Vitalik

Folks, I am super pumped to bring to you our conversation with Jeffrey Boadi, one of the coolest people in the plant based world. Jeffrey and I decided to hop on a video call to get to know each other, exchange some plant based knowledge and talk about healthy diet and lifestyle in general.

Folks, if you love technology and the cloud trends, you’re gonna love this conversation we had with Sarbjeet Johal!

Sarbjeet has worked for companies like Visa, VMWare, PeopleSoft, Rackspace, Oracle and others and he accumulated an enormous amount of first hand experience and knowledge about the cloud industry.

We intentionally skipped most of the topics that you can easily find on the Internet and focused on truly interesting things. Here’s what we discussed with him:

• His journey (so far) in tech
• State of the Industry
• Future of software technology
• Technology consumption design patterns
• Traits of good leadership in tech companies
• Tip for youth 4 tech

Hey guys, thank you so much for tuning in today! I want to share something interesting with you. About 8-9 months ago, I interviewed with a couple of companies for a product owner position here in Minneapolis but wasn't hired by them. What happened later is really funny and kinda fascinating! :)

My guest today is Jeff Grigg who has over 20 years of experience of working as a developer for multinational corporations. He and I recently engaged into a short tweet exchange where he mentioned a few things that caught my attention. I figured we needed to talk it over on the podcast. In this episode we are briefly discussing Code Ownership and then moving into a very new area to me – Extreme Programming. Based on what I heard and the answers I received to my questions, it does sound like something companies should at least pay attention to and even try a test run of this methodology to see how it goes for them. 

Test Driven Development and Pair Programming (where two people work at one computer thinking thru coding together) do seem to offer very straightforward benefits. I specifically liked what TDD has to offer because it does help build out that critical testing focused culture as well as testing infrastructure to make the testing process more streamlined and efficient. We all know testing is often underrated by a lot of companies so the TDD based culture and process can surely help with that.

Speaking of Pair Programming, it seems to me that this approach can be sometimes used for things like UX Design because there’s a lot more thinking in this area than the actual design work. If you put two smart UXers together on certain UX tasks, there’s a high chance that they will deliver higher quality work in a shorter period of time.

In this episode I have a very special guest, Pavel Samsonov, a UX designer from Bloomberg LP. Our conversation is focused on challenges that product design and development organizations face these days. Pavel expresses his view on how Agile may be improved to better accommodate design processes. We discuss very interesting things like “respecting the skills” of long time users, decision making ownership and more. Pavel also shared his point of view on how Microsoft's efforts in product design in the last few years have set them up for success in the future. I personally learned a lot from Pavel’s experience and the way he frames his thoughts. I’ll surely be listening to this episode myself at least a couple of times to make sure these learnings fully sink in.

In this episode, Oksana Ivanova and I discuss gaming - why today's games are easier than they were in the past, where the gaming industry is going, what can potentially happen to the Fortnite model as they expand into a social platform arena. This conversation provoked a few interesting thoughts that I hope you guys will find valuable.

This episode is very special with a very special guest. Joe Natoli shares insights from his many years of UX consulting experience. We also discuss a rather important topic of product ownership inside product development organizations. Turns out "Product Owner" is a very important role and we talk about it in detail. This episode should be very insightful for folks like me who for a long time have been searching for the right career track within product design but were afraid to end up going in a wrong direction due to the fear of the world we live in where everything is labeled.

Hope you guys enjoy this episode. I had a blast and I learned a ton from this conversation. Would love to hear your feedback!

I love Colorado! I snowboarded there many years ago (too many actually) and we also visited it last summer. Since Doug was born and spent almost all of his life in this beautiful state (he lives and works in Denver), I thought it would be a great idea to have him help me learn more about the state. We talked about job market in Denver, best mountains for skiing and snowboarding, cute resort towns, breweries and potentially the biggest liquor store in the world – Tipsy’s.

In this episode I let Doug Collins drive. He spoke about his learnings from some of his past failures. We also came up with some tips on how to negotiate with your business partners or managers when they prevent you from properly doing your job as a UX professional. Hope you guys enjoy it!