Sandi has had a remarkable career so far. She trained as a civil engineer at MIT, did an MBA at Stadford, moved into product management at Amazon, and now runs a very successful SaaS company, Skilljar.  Skilljar, founded in Seattle in 2013, is a fully distributed, ~150-person company that provides a customer education platform to over 400 customers. 

We discuss:

• Why do product managers make great founders?

Dave and Thomas talk about their experiences as product leaders, and the differences between PM in big companies and small companies.

Simon sold his first venture, an HRTECH company, multiposting, to SAP.  After successfully delivering on the post merger integration, Simon has started a new venture, Reveal.co. It aims to revolutionise how sales and marketeers collaborate between companies. 

In this episode we talk how product management has changed in the last 10 years, becoming more commercially savvy, and aware of what it takes to build a successful business.  We talk M&A, and how to do post merger integration well, and we continue to explore the themes of product led growth. We also talk Paris as an innovation hub and start up mecca.

Tim is the CEO and Co-Founder of Correlated, the leading product-led revenue platform for sales teams. Correlated recently launched publicly and announced an $8.3 million round of funding led by Harrison Metal and NextView Ventures. Prior to founding Correlated, Tim was an early executive team member at two data and analytics startups: Facet and Timescale. Timescale recently raised a $40 million Series B from Redpoint. Earlier in his career he was on the founding team of TapCommerce, a leading marketing tech startup which was acquired by Twitter for a reported $100 million. Tim has led sales, partnerships and go-to-market teams throughout his career and has witnessed the transition to product-led growth as a go-to-market motion firsthand." He also plays a mean game of Poker. 

We talk Product Led Growth/Revenue.

• What is PLG? Hype and reality…. 

We speak with Dan Faulkner, CTO of Plannuh, about building great product teams.  Dave is an advisor to Plannuh.

After getting a master’s in speech and language processing, Dan worked for speech recognition powerhouse Nuance for well over a decade, first as a researcher and later moving into product and business unit management.

Our topic is how to build great product teams.  Among other questions, we ask Dan:

• What makes a great product team?

Paul was a successful VC, but moved to become a founder and CEO.  In this episode we explore how to build a successful enterprise SaaS business, targeting the complex problem of accounting collections. It sounds niche, but there is lots to learn from Paul about building products for the line of business.  Niches can be super profitable, and can grow into significant market categories. We look at how SaaS products can function as a layer on top of existing applications, partner strategies and much more. 

 This show is with Alation cofounder Aaron Kalb.  Our topics: design, data, and disagreement in the context of product and product management.

Aaron serves as Alation’s chief data & analytics officer (CDAO) and before that worked as a designer and researcher in Apple’s Siri advanced development group after graduating from Stanford with a master’s in symbolic systems.

Questions include:

• How do you synthesize data-led and design-led product management?

Holger is one of the leading industry analysts (at Constellation Research) and former product leader. In this episode, Holger and Thomas talk about the dynamics in enterprise software.  We dig into history and the current state of product management, the shift and limits of more analytical PM, the growth of DIY (low code no code) tools, and the imbalances between tech vision and business process. We also talk Tour De France. And Holger gives some blunt advice on working with Analysts.   Warning: Holger thinks and talks fast. 

Andy’s got a great background, some real product chops, and can simultaneously give us both the Product and the CEO perspective on product issues.  Our topic is Andy’s framework for hiring product managers and product management teams.   Key questions for this episode.

• Why do I need a framework for hiring PM teams?

We cover most of these...

Evan Kaplan is the CEO of Influx Data. It helps developers to build IoT, analytics and monitoring software. In this episode we continue to discuss how open source is changing with the Cloud. We talk in depth about what it is be to cloud native and open source.  We also digress into ingress and database history.