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Learn from some of the best product managers in the world through conversations hosted by The Product Management Center at the University of Washington. In each episode, Jeff Shulman, Red Russak, and Soumeya Benghanem dive into the tools, frameworks, and thought processes that will help drive success in product management.
Episodes
Wednesday Feb 15, 2023
74: Startup Founder vs. Startup PM vs. Corporate PM
Wednesday Feb 15, 2023
Wednesday Feb 15, 2023
In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board member Soumeya Benghanem welcome Garrett Gross (Xemelgo) and JC Landivar (True Tickets) as they discuss the difference between being a startup founder and startup PMs and also corporate PMs. What makes startup founders unique and how can PMs transition to being a founder? Let’s find out more from our panelists today!
Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 06:15 Being a startup founder
- 09:46 What makes a startup founder unique?
- 11:40 From PM to founder
- 13:38 Influence without authority
- 15:17 Become a founder vs. become a product manager
- 24:41 What makes a startup PM?
- 32:12 Final thoughts
Wednesday Feb 08, 2023
Best of 2021: The Different Styles of Decision-Making
Wednesday Feb 08, 2023
Wednesday Feb 08, 2023
In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Adam Grupp (Woodhaven Advisors), Greg Young (Collectors Universe), Sumathi Kadambi (Zillow), Marily Nika (Meta), and Sumantro Das (Mattress Firm) as they discuss the importance of decision making in the success of any project. The panel of experts, known and respected in their respective expertise, share valuable tips and insights on what it takes to come up with the right decision.
Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 01:03 The different styles of decision-making
- 03:44 “Understand the right process and structure to use to frame up decisions.”
- 05:37 “The expensive and scary are the ones where it's a long-term commitment you can’t change so easily.”
- 08:05 The cost of failing to make a decision and the fear of decision-making.
- 12:17 “Create your own metrics for your own product.”
- 14:57 What’s your bold thought on decision-making?
- 16:37 Is data just confirming what you already know or do you have some wild changes based off of it?
- 20:02 Half of PM decisions are decisions they’re not even conscious of
- 21:26 Build an ecosystem of experts within the company to help make decisions
- 24:24 Favorite decision-making matrix regularly used
- 27:01 Go-to method for sourcing new ideas or iterating mature and new products
- 34:23 Oftentimes, the best ideas come from unexpected places
- 37:15 Take what makes you successful but apply it in new places that can help make big changes
- 39:05 Be very clear on how everyone makes decisions
- 43:09 Decision-making takes time to build confidence on and to build the tool set
- 44:27 Some things are hard to let go but maybe they're not where our future is
Wednesday Feb 01, 2023
73: ABCs of Platform Product Management
Wednesday Feb 01, 2023
Wednesday Feb 01, 2023
In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board member Soumeya Benghanem welcomes Arjun Subramanian as they discuss platform product management. This is one of the most challenging roles in product management as they are the ones who have to work closely with the engineering team to ensure that the product is well-maintained. For those PMs who are interested in this role, in order to be successful in this field, you need not only to understand the core technologies but be able to look at the long-term scalability of the product.
Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 03:42 What is a platform product?
- 07:42 Platform as a channel of delivery
- 12:05 Building a platform too late
- 16:09 Platform economics
- 17:48 Metrics of success for platform
- 21:47 Measuring cost savings
- 25:05 Mean time to recovery
- 26:39 Funding the platform team
- 29:38 Who can be a platform product manager?
- 34:22 Platform PMs need to be more technical
- 36:50 Edutainment
- 38:25 Advice for PMs stitching technologies together into a single platform
- 42:21 Building a unified user experience
- 44:27 Final thoughts
Wednesday Jan 25, 2023
72: Product Managing Internal Tools
Wednesday Jan 25, 2023
Wednesday Jan 25, 2023
In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Charles Stewart (Autodesk) and Dimple Singhania (Walmart) as they discuss product managing internal tools. PMs should know about the internal tools that companies use to help automate workflows, store data information for security, and connect the different organizations in a company like marketing or finance.
Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 09:42 Measuring success when building an internal tool
- 11:25 Associate satisfaction
- 12:38 Building a common language for people to use
- 14:05 Think about the employee experience
- 16:18 Take into account the consistency of human behavior
- 18:28 Communication channels for PMs
- 22:03 Creating a tool that works for the entire enterprise
- 24:19 Taking a product market mindset to internal tools
- 26:08 Build vs. buy
- 32:09 Competitive advantage in terms of build vs. buy
- 34:15 Compatibility with your own already built or bought tools
- 38:45 Product shift
- 42:23 Pushing forward with the modernization approach
- 45:52 The friction unique to internal tools
- 48:37 Final thoughts
Wednesday Jan 18, 2023
71: Making Customer Obsession a Cross-Functional Practice
Wednesday Jan 18, 2023
Wednesday Jan 18, 2023
In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman welcomes Darlene Miranda (DailyPay) as they discuss how to make customer obsession as a cross-functional practice. PMs gather data from their customers to help in product improvement and development, but how can a PM let everyone in the organization join this customer obsession?
Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 03:28 Customer obsession
- 04:55 How customer obsessed are you?
- 06:35 When PMs don’t do enough to make a customer obsession a cross-functional
- 08:08 Being obsessed with two different types of customers
- 10:20 Engineering in customer obsession
- 13:38 Marketing
- 15:16 Customer obsession from the support function
- 17:17 Tools and frameworks
- 21:05 The role of customer support
- 23:52 What is unique about customer obsession?
- 26:10 An organization that will help you become customer obsessed
- 28:05 Cross-functional practice in the early stages of a startup
- 31:22 How to know if a company is customer obsessed
- 33:58 Operations functions to maintain customer obsession
- 36:14 Security and fraud
- 38:48 Resources for making customer obsession a cross-functional practice
- 40:55 Final thoughts
Wednesday Jan 11, 2023
Best of 2021: Build Your Product Management Career Around Empathy
Wednesday Jan 11, 2023
Wednesday Jan 11, 2023
In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Kevin Shah (T-Mobile) and Lisa Huang-North (Microsoft) to discuss why product managers need empathy when communicating with customers and while building their career, as well as finding the balance between being empathetic and product success.
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 03:53 Empathy also matters in how you manage your career
- 07:36 Do you understand where you are in your personal journey?
- 10:13 We suffer from survivor bias
- 13:33 The lack of empathy to certain stakeholders or groups can show up in the execution
- 16:12 Don’t focus on the persona and characteristics, focus on the needs and problems
- 22:15 Data communication depends on the channels already established
- 24:48 What’s important to users vs what’s important to the company
- 27:16 Try to understand where the misalignment is happening
- 28:06 Come back to the pain points you’re trying to address
- 31:03 Feeling empowered and having an authentic PM mindset
- 34:10 An executive does not understand the customers as well as the PMs do
- 38:53 Myth: “I’m not a great sales person and that’s why I think I’ll be a great PM.”
- 43:02 Best relationship between sales and products are centered around culture
- 44:56 Product managers are artists and creators
- 49:19 Logically group your community and dedicate different efforts on each segment
- 56:17 Empathy is your superpower
- 57:49 Recommended resources for PMs to get better at being empathetic
- 01:01:16 Drawing a balance between empathy and profitability
- 01:04:23 Product management is a contact sport and also a team sport
- 01:09:45 Own the job and be resolute with your standards
- 01:11:34 You don’t have to love something, but you have to be really curious about it
Wednesday Jan 04, 2023
Best of 2021: Transitioning from an Individual Contributor to a Manager
Wednesday Jan 04, 2023
Wednesday Jan 04, 2023
In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Poorvi Shrivastav (HubSpot) to talk about how to smoothly transition from being an individual contributor to a leadership role. Aside from the tips and guides one can learn and practice while in transition, never lose focus on putting people first.
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 01:29 Transition from an individual contributor (IC) to Manager
- 07:43 Who directly reports to you?
- 08:51 The biggest transition from being an IC to a manager
- 11:02 3 things you need to succeed in the management role
- 16:20 Be very clear about the credit that belongs to you
- 20:13 Tips on how to transition in your first few days
- 25:29 Focus on outcome, but think about the process too
- 31:11 How to ace an interview for a leadership role
- 41:20 When you start leading a team that you are part of
- 47:38 How do you manage delegation?
- 50:00 Transition from an IC to management course
- 52:02 Focus on people first
Wednesday Dec 28, 2022
Best of 2021: Finding Clarity and Creating Alignment
Wednesday Dec 28, 2022
Wednesday Dec 28, 2022
In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Josh Haftel (Adobe) and Ben Waddle (Expedia) to talk about creating a product out of an idea by breaking it down into smaller, more manageable ones for a faster turn around and quickly get customer feedback, and how product managers need to work with their team instead of managing it.
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 01:10 A PMs job is finding clarity and then creating alignment
- 06:35 The Discovery and Framing framework
- 09:58 Always start at the fundamentals
- 15:01 Take the big things down and break them down
- 17:47 Fail quickly then go into future iterations
- 19:53 What kind of experimentation should you be doing?
- 25:31 Pick a problem that you might have some passion for
- 28:12 Come up with hypotheses about why something's going to work versus why it's not going to work
- 30:39 Look for skills that your team currently don’t have
- 33:34 Understand who you need to influence and tailor your work products accordingly
- 38:38 Start with what outcomes matter to the audience you’re speaking to
- 42:52 The fastest way to get something into the hands of the customers
- 45:30 Break down big assumptions into smaller ones
- 50:23 Partner with your team to arrive at the best solution
- 52:55 As a product manager, you don’t manage anybody
Wednesday Dec 21, 2022
70: Best Practices During Discovery
Wednesday Dec 21, 2022
Wednesday Dec 21, 2022
In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Charles Wartemberg (Netflix) and Pamela Fleury (Harvard) as they discuss the best practices during discovery. Gathering feedback and data from customers is very important in managing products so a good PM should be able to know how to get this data and implement it for product improvement.
Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 06:31 How much time to spend on discovery?
- 10:30 Recommended resource about discovery work
- 15:16 The alignment and getting everyone on the same page
- 18:27 Leveraging product sense
- 21:03 What does discovery look like in a lot of customer environments?
- 22:52 Truly understanding the why versus seeing how the market responds
- 33:59 A product inside a product
- 40:30 Product marketing team working with the overall marketing team
- 44:54 Career in product management
- 53:56 Final thoughts
Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
69: How Human-Centered Design & Engineering Can Help Product Managers Succeed
Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Julie Seto (Microsoft) and Aneesha Kommineni (Google) as they discuss how human-centered design and engineering can help PMs. Learning more about HCDE is one of the important skills a good PM should have because it lets PMs better understand what the people need and help make a more efficient design.
Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
What to Listen For:
- 00:00 Intro
- 06:31 How is HCDE related to other concepts
- 08:15 Similarities and differences
- 11:17 Tips for hiring people who have different biases
- 13:21 Combine different research methodologies
- 15:06 Design culturally neutral experiences
- 15:55 Why is human centered design important to learn?
- 19:20 The use of HCDE in your job
- 25:33 Tension between human centered design and business objectives
- 30:02 Differences in applying HCDE in a B2B vs B2C product
- 37:50 Considering geographical and cultural aspects while designing the product in enterprise
- 41:50 Resource or bootcamp recommendations
- 44:44 When someone says no about your human centered design feature
- 47:52 Universal design vs human centered design
- 49:06 Final thoughts