By One Knight in Product
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The podcast currently has 231 episodes available.
Ivana Todorovic is the co-founder of AuthoredUp, the "Ultimate LinkedIn Content Creation & Analytics Tool", and wants to help YOU get better at standing out from the crowd and beating the LinkedIn algorithm. We spoke about all things LinkedIn, including the dangers of "engagement pods", whether it matters where you put your links in the post, how to engage with larger accounts, the power of secondary comments, and much, much more. We also spoke about her startup journey, the pros and cons of being reliant on a larger platform, and why she's so happy she bootstrapped rather than seeking VC funding. Check the episode out now!
This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
Beware snake oil salespeople who claim to be making millions off of their LinkedIn content and are trying to sell you frameworks to be just like them. There's no cookie-cutter approach, the algorithm is changing all the time, and the majority of these people are basically lying about the results you will get and laughing their way to the bank.
Direct sales pitches underperform compared to content that offers value with a subtle call to action. Posts with a soft sell, focusing on the audience’s needs and delivering value without the CTA, perform better. You can't just keep selling things or trying to get people to click links... LinkedIn hates you leaving the platform and they will de-boost your posts.
Posts with external links often get down-boosted because LinkedIn wants to keep users on the platform. Adding links in the comments or at the very end of the post is a better strategy, though even this approach reduces post impressions.
However it might look, LinkedIn explicitly prioritises real conversations and interactions rather than people mindlessly sharing clickbait. Concentrate on having real conversations, replying to comments, and replying to the comments on comments. This will boost your own impressions.
There's no statistically significant impact on having either of these badges. The badges are just there to make you feel special and keep you coming back to LinkedIn so that they can keep advertising to you. People with blue badges don't obviously have better content than those without, and people with gold badges are just being rewarded for feeding the AI-training hamster wheel.
Engagement Pods are private groups of people who share their posts with each other so they can game engagement and try to defeat the dreaded algorithm. However, these are super-easy to detect and they show up quickly even to external analysis. There are better ways to win at LinkedIn than paying exorbitant fees to snake oil salespeople.
You can catch up with Ivana on LinkedIn or check out AuthoredUp.
Jenny Wanger is a product consultant and coach who loves to educate PMs around the world and is doing just that with her product operations course on Reforge.
Her hot take? Product leaders send their teams off for training but then don't do anything when they come back, and nothing changes. This leads them to question the value of the training, but it's almost never the quality of the training that's at fault, it's what they (don't) do with it.
Find Jenny on LinkedIn and remember to check out her course on Reforge.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
Nick Mehta is the CEO of Gainsight, a leading customer and product experience platform that aims to be the operating system for your customer journeys. He's a passionate advocate for Customer Success as a function and as a business strategy, an author of several books on the topic, and recently super-excited about the future of Customer Success in an AI world. We talked about all of these topics and much more.
This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
Yes, they both have the same "CS" initials, and this can confuse people, but it's not the same role. Customer Success conceptually sits somewhere in between Sales and Customer Support and drives customer value and retention. Customer Success is also more than a role, it's a company strategy. It's also part of the product you sell.
These days, CEOs and investors value profit today over profit tomorrow. Retention is a huge driver of pure profit, and it's one of the highest-leverage activities you can invest in for a recurring revenue business. On the flip side, leaders are looking to become as efficient as possible and reduce the human effort to drive this retention, leading to a requirement for digital customer success strategies.
Chris Degnan (CRO at Snowflake) recently opined on the 20VC podcast that he sees no use for Customer Success teams and would immediately get rid of them. That doesn't work for everyone though, and there are many companies that legitimately need Customer Success teams. It's fair enough to say "Customer Success is a strategy" but someone needs to wake up thinking about this and having it as their biggest priority. Customer expectations are rising all the time, and not all products can look after themselves.
Too many teams have almost no relationship, or only speak when there's an escalation. Both teams have a legitimate claim to own the customer experience, but they should own it together. The best Customer Success teams don't just bring escalations, or even the "What" but the "Who" and the "Why". This makes the relationship strategic and helps build a great product.
If you're not keeping up with AI you're going to be left behind. It's important to focus on the evolutionary and revolutionary changes that you can bring to your product. There need to be guardrails in your product to ensure that the customer experience doesn't degrade, and you need to be sensitive to the fears and paranoia of internal teams that might feel threatened... but it's going to happen so you need a strategy to survive and thrive in the AI-powered future.
"In Digital Customer Success: The Next Frontier, a team of trailblazing Customer Success professionals and digital entrepreneurs delivers an insightful discussion of the next stage in Customer Success management. In the book, you'll discover how to design and deploy touchless and automated digital interventions that help your software users learn and grow as they use your product and unlock the value trapped within it — without ever needing to reach out to a live Customer Success Manager. "
Check it out on Amazon.
You can catch up with Nick on LinkedIn or check out Gainsight. You can also check out the blog post that Nick mentions, The One Thing Billionaire Frank Slootman Got Wrong.
Rina Alexin is the CEO of Productside, a leading product training and consulting company (formerly known as The 280 Group). Rina is passionate about furthering the craft of product management around the world.
Her hot take? Product managers complain about stakeholders, but they're just doing their jobs and we need to spend some of our energy on understanding them and properly collaborating rather than treating them as annoyances.
Find Rina on LinkedIn or check out Productside
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
Andy Walters is a long-time consultant who has recently focused his consulting work on supporting companies with GenAI adoption with his new firm, Emerge Haus.
His hot take? Within the next few years, we're going to be moving to an AI-assistant-first operating model, and we can't stop it. There are too many financial incentives, but it might actually be better for users too; as consumers, but also potentially for their private lives too.
Find Andy on LinkedIn or check out Emerge Haus
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Bjarte Rettedal is a photographer-turned looking to take his interest in behavioural economics and systems thinking and pursue a career in UX design.
His hot take? AI models should be under public ownership or at the very least fully transparent. We don't let people release supplements or medicines without extensive testing, so why are we OK with something as potentially high-impact as AI models?
Find Bjarte on LinkedIn or bjarterettedal.com
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
Greg Prickril is a B2B Product Management coach, consultant and trainer who has gone all-in on AI and is bullish about the impact that he thinks it'll have on product management.
His hot take? AI is going to change everything about product management. It's going to mean fewer jobs are required to deliver products, but it also opens up opportunities for business-focused product managers to make a real impact in their jobs, and accelerate them in doing so.
Find Greg on LinkedIn, Prickril.com or https://www.coachpms.com/
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
May Wong is a product operations consultant and coach who also runs ProductTO, an in-person product management meetup in Toronto.
Her hot take? Product management is a team sport, and too much product management literature focuses on what the product manager should do, not what the team should do.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.
David Pereira is a product leader, speaker and regular blogger who loves to contribute to the wider Agile and Product communities with insights from his own career, including some of the mistakes he's made and not just the successes. David was recently tempted into writing a book, the newly released "Untrapping Product Teams" where he provocatively rails against "bullshit management" and tries to inspire us all to affect change in our organisations (but step-by-step). We talked all about themes from the book, as well as what it meant to have an endorsement from Marty Cagan.
Sometimes it can seem almost impossible to change things yourself, but you don't have to change it all at once. If you can start showing the impact of smaller changes that deliver value then you can get both interest and buy-in from stakeholders. This gives you permission to try more things.
David coined the term "bullshit management" to represent the work you have to do in many low-performing product companies. Bullshit management is where you spend all your time working on the work around the work, prioritising requirements with no context and being actively prevented from delivering value to your users, and it has to stop.
Coordinative flow is when you spend more time in meetings about the work and struggle to align people than you do actually doing the work. It's focused on outputs and gives you someone to blame when it goes wrong. Collaborative flow is when teams come together to work on problems... collaboratively and use what they know to uncover what they don't know.
Sometimes you have to hold your nose and do things in ways that you don't believe are effective, or actively destructive. This is part and parcel of the job and something you have to get used to. As long as you can find small ways to make an impact in some areas, you can give way in other areas. Rome wasn't built in a day.
We're all primed to look clever and give answers as quickly as we can but product people need to think deeper than that and ask good questions. Why do we really need that? What does success really look like? What don't we know?
"Untrapping Product Teams guides you to simplify what gets unintentionally complicated and equips you to overcome dangerous traps while steadily driving customer and business value. This isn't just another book about product management. It's a thought-provoking guide filled with simplicity, encouraging you to act today for a better tomorrow."
Check it out on Amazon.
You can catch up with David on LinkedIn or check out his website.
Dean Peters is a former opera singer turned product management leader, coach and educator who works with Productside to uplevel teams.
His hot take? That there's more to say about the Instagram-ification of product management, the root causes and contributory factors.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!
This episode is sponsored by June. June is a user retention hub for early-stage B2B SaaS companies that enables early-stage B2B SaaS companies to understand and act on their product usage, dig into activation, churn and key feature usage. Check out June here.
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