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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continue readingCongrats, you got the job! You’re leading a team of product managers. Now what?
“How do I get into product?” is a super common question, with a corresponding number of articles. But there’s far less good information out there about how to level up once you’re already in product.
What skills do you need to develop as you move up into product leadership? Roles like group product manager (GPM), director of product, VP, or CPO need different skills.
The challenge is how to keep learning and getting better in a structured, step-by-step way.
This, my friends, is where most people plateau.
There’s far less guidance available after you grok the core PM role and level up into leadership. My experience has been that there are a bunch of resources to help guide you into product management and learn the core role. But afterwards… you’re kind of on your own.
When you were a line PM, you spent most of your time thinking about the product, users, and how it needed to evolve. Sure, you had to deal with the stresses of roadmapping, stakeholder expectations, and product reviews. But at least the product itself bounded the work.
You were responsible (hopefully) for helping your team ship features that would delight customers and serve the business.
Now, you have a whole new set of challenges to think about: People management. Org structure and team design. Feedback and communication architecture. Connecting strategy and vision with line-level execution. Protecting your PMs—not to mention the engineers and designers they work with—from the whiplash of the latest “just this once” sales special and the CEO’s pet project of the week.
It’s hard.
And, there aren’t that many places you can turn to for help along the way. It’s time consuming to find the best resources and filter out the bad ones. There’s a dearth of quality, actionable resources for PMs that already have the job and want to level up.
Between my own product career and researching the podcast, I’ve invested MANY hours exploring these challenges. It’s been a very aggressive learning curve, and I’ve found quite a few good resources that will save you time.
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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:
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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Ever struggle with vulnerability as a leader? Me too.
This year, I’ve been thinking a lot about values, and how I show up and live them (or don’t).
Karl Kuhnert is all about helping leaders to make their unique contribution. He teaches leadership, organizational change and professional ethics at Emory University, as well as in the Executive Education Programs at UCLA, HEC Paris, and The University of Georgia. He did his undergraduate work at Penn State and earned his PhD in industrial-organizational psychology at Kansas State University.
In 2000, Karl was awarded the Hammer Award from Vice President Al Gore for outstanding contributions to the federal government, and has served as a consultant and executive educator with many organizations big and small, including UPS, the US Treasury Department, Siemens, The Jet Propulsion Lab @ CalTech, Cox Automotive, The Federal Reserve, Federal Home Loan Bank, The Robert Wood Foundation, Carnival Cruise Line, AECOM, Farmers Insurance, and The American Cancer Society and many more.
This is a conversation about the genius and strength of vulnerability, and the levels of development that we each go through as leaders, and how we each can keep evolving to give our authentic gifts. This is about living our values.
Please enjoy learning from Dr. Karl Kuhnert.
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If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time and energy in your career and want it to be a joyful, rewarding, and positively challenging experience, but probably have struggled with that at times. In this conversation, I’m excited to bring you one of the best thinkers I’ve found yet on crafting a joyful career.
My guest in this episode is Laura Garnett (@garnettl). Laura is a performance strategist, TEDx speaker, a regular contributor to Inc and Forbes and the author of The Genius Habit and the tactical follow-up, Find Your Zone of Genius, which releases September 1.
As a Performance Strategist, Laura works with highly motivated CEOs, executives, and managers who want to maximize their engagement, tap into their unique talents, and access a whole new level of joy and hunger at work, as well as create that kind of experience for their teams. In a nutshell, Laura helps people identify their unique genius and purpose, and craft an actionable plan to leverage them in their day-to-day work.
Laura is a global speaker and contributor at leading conferences and publications like Inc, Forbes, Fast Company and has consulted with leading organizations all over the world including Capital One, OpenTable, LinkedIn, and Instructure. Prior to launching her own company, she honed her marketing, strategy, and career-refining skills at companies like Capital One, American Express, IAC, and Google.
In this conversation, we go deep on how to connect with your unique zone of genius — that integration of the head and the heart where you are intellectually on fire and emotionally invested — how to own the value you bring and create joy in your day to day work, as well as more enlivening ways to think about success.
On top of all that, for part of the conversation Laura puts me in the hot seat and helps me uncover the core emotional challenge that drives my sense of purpose and impact, and I share openly about some things that I haven’t before. I hope this is useful to you as an example of an important part of the process.
Please enjoy learning to unlock your genius with Laura Garnett.
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Soushiant Zanganehpour (@soushiant) is a social scientist and serial entrepreneur with a long history of working to solve problems at the intersection of public policy, business, technology, and systems change.
In 2018, he founded Swae, a platform to help organizations create idea meritocracies by sourcing, evaluating, and improving ideas from all people in the organization, to lead to higher quality decisions with greater buy-in.
Prior to Swae, Soushiant led a global impact strategy consulting firm and was a director at the Skoll Center, a global epicenter for social entrepreneurship. He’s been a board member of Harvard Business Review’s advisory council, as well an advisor to numerous other startups, as well as having been an adjunct professor or guest lecturer at the masters level at multiple universities.
In this conversation, Soush and I:
Soushiant is one of the best systems thinkers and most passionate social entrepreneurs that I know and in this conversation, I think you’ll see why.
Without any further delay, enjoy learning about solving systemic problems with social entrepreneurship with Soushiant Zanganehpour.
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Pam Fox Rollin (@PamFR) is an executive coach, facilitator, and strategist with extensive experience in senior team development, especially in healthcare and tech. She’s worked with many clients in the Fortune 100, fast-growth startups, consulting firms, and NGOs. She was a Guest Fellow and Master Coach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and has lectured in business schools and boardrooms around the world. She’s the author of 42 Rules for Your New Leadership Role: The Manual They Didn’t Hand You.
In this conversation, we explore a lot of ideas that will help you show up more powerfully as a leader, and create an environment where people can come fully alive, and be decisive in chaotic, unknown spaces.
We also discuss how to know when you need to change your approach as a leader, a different definition of what leadership is, and among other things, how we should actually approach personality assessments like the Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram.
This conversation was a lot of fun to have and I hope it’s equally fun and thought-provoking for you to listen to.
Enjoy learning from Pam Fox Rollin how to be a decisive leader who helps people come alive.
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April Dunford (@aprildunford) is a legend in the product marketing world. She’s an executive consultant, speaker, and author who helps tech companies make complicated products easy for customers to understand and love. She is a globally recognized expert in Positioning and Market strategy. She’s the author of the book “Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It,” which I highly recommend you read.
April’s expertise is built from 25 years as an executive in a series of 7 successful technology startups and 3 global tech giants. She’s launched 16 products as an executive and consulted on the launch of dozens more, accounting for many billions in revenue. In short, she’s seen it all.
In this conversation, we go deep on positioning for products and services, strategy, and market building. I particularly love two stories she shared about Seth Godin, and how one of her companies executed a positioning strategy that led to 40x revenue growth 18 months. If you have an offering that you are putting into the world, and in particular if you need to adjust your business positioning to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic, you need to listen to this.
Happy learning!
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