Product Chats Podcast

“Break the communication barriers to your organization with data.” - Paul Meresanu

• Using data to make decisions when choosing a path for a product or starting a new product?
• How to encode and decode qualitative data
• Tools for managing qualitative data

Your product roadmap serves as more than just a mere document. It acts as a powerful conduit, effectively communicating your vision and strategy to key stakeholders, partners, and customers. Neglecting to provide realistic, relevant, and up-to-date information within your roadmap can lead to missed opportunities, wasted time, and potential revenue loss.

• Provides practical examples and insights on creating roadmap clarity
• Explains setting realistic timelines
• Demonstrates collaborative tools

“I would love for marketers to get involved in a couple of sales demos and commit to it, not just listen in. I think that would be uncomfortable for a lot of people, and that means that you're learning.” - Ross Cranwell

• How product marketers can build credibility
• The unique challenges B2B product marketers face (especially when trying to connect marketing efforts to revenue)
• Why product marketers should participate in sales calls

In this great throwback episode, pricing guru and long-time Pragmatic partner Mark Stiving covers three key methods you can use to get the most profitable products to the market as quickly as possible.

Want to learn more about pricing your product for success? Take Price from Pragmatic Institute. Learn more and register today.

"Your customers are looking at your product and asking for discounts. The key is to demonstrate the value of your product so that they understand the price is justified." 

- Mark Stiving, Chief Pricing Officer for Impact Pricing

In this episode of the Pragmatic Live, host Rebecca Kalogeris, Vice President of Product at Pragmatic Institute, interviews Mark Stiving, Ph.D., Chief Pricing Officer for Impact Pricing, who shares six ways to raise product prices effectively. 

They discuss pricing strategies such as focusing on products that are add-ons, using market segmentation to adjust prices, and creating a new product version by taking away some features and charging a lower price. These strategies can help companies increase revenue without causing too much disruption or risking losing customers.

The conversation contains valuable insights and practical tips to help professionals elevate their products, company, and career. Tune in to this episode to learn more about effective pricing strategies and take your product management skills to the next level.

Do you want to learn how to be more market-driven? Enroll in Foundations

You’ll learn how to understand the market and its problems, use that knowledge to build and sell products people want to buy, and master the Pragmatic Framework to bring successful products to market.

Learn More

“We're not looking for the learning itself; we're looking for that behavior. We want that application. That is where the real value is for any organization or business.” - Erica Sutula

• What is instructional design
• How Pragmatic helps students implement their training after they’ve completed a course
• The impact collaborative learning has on outcomes
• What is problem-based learning
• Why certification exams help with the long-term transfer of knowledge and skills

“The secret is not to pick the squeakiest wheel, but to actually find the thing that's going to add the most business value and customer value if we release it out to the market.” - Erik Johnson

• The three common pitfalls of market research
• How Aha! prevents market research from getting lost in digital drawers
• The three-prong test to validate and prioritize problems (and a tool to help)
• Aha!’s product value scorecard and idea portal
• How to effectively bring market insights to the development and design teams
• How to get buy-in for a new roadmapping tool

“Use that user empathy superpower with your engineers. See that they are your partners, not your resources.” - Kirsten Van Detta

• What engineers need from product managers
• Communication strategies to better collaborate with engineers
• Why advocating for the product is also advocating for your team
• How to repair your relationship with the engineering team if it isn’t ideal

• The limitations and capabilities of GPT-3 and GPT-4
• The applications for generative AI, evaluative AI and interactive AI
• An example of how Delibr uses AI to build PRD
• Prompt engineering approaches

“I teach the pricing class, and we like to say that people don't want to feel punished when it comes to price—they want to feel rewarded." - Todd Middlebrook

• Netflix’s latest changes and the impact
• The reaction in the market to the password-sharing crackdown
• Why businesses should avoid making customers feel like they are being punished with pricing changes
• The ways Netflix could approach the policy change differently
• How Netflix could improve its messaging and policy launch moving forward to earn goodwill with current and future customers

“Data in a spreadsheet is going to have a limited effect. How you tell the story and how you convey that to members of the leadership team in a way that is easily digestible and makes it clear how they can act on it is vitally important. If the feedback is only shared with the CEO or with one department, then you're leaving a lot of opportunities on the table.” - Evan Klein.

• How to implement systematic feedback processes
• Who should be included in customer satisfaction surveys and interviews
• How to share customer insights in a way the company will feel empowered to act on them
• Benefits of hiring a third-party voice of customer services
• Best practices for approaching win/loss interviews
• How to encourage customers to provide feedback and respond to survey or interview requests
• How employee feedback programs contribute to improving customer experience

"In an environment where there is not good collaboration, ultimately, you don’t leverage the expertise of everyone. You’re leaving all these superpowers on the table because people aren’t talking. The key to innovative ideas is leveraging the talents of a whole group.” - Teresa Brazen

• Why you should bring in design earlier in the development process
• How designers and product managers approach the development process differently
• Navigating the conflict between desirability, viability and feasibility

“The first market we have to sell to is our executive team” - Steve Gaylor

• The challenges product professionals will face when trying to implement change in their role and company
• How to get buy-in from the executive team to build a market-driven culture
• Why capturing market data will help you prevent emotional or political conversations with stakeholders in the company
• How to manage through influence versus authority

This podcast has some strong language, so if you've got any little ones around, you might want to pop in some headphones.

• Hiring the right product manager for your team starts with understanding exactly what your company needs, not simply “what makes a good product manager.”
• The key quality Matt looks for during an interview with a prospective product manager
• Why you should switch from clarifying the role of product management to clarifying the goal of product management
• How to incorporate different frameworks into the hiring process

“The first success criteria for positioning I use is if all the key constituents within the client organization have clarity and a united point of view on what the brand and the company stand for. The second is if the salesforce feels energized. The ultimate metric is business success, such as customer acquisition or growth.” - Ulli Appelbaum

• Ulli’s systematic approach to branding and positioning, including internal stakeholder interviews, competition analysis, and customer research.
• Types of positioning deliverables after completing initial research
• Why positioning can help you when things don’t go according to plan
• How to measure the success of positioning work
• Common problems that occur in positioning projects

This episode is from our latest Product Chat webinar >> watch the webinar

When it comes to the planning, execution and effectiveness of a launch, understanding the key components and their function within teams and processes is essential. Each phase of a launch brings its own very specific challenges and being able to execute and navigate while remaining on track can be challenging. So how can you best identify the key elements of a launch and utilize evaluation to ensure you’re building upon each launch successfully.

Join us as we welcome Trishna Sharma, Product Manager of Meta for a conversation on how to look at the key components of a successful product launch and evaluation techniques you can utilize to ensure you are driving powerful outcomes.

In this conversation Trishna will share:

• The key components of what drives a successful launch according to a PM
• How to plan and execute launch strategies that remain streamlined and on track
• Metrics and Data Insights you can look to, to measure success and efficiency
• How to conduct evaluation techniques post-launch to ensure you are consistently improving

“There are several things that can challenge a launch, but forgetting about some of the teams that are necessary for a launch can have a massive impact.” - Diane Pierson

• The people and teams that should be involved in a launch—but often aren’t
• Why you should use a launch readiness assessment rather than a launch checklist
• How to not lose control of a launch
• Why are product marketing managers often overlooked in the launch process

“My hope is that for product leaders and product managers is that in five years time you look back and you say, ‘tools like this have allowed me to free up my time so that I can do more high value work.’” - Paul Young

• The limitations of ChatGPT in its current version
• How ChatGPT can help product managers in their role
• Whether or not they are hopeful for new AI tools like ChatGPT

“Just because you may be a bigger company or the acquiring company doesn't mean you do everything right. Learn from the people that you're buying from.” - Frank Tait

• When to build, buy or partner in the context of a merger or acquisition
• The three stages of determining whether or not to buy a company
• The value of a gap analysis during an acquisition or merger
• How to apply the Pragmatic Framework to M&A build a shared mission and understanding
• The role of positioning and segmentation during an M&A process

Are your market research efforts providing meaningful insights? Have you accurately identified the needs of your market? Do your cross-functional team members understand your market well enough to win their trust – and get the sale?

Join us as Pragmatic Institute and Diane Pierson, visiting instructor and founder of Innovate on Purpose welcome Scott Lien, CEO and co-founder of GrandPad. Scott will share how to leverage market research to build powerful positioning and ways to utilize Pragmatic principles in the real world to gain a strategic advantage.

In this conversation Scott will also discuss:

• What kinds of market research will help you build better positioning
• Practical ways to conduct research with limited budgets and time
• How to drive market knowledge into every product and marketing decision to drive better results
• How to align with leadership to successfully jumpstart your positioning workflow

“I am pleading for everybody, working in any job, at the start of every one of your projects to say, ‘are we date-driven or are we scope-driven?’ Then, when something unforeseen comes our way, we will gleefully and joyfully make the adjustments and celebrate and move forward.

• How to determine if a perceived cultural issue is actually rooted in a problem with workflow
• Why unexpected rework is a sign of a workflow problem
• Why starting with customer data will bring clarity to workflows
• The importance of agreeing to adjust either scope or date deadlines to better manage resource and time constraints

“The whole point of doing a positioning document is to clearly and concisely say, ‘who are we solving problems for? What are those particular problems, and why do those people care so much that we solve those problems for them?’”

• Why position documents are essential for the entire organization and why it makes the product team’s job easier
• What to include in a positioning document and why the order of the sections is so important
• How many positioning documents should you create per product
• Who should own the positioning document

“I think every company should be thinking about is create a product-led growth strategy. You don't have to implement it. You don't have to say, "this is how we're going to run our company." But I think if you step back to think about what it would look like if we use product-led growth in our company, you would probably build much better products.” - Mark Stiving

• Companies moving toward usage-based pricing
• What is product-led growth
• Why net-dollar retention is the single most important KPI
• The importance of compensation for the sales team that grows customers
• Pricing and AI

Steve Goodyear, the founder of Realizer Services, is the first person to earn a PMC VIII certification.

Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, and Steve discuss the variety of courses offered through Pragmatic Institute, and how each plays a role in elevating the work he does at his company.

They discuss

• How the courses help Steve answer the question: "How do I turn professional services into more of a product."
• His lessons from the Design course
• How he uses the Pragmatic Alumni Community to build his network and talk through ideas.

Additional Resources

Foundations on Demand

Begin your product training experience with the course Foundations. Even better, this course is both live and on-demand. You’ll also gain your membership to the growing and active Pragmatic Alumni Community.

Course Overview:

• Understand the market and the problems it faces
• Use market knowledge to build and sell products people want to buy
• Master the Pragmatic Framework and the activities needed to bring a successful product to market
• Learn to listen to the market, prioritize projects and drive result

Learn More

In this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, hosts Sandy Orlando, the senior VP of product management at CDK Global, an automotive retailing software company. Sandy explains that her objective with NIHITO visits is to listen to the customer rather than to talk to the customer, and to test a hypothesis without trying to inform it. She said that while building personas people try to prescribe a conclusion and then prove it rather than exploring.

When done well, personas can lead a product team to create solutions that lead customers to desired outcomes. At times, she said she's received feedback from customers that she didn't deliver one single thing the customer asked for but instead delivered exactly what they needed.

This episode is from our latest Product Chat webinar >> watch the webinar

With 2022 coming to an end and rumbles of the macro environment creating some potentially tough hurdles for businesses in 2023, companies must be laser-focused on what is most important for success in the coming year. This is why product managers and leaders must hone in on areas that create resilience and deliver the highest value and greatest impact for their organizations, employees and, most importantly, their users and customers.

Join us as we welcome Kirsten Van Detta, senior product manager at LinkedIn, for a conversation on what key concepts product professionals should be focusing on to fuel their 2023 and how being ruthless in your prioritization can serve as your biggest ally.

This episode is from our latest Product Chat webinar >> watch the webinar

Join us as we welcome Sandi Olson, Senior Marketing Content Manager at Microsoft for a conversation on how utilizing the right asset assessment techniques can help you to analyze, prioritize and make forward-thinking pivots before your competitors.

In this conversation Sandi will share:

• How to approach asset assessment through a lens that allows you to revive, streamline and support any business strategy
• Ways you can utilize assessment to better integrate positioning and messaging
• How healthy asset hygiene enhances strategy development
• Archive, archive, archive
• Tools and processes you can leverage to ensure you are finding meaningful opportunities within your assets

Validating market problems isn’t about listening only to the noisy 20 percent of the market. Instead, it’s about understanding the needs of the quiet 80 percent too. Without validation, product teams can invest valuable time and resources into an idea that is destined to fall flat.

In this episode of Pragmatic Live, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews Pragmatic instructor Terry Sadowski who candidly shares his experience with a launch failure.

They discuss:

• How pressure and novelty can cause you to ignore established processes that protect against launch failures
• The ways hindsight reveals all the missteps overlooked in a moment of excitement and energy
• How to move forward after a big failed launch
• Key advice to avoid a failed launch

Want to learn more about effective launches?

Launch is a course that helps you create a more strategic approach to exceed your business objectives. Learn to execute successful launches that align your entire organization around the same strategies and goals.

Enroll Today

• Three pillars of a successful business
• Why the market can make or break any product
• What makes a great market
• How to drive alignment in a company
• How to get out of the “one more feature” trap
• The difference between strategy and execution

“Just because you hit the metrics for a couple of months doesn’t mean you will be instantly promoted. You need to hit those standards and maintain those standards for a period of time. For the more advanced roles, we want them to maintain those standards for a year. Others maintain those higher standards for six months, etc.” - Corban Wells

• How to define product manager and product owner
• Building development and career paths for product professionals based on KPIs
• How clear expectations for each role improve one-on-ones and make the feedback more objective

“Product teams should stay out of the how and focus on the what, who and why. If we can bring all that context to the table and then we can give our development teams the space to think creatively. To start with a blank canvas. It is a best practice to have a separation of duties between the how and the what.” - Amy Graham

• The importance of having clarity around roles and responsibilities and understanding what type of team you have (e.g., high market knowledge vs dependent)
• How to build trust and collaboration between product and development
• Some of the key areas where teamwork starts to break down in companies.

This episode is from our latest Product Chat webinar >> watch the webinar

Join us as we welcome Anand Arivukkarasu, Product Leader (formerly of FB) for a conversation on how you can use measurement to ensure success throughout every stage of the product lifecycle.

In this conversation, Anand will share:

• Key KPIs and metrics you should be paying attention to through the development, GTM, growth and product end-of-life phases
• Ways to apply measurement to employ strategies and align stakeholders
• How to utilize metrics to gain buy-in for current and future initiatives
• How to decipher insights between the metrics to ensure you are staying ahead of the curve

“It's useful to look at metrics, but metrics are a lot more useful and meaningful if we frame them around why we're measuring that thing to begin with. You want to measure a thing because it's meaningful. And OKRs are how teams put meaning behind the measurement.” - Paul Young

• The qualities of a good objective
• Why you might have multiple key results for each objective
• Why you should set a confidence score (on a scale of 1-10) and why every objective should be difficult but not impossible
• The difference between OKR and KPI
• How many OKRs should you have on your team

What’s the hallmark of a strong product team? Anna Turner, VP of Products at Paycor said there are two: being market-driven and stewardship of time and resources.

• What to look for when hiring a product manager
• How product teams can leverage data to improve collaboration and decision-making in the organization
• Strategies for nurturing emerging leaders

“Win/Loss is a garbage-in, garbage-out exercise. There needs to be careful curation and vetting of the information in the program. Otherwise, information is going to be unreliable at best and misleading it worst.”

• The importance of getting strategic alignment before starting a win/loss program
• When is it appropriate to use open-ended or leading questions
• How to leverage data and then go beyond the data by bringing together cross-functional teams
• Determining how many win/loss interviews are sufficient for gathering insights

This episode is from our latest Product Chat webinar >> watch the webinar

• A framework for connecting business objectives to marketing executions
• Ways to use research to size, position and name your products/features
• A four-phased GTM approach to prove marketing value and reduce risk
• Ways to apply the same methodologies to create a product marketing function to utilize moving forward

“In the past, it's been a little bit of a nebulous process and people trying to grab from Lean Startup and all these different things that are not cohesive as a journey.” - Daniel Elizalde

1. Strategic alignment
2. Market discovery
3. User discovery
4. Solution planning
5. prototyping
6. Early adopter

• Why distribution strategy can be innovative
• Indirect or direct distribution strategy examples
• Integration as a distribution strategy
• Am outside-in approach to distribution strategy

"Distribution strategy is where you make it easy. You can build the greatest product in the world, but if people can’t find it and don’t know how to buy it, then it doesn’t matter what you built.” - Rich Nutinsky

• Examples when distribution strategy was an innovative disrupter in the market
• Distribution strategy for software companies
• The relationship between customer experience and distribution strategy

“Distinctive Competencies are rarely a product feature because a distinctive competency isn't easily copied and product features. If you come out with a new product feature today, your competitor could copy that within a few months.”

• What are distinctive competencies and why do they matter
• Examples of distinctive competencies at big brands (Disney, Amazon, LinkedIn, Zappos and Walmart)
• How to get more differentiation for your products

Win-loss analysis is a practice every company should be doing but not every company is doing it—at least not as effectively as they can be. Win-loss analysis can help your business in almost every facet—product strategy, marketing messaging, sales enablement, and more.

Andrew Peterson, Co-Founder of Clozd, the leader in win-loss analysis, explains how to optimize your win-loss analysis program.

Andrew has expert advice on the win-loss best practices to increase your win rate, whether it be getting started or leveling up your current program.

In this conversation Andrew will share:

• How to get started with a win-loss analysis program
• Tips to optimize your current program
• How to take the data you receive from your program and use it to implement necessary change 

“I have taken the classes before and have used so many of the concepts from the Framework at the various companies I've worked at, but to be able to get in there, teach it to so many different groups, companies and people with diverse backgrounds—It just shows the power in The Framework and the Foundations class,” —Dan Corbin, Pragmatic Instructor

• The five key sections in the Foundations course
• What makes the Pragmatic Framework powerful and effective
• The common challenges product professionals encounter
• How can students get the most out of the training when they enroll

“It is essential to adopt a structured approach to collecting buyer insights. Now, if companies decide just to do an ad-hoc buyer interview or win-loss interview, and it's not a more structured process, then companies will end up relying on anecdotal information and never truly understanding the buyer” — Diana Igua

• What win/loss programs provide to product managers, product marketers and sales teams
• Why a collection of conversations is more meaningful than one story
• How to establish a standardized and focused process for structuring win/loss research
• Why surveys aren’t an adequate replacement for win/loss interviews
• Two approaches to get target groups to engage with a win/loss interview

“Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be a market to hire consultants, to tell executives that their idea is stupid.” - Paul Young

• What early warning signs did CNN+ ignore that might have indicated the product wouldn’t succeed
• The conversion rate you should expect going from a freemium model to a premium model
• Why you need both data and stories to effectively communicate market research

One of the largest struggles within product is articulating your organization’s unique abilities to deliver value to its market. But guess what, it’s also one of the most important! So how do you develop a successful path that combines innovation, proven methodology and sure-fire approaches to hone-in on the attributes and differentiators that set you apart from your competitors?

We got you covered.

Leon Stigter, Senior Technical PM at Amazon Web Services, covers topics on distinctive competencies and when and how innovation can become your biggest ally. In this discussion Leon will share:

• How you can find distinctive competencies and turn them into assets
• Why does “distinctive” matter in distinctive competencies?
• How to use marketing as a top asset when telling your story
• Why data is a key factor in your process

“Here’s how we define distinctive competencies: they are the unique attributes your organization has developed that allow you to deliver value into your market.” — Paul Young

• Distinctive competency as it relates to core competencies
• Examples of distinctive competencies: innovation, culture, customer intimacy, patent portfolio
• Why you can’t innovate like Apple >> Read More
• The consequence of assuming distinctive competencies without external validation
• Why technology isn’t a good distinctive competency
• How many (or few) distinctive competencies you should have in your organization
• The strategies for shifting distinctive competencies (the slow way and the fast way)

• Become market-driven by exploring concepts such as how to uncover strategic opportunities
• Define product team roles and responsibilities
• Prioritize actual vs. desired business goals
• Talk to and observe the market in action.

“We try to be pristine in our application of the definitions, and what it is we’re actually trying to accomplish can sometimes get lost in the shuffle” - Kirsten Butzow

• Sprints and how the market cares about usefulness and impact—not methodology
• Who is driving the release planning discussions
• How to collaborate for a launch
• Why requirements should start with data and market research
• The helpful role of a retrospective

“It's been a really interesting time to see such a high degree of camaraderie and cheerleading in the community because everyone is working on leveling something up; they want to grow their team; they wanna grow their influence; they wanna grow their own skill level.” — Georgina Donahue, Director of Community at Pragmatic Institute

• How the community helps connect alumni with jobs, candidates and innovative hiring strategies
• The types of engaging conversations happening in the community around building cross-functional teams and collaborating with other departments
• Masterclass opportunities exclusive to community members

• Become market-driven by exploring concepts such as how to uncover strategic opportunities
• Define product team roles and responsibilities
• Prioritize actual vs. desired business goals
• Talk to and observe the market in action.

This episode was recorded during our recent Product Chat Webinar.

Hear how should you approach your content endeavors, and where should you look to understand the best areas to focus your efforts and resources from Editorial and Metadata Leader at Netflix, Anjana Gopakumar.