Build with Maggie Crowley

Maggie is on a mission to learn how to set better goals. So on this episode of Build, she sits down with the expert in driving alignment across teams – Deidre Paknad. Deidre is the co-founder and CEO of WorkBoard (whose OKR software and expertise helps businesses like Cisco, Microsoft, Zuora, and Workday). Deidre and Maggie talk about why OKRs matter, how to use them, and how to get the doubters on board. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends. You can connect with Maggie on Twitter @maggiecrowley @HYPERGROWTH_Pod and checkout Workboard at https://www.workboard.com/

Product teams start with a one pager, then they storytime, then they get into the organize phase. But what do the engineers do while the designer is designing? A technical proof of concept that we call the tracer bullet. Freedom Dumlao, Chief Architect at Drift, joins Maggie to talk through how engineers contribute to discovery at Drift. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends. You can connect with Maggie on Twitter @maggiecrowley @HYPERGROWTH_Pod

So you've talked to customers, you've prototyped, you've figured out what will solve for your customer's problem. What's next? Kickoff. In this episode Maggie and Trevor Rundell (Director of Engineering at Drift) explain how to go from discovery to actually building by kicking off the work. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends. You can connect with Maggie on Twitter @maggiecrowley @HYPERGROWTH_Pod

So you've talked to customers, you've prototyped, you've figured out what will solve for your customer's problem. What's next? Kickoff. In this episode Maggie and Trevor Rundell (Director of Engineering at Drift) explain how to go from discovery to actually building by kicking off the work. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends. You can connect with Maggie on Twitter @maggiecrowley @HYPERGROWTH_Pod

Who says resolutions are just for your personal life? In this episode, Maggie looks back at what she learned in past year of Build — and what she’s committing to doing in 2020. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends. You can connect with Maggie on Twitter @maggiecrowley @HYPERGROWTH_Pod

Interviewing for your first product job can seem impossible (and so can interviewing for your 5th PM job, to be honest). In a role where EQ and being able to influence stakeholders is just as or even more critical than data fluency and understanding business models, interviews can be challenging and unpredictable. So in this episode, Maggie sat down with Craig Daniel, VP of Product at Drift, to talk through what matters when hiring PMs, their favorite interview questions, and the best product interview they've ever seen. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends. You can connect with Maggie on Twitter @maggiecrowley @HYPERGROWTH_Pod

Talking to Drift's Tim O'Brien about what happens after storytime got Maggie thinking about feedback. Because feedback is really the key to making ideas, designs, processes, and products, basically anything, better. But receiving feedback can be really stressful, and giving feedback as a PM can be really hard when you don't want to be a jerk – but you also want to get your point across. So she decided to reach out to someone outside of the product world who's well-versed in feedback: an artist and art professor. Julie Poitras Santos (Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art) shares how to give feedback in the art world, explains the role the audience plays in feedback, and offers some tips for how to give (and receive) better feedback.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Maggie on Twitter @maggiecrowley @HYPERGROWTH_Pod.

Yes, this whole episode is about slides. Here’s why you should care (and listen). Being able to communicate ideas, information, plans, product decisions effectively is absolutely critical to being a good PM. That communication often happens in the form of a presentation, so this is Maggie’s method for how to put together a fail-proof presentation every single time. Need to present a choice to your executive team? Have a conference talk coming up? Want to get people on board with your ideas? This system will help you do that faster and better. But making slides doesn't have to be such a pain if you follow this five-step process.

Struggling with prioritization? Want to know how the experts pick projects and scope work? Find out in this episode of Build, where Maggie talks to Ryan Singer, the Head of Strategy at Basecamp. Ryan has been shaping and building at Basecamp for over 16 years, and recently wrote a book on how they work called Shape Up. Maggie and Ryan dig into what it means to shape work, prioritization theater, how product decisions are really bets, and what happens when your product scope gets out of control.

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.