Build with Maggie Crowley

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.

You get product, engineering, and design into a room to go through your one pager. Then you develop a list of open questions as a team. But as a PM, what comes next? In this episode, Maggie is joined by Tim O'Brien, Director of Product Design at Drift, to talk about what happens after story time and what each team owns in the build process. Because let's get one thing straight. It's not the kind of thing where the design team goes off into a dark corner to come up with a prototype all on their own. It's a whole team effort. Want to know what Tim says is the number one reason why most design projects fail? Listen to the full episode.

In product, you always want to do more discovery, be more customer-centric, and talk to the people who are on the front lines using your product every day. But it’s easier said than done. And it’s also pretty tough to find real-life examples of what the relationship between a PM and the customer should look like. So on this episode of Build, Maggie talks to a customer she’s been working closely with for nearly a year. Rob Stevenson (Product Growth Leader at Keap) joins Maggie live at HYPERGROWTH Boston to talk about what it takes to build a partnership with a customer, how not to ask for feedback, and what it really means to build with your customers in mind.

There’s 10,000 different ways to do it. But when it comes to setting goals (and prioritizing and measuring them) which way is best? Find out in this episode of Build, where Maggie talks to Rachel Neasham, VP of Product at Lola.com. Before joining the startup world, Rachel was an officer in the U.S. Army. But after four years at West Point, two deployments, and five years in the Army, Rachel was ready for a new challenge and eventually found her way into product management. Maggie and Rachel talk about the things they say are really top of mind for product leaders – like how to go from strategy to individual team goals, how to navigate the balance between being super quantitative with just shipping what makes sense, and how to develop roadmaps. Want to know what Maggie and Rachel say is the the real job of product leaders? Listen to the full episode.

It’s underused, underrated, and often seen as a “soft” thing to focus on. But guess what? Product discovery is also critical in making sure you’re building the right thing – and the more thorough your discovery is, the more effective your delivery will be. So on this episode of Build, Maggie meets with Jocelyn Mangan, someone who has a ton of operational experience in product discovery. Before she was the co-founder & CEO Him for Her (an organization helping to get more women on for-profit boards) Jocelyn was the COO at Snag and the SVP of Product at OpenTable. Tune in to find out how much time product discovery really takes, what “good” discovery looks like, how to overcome challenges to getting your team to do more discovery, and how to establish discovery metrics to keep improving as a team.

You could have a field day researching the tactics, frameworks, mental models, and processes and then apply them to building better products. But David Cancel says most of us are doing this wrong. When you're picking a role model for your product, you can't cherry-pick the best parts – because then you end up with a Frankenstein product. So on this episode of Build, Maggie and DC talk about the importance of stepping back and using first principles. Want to know how DC says product managers should approach systems thinking? Listen to the full episode.

What works for some product leaders is often so company and culture-specific that it’s hard to see how you can take those best practices and make them work at your own company. So on this episode of Build, Maggie talks to Scott Williamson who is the VP of Product Management at GitLab. Before joining GitLab in 2019, Scott ran product management at SendGrid and CA Technologies, so he’s got first-hand experience developing a product philosophy at one company and then bringing it over to another company. Want to learn how Scott shifted from focusing on features to focusing on problems? Listen to the full episode.

On this episode of Build, Maggie sits down with Melissa Perri, product management and UX expert and author of Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value. Maggie and Melissa dive deep and explore what the build trap is and what it means for product managers, plus how product management teams can get out of the build trap and drive real business value – not feature factories. Want to hear Melissa's two best pieces of advice for PMs? Listen to the full episode.

On today's episode of Build, Maggie sits down with FYI co-founder Marie Prokopets to talk through how to run seriously effective project post-mortems. Marie explains what they are, why you should be doing them, what you can hope to learn and much more. You'll leave this episode (and your first post-mortem) with tangible takeaways you can use to improve your processes. And hey, they're not just for product people. Post-mortems apply to everyone and everything. So be sure to tune in for more from Maggie and Marie.