Build with Maggie Crowley

In this one Pratima Arora, Head of Product at Confluence, discussed how she scaled two product teams - one for Salesforce and one for Atlassian, bringing genuine diversity to her teams at both companies in the process.

The most important thing we can all do as product people is also something that most of us continue to fail at: talking to customers.

Getting customer feedback is an example of something that’s simple, but not easy. It’s incredible that talking to customers and getting feedback is the one thing that we all know is the key to building great products—but apparently we don’t all do it.

Luckily, there’s a way to massively increase the amount of feedback that you’re getting if you open up your definition of ‘customer feedback’ and instead focus on, ‘How can I talk to my customers more often?’”

On Twitter @maggiecrowley and @seekingwisomio

In this one, Maggie shares a recent Tweet that got her the most impressions she’s ever had—and her first internet troll.

It went something like this:

“Stop wasting time talking about tools and backlogs. It doesn’t matter. Go talk to your sales team, figure out what hurdles they’re running into, and solve for them.”

Listen in to hear why this struck such a nerve in the product community.

On Twitter @maggiecrowley and @seekingwisomio

Every employee wants to feel like they’re a part of a truly autonomous team. A team where they’re a part of the decision making process. A team where their voice matters. Where their opinions can make a difference.

Maybe you’ve never been a part of a team like this. Or maybe you’ve only been a part of teams like this.

Regardless, autonomy is something that everybody wants. But what does it look like in the real world?

What do you do about failure?

I’m not talking about a test that you took that failed. I’m talking about true product failures. Products that, for whatever reason, just bombed.

Failures far outside the acceptable scope of “fail fast.”

Experience and a fancy degree can only get you so far. 

 

If you've listened to Drifts founder and CEO David Cancel on Seeking Wisdom, you've probably caught that he doesn't exactly love hiring product managers with experience and those with their MBAs. They don't give you the right to tell people what to do; all they can do is help you get your foot in the door (he says).

 

But that's where Maggie breaks the mold. Maggie is a Product Manager at Drift, has her MBA from Harvard Business School -- and oh yeah -- she's a former Olympian. And now she's the newest host on Seeking Wisdom. 

 

And in this first episode of #build, she explains everything she's learned from DC and the Drift team about how to build better and faster. 

 

Follow Maggie on Twitter at @maggiecrowley.

On this episode of Build, Maggie sits down with Brittany Davis and Bryan Landers from Backstage Capital. Maggie's been in product for a while, and one thing she hears over and over from her peers is that they want to start their own project. So she decided to bring in Brittany and Bryan – two VC pros who are actually out there evaluating and funding startups – to see what their advice is on what makes for a good startup.

What does good look like for a product veteran? In this episode, Maggie taps Lesley Mottla (former product leader at Microsoft, Zipcar, M.Gemi, and others) to find out. Lesley talks about how to get the mix right between qualitative and quantitative data, the importance of building relationships, the path that's now opened up to product pros, and what she's learned along the way in her product career.

A lot of companies treat onboarding as something that they set and forget (or they treat as a project instead of a team). Slack? Not so much. From the day the company launched, Slack put a big investment into onboarding to help their customers get into the product and understand it quickly. So in this episode of Build, Maggie talks to Fareed Mosavat (Director of Product at Slack) to learn about Slack's approach to onboarding and how it's evolved over time.

Maggie is not a fan of backlogs. So in this episode, she talks about what's wrong with working off backlog and feature-based roadmaps. Not convinced? Don’t worry. Maggie walks you through the top five most common objections to this approach – and tells you what it’s really like to work without a traditional backlog.