Product Voices

Janna Bastow, CEO of ProdPad, joins this episode to discuss how product teams can build and use successful roadmaps. She also shares some insights on what makes great product managers and how to stand out when trying to move into product management from other roles.

Highlights:

On roadmaps...

• What is a roadmap? 
• What are the prerequisites for a roadmap? (hint: you can’t have a really successful roadmap without having a vision)
• A roadmap is a prototype of your strategy (wow! what a great way to think about it)
• How do teams use a roadmap? 
• How often do you update your roadmap? 

And some general advice for current and aspiring product managers:

• Core skills that a great product manager needs
• How to stand out from the crowd when trying to move into product management

Learn more at ProductVoices.com.

In this episode, Dave Dame, director of product accessibility at Microsoft joins to discuss how great teams and organizations use principles to best build products that are inclusive and accessible to users of all ability levels.

Highlights of the discussion:

• "It’s not a disability that holds me back, it is the environment.”
• Everyone will be disabled at some point, even temporarily. Products that were built to be accessible for one group often resonate with others, For example, closed captioning and audiobooks.
• Characteristics of high-performing teams that are building more accessible, inclusive products.
• Dave's advice on creating products that will make the world better than we found it.

Learn more at ProductVoices.com

Great product managers are fanatical about prioritizing the things that will make the biggest impact on their product.

In this episode we discuss some of the activities that product managers should not be leading and some ways that product managers can be fanatically prioritize their time.

We discuss:

• What a product manager is NOT
• Why product managers get pulled into some of these activities 
• Creating your Contentment Mix
• The VITAL time management tool

Learn more at ProductVoices.com

Bria King, a product coach and product leader with experience in social good, networking, online marketing, and hospitality industries discusses a people-first approach to product management.

We discuss:

• What is people-first product management
• What are the benefits of people-first PM
• How leaders and teams can move toward a more people-first culture

Chris Butler joins to discuss the "product spine" - how teams can align strategies, roadmaps, and tasks, and make sound decisions along all of them.

Chris is an all-around product expert, currently Lead Product Manager at Google, with past stints as head of product operations at Cognizant and a product leader at Facebook, Kayak, and Waze.

We discuss:

• what is the product spine
• how teams can align along various abstractions such as the strategy, roadmaps, and task lists.
• how this alignment can lead to sounder decisions and ultimately better products

Learn more at ProductVoices.com and be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.

Ensuring your product has the proper level and types of services around it can improve and optimize the user experience. We often forget how important these services can be to the overall success of a product.

In this episode, Tania Sahai, product leader and founder of The Silver Pallete, joins to discuss how product managers and teams can focus on the important services that surround products.

Learn more at ProductVoices.com

On this episode, Matt LeMay joins to discuss Product Leadership. Matt LeMay is an internationally recognized product leader, author, and consultant who has worked with companies like Spotify, Audible, Mailchimp, and Google. He is the author of Agile for Everybody (O’Reilly Media, 2018) and Product Management in Practice (Second Edition O'Reilly Media, 2022), and has helped build and scale product management practices at companies ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 enterprises.

Learn more at MattLeMay.com and ProductVoices.com.

When we think about building products, we most often think about products for external customers. However, many product teams create solutions for internal customers - those fellow employees who use our products to help them better do their job. These “internal products” can have a huge impact on the business.

In this episode, Sharon Aluma, Senior Technical Product Manager at Amazon Robotics joins to discuss the nuances of building products for internal customers and how to make the biggest impact with these solutions.

Learn more on ProductVoices.com.

We have a responsibility in product management to avoid exclusionary solutions and so it is incumbent upon us to learn inclusive design principles. We must learn how to design products that not only intentionally include but avoid unintentionally excluding groups. Sandra Camacho, a multicultural Inclusive Design strategist, educator, and advisor based in Paris, France, joins this episode to discuss inclusive design and share stories, insights, and tips for how we can learn and improve.

We discuss:

• What is inclusive design? How do we define it?
• What’s happening in the tech industry in terms of inclusive design.
• How does this inclusive design compare to the diversity and inclusion work that’s happening in so many organizations?
• Examples of things that have worked really well in inclusive design and some that didn't work so well. 
• How can those who aren’t in a marginalized group approach this work in a way that matters? 

Learn more at Sandra By Design or Inclusive Design Jam.

Find resources mentioned on the episode at ProductVoices.com

Dan Balcauski, founder and principal consultant at Product Tranquility, joins to discuss The Secret to Unlocking Value: How to Maximize Your Product's Price.

We discuss: 

• Three types of value drivers
• How to know what our customers value
• How to measure pricing effectiveness
• How companies find their value metric
• The connection between customer segmentation and pricing
• And more!

Learn more at ProductVoices.com.