Product Love

Product has always encompassed more than just design and engineering. It touches everything in an organization, including sales and customer success. We might not often hear much about the last two, but Duncan McCreery of MemberClicks has had the experience of the more customer-facing roles.    Today, he’s The Chief Experience Officer at MemberClicks. Before that, he was the Chief Product Officer, but even before that, he was the VP of Customer Success. But even way before that, he was an English teacher. He’s also had his hand in helping out at a potato farm. There’s no correlation between the latter and former, but it’s important to note Duncan’s breadth of talents here.  I kid. It’s safe to say that entering the world of software was a big change. But that obviously didn’t deter him, as he has dramatically scaled his career and transformed his company.    He started in the sales team at MemberClicks, and went through a self-discovery process where he developed a strong passion for the product. As he transitioned into customer success, he realized that there were more opportunities for product to do more, and get closer to their customers. While MemberClicks was a pretty nascent organization when it came to product management, Duncan transformed the organization, and helped rebuild their product.    This week on Product Love, I sat down with Duncan McCreery to talk about why product management at MemberClicks is much more entrepreneurial than most organizations, and we also talked about the intersection between product management and customer success.

  This week on Product Love, I talked to Jason Vandeboom, CEO and Founder of ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is an email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation and CRM software platform for small-to-mid-sized businesses.    Growing up, he always had a passion for building things. His entrepreneurial career started from finding jobs online where he could provide services like web design, custom solutions, or intranets. He even had a consulting job at a local internet agency. But unlike what you expected, he pursued fine arts in college. He admits it’s a weird blend, but the mix of science and art inevitably leads to product.    This week on Product Love, Jason and I talked about the freedom and limitations of bootstrapping, as well as making champions out of your customers.

This week on Product Love, I talked to Mada Seghete, cofounder of Branch.io, as well as Head of Strategy and Market Development. Branch.io is a mobile linking and attribution platform. Mada created Branch as a solution to solve her issues with mobile. In the past, she noticed that there were issues with tracking the mobile experience. When an app opens, there weren’t many ways to figure out where that user had come from, what they were doing next, so developers couldn’t customize their customer experience. The core of Branch is to combat that, by building a link to understand where users are coming from and what their experiences in-app reflected.  This week on Product Love, we talked about how companies can drive mobile growth and virality.

  This week on Product Love, I sat down with Oji Udezue, VP of Product at Calendly. Before Calendly, he was the Head of Product at Atlassian. While Oji and I joked a lot about the enigmatic 10x product manager that came from Twitter memes, he also expressed how the role has gotten a bit mysterious.  We also discussed the human side of building software, and how to optimize customer calls. 

This week on Product Love, I sat down with Benjamin Earl Evans, inclusive design lead at AirBnB. In this episode, Ben discusses the importance of inclusive design, and the three types of bias that product managers tend to fall victim to.

In the past, when people heard the phrase “artificial intelligence”, they probably thought three things: robots, destruction, and the impending end of humankind. Nowadays, artificial intelligence has graduated to something more sophisticated and much less deprecating like self-driving cars, Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri.  But there are wary feelings of replacement that are still associated with it. If AI automates everything, what happens to everyone else? Deon Nicholas thinks differently. Instead, he asks us to think of AI as augmentation instead. This week on Product Love, I sat down with Deon, the CEO of Forethought to discuss AI, and his perspective on increasing product-market fit.

These days, it is unbelievable how easy it is to be distracted. Think about it. We have a nearly Pavlovian response to every Slack notification or every text message, or we’re attached to the “endless scroll” that social media platforms have now adopted. These products are so entwined with our daily habits, because they know how to hook you. In 2014, Nir Eyal released a book called “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products” which essentially became every product person’s go-to book. He had researched a framework that would help anyone create products that would influence users. These days, he has a new book called “Indistractable” which focuses on how to avoid distractions from technology. The two might seem like they contradict each other, but they actually complement each other. This week on Product Love, I sat down with Nir Eyal to discuss his new book, what new technology means, and how to actually conduct good meetings. 

Bootstrapping. Pricing. Freemium. Three words that incite fear in most product-minded people. But don’t close your tab just yet. This week on Product Love, I sat down with Patrick Campbell, who has managed to turn those three things into a pretty successful company called Profitwell. Profitwell is a company out of Boston that helps subscription companies achieve faster recurring revenue growth, by optimizing their pricing or helping them avoid churn. In this week’s episode, Patrick shares what he’s learned in the past about bootstrapping, the ingredients to a winning pricing page, and he breaks down some freemium myths. 

Lewis Lin is a well-known product management author and career coach. He's written about acing PM interviews, getting into top tech companies, and his latest book is all about scaling your PM career.  Lin reveals the ESTEEM Method™: six magical competencies to move ahead in your PM career. He explains why they’re the most critical competencies and provides specific tips and tactics on what you could do to demonstrate your capabilities.

Product managers and business leaders often wax poetic about how they want to change the world with their products or ideas. It’s natural. As product managers, your mission is to obsess over a problem, and find a unique solution that impacts your customers. But how much of that impact are you responsible for? Radhika Dutt believes that you’re responsible for a lot more than you think.

Jeetu Patel has run every function of the business in his career. He’s done his stint in marketing, engineering, sales, and now, product. But the one thing in business that has fascinated him the most has been scale. Early in Jeetu’s career, he’d travel a lot and was constantly amazed to see certain companies that were famous in the United States, have the same level of recognition and impact in a completely different company. It inspired him to learn the global nature of the business, and how a company can transform its’ reach. This fascination led him to Box, a cloud content management company where he is currently the Chief Product Officer and Chief Strategy Officer. Box was essentially the same product that served 3 employees to 400,000 employees and 14 million customers. Having a product unique enough to span that incredible spectrum is a huge challenge for any product manager. All of those segments have different requirements, so how do you even begin to adjust those? It’s a great intellectual challenge to have, and one of the most rewarding ones in his career. This week on Product Love, I sat down with Jeetu Patel, to discuss important metrics, and how to build an effective product team.

There are a lot of different facets to product. From UX design to engineering to development, Melissa Perri has had a stint in them all. When you look at product with those three different approaches, you come up with a foundation on how to work with these teams. Melissa believes that you get a holistic systems approach to product management, and can evaluate the product for its’ feasibility, usability, pricing, and more. She’s had over a decade of product experience, and now she’s currently the CEO and Founder of ProduxLabs. ProduxLabs helps companies grow and transform their product management organizations. Other than helping companies scale their product orgs, Melissa is also the founder of the online school, The Product Institute. This week on Product Love, Melissa and I discuss how companies are undergoing product transformations, how PMs can better utilize data, and how PMs can better scale their career.

Manish Patel joins Product Love to talk about communication as the key trait for all product managers. The core of product management is spreading influence, so communication must be the key tool to drive that. Despite all the demand for technical product managers or domain expertise, Manish still believes soft skills are the best to develop.

Supriya is a product technology executive with 20 years of experience at Amazon.com, Booking Holdings and stints at several startups including Zynga and Pro.com. She was with Amazon.com in Seattle for over a decade focusing on the core customer experience on a variety of products including retail, social and Kindle. Her last role at Amazon.com was the technical advisor to the Sr. Vice President of Amazon devices. Supriya was also the Chief Product Officer of Booking Go from 2016-2018, responsible for the product transformation of the company from a car rental product to becoming the ground transportation division for Booking.com. Supriya is a guest speaker at Insead Business School and is currently the CEO of Accelerate Product, based in London where she advises companies on their product strategy, execution and digital transformation.

In this week's episode, Sachin Rekhi dives deep into every aspect of product management. He discusses the roles inside product management as well as hiring. Sachin also brings up the case-study question that uses when he's trying to look for great product managements. Check out the rest of this episode to learn about all the gems he's picked up during his 20-year career.