Andrew Skotzko

This conversation features Barry Brown, a dear friend and mentor. He’s one of those people I feel really, really grateful to have in my life. Barry helps leaders all over the world be more of who they are, and be more effective in bringing forth the contribution they seek to make in the world.

Barry is someone I call a “shaper of shapers,” and by the end of this conversation, you’ll understand why.

We dive right into the deep end about what it means to be a grounded, humble leader, and what it means to embrace the limits within our work as a pathway to our individual and collective evolution. We also discuss how to bring a craftsman mindset to your work.

For longtime listeners of the show, you may recognize Barry’s name! This conversation was one of the first episodes I released, back when this podcast was but a twinkle in the eye. And, for a bit of trivia, it was actually the first interview I ever recorded for the show. So this is as OG as it gets here. I’m republishing this conversation, because the show has grown a lot since this early interview, and I think this conversation deserves more love. I’ll do this once in awhile, to highlight an episode and feature it to all the people who weren’t yet listening to the show back when it first dropped!

So with all of that, please enjoy Barry Brown.

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Eric Steege is an energetic product leader with over a decade of experience leading large-scale innovation-focused product teams.

With what I think might be a perfect background for a product leader, Eric actually started his career as a pro soccer player and then a Division 1 college soccer coach with a masters in sports psychology! He’s been a founder and product director as well, and currently works at Amazon AWS, building the world’s largest community of product management and innovation consultants. Basically, his teams help other companies adopt Amazon’s secret sauce for building new products and businesses. He’s deep

This conversation goes into an area that I’m really interested to explore more deeply, which is about how to approach culture building. We riff a lot here, exploring different ideas around how to approach your culture like a product.

Please enjoy learning with Eric Steege.

Enjoy!

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Melissa Perri is the CEO of Produx Labs, a product management consultancy, and the author of “Escaping the Build Trap” which is one of my favorite books on product.

She’s the creator of the online school Product Institute, where she has shared her scientific approach to Product Management with over 3500 students and since 2019, she’s taught on the faculty of Harvard Business School.

In this conversation, we discuss the “missing middle” layer in organizations, how to create and maintain a product strategy, how to assess whether you want to work with a company, product operations, and much more.

After you listen to this, check out Melissa’s new podcast, Product Thinking, which launched after we recorded (link in show notes below).

Enjoy!

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Sarah Avenir is a full-hearted leader who models the strength of vulnerability in her experiments with creating sustainable businesses that are good for people and sharing her journey on the way. She is the CEO of Andyet, a people-first growth and creative web consultancy founded in 2008, and is the author of Gather the People, a book I really appreciated in which she introduced the world to a deep-not-wide marketing theory built on genuine vulnerability and authenticity.

I really enjoyed this conversation exploring people-first growth and bridging the gap between authenticity, spirituality, and leadership. I hope it inspires you to step into the next level of your leadership with a full, open heart, as it did for me.

Please enjoy Sarah Avenir.

Enjoy!

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C Todd Lombardo is a data and design obsessed product leader, currently the VP of Product and Design at MachineMetrics. He’s a mentor at TechStars, a global speaker and consultant on all things product design and customer experience, and is also on the faculty at Madrid’s I.E. Business School, and Baltimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art where he teaches graduate level courses in design, innovation, and data visualization.

And because he’s obviously bored and looking for more interesting things to do, C Todd has also co-authored three books published by O’Reilly, with his most recent book being Product Research Rules which is one of my new favorite guides to thinking about product research.

This is a fun conversation that really explores how to think about the questions that we all are asking — often unconsciously — that shape our lives and work. Talking with C Todd made me a better listener, thinker, and question-asker, and I think it’ll do the same for you.

Please enjoy C Todd Lombardo.

Enjoy!

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Michael O’Bryan is on a quest to transform the way organizations understand and support human development, interaction, and performance. An expert in the fields of community development, organizational culture, and human wellbeing, he’s spent more than a decade working directly with resilient yet underserved populations, including veterans, adults in recovery, returning citizens, and families experiencing homelessness. 

Michael lives at the intersection of arts and the social sciences, speaking, teaching, and consulting nationwide in his quest to transform the way organizations understand and support human development, interaction, and performance. 

This conversation explores the science of our humanity, and how understanding those mechanics gives us a chance to create systems that lift up all of us instead of just some of us. I hope it pushes you to think about creating truly humane systems wherever you go, as it did for me.

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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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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