Talk About Know Priorities

By Randy Skopecek

Prioritizing what matters... more

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FAQs about Talk About Know Priorities:

How many episodes does Talk About Know Priorities have?

The podcast currently has 6 episodes available.

Talk About Know Priorities episodes:

September 15, 2015Mike Oeth
Mike Oeth is the CEO of OnSIP Business VoIP and winner of the Telecommunications Executive of the Year in the 2013 American Business Awards. Mike graduated from Harvard College in 1991 with a degree in Economics and has since worked for technology companies, cofounding OnSIP in 2004. Mike is an active community member and father, balancing his roles as board member of the local YMCA, member of the father-daughter Y-group Adventure Princesses, and basketball coach for his three daughters’ basketball teams. Mike also enjoys rock climbing with his teenage son.
Find & Follow: @VoipCEO
Extra links:
OnSip Business VoIP
Lighthouse
Good to Great - Jim Collins
Notes:
Sales/support > engineering estimates & provides 2 cents > executive team (mkt potential vs time to mkt)
It’s rare to get a completely 1-off request
Sync up with very active resellers (to help harmonize with the consumer base)
Biggest thing to worry about, customer who is yelling the loudest or the most recent thing you heard
Loudest or recent is not the best way to figure out what your product should be
Have, follow, and stick with a process
We are not going to get this deal without X feature, okay pass on the deal
Interrupting engineering for 1-off features is like a commercial break, you have to go back and recap
Best thing you can do is have a very clear idea of where the product is going and end result is and stick with it
Do all of your research ahead of time before they write that first line of code
A good engineering team will go pick the best tools, database, interface, etc
Have a process, stick to it, and have some consistency once it gets going
Emails are best because it's in the customer's own words
Tough/flawed: not being thorough enough and not thinking through all the way to how the customer is going to interact
Like a director shooting a movie, get down to the little story boards before you even start
Get down to the detail before starting otherwise there is too much ambiguity or the result is not what's expected
Hedgehog concept (book: good to great), nucleus of the company...what is the core idea
If they don't fit into your hedgehog concept, you pass on those features
Have to figure out how these products mesh where you want them to be in 5-10 years
Internal back office projects are tougher to get priority compared to revenue generating projects
Pitching a product, easier to talk about revenue versus cost savings with execs
Interesting to have a voting system to get the wisdom of the crowd
Nice to have a crystal ball to see what the market impact would be
Good Job:
Apple
Google
Dell
Juniper
...more
51min
September 02, 2015Allan Branch
Allan is the co-founder of LessEverything which is the coolest company you've never heard of. They make amazing products like LessAccounting and LessFilms. He loves his family more than breathing. He also build cool lamps as a hobby MassalanaDrive.com
Find & Follow: @AllanBranch
Episode has some explicit language
Extra links:
LessAccounting
AutoPilot - Bookkeeping Service
LessFilms
Massalina Drive
Calendly
Ramen.is
Notes:
(prioritization) the answer changes every day
how we pick the feature to work on depends on resources
where are we trying to take the app balanced against what the customer is saying
realize they don't know our long term vision
they don't see the full picture
ideas are not the problem, knowing what to work on next is
sometimes features are Pandora's box of other features
especially with a small team you have to be conservative about what you build
change something small, you'll get 50 praise and 50 hate emails
take user feedback and put it in a place that doesn't hurt you
we try to interact like human beings,...more than likely they are human too
gathering feedback, it's all hard
you give advice based on your situation,...don't know the full story
advice is easy to get, not right a lot of the time...just got to go with your gut
get the psychology behind what are they trying to accomplish
...only takes 15 minutes to read all the daily tickets
everyone has baggage, perspective, shortsightedness...your job is to look above that
listen to everybody a little bit, and then ignore everyone
that state of chaos is what I need
wish we had more resources, but then we would be building a lot more crap
what the internet doesn't do for us is make you think you are the smartest person in the world
Good Job:
Ben Chestnut, MailChimp.com
Basecamp.com, Jason Fried, DHH
Brennan Dunn, Double Your Freelancing
Nathan Barry, ConvertKit.com
Rob Walling, GetDrip.com
Rdio
Ira Glass
Josh Pigford, Baremetrics.com
Harvest
Mike McDermin, Freshbooks
...more
44min
August 26, 2015Joe Albanese
Joe is the regional sales manager at Identity Finder. He has worked in the sales channel for over 15 years covering information management and cloud computing markets. His experience covers an array of companies like Syncplicity, EMC, Accellion, nGenX, and Iron Mountain.
Find & Follow: @jalbanese74, LinkedIn
Episode has some explicit language
Extra links:
Identity Finder
UserVoice
Priority Calculator - Excel, Api, Open Source
Notes:
The channels are there, but it's a lot of noise
Focusing on the delivery of what we are going to do
Missed their mark, so we are going to refocus on what we do
CEO wacked, CMO wacked, a lot of people, I'm like oh no
Hardest thing in smaller companies: a 1-off large deal size over ruling pre-set priorities
Asked what you wanted, then trumped by a company trying to be nimble
It all sucked. I understand it, but we lost all around.
If prioritize something, stick to it.
Dollars trumping process is bad
Never know how much voice you have
People will always try to game the system
You and your customers get on the same page; and how many times does that happen...
A transparent % of say, would spark communication
What do you want,... just tell me
Sometimes you don't get a chance to cultivate relationships with customers
Depreciation is huge, and what if someone leaves the company, why should their voice matter
What works, flat out asking
What doesn't work, multiple emails or huddled conference calls
Direct 1-1 communications work best
Direct line of communication with the right people
Direct communication and alignment with the product team
When people have different projects in different silos, they don't exactly want each other's input
Good Job:
Salesforce
GoPro
...more
1h 24min
August 17, 2015Richard Seroter
VP of Product for CenturyLink, a Microsoft MVP, an instructor for developer-centric training company Pluralsight, the lead InfoQ.com editor for cloud computing, and author of multiple books on application integration strategies. As VP of Product for CenturyLink, he is responsible for product strategy, sprint planning, community contribution, and leading an expert team of product owners and analysts.
Find & Follow: @rseroter, http://seroter.wordpress.com/
Extra Links:
Courses on Pluralsight
Books on Amazon
Articles on InfoQ
Microsoft MVP
CenturyLink Cloud
Notes:
"they don't even need the service, they need what the service can give them"
Cost of delay factor
Strategic alignment to prevent blocking a team in the future
Also focusing on deprioritization
Just go through everything in the list comparing one vs another, rinse and repeat
You should be able to build your products with few to no dependencies. Although sometimes it's impossible.
don't loose your shared awareness
the product owner is the voice of the customer in, and the voice of the technology out.
one of the hardest parts is explaining priorities that span teams
the entire job of the product owner is prioritization and that involves hard choices
Instead of putting teams in a holding pattern or assign to help another team, make them work within the constraints to deliver whatever they can.
Balance between transparency and making people understand the priorities
An 18 month road-map is useless
Execution matters. it gives you a free pass a bit to be flexible because you are continually shipping value.
shipping value on a regular basis earns trust and leeway to alter the priorities a bit
Ensure as much 1-1 feedback
Having a back-office product owner can help cover internal voices that can be excluded from
Use a brain trust, but push decisions to the edges
The biggest place you get into trouble is when you think there is a single channel to collect requirements.
Some will be vocal, some will be quite, some need face to face, some will fill out a survey, some will attend a conference
The more options you can give your products owners and get feedback, the more rounded feedback you'll get.
Don't let yourself get bogged down by so many sources of input that you are paralyzed
Sometimes seeing behavior is the best feedback. Some people will just tell you what you want to hear.
90% of what you hear is what next. The constant drive of what is next.
Best companies that execute well, explain well. They don't just announce a feature, they put in context.
Others doing a good job:
Slack
Trello
...more
55min
August 17, 2015Marc Grabanski
Marc is the CEO and creator of Frontend Masters, dedicated to teaching advanced web development skills. Before that he was heavily involved in open source and created one of the most popular UI elements on the web, the jQuery UI Datepicker. He also spoke at over sixty conferences around the world, created conferences and wrote on his blog to hundreds of thousands of readers monthly.
Find & Follow: @1Marc, http://marcgrabanski.com/
Extra links:
Frontend Masters
Intercom.io
GumRoad
LeadPages
Notes
what experiment can i try next, and validate that they need the thing
hater driven development: hate on you because they have a need but something is off (aka fighting apathy)
intercom is a great feedback medium
live feedback as much (1-1) as possible
Being heavily harmonized with and in the industry and networked with the people allow simple priority decisions
NPS (net promoter score) surveys are very helpful (1-10 scale surveys)
determining what people what: huge difference between people who get it for free and those paying
Careful because "free" can sometimes take your product away from it's core
One of the big reason surveys fail is because they are blasted to everyone instead of contextual groups
In software you can make a car a submarine, and then lets add freaking wings
Biggest flaw is not validating the need
Unless it's growing in ways that people care about, it's going to die. No matter how amazing, it will die, and no one will care.
While still small enough, and agile enough, you can benefit from as close to a 1-1 conversation with a human on the other end
Hard part or frustration is the pull/desire to jump on a new prototype product vs on the product at hand
Good Job:
Aaron Skonnard
Tim Ferriss
Gary Vaynerchuk
Scott Harrison
Justin Kaufenberg
Matthew Dornquast
...more
55min
August 17, 2015Justin Jackson
He likes to make stuff. In addition to building several products, such as Marketing for Developers, and the Product People Club, he hosts two podcasts and writes extensively. When he's not working, he's chasing his 4 kids and spending time with his wife.
Find & Follow: @mijustin, http://justinjackson.ca/
Extra Links:
Marketing for Developers
Product People - Club
Build & Launch - Podcast
Product People - Podcast
List of Other Products
Sprintly
Notes:
“wired for relationships” “lens of people”
“what’s going to get them to reach into their pocket and pull out the mastercard, punch in some numbers, to buy that thing…”
“the gap is that they don’t understand the people part”
“I’m a neck beard disguised as a marketer”
60-70% of my list is software developers (who are product people)
Dirty secret: “much easier for devs to learn marketing, than for a marketer to learn dev”
Prioritization is variable and elastic depending on what the commitment is.
Long lead times are daunting.
6-9 months away, chances of that “thing” happening go down drastically
Favorite way to decide to prioritize it is whether people are will to pay for it.
In many groups, the people who pay for the product are not the people using the product. So the person receiving the communication is the person paying.
Customer service often don’t get a direct line to the product management or the dev team and thus a lot of information is getting lost.
Customer service or other “excluded” party could benefit from learning the language of the business to get their voice heard.
Including vendors is much more of a partnership when they are included.
Sometimes the inclusion from vendors, due to a lack of execution on their behalf from that inclusion, sours the partnership.
“The data is much more dirty and much more general than we wish it was”
Basing voice on LTV might be an interesting
Something many applications miss the question of what is the risk in terms of churn
In most organizations, what ends up winning in terms of what gets prioritized, is whatever is presented by the best sales person
Good job with prioritization:
Josh Pigford @ Baremetrics
Nathan Barry @ ConvertKit
...more
1h 5min

FAQs about Talk About Know Priorities:

How many episodes does Talk About Know Priorities have?

The podcast currently has 6 episodes available.