Product Collective - 🎧 Listen up, Product Managers

Best Product Podcasts of 2022

A wise person once said “Sometimes you have to listen in order to hear the words of wisdom. Being wise isn’t being the leader, it is being the observer.” We’re not sure exactly who said it, but chances are they were thinking of podcasts when they did. To get an idea of what we’re talking about, here are five podcast episodes from the past year that are packed with a bunch of product management wisdom.

Rocketship.fm - Taking Off with YCombinator. Since its founding in 2005, YCombinator has helped startups like Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash, and many others find success. In this episode, Rocketship.fm traces the accelerator’s history from its humble beginnings in Cambridge. Massachusetts all the way to where they are currently under new leader Garry Tan.

(via @RocketshipFM)

BUILD Podcast - Today’s job market with Katie Burke. Katie Burke has been Chief People Officer at HubSpot since 2017. She has helped the company grow to thousands of employees globally. In two separate podcast recordings, Katie outlines her top priorities in today’s uncertain macro environment — both for existing employees and for recruiting new talent.

(via @OpenViewVenture)

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Take one more look at 2023

This is the time of year where it’s pretty natural to start thinking of the year ahead. Well… the reality is that most of us have probably been doing that over these last couple of months. But sometimes, life changes fast… doesn’t it? Even if you’ve done what you should have been doing and have thought deeply about your 2023 planning well in advance, chances are there are so many new variables in play now. Whether it’s macro-economic conditions, internal changes, competitive moves… the world may look a little different now than it did two months ago. 

So guess what – it’s time to revisit those plans. 

The one thing I’ll encourage you to do in order to properly revisit those plans you’ve made is to step out of your bubble. Get out of the office. If the “office” is your kitchen island (like it is for me)... then get out of your house. Find an environment for the day where you can feel some inspiration. Go through that plan you and your team put together in great detail now once more, and start thinking about whether any recent developments changes the game for you.

Believe me, you won’t be the most popular person internally if you’re bringing up potential changes to the plan just a couple of weeks before everybody’s about to be OOO. But… in a couple of weeks… everybody’s about to be OOO. So there’s no better time to revisit the plan than right now. 

The worst-case scenario is this extra deep thought around your 2023 plan results in no change at all… and you’ve spent a few hours for nothing. Then again, that might actually be the best case scenario. In fact, this should be what we hope for. Because if that’s the case, we can especially feel great about the plan in front of us and start off 2023 on the right foot. 

So before the Holiday season takes us away from the office, consider dusting that 2023 plan off just one more time to review where things stand. It can’t hurt.

Let’s talk about OKRs—The Product Experience. In this episode of The Product Experience from Mind The Product, Lily Smith and Randy Silver take a trip down memory lane, diving deep into the best OKRs insights they’ve experienced from a range of product experts on the podcast including Storm Fagan, Todd Olson, Petra Wille, and more!

(via @MindtheProduct)

Building better product roadmaps. In this episode of Lenny’s Podcast, Lenny Rachitsky spoke with Janna Bastow. Janna is a former product manager, and currently the CEO and co-founder of ProdPad. She also co-founded Mind the Product, a community for PMs, which has grown to 300,000 members across the world. Janna discusses the limitations of timeline-based Gantt charts and her “Now/Next/Later” framework. She also shares stories about hosting conferences and gives some great tips on how to improve your presentation skills and cope with performance anxiety.

(via @lennysan)

Getting into the habit of continuous discovery with Teresa Torres.  In this episode of One Knight in Product, Jason Knight talks with Teresa Torres. Teresa is a product discovery coach who works with a variety of organizations to help bed in good product discovery practices. Her coaching experience led her to write a book on the same topic, which she hopes will inspire product teams around the world to build fast feedback loops and defeat stakeholder bias.

(via @onejasonknight)

How to utilize and track Product Management metrics and Voice of Customer data

Statistics and analytics will help you hone your product sense and justify your decisions to stakeholders. The right product metrics give us a read on the health of our product, help us identify strengths and weaknesses, track improvement over time, diagnose problems, etc. But how do we know what data we should be paying attention to? What are the metrics that actually matter?

Voice of Customer (VoC) is an important tool that helps you gauge your customer sentiments and their overall experience with your brand. You may assess how intuitive your product is and see if customers desire any other features. As a result, you’ll be able to not only further evolve your product, but also to test out new products or feature ideas in order to launch them with confidence.

But how can we gain the project team's participation in VOC, and the buy-in from leaders of the respective functions?

We'll answer these questions — as well as your own questions — in this discussion with Dustin Richardson, Senior Product Manager Embedded Analytics at insightsoftware.

This webinar is brought to you by our friends at insightsoftware.