Behind The Product

Christian Idiodi, Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, has worked on 205 products throughout his career and has learned a thing or two about modern product management. He joins us to share how he equips product leaders and gives them a framework for leading within their organizations.

Christian emphasizes the importance of understanding the why, not just the what, behind ideas and problems that need to be solved. He shares how product managers can build trust within their organizations and with customers, allowing them to drive change and build great products.

You can find more information about this podcast at sep.com/podcast and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

We're doing something a little different for this episode - giving you a peek behind the scenes at SEP. We asked three of our peers at SEP (SEPeers, if you will) to share their perspectives on how we approach sales at SEP. Spoiler alert: we're a little non-traditional!

• Mike Mumau, VP of Customer Experience
• Raman Ohri, President & CEO
• Maddie Beadle, Business Operations Analyst

Transitioning from a decades-old manual processes to a modern, digital process is no small feat, but that's the job Tracey Kantrud and Katelyn Renner, Product Managers at FBS, are tackling.

In this conversation, Tracey and Katelyn explain the way they gradually introduce product changes to customers to minimize disruption to users while continuing to evolve the product. They share how they align on organizational priorities and simplify decision making with opportunity solution trees. They also address the challenges of customization, legacy features, and evaluating trade-offs.

You can find more information about this podcast at sep.com/podcast and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

Ego is a product-killer. It's what keeps us from empathizing with users and building the right thing. It doesn't always start from a place of selfish intentions, but if we don't keep ourselves in check, we can quickly slip away from creating products that benefit users.

Tony Poon, Chief Product Officer at R-Zero, joins the show to share how he battles his own ego in product leadership. We discuss balancing intuition and data-driven decisions, the challenge of product management in a new market, and the importance of listening well.

You can find more information about this podcast at sep.com/podcast and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

Innovation is a skill you can learn, according to author, speaker, and thought leader Bob Moesta.

Bob joins the show to share some of the tools, philosophies, and practices he's developed by working on 3,500 products throughout his career. He emphasizes the impact of his many mentors, the multiple hats we need to wear as product developers, and the danger of relying on luck. Through it all, he explains that his ultimate goal is to help people make progress in their own lives.

Bob also shares about his new book, Learning to Build, which helps innovators and entrepreneurs round out their portfolio of product thinking skills.

You can find more information about this podcast at sep.com/podcast and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

We recently attended the Agile2022 conference put on by the Agile Alliance and wanted to share our conversations with a few of the speakers and attendees. This episode is a conversation with Josh Kerviesky, a long-time Agile practitioner and speaker, and Chris Shinkle, SEP’s Director of Innovation. We sat down with Josh prior to his keynote at the conference to talk about his journey in the Agile community and software product development world.

Note: The audio for this is not our normal in studio quality, so thanks for bearing with us.

You can find more information about this podcast at sep.com/podcast and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

We recently attended the Agile2022 conference put on by the Agile Alliance and wanted to share our conversations with a few of the speakers and attendees. This episode is a conversation with Dan Vacanti, an author and speaker in the product development world, and Chris Shinkle, SEP’s Director of Innovation. We asked Dan some follow-up questions to expand on his talk from earlier in the conference.

To illustrate how we interpret data, Dan used a story about Wilt Chamberlin’s record breaking total points in a single basketball game. Dan emphasizes that all data have noise and it's easy to mistake noise for signal.

Note: The audio for this is not our normal in studio quality, so thanks for bearing with us.

You can find more information about this podcast at sep.com/podcast and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

It's no secret that recruiting, especially in today's market, is tough. But Mike Seidle, Co-Founder and CTO of Indianapolis-based company PivotCX, believes that only 10% of recruiting is about finding people, and the other 90% is about screening.

In this episode, Mike shares how his team combines tech and human touch to dramatically reduce time to hire and onboard new employees. He sheds light on the recruiting process and shares tips you can apply to your hiring strategy.

We also discuss how customer feedback in a challenging time led Mike to re-imagine his business and turn it into what it is today.

You can find more information about this podcast at sep.com/podcast and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

The tension we feel between generations is much deeper than Millennials versus Gen Z or Gen X versus Boomers. The difference between us actually boils down to developmental psychology.

Speaker, trainer, and coach Lindsay Boccardo joins the show to shed light on the causes of generational divides and shares how we can navigate them well as individuals and organizations. She explains the influence of developmental stages on what matters most to people, the importance of investing in leaders' emotional intelligence, and how internal leadership programs can prepare companies for future success.

You can find more information about this podcast at sep.com/podcast and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

With multiple successful startups under his belt, Abhishek Nayak has learned a lot about finding product/market fit, defining a niche, and, most importantly, simplicity. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Appsmith, an open source project that helps organizations build and maintain custom internal tools. The heartbeat of this product? Ease of use.

On this episode, Abhishek shares the challenges he's faced while pursuing simplicity in scaling products. We discuss the importance of understanding your customers, what B2B products can learn from B2C products, and the biggest reasons products fail.

You can find more information about this podcast at sep.com/podcast and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!