The Head of Product at Wildbit, Rian van der Merwe has spent his career being crazy busy – and he’s had enough of it. He joined us to talk about slowing down to speed up, making sure your team(s) are productive, and managing yourself to provide the most value to everyone around you.

Quote of the Episode

We’re crazy busy taking on too much responsibility and not trusting our teams enough.

Listen if you’d like to learn more about

* Remote working and four-day weeks

* Structuring your day – and your team’s workload

* Diagnosing the problem as well as strategies to fix it

Links mentioned in this episode

* Follow Rian on Twitter and keep up with his writing at Elezea.com

* Parkinson’s Law

* Natalie Nagale on Indie Hackers

* Teresa Torres on the Product Science podcast

* Ryan Singer of Basecamp’s articles, etc.

* Javier Grillo-Marxuach, The 11 Laws of Showrunning

Hosts

The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.

Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. Lily has spent 13 years in the tech industry working mainly with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She has worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank in Bristol, the Product Managers’ meetup with regular events and talks on Product now with 800+ members and growing. This year Lily will be launching ProductCamp in Bristol and she joins the MTP team as co-host of The Product Experience podcast.

A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. After launching Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, Randy has worked with museums and arts groups, online education, media & entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. He’s spoken at Mind the Product Engage (Hamburg and Manchester), at a number of ProductTanks (London, Zurich, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford, and Brighton… so far!) and at conferences across the US and Europe.

Music

Our theme music is from Hamburg-based Pau, featuring ProductTank Hamburg’s own Arne Kittler on bass. Listen to more on their Facebook page

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