the right product in the right way using their expertise and product coaching framework.  His and the team's thesis is that by both executing on the product as well as coaching founders on what good best practices look like, Founders Factory won't only build great products but also great teams and businesses. In this episode, he shares great stories and best practices on what to consider as a fresh startup and how to hire the right people. Table of content: 0:30 - Intro Sebastian Abdy Sabouné & The Founder’s Factory 5:35 - Coaching founders & product people 7:10 - Product development processes in startups 14:25 - 0 to 1, hiring the right people 18:30 - Which roles to hire first in an early-stage startup 21:00 - Recognizing red flags during the hiring process 24:20 - Setting up early product management processes 29:25 - Data-based decision making with no/few clients 32:50 - Experimenting & defining hypothesis 35:00 - First roles & skills needed when you kick-off a project 37:00 - Tips from Sebastian for aspiring CEOs and Product Managers 44:05 - Debrief Alex & Christian   Sebastian's book recommendations: Escaping the build trap Thinking fast and slow Never split the difference Sebastian's articles: Product thinking Product coaching framework ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Urbi realized pretty "fast" that studying business administration isn't the right thing for him. After he moved to computer science he started his career as a QA Engineer and worked his way up. Currently, he works as an Engineering Manager at Trade Republic.  Urbi's mission is to establish a Product and Engineering mindset in the fast-growing Berlin fintech. He shares insights on onboarding processes, the collaboration between product & engineering as well as establishing a culture of open communication.   Table of content 0:30 - Intro Andreas Urban aka Urbi 6:15 - Urbi’s mission at Trade Republic 8:00 - What Engineering needs from Product Managers 10:00 - Transitioning to a scaling Product & Engineering organization 15:25 - Writing documentation to speed up onboarding of new Engineers 17:40 - Early Engineering involvement for better product planning 27:35 - Helping teams to stay focused 30:15 - Company culture vs. processes 33:45 - Collaborating with Product Leads as Engineering Manager 39:22 - Engineering a Product & Engineering organization 44:45 - What Urbi motivated to pick up the hyper-growth challenge 48:40 - Debrief Alex & Christian    ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

People were always a passion for Emilie Lindström.  With a background in HR & recruiting, she moved into Product Management 3,5 years ago and is now building internal tools and processes for Outfittery. As Product Manager, Emilie spends a big part of her day working with Stakeholders to get them involved and manage their expectations along the journey. In this episode, she shares insightful stories as well as tips for everyone working with challenging stakeholders.    Table of content 0:30 - Intro Emilie Lindström 5:55 - What product newbies need to know 9:30 - Getting started with stakeholder management 13:15 - Identifying your stakeholders 18:55 - Treating stakeholders as domain experts & customers 20:25 - Dealing with “tricky” stakeholders 28:05 - Managing people vs. managing stakeholders 33:00 - How to work with customers 36:55 - Negotiating with stakeholders 41:00 - Christian’s stakeholder horror story 46:45 - Emilie’s key takeaways about stakeholder management 49:10 - Debrief Alex & Christian   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

With a master's degree in psychology and many years of experience as a User Researcher, Nikki Anderson moved in 2018 from New York to Berlin. She works currently as User Research Lead at Zalando as well as her own startup the user research academy.   Nikki shares the basics of qualitative user research to be able to get started with it in a fast and effective fashion. Next to that, she talks about when a company should start doing user research and at which point it's worth thinking of hiring a researcher.    Table of content 0:30 - Intro Nikki Anderson 2:46 - Researching the perfect croissant 6:55 - The basics of qualitative research 14:10 - Choosing the right segments to research 15:55 - Kicking off a research project 23:00 - The TEDW framework for user interviews 29:00 - Validating qualitative interview data 35:25 - Hypothesis-driven research (how might we statements) 37:35 - Evaluative research vs. generative research 41:55 - Parallelizing market research & user research 44:30 - When to start doing and hiring for research as a company 51:25 - Nikki’s key takeaways about getting started with research 54:00 - Debrief Christian & Alex   Connect with Nikki: Website: https://www.userresearchacademy.com/ Linkedin: @Nikkianderson-ux Twitter: @productherapist Link to Nikki's research template:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/19_2S5c-LWhwEk86oMxemgwsYHcm6CG_rwut5TLz0byY/edit   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Alex and Christian were brainstorming during brunch about "what makes the perfect croissant so delicious." They came to the conclusion, that they could do research to find the answer. But how much research would they need to do, and would they really find the answer? In this episode, Alex talks about defining good questions and hypotheses to be able to do good research. Besides that, he touches on why many companies are hesitant to do research and how to apply it as a way to not lose speed.    Table of content 0:30 - Can “taste” be researched? 4:00 - Copying ideas doesn’t replace research 5:25 - Acceptance of research on C-Level 10:00 - Getting answers after deploying to production 13:10 - Dual track research 21:05 - Death through research summary   Connect with Alex: Website: www.alexdapunt.com Linkedin: @alexdapunt  Twitter: @alexdapunt   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Liam Murphy is a crypto enthusiast for more than 8 years as an investor and a Product Designer. He shares insights into how to build crypto products that are "more usable" for crypto investment app consumers. These days he's focused on working for crypto communities and talks about how the community decides and builds new features & products.    Table of content 0:30 - Intro Liam Murphy 3:10 - Basics around crypto & decentralized finance (DeFi) 8:00 - Designing crypto products 13:40 - Changing user behaviors about investing 15:24 - Kicking off crypto projects 19:25 - Emerging crypto trends 22:50 - Designing for the crypto community 25:30 - The value of cryptocurrencies vs. fiat currencies 29:25 - Best practices to start developing a crypto project 32:10 - Community-driven development 36:35 - Will crypto become mainstream? 38:50 - Liams biggest challenge as a Designer in the crypto space 42:30 - How to get started in the crypto space 44:15 - Debrief Alex & Christian   Connect with Liam:  Twitter: @lemurf Linkedin:  @liammurphydesign   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Being a computer scientist was too boring for Henning. Once he saw Photoshop the first time he fell in love not only with the tool. He quickly started expressing his ideas on the screen and started working as a freelancer until one of his clients got acquired by the entrepreneur Stephan Schambach.   The omnichannel retail platform NewStore was born and he started as a Product Designer. These days Henning is leading the Design Team and everything related to user research, experience, and product planning. He shares deep and detailed insights about projects with NewStore's clients and how they build a B2B retail product that has touchpoints to end customers.    Table of content: 0:30 - Intro Henning 3:55 - Definition of Omni-Channel & NewStore 9:20 - Product development in B2B (real-world project examples) 14:45 - Developing modern point of sale & checkout features 18:25 - Translating customer feedback into design & user experience 20:55 - Challenges with quantitative feedback in B2B (e.g. Google Analytics) 22:40 - Organizational customer feedback funnel 24:55 - Design as a service 30:55 - Early design involvement for the win 38:20 - Design collaboration with Product Managers 43:55 - When & how to say “no” to customer requests 52:55 - Henning’s key takeaways about design thinking in B2B enterprise 55:31 - Debrief Christian & Alex   Connect with Henning:  Linkedin: @henning-witzel Twitter: @Henning_Witzel Website: https://www.henning-witzel.de/   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

What's the difference between a product vision and a company vision? Christian talks about the definition of a product vision and the key information it should and shouldn't contain.  He describes the definition process based on examples and best practices. Next to the "theoretical" part, he talks about how to create a product vision based on two workshop methodologies that you can easily apply for your own vision.   Table of content 0:30 - Product vision basics 7:05 - The one catchy product vision sentence 7:50 - Benefits of having a product vision 11:30 - Iterating on the product vision 17:00 - Defining a product vision (workshop formats) 24:55 - Christian’s summary about creating a product vision   Connect with Christian: Website: www.christianstrunk.com Linkedin: @christianstrunk Twitter: @strunkchristian   Read more here: https://www.christianstrunk.com/blog/product-vision   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

James & Tim are both founders of Avion.io, a user story mapping tool that helps Product Teams to better collaborate and plan features, products, and services.  When Tim came back from his Product Owner course 5 years ago, learning about user story mapping, he quickly realized together with James that this methodology makes planning much easier and efficient. Unfortunately, they were missing a tool to digitalize and remotely collaborate on a user story map. They sat together after work and started designing and developing Avion.io which they've launched in 2019.  In this episode, they talk about the advantages of user story mapping as well as advanced techniques on release planning, MVP definitions, and some more cool story mapping life hacks.   Table of content 0:30 - How Tim & James got into user story mapping 5:25 - User story mapping vs. customer journey mapping 8:30 - Story mapping during the product development cycle 13:30 - Product discovery with story mapping 19:00 - Defining MVPs and preparing the backlog 25:40 - Story mapping as a product documentation tool 26:15 - Advanced release planning with story mapping 32:15 - Downside of story mapping 35:25 - Bootstrapping Avion with story mapping 43:40 - Key takeaways from Tim & James 46:30 - Debrief Alex & Christian   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

This time, Christian interviews Alex Dapunt about his career path and work experience. He initially wanted to become an architect but then landed in the Digital Design Space.  Alex started his career in an Italian agency and then moved to Munich and finally to Berlin where he started working for SumUp where he became the Head of Design. Over 4 years Alex scaled up the Design team from 4 to 40 people before he left the hyper-growth startup.  Besides a lot of hiring and building up a Brand & Product Design Team, he shares the importance of introducing a design system to scale in hypergrowth.  If you're interested in his work check out the design system Circuit UI on Github.    Episode Minutes: 0:28 - Introduction of Alex Dapunt 6:00 - Key design challenges in companies 8:00 - Cross-functional design collaboration 12:20 - Leading a Design Team to build a customer-focused design system 15:50 - Decision-making process to build a design system 18:55 - Potential downsides of a design system 21:50 - Design system & branding 27:00 - Establishing a design system in cross-functional teams & multi-products 30:00 - Alex’s key takeaways & summary    Connect with Alex: Website: www.alexdapunt.com Linkedin: @alexdapunt  Twitter: @alexdapunt   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

In this episode, Alex interviews co-host Christian Strunk to get some background on how he transitioned into Product Management.  Christian started working as a baker before he studied business administration. While studying he founded his first start-up "Pocketrobe" which opened the doors into the world of Product Management... Besides his career path, Christian talks about his most favorite product planning methodology "user story mapping" and how to get started with it.  If you're interested, listen in! For more information about story mapping  & Product Management check out his blog.     Episode minutes: 0:28 - Introduction Christian Strunk 8:00 - Product challenges in companies 8:45 - Get started with product planning 11:35 - Product planning with user story mapping 15:00 - Estabishing story mapping in the product development process 18:40 - When to not do user story mapping 21:25 - From planning to delivery (backlog preparation) 25:15 - Start planning from the end/back 30:30 - User story mapping or customer journey mapping? 35:05 - Christian’s key takeaways & summary    Connect with Christian: Website: www.christianstrunk.com Linkedin: @christianstrunk Twitter: @strunkchristian   ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Meet your hosts Christian Strunk and Alex Dapunt as they introduce you to their new Podcast Format 'The Product Bakery Podcast'.  ✩ Follow The Product Bakery Podcast ✩    👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery    📸 Instagram: @productbakery    🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20    🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/