Podcast

Dianne Frommelt is the Chief Product Officer for 15Five, a company I am a longtime fan of. They’re on a mission to create high performing, highly engaged teams, and to create a product that helps everyone who uses it to be and become their best selves.

In this conversation, we go deep on the types of practices that can infuse your values into your team’s rhythms. We talk about what it looks like to craft a strategy and navigate roadmapping conversations, outcomes thinking, how to approach taking on leadership of an existing team rather than one you get to build from scratch, and much more.

And if nothing else, you’ll walk away from this episode with a great set of practices to try that will help you and those you work with feel much more connected and have deeper, more trusting relationships with each other.

Enjoy!

And if you have a moment, I’d love it if you could give me a little feedback via this SurveyMonkey link. (It only takes one minute.)

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William Tyrone Toms is the cofounder of REC Philly, an incubator, community, and resource center aimed at helping independent creatives make a sustainable living. In short, he’s out to challenge the narrative of the starving artist and create an international community of creatives who control their own destinies.

As REC Philly likes to say, “independent doesn’t mean alone”, and this story really embodies what it looks like to build something that matters with intentionality, clarity, and connectedness at its core.

There are a lot of gems packed into this conversation. Among other things we discuss:

• creative placemaking and how to create the community and space you have always sought
• how to reverse engineer your business from who you want your customers to become, all the way back to the product offering
• the power and clarity of having an artistic message as your north star in making decisions
• how to choose an audience
• the work required to move from having a vague desire for impact (which we all feel) to a specific and actionable plan to create that impact for a specific kind of person

If you are out to make something that matters, this conversation will help you to get clear on how to do that better.

Enjoy!

And if you have a moment, I’d love it if you could give me a little feedback via this SurveyMonkey link. (It only takes one minute.)

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For the last episode of 2020, I reflect on eight big lessons I learned from guests this year, and share a few questions to ask yourself as we head into 2021.

We’ve shared so many amazing conversations this year, and I couldn’t possibly cover all of them, but I wanted to pull out some that I think are timely to keep in mind as we’re all closing out this year, and navigating into an unknowable future together.

How do we want to show up differently? How do we want to lead differently? How do we want to create differently? This episode shares ten takeaways from the conversations of 2020 to help us navigate into the next year.

I wish you all a peaceful end to this turbulent year. I hope you are finding an opportunity to rest, to reflect, to just take a deep breath with yourself and with the people you’re close with. Here’s to making things that matter in 2021!

And if you have a moment, I’d love it if you could give me a little feedback via this SurveyMonkey link. (It only takes one minute.)

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Alex Hillman is a pioneer who has made it his mission to help independent creatives build sustainable careers. He’s the author of the recent bite-sized hit, The Tiny MBA, which is an insightful collection of short lessons about the long game of business.

Alex cofounded Indy Hall, Philadelphia’s first coworking space, and helped launch what became the coworking boom. He also built Stacking the Bricks with Amy Hoy, where they teach creative professionals how to bootstrap their own businesses.

As I believe you’ll hear, Alex is a very caring and generous person with his knowledge and experience and loves nothing more than to hear about how these ideas are helping people level up, so please reach out to him via email at Alex [at] tiny.mba and let him know what resonated with you.

Among many other things in this conversation, we talk about…

• What does it look like to bring intentionality to our careers, to be able to connect the dots between starting where we are with what we have, and the long term aspirations and impact we want to create?
• mindsets that will help you to have balance and equanimity in the face of uncertainty and having no control
• the application of Buddhist teachings to a business career

This was a really fun conversation that will help you cultivate continuity in your efforts and invest in the long game of business, to benefit yourself and everyone around you.

Please enjoy learning with Alex Hillman.

And if you have a moment, I’d love it if you could give me a little feedback via this SurveyMonkey link. (It only takes one minute.)

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My guest in this conversation is Marty Cagan. If you aren’t familiar with his work, Marty is a very influential person in the world of technology — he’s basically the godfather of modern tech product management.

Before he founded the Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) to help others create successful products, Marty was an executive responsible for defining and building products for some of the most successful companies in the world, including Hewlett Packard, Netscape, and eBay.

As part of his work with SVPG, Marty is an invited speaker at major conferences and top companies across the globe. He’s a highly sought after coach to the best product organizations out there, and has had a significant impact on the teams that make most of the tech products you love.

His first book, INSPIRED, is the seminal book out there for how product people should approach their work. Now he’s done it again with EMPOWERED, which he coauthored with his partner at SVPG, Chris Jones.

Please join me in learning about how to create empowered teams and the kind of environment where people can do the best work of their lives, with the one and only, Marty Cagan.

And if you have a moment, I’d love it if you could give me a little feedback via this SurveyMonkey link. (It only takes one minute.)

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My guest in this conversation is Natalie Nagele, the cofounder and CEO of Wildbit. Wildbit is a bootstrapped, independent, people-first software company that is celebrating a very special milestone: 20 years in business! Now entering their “third act,” Wildbit is starting to expand its focus to new arenas, starting off with the new job board called People-First Jobs.

I’m catching Natalie at a very special moment – right at Wildbit’s 20-year anniversary, a milestone that most businesses never reach, and one that’s even more rare in the fast-paced world of software. As such, this conversation is a bit more reflective and goes deep into the mindsets and worldview that have enabled Wildbit to evolve as it has.

Wildbit is one of the best examples I’ve come across yet of the kind of company I want to see the world be full of. They are a terrific example of building an ethos and approaching a company as a vehicle within which everyone can continually evolve and do fulfilling work that makes a net positive contribution to all people affected.

For anyone who either runs a company or aspires to build one, this conversation will inspire and guide you to make impact and enjoy the journey.

I hope you enjoy going deep into Natalie’s world as much as I did. With that, I give you Natalie Nagele.

And if you have a moment, I’d love it if you could give me a little feedback via this SurveyMonkey link. (It only takes one minute.)

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Wow, it’s been a year of the podcast! So much has happened. I wanted to acknowledge the anniversary ep — which happens to release on election day in the USA — and announcing an upcoming name change for the show.

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Do you want to build a small giant startup? Where do you begin, and what and when is enough? Learn the reasons and mindsets needed to build non-venture track startups. In this episode, I talk with Rob Walling, a serial entrepreneur. Currently, Rob runs TinySeed, the first startup accelerator for SaaS bootstrappers and MicroConf, a conference and community for non-venture track company founders. Rob is also host of Startups for the Rest of Us, a popular podcast for bootstrapping entrepreneurs.

If you’ve ever been interested in starting your own business and thought there must be a 3rd option between a small side project and a billion dollar Silicon Valley VC-fueled unicorn, then you need to hear this.

Please enjoy learning from the master of “startups for the rest of us,” Rob Walling.

And if you have a moment, I’d love it if you could give me a little feedback via this SurveyMonkey link. (It only takes one minute.)

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Hope Gurion was the Chief Product Officer of CareerBuilder, the SVP of Product at Beachbody, and led multiple product verticals at AOL. Today, Hope coaches product leaders and teams seeking to grow through customer-centric, evidence-based strategies. She’s led almost 50 products teams in her career, in both consumer and B2B companies. Hope also hosts one of my favorite product podcasts, “Fearless Product Leadership” , where she helps other product leaders shorten their learning curves.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• the things nobody tells you about product leadership
• the root causes of many dysfunctional product orgs (hint, they are at the executive level)
• how to get over the fear of saying no and coming across as “mean”
• Hope shares some of her battle stories from the front lines of organizational transformations—what has, and hasn’t, worked

In short, this conversation is full of gold that anyone working in or around the leadership of a product organization needs to know.

So without any further adieu, please enjoy learning with Hope Gurion.

And if you have a moment, I’d love it if you could give me a little feedback via this SurveyMonkey link. (It only takes one minute.)

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As a listener of this show, you’re someone interested in using your time to make things that make things better, and this conversation with David Dylan Thomas will help you do that.

David’s work centers on the intersection of bias, design, and social justice. He’s the author of the new book, Design for Cognitive Bias, serves as a Content Strategy Advocate at Think Company, and is the creator and host of the Cognitive Bias Podcast.

David’s developed digital strategies for major clients in entertainment, healthcare, publishing, finance, and retail. He’s also a prolific public speaker on topics at the intersection of bias, design, and justice, and has presented at conferences such as TEDNYC, SXSW Interactive, Confab, the Wharton Web Conference and many more.

This is a conversation about the power we each have to affect the world around us. David’s work will help you to see the ways that we are each unavoidably biased, and more importantly, what we can each do about it. No matter what it is you do, understanding cognitive bias will help you do it better for everyone that it affects.

Whether you realize it or not, you are a designer — we are all designers of something — whether it be a system, products, meetings, spaces, conversations, or something else. And as a designer, understanding bias will help you do more good with your work.

Please enjoy, David Dylan Thomas.

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