One Knight in Product
Dec 12, 2020
Technical Product Management & the importance of mentorship (with Mark Yamashita, Technical PM @ Sensibill)
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An interview with Mark Yamashita, Technical Product Director at Sensibill, a fintech company that means you never have to worry about expense forms again. Mark moved into Product Management from working on supercomputers and compilers, via an MBA. We talk about how technical PMs should keep away from solutioneering, how education & mentoring are so important for PMs, as well as why "Singin' in the Rain" is basically the Lean Startup. Catch up with Mark here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-yamashita/
More episodes from One Knight in Product
8 hours ago
Your Product is a Joke - How to use Improv Comedy Principles in Product Management (with Amogh Sarda, Co-founder @ Eesel)
About the Episode
An interview with Amogh Sarda. Amogh is a former Atlassian and Intercom product manager turned company founder with Eesel, a company that aims to take the pain away from managing your documents. He's also a keen improv comedian, and believes there are similarities between how you create an improv skit and how you make a winning product.
We speak about a lot, including:
* The story behind founding Eesel, how they're trying to make finding your own documents as easy as finding President Obama's shoe size, and whether they can save us from Slack thread hell
* The pros & cons of starting a company with a founder who lives 10 hours' time difference away, and how to make it work for you
* The jump from big structured product company to startup life, how you have to identify your ground truths as well as accept the layers of uncertainty that will evolve as you go and making sure you don't change everything all the time
* How you should bring nuance to product principles, what this means and why sometimes it's worth spending some time in the solution space and working back to the problems
* His love of improv comedy, how he got into it, and how it maps to product management practices more than you might think:
* The base reality - working out where you're at and the unarguable truths of your situation
* The game - the key insights or ways that you can affect the base reality
* The funny scene / a great product - executing and bringing it all home
* The importance of keeping it simple, not getting sidetracked or going after everything you could
And much more! A brief interruption from my sponsor - me!
I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, you can buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway! Contact Amogh
You can find Amogh on Twitter or check his blog, The Paperclip.
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4 days ago
Diving into the Deep End as a Woman in Product (with Darby Maloney, Product Manager @ Divvy & Occasional Swimming Pool User)
An interview with Darby Maloney. Darby is a product manager and an avid TikToker who made an innocuous video about product management for her non tech friends and was all of a sudden centre stage for tech bros across TikTok and Twitter, getting criticised for being a woman in tech, for being a woman in a pool, for being a product manager and just about everything else.
We talk about a lot, including:
* How she made the move into product management from customer support, got that tricky first product management job by putting extra hours in on top of her day job, and the importance of finding good mentors to help you along the way
* The story behind that video, why she was making a video about product management with a laptop in a swimming pool in the first place, and whether she stands behind her (and her colleague's) description of product management
* The three main types of criticism she got after the video went viral, how much of that was about her being a woman, how much was about her being a product manager and the crass double standards it exposed
* The effect of the abuse on her mental & emotional state, and how she started to worry about her job and the credibility that she had to work so hard for
* How young women in general have to work extra hard, in a way that young men don't tend to have to do, to prove that they're intelligent, reliable and good at their job
* How she tried to give due credit to engineers & designers for doing the "impressive" work and it why it was disappointing to be attacked in return
* The supportive comments that she got after the hate, how much this meant to her and how some people got in touch to admit wrongdoing and that they'd changed their minds
* Whether she's going to double down on tech videos in future, and if she does whether she'll do the next ones in a serious looking room with lots of books behind her
And much more!
A brief interruption from my sponsor - me!
I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway! The infamous swimming pool video and the rebuttals
Here's the original video that started it all off.
The swimming pool video
Darby also posted two follow up videos:
Rebuttal 1 Rebuttal 2 Contact Darby
You can find Darby on TikTok or Instagram.
We're also trying to get her to spend more time on Twitter!
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Jun 19, 2022
Mapping your Way to B2B Product Success (with Daniel Elizalde, author ”The B2B Innovator’s Map”)
An interview with Daniel Elizalde. Daniel is a Product Advisor to ClimateTech product teams and long time IoT guru. He's also recently decided to tackle some of the problems B2B product managers have getting their ideas to market. He's tackling this with his own podcast as well as new book "The B2B Innovator's Map".
We speak about a lot, including:
* Why he decided to write his new book now, and how he tried to make it actionable and fresh with numerous real world examples from his own career and long experience consulting with B2B firms
* How the vast majority of B2B innovations fail, how his book aims to offer a solution to this and give a process to enable B2B product leaders to get from zero to their first ten customers (and who those ten customers should be)
* How his experience in Climate Tech has helped him come up with recommendations on how to frame seemingly esoteric B2B products in ways that resonate with those customers' real problems and drawing a line back to real world ROI
* The six stages of the B2B Innovators' Map (Strategic Alignment, Market Discovery, User Discovery, Solution Planning, Prototyping, Early Adopters), what they involve and when to double back
* The importance of cutting your losses with Early Adopters, and not succumbing to the temptation to do absolutely anything to keep a customer on board if you've proved it doesn't make sense for you in the wider context of your product
* The risks of coming to the end of the process with a niche product for a limited audience, and how to make sure that the things you're building are made generic for an entire market
* What comes after the B2B Innovator's Map and the importance of aligning next steps with your leadership team to take your learnings to the big time
And much more! Buy "The B2B Innovator's Map" "Most new enterprise software products fail to generate a profit. They fail not because of technical challenges, lack of funding, or market conditions. Instead, new products fail because most companies build products that don’t satisfy a market need, so customers don’t buy them. The B2B Innovator’s Map is your practical guide to taming uncertainty and discovering opportunities to develop products your customers will be eager to buy."
Visit The Book Website for more info. Contact Daniel
You can find Daniel on LinkedIn or DanielElizalde.com.
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