Product Chats Podcast

“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.

Customer success isn't just a department, especially in subscription businesses.

In this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews Kirsten Butzow, senior VP of customer operations at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who explains why companies have to earn their customers business on a regular basis and how to do it.

They discuss that even know the product team understands the market problems, it's the customer success team that will reveal whether or not the product team hit the mark. They also outline the natural checkpoints along the way to know if the organization is staying grounded in the problems and personas.

How often should you conduct market visits? What data should you gather? And, where does discovery fit within the product roadmap cycle? This episode is a recording from the latest Product Chat featuring Ted Best, senior vice president of product at Offerpad. During his expert presentation, he answers these common market visit questions and explain how to implement a continuous discovery strategy. He also provides an approach to using market visits to answer the “why” of the roadmap, not just the “what” and the “when.”

There isn't just one type of buyer's journey, there are three: trust journey, relationship journey and analytical journey. During this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews pricing expert Mark Stiving, chief pricing educator at Impact Pricing. Not only does he explore the three types of buyer's journeys in-depth, but he also gives listeners the one question they should ask to quickly identify which journey their customer is on. He also explains the value map and why you should always assume your buyer is on a trust journey until proven otherwise.

“The roadmap really should be a conversation” - Jim Semick, founder and chief strategist of Product Plan. 

Are you curious what the best framework is to plan and prioritize a product roadmap? Are you a Product Manager that wonders how often to update this tool? Listen in as Rebecca Kalogeris is joined by Jim Semick to discuss Product Plan’s annual survey results, his tried and true method of ‘value vs effort’ and his advice on updating and maintaining roadmaps that work. 

Jim explains that updating roadmaps often keeps the product conversation open, and that for how many hours product managers spend managing the roadmap each week that it’s important to share them with their teams frequently so there’s a level of transparency and understanding when something changes. Roadmaps are embodiment of strategy, building the roadmaps are a part of how you define and share that strategy across the organization.

(This episode was recorded during our recent Product Chat)

During this episode, Lindsay Hunt, director of product at TaskRabbit shares insights on customer and revenue retention and how to build products and services that keep your market coming back. She teaches how to navigate when you have two users in a marketplace, strategic angles to entice and delight customers and opportunities for revenue growth by nurturing relationships and creating products people want to buy.

This episode is for anyone trying to figure out how to leverage storytelling in their role as a product manager or product marketer. The VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute and host, Rebecca Kalogeris, interviews Matthew Woodgett, founder and CEO of Go Narrative who explains that a story isn't an artifact or finished product like a book or movie, but instead, using is a way of communicating.

He explains how stories help companies prioritize, connect departments and gain buy in for roadmaps. During the conversation, Matthew outlines an efficient and effective way to think about storytelling when you're a busy professional, which he describes as the 3D framework: Desire, difficulty and denouement.

In this episode, Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, hosts Erin Neal Enterprise Account Executive at Klue. Erin explains how to systematically approach objections to win customers who are talking with the sales team. The approach taught in this episode shows how to be collaborative rather than combative when approaching objections. Erin and Rebecca also cover how to provide sales with the tools they need to be successful in their objection handling with prospects.

Klue is company that provides market and competitive intelligence software that enables competitor research and delivery of sales battlecards to B2B Sales teams.

Mark Miller and Ted Vaugh, authors of Culture Built My Brand: The secret to winning more customers through company culture, join Rebecca Kalogaris, VP of marketing at Pragmatic Institute to talk about the intersection of culture and brand. They outline the 5 pillars of the brand, which include culture, products and services, the story of the company, user experiences and identity. They also explore the frustration that emerges when different departments and different people own different parts of the brand because it becomes complicated to shape culture. The conversation includes tips on how to address culture as someone who isn’t a leader at the organization. Mark and Ted explain that a marquee culture drives performance, but a bad culture can kill the brand.

Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute and Cindy Cruzado, certified instructor at Pragmatic Institute, discuss how to build a company culture that is healthy and creative especially in remote and hybrid working environments. Cynthia shares how to make disagreement comfortable and common as a way to support different ideas. They both agree that having fun along the way supports all of the team-building initiatives, and they include some game ideas that their teams find engaging.

(This episode of Pragmatic Live was captured during our recent Product Chat session)

How do product pros deliver innovative solutions to users, leverage technology and develop tactical plans without a prior blueprint or example to follow?Ebony Shears, VP of product at Forbes, to the Product Chat shared how she gains team enthusiasm and buy-in, and how she determines what opportunities are worth pursuing at the 103-year-old institution.

In this episode, Andrew Wale, the chief revenue officer at Twintag, meets with Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, to discuss how to use a great product as a vehicle to engage with customers and enhance their experience. He explains how to give customers information when they need it and in a user-friendly format with tools like QR codes. When customers have to navigate robust websites, they might get lost in their search for an answer. He shows how product-led communication breaks down these types of barriers and improves customer retention.

We are going to be a product excellence team, so how do we measure how effective we are?" - Sherwin Damdar

Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute interviews Sherwin Damdar, director of product management and innovation at Garlock, and he shares how he uses the sales of differentiated products to measure his teams' success. He says that differentiated products must meet three criteria: They must be unique, valuable and proven. Together they talk about how product managers can find areas of opportunity by evaluating problems customers have and the solutions they are willing to pay for.

What a wonderful time to be product marketing, and Pragmatic instructor, Rich Nutinsky, explains why in this episode hosted by Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute. They discuss how the world of product management has evolved because of new technology and refined approaches to customer research. Rich also shares his own experiences as a product professional and how product training was a game-changer early in his product management career path. They conclude that we are in fact in the age of products.

Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews Dr. Nancy Li, director of product, mentor and YouTuber. In this episode, Nancy gives all the details on her powerful story and some amazing tips on climbing to the top of the product industry, from worker-bee to director and beyond.

Dr. Nancy has mentored more than 100 professionals to break through in product management, check out her YouTube below.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIXcpwAsd6uO6PQ7VaMbXpg

"Demand generation at its base definition is simply generating demand for a product or service, and then converting that demand into a lead." - Charlotte Bohnett

Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews Charlotte Bohnett, the senior director of demand generation at WebPT. In this episode, she talks not only about what makes demand generation successful but also what qualifies as quality content marketing. As a leader in the field, she shares strategies for building effective content marketing teams from the ground up and talks about the importance of retaining the best employees on your team.

Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, interviews Leidy Klotz, author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. He encourages people to fight their instinct to add to projects, products and to-do lists as a way to display competence. Instead, Leidy teaches listeners how to add value to life and work through subtraction. The muscle for adding is strong for most people but subtraction takes practice and intention through prompts and reminders. During the episode, Leidy provides strategies to add subtractive solutions to their toolbox.
"Historically, adding was the only option to improve things. But now, there are so many opportunities to take things away to make things better." - Leidy

Listen in to our recent Product Chat with Oji Udezue, chief product officer at Parsable, as he discusses his experience and shares fundamental product systems that can accelerate your path to achieving repeatable, consistent innovation for your organization.

Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, and Diana Richardson, technical product manager at Core Logic, explore the challenges that immerge with team and culture during an acquisition. Diana experienced acquisitions during her career and she shares how to navigate the uncertainty during the early stages of acquisition and how to spot opportunities rather than worry about "what ifs."

During the upcoming holiday, allow us to be your guide for some excellent product listening. We look back at one of our most popular episodes featuring David Meerman Scott.

What does neuroscience and selfies have in common?  They help create "fandom".

Join us for this episode of our Pragmatic Live Podcast to address just this, and what it means to build and keep fans. Our own Rebecca Kalogeris is joined by David Meerman Scott, to discuss his recent book, Fanocracy: How to turn fans into customers and customers into fans, to address more than just proximity, but how you can empower your fans to help you grow. We chat with David to understand what Fanocracy is, how it can be utilized and how we can tap into our existing fandom. 

Rebecca Kalogeris, VP of marketing for Pragmatic Institute, and Diane Pierson, an instructor at Pragmatic Institute, talk about how the product industry has evolved during the last 15 months as the world drastically changed during the pandemic. They discuss what changes they predict are permanent and what might be a temporary shift to manage a unique environment. Rebecca and Diane also talk about how to measure success when the baseline is no longer relevant, and how to put structures in place to prepare for the unpredictable."You can't know what's going to happen, but be ready to act when it does. Keep these lessons with you and use them as you go forward. I think the future is going to be different, but I think we've got a lot of promise for this role as we go forward."