With a master's degree in psychology and many years of experience as a User Researcher, Nikki Anderson moved in 2018 from New York to Berlin. She works currently as User Research Lead at Zalando as well as her own startup the user research academy.  

Nikki shares the basics of qualitative user research to be able to get started with it in a fast and effective fashion. Next to that, she talks about when a company should start doing user research and at which point it's worth thinking of hiring a researcher. 

Connect with Nikki:

Link to Nikki's research template: 

   👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery

   📸 Instagram: @productbakery

   🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20

   🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Alex and Christian were brainstorming during brunch about "what makes the perfect croissant so delicious." They came to the conclusion, that they could do research to find the answer. But how much research would they need to do, and would they really find the answer? In this episode, Alex talks about defining good questions and hypotheses to be able to do good research. Besides that, he touches on why many companies are hesitant to do research and how to apply it as a way to not lose speed. 

Connect with Alex:

   👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery

   📸 Instagram: @productbakery

   🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20

   🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Liam Murphy is a crypto enthusiast for more than 8 years as an investor and a Product Designer. He shares insights into how to build crypto products that are "more usable" for crypto investment app consumers.

These days he's focused on working for crypto communities and talks about how the community decides and builds new features & products. 

Connect with Liam: 

   👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery

   📸 Instagram: @productbakery

   🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20

   🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Being a computer scientist was too boring for Henning. Once he saw Photoshop the first time he fell in love not only with the tool. He quickly started expressing his ideas on the screen and started working as a freelancer until one of his clients got acquired by the entrepreneur Stephan Schambach.  

The omnichannel retail platform NewStore was born and he started as a Product Designer. These days Henning is leading the Design Team and everything related to user research, experience, and product planning. He shares deep and detailed insights about projects with NewStore's clients and how they build a B2B retail product that has touchpoints to end customers. 

Connect with Henning: 

   👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery

   📸 Instagram: @productbakery

   🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20

   🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

What's the difference between a product vision and a company vision? Christian talks about the definition of a product vision and the key information it should and shouldn't contain. 

He describes the definition process based on examples and best practices. Next to the "theoretical" part, he talks about how to create a product vision based on two workshop methodologies that you can easily apply for your own vision.

   👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery

   📸 Instagram: @productbakery

   🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20

   🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

James & Tim are both founders of Avion.io, a user story mapping tool that helps Product Teams to better collaborate and plan features, products, and services. 

When Tim came back from his Product Owner course 5 years ago, learning about user story mapping, he quickly realized together with James that this methodology makes planning much easier and efficient. Unfortunately, they were missing a tool to digitalize and remotely collaborate on a user story map. They sat together after work and started designing and developing Avion.io which they've launched in 2019. 

In this episode, they talk about the advantages of user story mapping as well as advanced techniques on release planning, MVP definitions, and some more cool story mapping life hacks.

   👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery

   📸 Instagram: @productbakery

   🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20

   🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

This time, Christian interviews Alex Dapunt about his career path and work experience. He initially wanted to become an architect but then landed in the Digital Design Space. 

Alex started his career in an Italian agency and then moved to Munich and finally to Berlin where he started working for SumUp where he became the Head of Design. Over 4 years Alex scaled up the Design team from 4 to 40 people before he left the hyper-growth startup. 

Besides a lot of hiring and building up a Brand & Product Design Team, he shares the importance of introducing a design system to scale in hypergrowth. 

If you're interested in his work check out the design system Circuit UI on Github. 

Episode Minutes:

Connect with Alex:

   👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery

   📸 Instagram: @productbakery

   🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20

   🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

In this episode, Alex interviews co-host Christian Strunk to get some background on how he transitioned into Product Management. 

Christian started working as a baker before he studied business administration. While studying he founded his first start-up "Pocketrobe" which opened the doors into the world of Product Management...

Besides his career path, Christian talks about his most favorite product planning methodology "user story mapping" and how to get started with it. 

If you're interested, listen in! For more information about story mapping  & Product Management check out his blog.  

Episode minutes:

Connect with Christian:

   👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery

   📸 Instagram: @productbakery

   🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20

   🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/

Meet your hosts Christian Strunk and Alex Dapunt as they introduce you to their new Podcast Format 'The Product Bakery Podcast'. 

   👨‍💻 Linkedin: Product Bakery

   📸 Instagram: @productbakery

   🐦 Twitter: @productbakery20

   🌍Website: https://www.product-bakery.com/