Product Love

Dan Smoker joins Product Love to talk about product in the B2B and B2C space by Eric Boduch

Jason Mueller joins Product Love to talk about product ops and communication by Eric Boduch

Darren Chait joins Product Love to talk about self-service and culture by Eric Boduch

Gerard Fitzgerald joins Product Love to talk about product design by Eric Boduch

Jake Sorofman joins Product Love to talk about the 2020 State of Product Leadership by Eric Boduch

Rahul Vohra joins Product Love to talk about product-market fit and positioning by Eric Boduch

Brandon Chu joins Product Love to talk about entrepreneurship and building teams by Eric Boduch

You probably have seen the name “Brandon Chu” floating around PM-side of the internet, if you’re an avid reader. He’s the creator of the Black Box of Product Management, a site that “shines the light on the PM discipline.” There are tons of amazing frameworks and articles on making good decisions or just growing in your craft. That’s why I had to have him on the podcast. Brandon goes into detail about what it was like to shape the product organization -- even amidst skepticism about what product managers exactly do (a PM’s favorite question). What defined success for product managers? How could they help their teams when the ratio to developers looked like 1:100? What steps did he take to figure out the team’s mandate? How could he evangelize product within an engineering-centric organization? Brandon says it best, when he says that his own story of growth is the story of growth of product management at Shopify.

Thomas "Tido" Carriero joins Product Love to talk about finding product market fit more than once and uniting teams by Eric Boduch

This week on Product Love, I sat down with Daniel Mintz, the chief data evangelist at Looker, a data exploration and discovery business intelligence platform. Daniel studied music and politics as an undergrad and later pursued his Master’s in multimedia engineering. He’s worked as the head of data and analytics at Upworthy and as a director of analytics at MoveOn.org.  His love for data started with learning SQL. But if you’re curious about how he got the chief data evangelist role at Looker, listen to the episode above. We talked about data lakes, metrics that matter, and why “why?” is so important for PMs. 

I asked Scott Belsky the age-old product cliché — is product management a science or an art? His answer was that it’s clearly both. Sure, product management has scientific themes — there’s the experimentation, testing, and data. But it also calls on some things that are more qualitative, like empathy for the user and the creativity necessary to stay competitive.   Before he was the chief product officer at Adobe, he was the CEO and founder of Behance, a platform that allows creatives to share their portfolios. He also had a brief stint as an entrepreneur and investor, and wrote two books: Making Ideas Happen, and The Messy Middle.   This week on Product Love, Scott and I talked about the science and art of product management.

This week on Product Love, I talked to Tatyana Mamut, the Head of Product at Nextdoor. Nextdoor is a social networking site for neighborhoods. Before that, she advised and consulted in the blockchain space for a year. She’s led the product team at Amazon Web services, Salesforce, and has even led a bunch of innovation products at IDEO. But her resume doesn’t stop there, she also has her PhD in economic and cultural anthropology. On this episode of Product Love, Tatyana and I talked about building a team, evangelizing for customers, and the impact of a wildly successful product.

This week on Product Love, I talked to Christian Idiodi, a partner at Silicon Valley Partner Group. Silicon Valley Partner Group was created to share senior level experience and best practices with technology companies. At SVPG, Christian stays engaged with the product community by mentorship. He works closely with two student-led startups every year.  Like most people, Christian stumbled into product management unintentionally.  When he worked at CareerBuilder, he won an annual competition where individuals could submit their entrepreneurial ideas. If they won, they could get funding and time to work on it. Spoiler: He won the competition. So what does he do with a massive check and a responsibility to run a business? In some ways, product management probably called out to him first.  To this day, he's been a product leader for over 15 years and has launched over 120 products.  On this week’s episode, we talked about customer-centric product managers, and his favorite interview question.

This week on Product Love, I talked to Marty Duffy, VP of Product at G2Crowd. G2Crowd is is the world’s largest tech marketplace where businesses can discover, review, and manage the technology they need to reach their potential.  Marty says that he’s a generalist by nature. His strongest suit has always been leadership and problem-solving. The latter naturally drew him to product. Product management has always been a magnet for people who thrived in solving problems.  This week on Product Love, we talked about how Marty hires product managers at G2 (he even provides a homework example!), and how he builds a thriving environment.

This week on Product Love, I caught up with Jay Brewer, the VP of Experience Design at Rapid7. Jay shares what experience design entails in the security space, and how product managers can optimize from learning about experience design. He also shares how working in video games has benefitted his sense of product thinking.