Rocketship.fm

Teresa Torres helps digital product teams adopt continuous product discovery practices including a regular cadence of customer interviews, rapid prototyping, and assumption testing. She emphasizes strong critical thinking a strong connection between what the teams are learning in their research activities with the product decisions that they are making. Mike Belsito interviews her today to discuss how teams can begin practicing continuous discovery, how to get buy-in from management and why the best product teams are talking to their customers every week (if not every day). 

It seems like all we hear about today is disruption, disruption, disruption. Everybody is disrupting something -- from Transportation to Hospitality -- all anyone wants to do is blow everything up. So what is the difference between Disruption and Innovation?  Well, Disruptors are innovators, but not all innovators are disruptors. Disruption and Innovation are often different sides of the same coin. Today we explore how companies are approaching innovation and disruption in the Healthcare industry. We talk with Joshua Landry of Figure1 and Sasha Bhatia, the Director of Women’s College Hospital Institute for Health System Solutions and Virtual Care in Toronto.

Love isn’t rational. It doesn’t always make sense. But when love is in the air, nothing can come between you and a public tweet. Today we talk to people who’ve professed their love, publicly, for products they love. We discuss why they love the products they love, and what about these companies and brands gets them so excited. We dove into tech brands like Slack and Intercom as well as roll-on deodorant brand Phresh and personal fashion brand Stitch Fix. Huge thanks to our guests today: Lindsey Smith: https://twitter.com/LindseySmithHHC Jordi Romero: https://twitter.com/jordiromero Natalie Gerke: https://twitter.com/Ngerke Alys Gagnon: https://twitter.com/AlysJ

You may be tired of writing product stories and pitching product ideas that fall flat.  Here we break down how to tell compelling product stories by understanding the basic of storytelling itself.

We take a deep dive into how to prepare for and run better meetings, and some tricks to make sure that what was discussed at the meeting, actually gets done. We'll hear from Mamie Kanfer Stewart of Meeteor, Charlie O'Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, Cameron Herold the author of Meetings Suck and Brian Scudamore of 1-800-GOT-JUNK

Jobs to be done will change the way you think about a product. It will change the way you approach user personas and influence your product decision process. It is one of the most important developments in product thinking in our time, so today we're going to dive right in. In this episode we talk with Jeetu Patel of Box, Bob Moesta co-creator of the Jobs to be done framework, Benedikt Lehnert of Wunderlist (now Microsoft) and Eric White. The theory of jobs to be done was developed in part as a complement to the theory of disruptive innovation. But disruption theory doesn’t tell you how to create products and services that customers want to buy. Jobs to be done theory does. It transforms our understanding of customer choice in a way that no amount of data ever could, because it gets at the causal driver behind a purchase.

In the second and final episode of our look at Books.com, we discover what happens when Charlie Stack is faced with competition from Amazon.com and a multi-million dollar buy out offer on the table. We also learn more about what Charlie is up to currently and how the Books.com legacy has lived on.

The year was 1992. The location… Cleveland, Ohio. The birthplace of online commerce. That’s right. Cleveland Ohio. Not Silicon Valley, Not San Francisco. Not even Seattle Washington. This is the story of Books.com, the internet’s very first e-commerce store, its founder, Charlie Stack, a lawyer-turned-self taught software developer — and what happened when they created internet history… and later… faced a new entrant in Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com.

We talked with Arlan Hamilton, theFounder & Managing Partner of Backstage Capital. Backstage Capital has invested more than $2M in 50+ companies led by underrepresented founders.  Arlan is a venture capital fund manager, but she got her start publishing the internationally distributed indie magazine INTERLUDE, and toured extensively as a live music production professional, she enters the venture investing world from an unconventional path. Arlan is dedicated to minimizing funding disparities in tech by investing in high-potential founders who are of color, women, and/or LGBT.  We discuss diversity in tech, her story to becoming an unlikely VC and her advice for founders on how to stay focused and prioritize. 

Vidya Dinamani has a passion for coaching product leaders and teams. Vidya has over 18 years of experience specializing in business & technology strategy development and product design, development and management.

We talk with Seth Godin about his view of the 10,000 hour rule, his own concept behind achieving greatness, The Dip, and his personal journey to success.  After leaving Spinnaker in 1986, he used $20,000 in savings to found Seth Godin Productions, primarily a book packaging business, out of a studio apartment in New York City. He then met Mark Hurst and founded Yoyodyne. After a few years, Godin sold the book packaging business to his employees and focused his efforts on Yoyodyne, where he promoted the concept of permission marketing. Yoyodyne, launched in 1995, used contests, online games, and scavenger hunts to market companies to participating users. In August 1996, Flatiron Partners invested $4 million in Yoyodyne in return for a 20% stake. At Yoyodyne, Godin published Permission Marketing: Turning strangers into friends and friends into customers. In 1998, he sold Yoyodyne to Yahoo! for about $30 million and became Yahoo's vice president of direct marketing. In March 2006, Godin launched Squidoo. In July 2008, Squidoo was one of the 500 most visited sites in the world. Godin is the author of over 18 books. Free Prize Inside was a Forbes Business Book of the Year in 2004, while Purple Cow sold over 150,000 copies in more than 23 print runs in its first two years. The Dip was a Business Week and New York Times bestseller; Business Week also named Linchpin among its "20 of the best books by the most influential thinkers in business" on November 13, 2015. In the early 1990s, he curated a 10-book series for children titled Worlds of Power. Each of the book's plots is based on a video game.

Rachleff co-founded Benchmark Capital, a venture capital firm, in 1995. The firm invested in companies including eBay, OpenTable, Snapchat, Twitter and Uber. Rachleff personally led investments in Blue Coat Systems, Equinix and Juniper Networks.

Scott is a serial entrepreneur who has launched multiple technology product companies. He is the winner of the Ernst & Young Emerging Technology Entrepreneurs Of The Year 2016, and in this episode, Scott is sharing his experience around transforming companies internal product production processes. Dialexa is an internationally acclaimed technology and product development company, headquartered in Dallas, Texas. The company helps organizations, government agencies and businesses conceptualize, design, engineer, and launch innovative and high-quality products and solutions. 

Mistakes. We all make them. We all learn from them. From a food delivery startup who's users couldn't find their menu, to Amazon's redesign of Audible and even an emergency support system on 9/11, today we bring you mistakes Product Mangers made, and how, in some cases, they fixed them.  Stories from Melissa Perry, Alison Go Product Manger at Facebook and Blade Kotelly Leader of Experience Strategy at Sonos. 

Todd Olson is Founder and CEO of Pendo.io. Olson served as Vice President of Products at Rally Software Development Corp. where he lead the evolution of Rally's proven Agile ALM platform for enabling software and product-driven enterprises to deliver 50% faster to market.