Product Chats Podcast

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.

“When your message is generic, instead of being for everyone, it turns into a piece of content for no one. So for me, specificity is always been really a key trait. To building that hero and then, also for me, is being real and genuine and authentic as I possibly can be."

• How to think beyond the inbound methodology
• Why distribution is the path to having a proactive marketing strategy
• The ways that content can build valuable relationships
• Vulnerability as a superpower and experimentation as a strength

“With video, whether you're using it for marketing or sales or just even information sharing, it's a human thing. You're building a human connection with someone. And what that serves to do is show your authenticity” - Ellen Grogan

• Why video is so powerful for building empathy and showing authenticity
• The challenges companies face when they start incorporating a video strategy
• Strategies for measuring success
• How to repurpose long-form videos in shorter formats

• Where to generate innovative and bold UX ideas
• How to delve into your users to understand patterns
• How to measure user efforts and KPI’s to pay attention to
• Ways to optimize UX experiences that increase both adoption and retention

Yes, Agile is typically associated with product and engineering teams, but the principles can be powerful when applied to the job search. In this episode of Pragmatic Live, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews Pragmatic’s newest instructor Dan Corbin about his unique approach to finding jobs in products.

• The different stages of the job search
• Why an iterative approach can reduce feelings of failure
• How having a partner in the job search can help improve the experience

“The hardest part is looking at ourselves or looking at the way we're doing things and knowing whether or not it is the most effective way things could be done and remaining open to an alternative.” - David Bard

• Recent research on curiosity
• How you can encourage curiosity at your organization and on your teams
• Strategies to stimulate and exercise curiosity
• How humility can overcome the Einstellung Effect

This is part four of a four-part series with pricing expert and Pragmatic instructor Mark Stiving. Each new episode will feature a case study on current pricing trends.

• The reason why people buy the $6,000 hotel room at Disney: Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser
• Why Mark thinks the hotel Room is underpriced
• How comparison helps the buyer justify pricing structures

• Product Portfolio Worksheet
• Isoprofit Tables
• Pricing Ownership Matrix
• Value Matrix

• The three revenue buckets and how they drive prioritization
• The three levels to pull to create and capture more value
• Which growth strategies are best based on the life cycle of a product
• The four ways to grow revenue from a single customer

This is part three of a four-part series with pricing expert and Pragmatic instructor Mark Stiving. Each new episode will feature a case study on current pricing trends.

• The elements driving buyer behavior in the housing market.
• The reasons why Zillow stopped flipping houses. Answer: Labor shortage and “the winner's curse.”
• How we can apply lessons learned in the housing market to B2B and SAAS companies.

• Product Portfolio Worksheet
• Isoprofit Tables
• Pricing Ownership Matrix
• Value Matrix

• The three revenue buckets and how they drive prioritization
• The three levels to pull to create and capture more value
• Which growth strategies are best based on the life cycle of a product
• The four ways to grow revenue from a single customer

>>Enroll Today 

This is part two of a four-part series with pricing expert and Pragmatic instructor Mark Stiving. Each new episode will feature a case study on current pricing trends.

• Why we might notice changes in volume, features and quality more than price changes.
• How do we make changes that increase profits but don’t upset buyers or users?
• Why now might be the best time to experiment with pricing.

• Product Portfolio Worksheet
• Isoprofit Tables
• Pricing Ownership Matrix
• Value Matrix

• The three revenue buckets and how they drive prioritization
• The three levels to pull to create and capture more value
• Which growth strategies are best based on the life cycle of a product
• The four ways to grow revenue from a single customer

“It wouldn’t surprise me if these latest price increases won’t work out as well as previous ones,” - Mark Stiving

• How do we get different customers with different willingness to pay to still buy our product?
• The risk of offering ad-supported cheaper versions
• Why “good, better, best” options work so well in subscription services

• Product Portfolio Worksheet
• Isoprofit Tables
• Pricing Ownership Matrix
• Value Matrix

• The three revenue buckets and how they drive prioritization
• The three levels to pull to create and capture more value
• Which growth strategies are best based on the life cycle of a product
• The four ways to grow revenue from a single customer

• Why innovation is everybody’s job
• The 7 different innovation archetypes
• How an innovative Valentine's Day commercial sold routers in a new way > Watch It

This episode was recorded during our recent Product Chat Webinar.

"Human-centered innovation" is the latest industry buzzword, and knowing how to leverage this approach is essential for driving success across products, services and business models. In this Product Chat, you'll learn...

• How human-centered innovation can help shape key business plans  
• Tactics for employing human-centered innovation within your organization
• Case studies of successful applications that created stellar impact for products and offerings

While you might be comfortable with the concept: NIHITO (nothing important happens in the office), getting the most out of market visits is challenging. In this episode of Pragmatic Live, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews Joy McCaffrey, product manager at LeaseQuery about her systematic approach to market research.

They discuss:  

• How to leverage an interview questions library
• Capturing quantitative data and qualitative data by utilizing both open-ended and close-ended questions
• How to schedule time with customers, non-customers, users and executives
• Effective ways to present insights to leadership

Additional Resources
There is a new course update to Market.
This course helps you gain a thorough understanding of your buyers and how they like to buy so you can build the product marketing strategies that deliver results.
Learn More
And, the newest course, Insight, provides you with a grounded and actionable approach to incorporating data into product practices and decisions.
Learn More

• How to use agile thinking to identify market problems
• Ways to solve market problems utilizing an agile workflow
• Key indicators for tracking progress and success
• and more!

• The responsibility of moving into a strategic role.
• The relationship between execution and strategy.
• The power behind knowing which activities and tasks to stop, not just what to start.
• How to think about buyers journey differently for renewals versus new customers.

• The difference between innovation and invention
• Thinking beyond existing personas
• Investing in emerging opportunities
• Setting realistic expectations around innovation initiatives

• The complicated process of a launch
• The value of having clarity on the end goal
• The components of a 90-second story

Product professionals are tasked with taking what they learn from the market and making it a reality. But, to do that, you have to communicate effectively with the people building the product.

In this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute interviews Jonathan Lucky, scrum master at Dazn, and they talk about how to bring information to the engineering team that is digestible and usable.

Jonathan discusses:

• The value of shortening the feedback loop between the engineers and customers
• Why you should include the engineers in the buyer persona creation process to create an environment where insights are jointly-owned
• Effectively building teams and optimizing communication

Additional Resources:

[Article] Using Data-Driven Personas to Boost Business

[Article] 7 Buyer Persona Generators and Templates

Knowing who buys your products is one thing. Becoming an expert on your buyers and using that knowledge to create product marketing plans that impact the bottomline is something else.

Market is a course that helps you gain a thorough understanding of your buyers and how they like to buy so you can build the product marketing strategies that deliver results. >> Enroll Today (edited) 

Listening to your market might lead your efforts in a new direction. That's what happened when Richard White, founder and CEO of Fathom, began talking to his audience about the challenges of scheduling customer interviews. While scheduling was a problem, the bigger challenge was the massive time investment required to capture insights from each interview.

During this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of Marketing and Product Strategy interviews Richard about how he and his team discovered and validated a market problem and then designed an innovative solution.

Richard's solution, Fathom.Video, is a Zoom app that allows you to record and highlight notes during zoom meetings in real time. Those highlights can be assembled into a video you can share with your team. The initial waitlist for Fathom.Video is over 70K strong, but Pragmatic Institute listeners get to skip the waitlist and go directly to the front of the line: fathom.video/pod.

Listen now to learn more.

In this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews Rod Griffith, chief client officer at MarketReach on how to help current customers discover new value in a product. Rod discusses how personal benefits can be a strong differentiator, especially when the competition focuses on business benefits. He explains how to uncover and leverage unrecognized benefits, unrecognized beneficiaries and unrecognized uses. They also explore how to remain authentic in the sales process by indirectly highlight personal benefits through conversation and questions.

Guest host Michael Li—the founder and president of The Data Incubator—sits down with Aishwarya Srinivasan, an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Innovation Leader at IBM. Aishwarya works cross-functionally with the product team, data science team and sales to research AI use cases for clients at IBM Data & AI. In her role, she conducts discovery workshops and builds assets to showcase the business value of the technology. Aishwarya holds a postgraduate degree in data science from Columbia University.

The two data science experts discuss the importance of building responsible AI systems that aren't harmful to society, citing examples in the media. Aishwarya shares the responsibilities of roles like AI ethicists, UX researchers, data scientists and cybersecurity officers in upholding responsible AI standards. She also highlights the key issues organizations will have to grapple with as AI continues to evolve, and she shares key takeaways for leveraging machine learning and AI to create business value. Find links to resources shared in this episode:

• Trusted-AI/AIF360 via Github
• "Adversarial attacks in machine learning: What they are and how to stop them" via VentureBeat
• "What is Adversarial Machine Learning?" via Towards Data Science

We're throwing it waaay back to 2019 if you want to listen to one of our most popular episodes to date.  While the conversation was a couple years ago, the information remains incredibly relevant. 

Netflix is one of the biggest, most recognizable names in the world, and it’s one of the biggest, most recognizable names in data science. But what does that really mean to be a data scientist in a big company like Netflix? Senior data scientist at Netflix, Dr. Becky Tucker, joins our podcast to share her experience learning data science and working at Netflix.   

Want to learn more about data science and how you can use it in your business? Check out our Business of Data Science course, designed for business leaders looking to become more data driven. If you’re looking to take data science training like Dr. Becky, check out our TDI data science courses. And make sure you listen to our other great podcasts, and join us for the best product training in the world.

A throwback this week because we want to end the year thinking about how to grow product teams in 2022. First step: Interviews. 

The wrong hire can negatively affect the entire department and the product long into the future, so getting the right people for the job is critical. Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews Pragmatic Instructor, Paul Young, about Product Manager X-Factors—or the skills that make a product manager excel.
He explains that being a product manager requires a diverse set of skills including soft skills like leadership, curiosity, listening, pitching and building consensus across the organization. During the conversation, Paul dives deep into some of these characteristics including why they matter and how to spot them during a job interview.

"How many buyer personas should you have?” This is the most common question companies ask when refining or starting their first persona project. In this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing at Pragmatic Institute, asks Adrienne Barnes, founder of Best Buyer Persona, that question. And she answers. This conversation is all about buyer personas including, how to research, how to create meaningful segments with the jobs-to-be-done method, and whether or not you should name them.