One Knight in Product

Platform Product Management & Getting Ready for Launch Day (with John Zilch, Director of PM @ Upland & founder @ Launch Day)

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An interview with John Zilch. John is Director of Product Management at Upland, adjunct professor at Providence College and founder of Launch Day, a new startup that's aiming to take the pain out of launching new products to market.

We talk about a lot, including:

  • The pros & cons of working as a platform product manager and integrating various product lines & features into a new platform
  • When it's appropriate to replatform and when not, and whether a platform product manager gets a lot of customer contact
  • John's journey into product management from a computer science background and how, like everyone, he kind of fell into it, and how analysts get more love than PMs
  • How his dissatisfaction with the way software gets launched led him and a former colleague to build their own platform to make it better
  • Why he's started teaching at Providence College, how teaching is the best way to learn, and how academia is a fertile ground for hiring the best talent
  • What he thought of Marty Cagan's recent takedown of MBAs, why he's tired of everyone being against them, and what they're good for
  • Why there's a problem with experimentation culture and why it shouldn't be a replacement for good customer discovery
  • How's it's OK to do things that don't scale as long as you have a plan to make sure that it can scale in the future
  • The problem with people concentrating on "Agile" as a method of delivery rather than a way to get close to customers

    • And much more!

    Contact John

    You can check out the Launch Day website or connect with John on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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