Product Perspectives

My guest today is Julie Robles. Julie is leading the Product Ops team at PayFit, and her role is to maximise efficiency, and impact of the Product and Tech teams. She has over 13 years of experience in product and program management for both startups and large corporations, exploring ecosystems in Europe, Middle East, and Asia. She is also a product and OKRs mentor (for Google for Startups and ADPList). I’ve split my conversation with Julie into 2 episodes, because there were lots of topics to discuss. In this first episode, we talk about her background and journey into product ops, and the relationship between product managers and product ops - how the roles overlap, when is the right time to set up a product ops functions and how to ensure everyone has time for glue work. In the second episode, we talk about how AI is changing the role of product managers, and how product ops can help leverage this technology. We also discuss the different types of complexities to manage, including the biggest ones: managing change with human beings. If you’re tired of doing the ops work yourself because you don’t have such dedicated team, if you dislike your product ops team who keeps on giving you processes to follow, these two episodes are here to reconcile you with product ops and giving you hints to move forward and be a better product organisation.

My guest today is Julie Robles. Julie is leading the Product Ops team at PayFit, and her role is to maximise efficiency, and impact of the Product and Tech teams. She has over 13 years of experience in product and program management for both startups and large corporations, exploring ecosystems in Europe, Middle East, and Asia. She is also a product and OKRs mentor (for Google for Startups and ADPList). I’ve split my conversation with Julie into 2 episodes, because there were lots of topics to discuss. In this first episode, we talk about her background and journey into product ops, and the relationship between product managers and product ops - how the roles overlap, when is the right time to set up a product ops functions and how to ensure everyone has time for glue work. In the second episode, we talk about how AI is changing the role of product managers, and how product ops can help leverage this technology. We also discuss the different types of complexities to manage, including the biggest ones: managing change with human beings. If you’re tired of doing the ops work yourself because you don’t have such dedicated team, if you dislike your product ops team who keeps on giving you processes to follow, these two episodes are here to reconcile you with product ops and giving you hints to move forward and be a better product organisation.

My guest today is Agnieszka Rzesniowiecka. Aga is a Senior UX Researcher at Wise, where she leads research on Wise’s business customers. As Product teams at Wise are cross-functional and autonomous, she collaborates with PMs, Engineers, and Designers every day. After graduating from the MSc Human-Computer Interaction course at UCL, she's worked in-house in B2B and B2C companies ranging from fintech start-ups to corporations like IBM. Agnieszka is the president of City Women Speakers, and regularly does speaking engagements on breaking into the UX industry. She also founded Hevelianum Science Days, one of the biggest science festivals in Poland. Outside of work, Aga does personal branding photography and likes to learn new dance genres.

In this episode, we dive deep into the world of UX research! We talk about her career in B2C and transition to B2B, witnessing remarkable growth and transformation, and working as an embedded researcher within product teams. Data, customer empathy, AI, influencing, we touch on all the topics that UX teams and Product Managers should be collaborating on to make great products.

Product organisations have faced challenges and undergone a huge amount of change over the past few years, and this isn’t slowing down in 2023 and beyond in the aftermath of the global pandemic and in light of ever-faster technology development. The session will cover the trends we’ve seen accelerating recently in Product management, from the lenses of people, processes, data and technology. Then I’ll share my predictions about what is going to shape Product Management in the future, and have the most impact in the way Product organisations work. The talk will help both leaders and individual contributors in the audience get ready for the future of Product, with take-aways for them to think about and implement in their organisation, as well as insights into what other people in the audience think since the session will include interactive polling. From the use of data to the talent and skills challenges, through leveraging technology to support product decisions and evolving the very definition of “product”, let’s dive into the future of product management. Are you ready?

My guest today is Sophie Heller. Sophie leads the CX Services team at Outschool, a marketplace of live-online classes for kids. She joined the company as employee #2 as its first customer support agent and has since seen the company grow to 200; the support inbox now contains 100+ people, spread over several internal teams and an outsourcer. Sophie's team works to equip the inbox, including 50+ outsourced agents, for any changes to Outschool's website or policies, providing services including documentation, training, and quality assurance.
Sophie explains how she helped to scale the business and how they support 10,000 teachers and respond to 5,000 tickets per week. She has mastered the art of knowledge sharing within her company, with a mix of different training material, good release preparation processes and also a feedback loop with the product team. I've enjoyed learning about how Outschool measures quality of the replies to customers, as opposed to usual metrics like CSAT, volume and time to resolve queries. I hope you'll love hearing her real-life stories and you'll better understand how support teams operate after this episode.

Marty Bakal is an experienced Product Leader who works in product management, product marketing and field application engineering. Marty understands user needs and how to translate them into products and collaterals. He has the ability to translate technical features into content understood by engineering and users alike, and a thirst for knowledge spanning multiple industries. In this episode, Marty talks about Product Marketing Management, or PMM, and how he collaborates with product managers on inbound and outbound activities. He debunks some of the misconceptions about PMM and highlights the challenges and opportunities in the PM/PMM relationship. This is a short episode but packed with lots of insights!

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Teagan O’Donovan is a Managing Consultant at ISL Talent, who focuses on recruiting people in Product and Design. Her clients are start ups and scale ups in the tech space of all different industries. She loves helping her clients find the best people to drive business forward and watching her candidates flourish while they progress their careers. At ISL, they pride ourselves on being trusted partners for both job seekers and employers and her main focus is building lasting relationships within the market! Whether you’re new to product management or climbing the career ladder, there’s one person you can’t do without: the recruiter. In this episode, Teagan shares her view of the market (spoiler alter: it’s competitive!), how she works with candidates and companies, and how you can get the next role that really works for you. Listen for lots of tips for interviewing and taking full advantage of the candidate-recruiter relationship !

Reach out to Teagan on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/teagan-o-donovan-527803181/ and ask to be added to her monthly newsletter.

My guest today is Nick Russell. Nick is one of the Co-Founders of Dualo, a stakeholder-friendly research repository that helps product teams to organise, connect, and showcase their key research findings across the wider organisation. Prior to Dualo he worked for 10 years as a Product Manager, leading product teams at ASOS, Gousto, Thomas Cook, and The Telegraph. In this episode, we talk about the value of user research and how some of that is lost or wasted due to the difficulty in sharing insights across the organisation. Nick also shares his tips for moving from product manager to founder, and the product management leaders who inspired him to do better user research.

Tristan is formerly a senior data leader within a US $1BN+ global E-commerce business. He has over 15 years experience in data, financial analysis and strategy roles. He has data experience from startups, scale-ups and the high pressure world of banking where he worked for one of Wall Street's most well known banks: Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Tristan is deeply passionate about technology and startups and has been endorsed by the UK's Tech Nation as a Global Talent in Tech. He speaks frequently at tech events and has experience as a founder having started two marketplace businesses. In this episode, we talked about how PMs need to be data literate and how much they really need to know about data to be able to self-serve, but also how they can partner with their analytics team to run experiments that lead to better insights and products, and how AI/ML is changing analytics.

My guest today is Rachel Wilde, who is an leader with over 20 years of experience, specializing in SaaS adoption and growth for startups, with a deep understanding of SaaS technology and customer experience. She has worked at various early and late-stage startups, including Healthy Pet (acquired by VCA Antech), OSI, Next2Friends, and currently as Head of Global Implementation Enablement at Harri, an end-to-end talent acquisition and workforce management platform for the hospitality industry. At Harri, Rachel works closely with product managers to scale technology onboarding for new clients, leveraging her business acumen and technology expertise to drive the company’s success in the highly competitive SaaS industry.

In this episode, we talk about how, to ensure successful onboarding and customer success, the product team needs to understand and prioritize customer needs of course but also consider compliance needs, user efficiency and scalability. We discuss how Harri leverages the latest technology to onboard its customers and how Rachel works with the product team to establish onboarding processes that are predictable, scalable, and provide a consistent experience.

Welcome to this new episode type, Product Q&A, a weekly bite-size episode, part of the Product Perspectives podcast, where I answer the most common questions that product managers encounter at job interviews and in their day-to-day work.

Whether you're a seasoned product manager or just starting out in your career, this episode format is for you. Each week, I tackle a different question related to product management, from strategy and planning to user research and design.

Not only is this podcast a great resource for product managers looking to expand their knowledge and skills, but it's also a valuable tool for interviewers who want to ask insightful questions and for product stakeholders who want to better understand what they can expect from a great product manager.

So, tune in every Thursday for a new episode of Product Q&A, and join me as I explore the exciting world of product management and answer your burning questions.

Welcome to this new episode type, Product Q&A, a weekly bite-size episode, part of the Product Perspectives podcast, where I answer the most common questions that product managers encounter at job interviews and in their day-to-day work.

Whether you're a seasoned product manager or just starting out in your career, this episode format is for you. Each week, I tackle a different question related to product management, from strategy and planning to user research and design.

Not only is this podcast a great resource for product managers looking to expand their knowledge and skills, but it's also a valuable tool for interviewers who want to ask insightful questions and for product stakeholders who want to better understand what they can expect from a great product manager.

So, tune in every Thursday for a new episode of Product Q&A, and join me as I explore the exciting world of product management and answer your burning questions.

My guest today is Tess Dixon. With 20 years in tech including a past life as Director of Support at Tumblr, Tess pivoted to design in 2019 and spent the last couple of years learning about and practicing DesignOps — most recently as Director of DesignOps at Condé Nast. She loves documentation, remote-first culture, getting things organized, and supporting an entire team with the best environment possible.

I had a long conversation with Tess and for that reason, there will be two episodes with her. The first one focuses on her background and role as Director of Support at Tumblr, whereas next week’s one will be about her role as Director of DesignOps at Conde Nast. In this first episode, Tess talks about how product managers can work closely with support teams to understand user reactions to new features, how she introduced self-service support solutions to reduce support tickets and how support teams can drive customer satisfaction and sales opportunities.

My guest today is Justin Zalewski, who is a people-centered design leader with 10+ years of experience in product design, product strategy, and service design. As Director of Product Design and Strategy at Studio Science, Justin leads a team of talented product designers and works with clients to solve business problems through design. He and his team are experts in rapid prototyping and running experiments to learn from customers.  He has led projects with clients ranging from market-leading tech companies to Fortune 500 brands. Clients include Angi, Genesys, Simon, Stack Overflow, and Cummins.

In this episode, we talked about how new technologies and tools impact the role of a UX Designer, and what new responsibilities the people who create products hold as a result. Justin introduces the idea that products are actually digital services - as in software as a service, and gives examples on how he’s worked with customers and product managers to improve their metrics, promoting co-creation and designing for the real world. For UX Designers who want to find their place working with product managers and PMs who want to challenge their perspectives on building products, this is a great episode to get some inspiration and actionable tips

My guest today is Mirela Mus who has 12+ years of product management experience, a background in Computer Science, and an MBA. She is the Founder of Product People, a Product Management Consultancy with 40 in-house full-time PMs who help as Interims in Europe’s top Product companies. As an Interim PM, she has personally contributed to Tier, Zalando, Omio, WHO (World Health Organization), and continues to do so with her growing team. 

In this episode, we talk about the need for temporary staff when there a gap due to a PM going on parental leave or leaving, how Mirela introduced blind interviews in her company to identify the best talents, how she sees her workforce as the product and the parallels she draws between being a founder and a product manager. Mirela has impressed me by her diverse experience and product cultures she’s encountered along her journey. For PMs who want to get exposure to lots of different companies, product management consultancies can be a great way to acquire experience quickly - and for companies to bring better product management practices in their organisations.

My guest today is Charlie Sharzer who is product operations lead at Palantir Technologies, where he created the operations function for the Gotham product organization. Previously, he worked in business development as a deployment strategist in Palantir's U.S. Government business, where he partnered with users, built product, and led client engagements. Before coming to Palantir, Charlie taught high school phyics and chemistry in Newark, New Jersey.

In this episode, we talk about the role of Product Operations and how Palentir saw the need to build this function. Charlie talks about the specificites involved with working with the government, as well as how to de-risk releases and make customer’s lives easier when there’s an upgrade.

My guest today is Vishali Dialani who has been a strategy-driven customer experience professional for 6+ years. She’s recognized for creating human-centred design systems for complex digital products and leading marketing initiatives across diverse industries from advertising, education and fintech. With a collaborative mindset to make a difference, Vaishali loves to understand customer needs, map out across-the-board customer journeys, be the voice of customers and develop effective operational processes to drive customer adoption and business success. Recognized as CXPA’s emerging leader 2022, she believes in the power of making customer experiences simple and seamless.

In this episode, we talked about her role as a CX executive, and how her approach both mirrors and complements the one of a product manager. We’ve touched on non-digital products like manufacturing and hardware, as well as the future of CX with immersive experiences. I hope you’ll enjoy this final episode of 2022 and wish you a wonderful festive season.

Rishabh Bhandari is the Founder & CEO at Content Beta, a video-design-audio studio that has helped over 80 B2B software companies create engaging product marketing content to successfully drive engagement with marketing, generate more MQLs and signups, improve win rates, and get faster production adoption using product videos and retain users with technical content. Rish has built Content Beta from scratch and turned it into a 600K dollar company during the covid lockdown. He has co-authored the popular ebook ‘Customer Training Maturity Report 2021’ with the renowned customer education expert, Brian Childs. With a wide range of career accomplishments, he has learned the ins and outs of the industry, can recognize the gaps that can stall a B2B company’s growth, and has counseled over 108 product marketers and customer success managers in order to better their approach.

In this episode, we talk about his journey as a founder but obviously a lot about content and the role that product managers have in creating quality content for their customers as well as for their internal stakeholders: from sales enablement to marketing.

My guest today is a UX designer I’ve known for years and who has inspired me to get into product management. Philippe Clairet has been working in what we know today as "digital products" for 15 years. He’s worked across multiple domains such as finance, travel, online marketplaces, online planning, supply chain and web3. His roles have also varied a little along the way, including managing a UX team, but he’s a UX designer at heart. Heart is actually a good work to describe this interview, as Phil talks about kindness and shares personal stories of people who have supported him in his journey. We also touch on the role of UX and UX researchers, and how giving feedback to coworkers can still be difficult in a product world in which feedback from customers is so valued.

My guest today is Faris Aranki, Founder and Chief Effectiveness Officer at Shiageto Consulting. Faris has spent over 20 years delivering strategic change for the corporate and non-corporate worlds, including 12 years working as a strategy consultant, 4 years working in the strategy team of Centrica (the UK’s largest utility firm), 4 years working in education and development, Non-exec director and trustee of several charities. He came to realise that often what hinders institutions from achieving their goals goes beyond the quality of their strategy; it is their ability to engage effectively with others at all levels and remove barriers in their way. This has led to his passion for improving strategic effectiveness within all businesses and individuals and the foundation of Shiageto Consulting. On top of leading our business, Faris is now an accomplished speaker and contributor for a variety of outlets. 

In this episode, we talk about Emotional Intelligence and Focus, to design strategies that actually work. These skills are critical for product managers and I hope you’ll get the tips you’re looking for to develop your career.

You can contact Faris via Linkedin and his website.

My guest today is Jareer Ali. Jareer is looking after the Product Marketing of AssetSonar, which is an IT Asset Management Solution. Before joining this team, Jareer got an MBA in one of the Top Business schools in Asia. Jareer is a truly international professional; not only he's working in a diverse and multicultural team - but he also did a exchange in France and works with an American company). I’ve found him to be passionate about Tech & Strategy and how to make a positive impact on the world. In his current role, he interacts with the product manager on a daily basis - and that's the reason we have invited him to our podcast. We talked about product marketing of course, including sales enablement and content creation like running campaigns and webinars. He shares his view on MBAs and what makes a product stand out from competition. I had a lot of fun talking to Jareed and I’ve been delighted by his responses, they surprised me and I hope they’ll surprise you too.

Welcome back to Product Perspectives for this episode about growth, one of the hot topics in products. I’ve talked to Ken Rudin who is the SVP of user growth at ThoughtSpot, a modern BI solution which I use as part of my current role.

Ken is the SVP of User Growth at ThoughtSpot, leading Product Led Growth initiatives across the company, increasing user acquisition and engagement. Previously, he led the global User Growth and Analysis team at Google, where he focused on driving user acquisition, engagement and monetization across all Google products and services. His team provided analysis, best practices, tools, and services to optimize Google’s products as well as marketing campaigns, resulting in accelerated growth in users and revenue. Prior to Google, Ken built the Analytics organization at Facebook, which included both the data science teams and the data engineering teams. He led the organization to deliver high impact analyses across all Facebook products. and before that, Ken was the VP of Analytics and Platform Technologies at Zynga, helping Zynga to become known for excellence in analytics, and helping to build the foundation for one of the world’s largest social gaming platforms.

In this episode, Ken explains how he’s helped companies transition the company from a traditional sales-led model to product-led growth, with some real-world examples. I’ve enjoyed learning about his journey into product and the data world as well as his clear explanation of how core PMs, growth PMs and product marketing can work together to make great successful products. This episode is a bit longer than usual but it’s worth it, so I hope you enjoy the listen!

Dear listeners, it’s been 4 weeks without an episode of Product Perspectives and this is because I was first on holidays and then off sick – I’m sorry that you can still hear this is my voice. I do have episodes in the pipeline though and I’ve got some great announcements to make.

The first one is Product Perspectives is growing, with more listeners at each episodes, and that’s thanks to you. If you enjoy the podcast, please share it with your friends and colleagues. There’s a Product Perspectives page on Linkedin to stay up-to-date with episode releases and product-management related topics. Our Linkedin page is getting more and more clicks so make sure you follow it.

On another note, I’ve been looking for a co-producer and co-host for a few months, since I initially launched Product Perspectives on my own. Following a few rounds of interviews, I think I’ve found the right person and we’ll start working together on the strategy, marketing and of course the episodes. I’ll introduce you when it’s the right time.

About the future, as a good product manager, we’ll be running experiments with new podcast formats. So far, the format is short with a maximum of 40 minutes, and there are two types of episodes: interview-style with one guest, and roundtable with 3 guests. In order to ensure the format brings you the most value and best content as a listener, we’ll be doing tests with new formats. So if you’ve got some feedback, please share it with me via my social media or on the website.

There are exciting times ahead for Product Perspectives and I’m looking forward to sharing those with you. Thank you for your patience and see you next week for a new episode.

My guest today is Sophie Heller. Sophie leads the CX Services team at Outschool, a marketplace of live-online classes for kids. She joined the company as employee #2 as its first customer support agent and has since seen the company grow to 200; the support inbox now contains 100+ people, spread over several internal teams and an outsourcer. Sophie's team works to equip the inbox, including 50+ outsourced agents, for any changes to Outschool's website or policies, providing services including documentation, training, and quality assurance.

Sophie explains how she helped to scale the business and how they support 10,000 teachers and respond to 5,000 tickets per week. She has mastered the art of knowledge sharing within her company, with a mix of different training material, good release preparation processes and also a feedback loop with the product team. I've enjoyed learning about how Outschool measures quality of the replies to customers, as opposed to usual metrics like CSAT, volume and time to resolve queries. I hope you'll love hearing her real-life stories and you'll better understand how support teams operate after this episode.

You can contact Sophie on Linkedin.

My guest today is Ines Beatrix. Ines is a professional certified career and leadership coach. She coaches people who want to make a positive impact on the world and want to play a bigger game in their careers. With over 8 years of experience in design thinking, communications, mindfulness and coaching, she encourages people to dream big and cultivate a sense of inner calm and deep confidence. Before becoming a coach, she worked as the Design Thinking Lead at a US bank, led projects as an innovation consultant for Fortune 500 companies, and taught design thinking courses in Paris.

Ines is the first coach I receive in the podcast, she works with product managers but also with companies who want to introduce design thinking into their organisation. We talked about creative problem solving and human-centered approach, topics that are close to the heart of product people. If you want to understand the link between design thinking and farmers in China using washing machines to wash potatoes, as well as hear examples of applying design thinking in the corporate world, but also to your mental health, listen out to this episode and get tips about how to convince your leadership team to change the way your company identifies problems and goes about solving them.

My guest today is Orian Roturier, Head of Growth & Demand Generation at GitGuardian. As an engineer turned marketer, he’s passionate about building the right data pipelines and processes that will make products grow. He used to work in consulting to advise all kinds of companies on their acquisition strategy. Then he chose to focus his efforts on GitGuardian, a cybersecurity SaaS company, as he reckoned that cybersecurity is both a complex and important topic given most of our lives are now online. Growing GitGuardian from Series A to Series B, he focused on inbound tactics targeting cybersecurity teams, and a product-led-growth funnel for developers.

In this episode, we start by understanding the cybersecurity topics that a product manager should know about and prioritise to reduce the risk of reputational damage and potential fines for their product and company. Orian explain his role compared to traditional product marketing and product management functions, and how his company is implementing product-led growth by focusing on some specific personas, as well as how the Pirate framework helps him to measure success. This is a great listen for practical tips on security, GitHub optimisation, starting a product-led strategy and working with growth teams to deliver it.

You can contact Orian on Twitter or Linkedin. Thank you to Enzo, Product Manager at Teale, for his question.

My guest today is Katie Keate Johnson. Katie has spent the last decade working in B2B sales, that includes 7 years with Linkedin talent solutions where she was a sales rep but also a sales leader. After Linkedin, she was the first sales hire at an early stage company called ROOM, where she built the sales team up to 15 members. Then, she was the Head of Sales at Betterment, selling their product to small businesses. At the start of 2022, Katie decided she wanted to take the leap to be a founder and is currently working on a new venture that is focused on a community solution for B2B onboarding.

With Katie, in person from New York City where she's based, we talked about the difference between the buyer and the product personas, and how to align sales strategy with the product strategy so that the Sales Teams attract the right types of customers. She gives her opinion about the famous dilemma of sharing the roadmap with sales people, but also tells us she does want to have an input on the roadmap. If you want to learn some sales skills that are also useful for PMs as well as get some efficient tips, stay tuned and enjoy this episode.

Welcome to this roundtable between product management and UX Design. On the UX Design team, I’m please to welcome two of my previous guests – Pamela Sanchez and Hayden Chambers. In team product management, I’m please to welcome for the first time Iryna Struk, a Product Manager at HandsHQ.

In this third and final round, we talk about KPIs. Should companies have success metrics for their UX Design function? How do you measure improvement in UX and why? As product managers are asked to be more and more data-driven, what's the impact on their prioritisation of UX improvements which are harder to measure.

Who's going to win this round, but more importantly the entire roundtable: UX Design or Product Management?