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 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.

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?

Pluralsight's Nate Walkingshaw literally wrote the book on product leadership. On this episode of Build, Nate dives into the importance of empathy in product and how his own background as an EMT helped him build more empathetic, more intuitive products. Plus, Nate shares his framework for the "product heart" – all of the key elements for what a healthy product should look like.

In this episode:

00:35 - Nate’s journey from EMT to Chief Experience Officer (CXO) at Pluralsight

1:48 - Inventing products to solve EMT problem

3:25 - Nate’s work at Stryker

4:09 - The transition from hardware to software development

4:45 - Nate’s work at Strava

6:20 - Launching Strava’s first commerce based app

6:47 - Nate’s work as Head of Tanner Labs at O.C. Tanner

8:00 - The Mission of Pluralsight: Democratizing Technology Skills

8:30 - Joining Pluralsight

9:45 - How to develop a great product that impacts people

10:27 - Why “why” matters

11:25 - Direct Discovery: Mission, Vision and , & The Client

12:17 - Hearing the voice of the customer

12:50 - Customer Preference Testing (CPT) & Customer Confirmation Testing (CCT)

14:40 - Merely sSolving problems vs. creating meaningful outcomes

16:22 - Leveraging key performance indicators for product design

17:19 - Outcome and & the customer’s success

19:15 - How you can benefit from switching to output focus

23:17 - How Nate taught his team about output focus

25:30 - How Nate’s team stays available & engages customers

29:50 - Care for the craft (and popularity will follow)

30:35 - The value of listening in a distracted world

Books & Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

Read Nate’s book on Product Leadership www.amazon.com/Product-Leadershi…ful/dp/1491960604

Check out more of Nate’s wisdom

medium.com/@nwalkingshaw

Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and share the pod with your friends!

And be sure to check out more insights on product development on the Drift blog at drift.com/blog and find us on Twitter @maggiecrowley, @drift and @seekingwisdomio.

It’s a special episode of #Build. Host Maggie Crowley is joined by members of Drift’s Product and Engineering teams. Meet Alexa Nguyen, Senior Product Manager, Trevor Rundell, Director of Engineering, and Peter Karl II, Lead, Product Efficiency.

The group chats through how product and engineering can work together most efficiently. That means breaking through the perception that engineers should be wholly removed from the customer. To tackle this problem at Drift, tech leads here are directly responsible for the outcomes of the products they’re working on (where at most organizations, that’s the Product Manager’s responsibility). This gives engineering more context around the products they're building. And empowers them. They’re expected to be on the front lines answering questions from customers. Because at Drift, it’s all about putting the customer first.

Learn more about story time and how to get your engineering and products teams better aligned in today’s episode of #Build.

Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and share the pod with your friends!

Be sure to check out more insights on the Drift blog at drift.com/blog and find us on Twitter @maggiecrowley, @drift and @seekingwisdomio.

In this episode:

0:37 - Introductions of Alexa, Trevor, and Peter

1:44 - Tech Leads vs. Product Managers

3:48 - Creating a space of forward-thinking work called “Story Time”

5:50 - When to bring an engineer into a project

6:30 - Starting Story Time with a well-defined problem

7:44 - What does the customer want?

8:36 - The team discusses their first Story Time.

10:24 - Pencils Not Pixels

11:04 - How to communicate this idea with new engineers

12:00 - What is the role of conflict/disagreement?

12:34 - Do not mistake feedback for criticism.

14:00 - How to disagree with respect

14:36 - One-on-one meetings explained

16:19 - The best PM to work with

17:18 - Practice at work

18:12 - Experience working with Drift’s co-founder

20:26 - Advice to the listeners

On today’s episode of #Build, host Maggie Crowley sits down with Joff Redfern, VP of Product at Atlassian. Together they talk through Joff’s time as VP of Product at LinkedIn, building a product org from 12 people to 650, the concept of a shipyard, why talent is priority 0, why he chose to join Atlassian and much more.

Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and share the pod with your friends!

Be sure to check out more insights on the Drift blog at drift.com/blog and find us on Twitter @maggiecrowley, @drift , @seekingwisdomio, and @mejoff.

In this episode:

0:33 – Maggie introduces Joff

2:19 – Falling in love with the Atlassian vision, needing a calling

3:30 – How LinkedIn shaped Joff’s career

6:45 – Riding the double paradigm shift to mobile and social networks

7:48 – How to scale an organization...Building Your Shipyard

8:52 – Three pieces to a shipyard: values (8:59), people/talent (10:15), practices (10:43)

12:11 – What does it mean to be an Atlassian Product Manager?

15:40 – Having just one set of expectations for hiring, evaluating, and growing talent

19:15 – Keep it simple, because movements are built on slogans

21:52 – Creating autotomy and best practices across the organization

25:15 – Maggie shares about independent work with accountability at Drift

26:00 – Scaling really fast and incrementally improving

28:01 – Joff’s book list: Drive, Zero to One, Thinking Fast and Slow

30:18 – Don’t wait, don’t be afraid to look bad, and embrace creative confrontation

On this episode of #Build, board advisor and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, Julia Austin, shares her point of view on what makes a truly great product manager. How does she know? Well years of experience spent as CTO at Digital Ocean and VP of Engineering at VMWare and Akamai.

Julia also opens up about her time as a lecturer at Harvard Business School and experience serving as a board advisor to startups including Drift, Wistia, Help Scout, ZappRx and others.

Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and share the pod with your friends! Be sure to check out more insights on the Drift blog at drift.com/blog and find us on Twitter @maggiecrowley, @drift, @seekingwisdomio and @austinfish.

In This Episode:

0:09 – Maggie introduces Julia Austin

0:40 – Introduction of the two big topics of today’s show: 1. What is a great product manager, 2. How one builds a carrier in production management

0:57 – Julia shares how she went from production itself to teaching about it

4:23 – Product manager is not a cool CEO position, but it turns ideas into made products and can be very gratifying

5:48 – The process of idea to realization in project management that she teaches in Julia’s class

8:32 – By taking a product management class one can walk through and gain knowledge about the whole process

9:05 – Kinds of people customarily being most successful in product management

16:29 – Julia explains what a ‘typical’ product manager looks like

20:24 – You don’t have to build the most fancy things all the time

21:57 – Sometimes you have to take scary risks

23:20 – What makes a great PM is someone who says ‘I know this is the right thing to do,’ and can make the call

23:28 – Julia shares advice on how one can get their first PM job

26:46 – Advice on how to evaluate the next carrier steps as a PM, and whether to go / remain in a big or a start-up company

35:32 – Julia shares some final pieces of advice

37:21 – Be willing to take risks

38:03 – Don’t be focused on titles, but on what you will actually do

It's a special crossover episode of Build! And the first episode in our brand new dedicated feed. Today's guest? Dave Gerhardt, Drift's VP of Marketing. Dave discusses his one week spent as a product manager at Drift plus, the real meat of this episode – how to write good copy and tell a story with your product. Copywriting and storytelling are key to product management. If you can't tell the story and motivate your team, they won't know where to go next. On this episode of Build, how to build that excitement and get everyone on the same page.

Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and share the pod with your friends! Be sure to check out more insights on the Drift blog at drift.com/blog and find us on Twitter @davegerhardt, @jayacunzo and @seekingwisdomio.

WHAT WAS COVERED

00:38 - DG’s one week as a product manager

2:17 - The most underrated skill at a company: internal marketing

5:15 - Read it out loud, say what you mean

6:40 - Simplify

8:00 - Would you say that out loud?

8:28 - Use their words

10:45 - Let your customers write the copy

12:20 - The swipe file

13:44 - Storytelling

14:10 - Five parts of a story

15:34 - The best books on copywriting

18:13 - The best books on storytelling

19:00 - DG’s storytelling secret: The Steve Jobs’ keynote

19:46 - The hardest part of storytelling in product

21:34 - Two ways to sell a shovel

LINKS

Read Ogilvy on Advertising

Read CA$HVERTISING: How to Use More than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency

Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone

Read Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t

Watch the 2010 iPad keynote

Watch the 2007 iPhone keynote

On today's episode of Build, host Maggie Crowley sits down with Richard Banfield, CEO and co-founder of Fresh Tilled Soil, a leading user interface design and experience agency, and co-author of Product Leadership, the manual Maggie lives her life by.

On this episode, Richard dives deep into how to build high performing product teams. Be sure to tune in for actionable insights you can apply to your own team today.

Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and share the pod with your friends! Be sure to check out more insights on the Drift blog at drift.com/blog and find us on Twitter @maggiecrowley, @drift, @seekingwisdomio and @RMBanfield.

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.