Product Love

Do our own experiences and biases work against us when we are building products? I mean, we often start down a path based on our experiences and our owned learned biases. We often start with constraints, what we know how to build or what is convenient. It is rare we truly start from a blank slate. This week on Product Love, I talked to the Head of Strategy at Basecamp, Ryan Singer, at their headquarters in Chicago. What is powerful about Ryan and the team at basecamp is how they approach thinking about problems, answering the when’s and focusing on leading with design and getting to the outcomes customers desire.

This week, I talk to Rich Mironov, the CEO of Mironov Consulting, and an all-around product guru. Rich has been practicing product management since the 80’s. We discussed why a grasp of human psychology is crucial for PMing, and why it’s important to understand the difference between features that are for show and those that are actually used.

Bootstrapping instead of raising capital. On one hand, you can retain control and can set your own course. On the other, the luxury of capital gives you the resources to add features, hire more engineers and grow quicker. But maybe capital limitations can actually help you create a more focused product. This week on Product Love, I sat down and talked to Jim Semick, founder of Product Plan, about bootstrapping a startup, key metrics for product managers and how to approach pricing.

What do you consider a product? Us product managers, past or present, are probably quick to point to our trusty smartphones, our favorite apps, and even our own software but Mike Belsito thinks otherwise. He considers everything a product. Like many product managers we’ve interviewed in the past, Mike accidentally stumbled onto this role. He jokes that becoming a product manager was probably the next step after being a failed startup founder, but ironically, he’s the co-founder of the Product Collective: an organization that puts together one of the largest product management summits in the world: INDUSTRY. This week on Product Love, I sat down and talked to Mike Belsito about the conference he’s organizing, and why he believes that everything is a product.

This week on Product Love, I talk to Jeff Lash, Vice President and Group Director of Product Management, at SiriusDecisions. With over a decade of experience in product management, he believes a key trait of product managers is empathy.

This week on Product Love, I sat down with David Schwartz, the VP of Product at Wix, who makes it a goal to talk to three customers a day. We discussed the importance of being able to say no and how features can make-or-break a user experience.

This week on Product Love, I talked to Steve Johnson, who believes that simplicity is key when it comes to product management. If you’re doing more than 10 things at once, then maybe you’re doing too much. And as a bonus, he can sing! No really, some record company should sign this guy.

Peldi, the CEO of Balsamiq, embodies some of the best attributes of both successful CEOs and product managers. He is always learning and looking to learn. He strives to deliver not only a product that his customers love, but to build a company, culture and community that help his customers beyond the ordinary product features. Despite his jokes to the contrary, Peldi is in no way clueless, his humility and thoughtful approach to his business are refreshing and he should serve as an inspiration to entrepreneurs looking to build a business with or without venture funding. I think you will enjoy our conversation about building a bootstrapped company, the little touches you can add to inspire your customers, and his thoughts on building products and communities your customers will love.

This week on the Product Love podcast, I sat down with John Cutler, self-proclaimed “product agitator” and, most recently, a first-time dad. John has worked in a variety of roles in product and consulted at top tier companies like Zendesk, Appfolio, and Pendo. John is one of the most active and prolific writers and thinkers, and if you don’t already, you should definitely follow him on Twitter.

This week on Product Love, I sat down with Jorge Mazal, director of product management at Duolingo, the world's most popular way to learn a language. We talked about how to structure a product manager interview, building user frameworks and a shared vocabulary around users, and how behavioral psychology impacts his work.

This week on Product Love, I sat down with Rohini Pandhi, a product manager at Square, the payments giant. We talked about introverted product management, time management, metrics, and startups.

This week on Product Love, I sat down with Jon Noronha, Director of Product at Optimizely, the experimentation platform. Not surprisingly, we talked a lot about product experimentation – this is not only what Jon does at work, it is really a product management philosophy he lives by. Jon started his career at Microsoft, working on Bing, where he was also really invested in experimenting, mostly in the form of A/B testing. He joined Optimizely when it was still very small, but it was really there that he started thinking about how product managers can bring experimentation into their daily practice.

This week on Product Love, a podcast about product, I sat down with Kirsten Butzow, who is so prolific in her work that it’s hard to easily introduce her. Kirsten has more years of experience as a product management leader than almost anyone I know and has served in senior product management roles at a diverse set of companies, including Fujitsu, Pearson, and Blackboard. She is now a certified instructor and product coach with Pragmatic Marketing, and a speaker at many of the leading product events around the world. She’s also an esteemed member of the ProductCraft debate club.

John Weeke is an award-winning filmmaker and a product marketing manager at Insightly. With John, we talk about the operating system for human beings, we chat about The Hero with 1000 Faces, a classic book about story telling by Joseph Campbell, and we delve into how to integrate concepts of story telling into your products.

Kathryn Hume is the Vice President of Product & Strategy at integrate.ai. With Kathryn, we talk about a variety of AI and machine learning topics including some interesting uses of AI she has seen, like robotic prostate surgeons, we chat about integrating AI into existing product offerings, we touch on the implications machine learning has into our privacy, and we delve into what she loves about her favorite software product, Spotify