Product Momentum Podcast

Christian Marek is Vice President of Product Management at Productboard. He has applied his years of experience in technology and finance while leading product management efforts at Facebook, Google, and Docusign. In this episode, Christian joins co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to explore how AI tools are revolutionizing product management by enhancing customer obsession and meeting user needs effectively. Here’s what we cover:

What does it mean to be “customer obsessed”?

And how do I know if I am? Customer obsession is more important than ever before, Christian says. He shares three critical questi...

Cassidy Fein is currently leading growth for Autopatch within Windows Servicing and Delivery at Microsoft. Based in NYC, she has over 10 years of experience driving product innovation, scaling teams, and delivering customer-centric solutions. Throughout her career, she’s demonstrated a passion for empowering the next generation of product leaders, especially through her teaching with Mind the Product.

In this episode, Cassidy sits down with Product Momentum co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to take a closer look at product strategy – and its execution. Using Nvidia as an example, Cassidy describes how the chip maker applied three core tene...

Sarah Doody, CEO of Career Strategy Lab, sat down with Product Momentum co-hosts Sean Murray and Dan Sharp to offer advice to UX designers out there who are frustrated by the volatility in today’s job market. Treat your career like a product you’re designing, Sarah says, and focus on the essential skills you need in a turbulent job market. This is what you’ll learn:

Job Searchers.

Think of your career as a Product. Sarah offers 3 pro tips:Think about how you’re designing your career? Marketing your career? Selling your career...

In this episode, AgilityInsights’ Trisha Hall joins Paul Gebel for a first-ever joint podcast for Product Momentum — here, with Trisha’s Illuminating Insights. Trisha leads the enterprise solutions and government contracting team at AgilityInsights, and Paul is a VP of Delivery at ITX as well as long-time host of Product Momentum. In this inspiring conversation between friends and colleagues, Paul and Trisha explore the deep connection between organizational agility and the delivery of business value. They also discuss the role AI can play to generate user insights that help product teams convert strategy to desired outcomes.
 
AgilityInsights’ Rebrand +...

Tami Reiss, also known as The Product Leader Coach, brings together the strategy, process, and mindset tools we need to perform our roles as product leaders with the ability to think and communicate like an executive. A coach is able to see the whole field, and they’re watching us, their player, from an outsider’s perspective. “Beyond that,” Tami says, “a coach is a great sounding board; the higher we go in our careers, the less we can turn to our bosses for advice. They’ve either never done our specific job, or we don’t want them to think we don...

Katie Dove is an applied behavioral scientist and managing director of Irrational Labs, a  product design and behavior change lab. She and her team help companies like Airbnb, Microsoft, and Uber answer the question, Why do our customers behave like they do? and then help them design creative solutions that work. We caught up with Katie for an in-person chat at INDUSTRY; in our conversation, we discussed:

Human Value in Products.

Katie unpacked the notion of amplifying user value – human value, to be more precise – stressing the importance of understanding user behavior and needs, rather than...

Bruce McCarthy is a renowned product leader at Product Culture, the organization he founded in 2018. He’s also the author of two books: Aligned (2024) and Product Roadmaps Relaunched (2018). Bruce sat down with the Product Momentum team for an in-person chat on the heels of his INDUSTRY Global keynote; our conversation focused on –

The bottom line is this: stakeholders are not just peripheral figures in the product development ecosystem, but are central customers whose...

There was a time not long ago when a handful of Product Momentum guests (Rich Mironov and Marty Cagan to name just two) lamented the absence of any formalized university program dedicated solely to product managers. Lament no more, thanks to Brad Eiben and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, where Brad is Executive Director of the Master of Science Program in Product Management. Launched in 2018, the program is a one-year experience that blends coursework in leadership and business strategy with such technical practices as UX design, development, and Agile methodology.

Our conversation with Brad actually began...

Dan Chuparkoff is a seasoned innovation leader with experience at Google, Atlassian, and McKinsey. The Product Momentum team caught up with him right after his keynote at INDUSTRY Global and talked about how product teams can get beyond the theoretical hype of AI and start zooming in on its immediate potential.

His message was clear: while AI has the capacity to deliver transformative possibilities, product teams need to balance their long-term ambition for AI with a dose of everyday practicality.

“It’s easy to think about the future-forward-looking thing when you talk about something new, like...

The Product Momentum team continues the series of conversations that we recorded at INDUSTRY Global; in today’s episode, Bukky Adebayo and Rye Castillo join Sean and Sean to talk about the challenges and opportunities that come with building products for technical audiences. Bukky is Chief of Staff, Digital Customer Experience at Autodesk, and Rye is a Design Lead at Render (a self-described “curious generalist.”).

The discussion revolves around challenges in product design, particularly in technical environments (where users are often tech-savvy developers), and emphasizes the importance of collaboration and empathy in the development process.

“The over...

In this episode of Product Momentum, we share our conversation with Matt LeMay, who had just delivered a keynote at INDUSTRY Global, entitled The Business is Your Business.

About Matt LeMay

Matt LeMay is an internationally recognized product leader, consultant, and author. His titles include Agile for Everybody, Product Management in Practice, and the soon-to-be-released Impact-First Product Teams. Today’s episode marks Matt’s second visit with Product Momentum; his first was in episode 113, Embracing Human Complexity in Product Management (June 2023).

High-Impact Work Is Hard…

For product managers and their teams, Matt e...

If you’re a product manager who’s making the transition from individual contributor (IC) to people manager, you not only need to be nailing your job, Melika Hope advises. “You have to be showing up as a leader.” Opportunities for practicing leadership aren’t confined to managerial roles, she adds. ICs can exhibit leader-like traits every day by taking on a challenging strategic task, coming up with a creative solution, and solving complex problems that impact the business.

Melika Hope is Director of Product Management at Spotify; after delivering her keynote and INDUSTRY Global, she sat down with...

We didn’t realize it when we started recording this episode with Bob Moesta. But the moment our conversation ended, we knew his would serve as Product Momentum’s milestone 150th podcast! And what better topic to explore – and who better to explore it with – than a product manager’s job to be done with the champion of JTBD theory. As Bob explains, people don’t buy products at random; we hire them to solve specific problems or fulfill specific needs. Understanding the user’s struggling moments is our primary job to be done.

Product Momentum co-hosts Sean Flaherty...

Shikha Kapoor’s journey to Silicon Valley began in a small town in India, where she had only limited access to technology. She didn’t have access to the internet – or even to a computer. Now she’s a trailblazer in AI product management at Meta. Shikha credits a passion for learning, staying hungry, and maintaining a healthy curiosity as pillars in “a student mindset” that has served as her North star. Shikha currently serves as Meta’s Head of Product, Gen AI for Recommendations. Before then, she was a Product Leader AI for Consumer Productivity, at Google Assistant.

In this...

The success rate of new software products varies, depending on the criteria we used to define success. But a common statistic is unflattering: about 70% of new software releases fails to meet their initial expectations or goals. In this episode of Product Momentum – and in his new book, LAUNCH Code – James Whitman explains this phenomenon, describes the factors that contribute to such high failure rates, and presents research-based remedies we can deploy to reverse the trend.

Too often in product development, we become so focused on heads-down requirements building that the act of launching the product feels like an a...

What percentage of your software product launches have been successful? If you answered, “about 50%,” you’re ahead of the curve, says Itamar Gilad. Itamar is a product leadership coach and author who also held senior product management and engineering roles at Microsoft and Google, where he worked at YouTube and led parts of Gmail.

In today’s conversation, Itamar looks back on his early career that – he readily admits – includes ‘not that many big wins.’ As he explains, “The engineer in me kept whispering, ‘you don’t really know. You’re just faking it.’ And the results spoke for themselves.”

Can Product Operations transform your role as a product manager? Denise Tilles, who quite literally wrote the book on the subject (Product Operations, with Melissa Perri), thinks so. Especially if you’re interested in making better decisions faster – and who of us isn’t?

In her return visit to Product Momentum (having joined us from NY Product Conference, back in April), Denise reveals to hosts Sean Flaherty, Paul Gebel, and a standing-room-only audience of Product + Design Conference attendees how Product Operations unlocks the value of our organizations’ collective work.

What Is Product Ops?

Product...

In this episode of Product Momentum, Patricia Reiners chats with Paul Gebel and Brian Loughner (a Lead UX Designer at ITX); during the conversation, she tackles three critical topics that UX designers should consider when thinking about how best to interact with AI in their daily work, in their careers, and in their role as ethical humans.

About Patricia. In addition to hosting the Future of UX podcast, Patricia Reiners is a distinguished UX innovator and a prominent voice in the field of user experience. Based in Zurich, she works to develop advanced UX methodologies in emerging...

In this episode, Paul and Sean catch up with Ryan Rumsey just moments after his poignant keynote at the 2024 ITX Product + Design Conference. During his keynote and follow-up conversation, Ryan explained that the biggest challenges product builders face are people challenges, “deeply rooted in our own personal experiences and feelings.”

Ryan Rumsey is the CEO of Second Wave Dive, an on-demand strategic consultancy, and the founder of Chief Design Officer School, a learning platform for design leaders.  He is also the author of two books and – as conference attendees can attest – a captivating speaker.

Assess Workplace Po...

In this episode, John Maeda explains that software products are tools that help us achieve our broader goals – like caring for loved ones and strengthening our relationships – rather than the ultimate objective. So it’s no surprise that John frames artificial intelligence as a power tool that levels up our human potential to create an even better future.

John Maeda, VP of Engineering and the Head of Computational Design and AI Platforms at Microsoft, joined the Product Momentum team to record a live podcast episode on the heels of his conference-opening keynote at ITX’s Product + Design Conference...

In this episode of Product Momentum, Christian Idiodi shares insights gathered over his 20-year career as a product leader, leaning especially on the significance of human skills and highlighting the importance of product sense in product management.

Christian Idiodi is a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group and co-author of TRANSFORMED, with Marty Cagan and partners at SVPG. He recently joined co-hosts Paul Gebel and ITX Product Manager Dan Sharp for a conversation exploring the two sides of product sense and why its human component is essential to product success in the context of today’s AI-focused wo...

Welcome to this special episode of Product Momentum, where four ITX leaders share their hands-on experience establishing (Upstate Product Meetup) and growing (Upstate UX Meetup, to nearly 600 members!) two Rochester-area communities of practice (CoP).

Perhaps it was the recent conversations with Petra Wille and Jared Spool that inspired the idea for this up-close look at communities of practice. Or maybe we’re just eager to spread the word about our communities and support our colleagues. And, of course, it could be that we’re ramping up to host our upcoming Product + Design Conference, where the primary focus is a...

What’s the best way to align product strategy with business goals? How can product managers communicate product value to the go-to-market side of the house? Rich Mironov, a 40-year veteran of product management and author of The Art of Product Management 2d, joins Product Momentum to address these and other vexing challenges in the world of product management.

Rich remains a good friend of ITX; he delivered a workshop and keynote at the 2023 ITX Product + Design Conference, and this episode marks his second visit to the podcast — his first visit coming 4 years ago.

Know Your...

Back in episode 132 of Product Momentum, Janna Bastow talked about using AI tools to do much of the “grunt work” product managers and UX researchers do so that they can spend more time on the higher-value work that’s actually helping to transform product building. In this episode, John Haggerty and Prerna Singh go a bit deeper explaining how AIs can expedite – and simplify – those mundane, repetitive tasks to analyze qualitative data compiled from reams of user experience research.

John and Prerna will conduct a pair of workshops at the ITX Product + Design Conference, in Rochester, NY on June 27...

As Holly Hester-Reilly explains, “Intuition isn’t magic. People who have good product intuition know this, because they’ve worked hard over time through lots of hard practice to build it up – and build better products in the process.” Holly is the founder and CEO of H2R Product Science (and a good friend of Product Momentum). We jumped at the chance to catch up with Holly right after her talk at the New York Product Conference. 

3 Pillars of the Product Science Strategy

The product managers who develop this intuition have learned real, tangible skills, benefitting...

Among the many hats product managers wear is that of change agent. In many respects, product management is change management. PMs always seem to be flexing their approach to new circumstances, adapting to evolving markets and technologies, and side-stepping organizational landmines. “It’s hard,” says Zoia Kozakov, “especially when the change you’re trying to bring about might actually move the needle.” Zoia heads up device-based Digital Wallets at JPMorgan Chase.

Product Momentum caught up with Zoia Kozakov following her talk at the 2024 NY Product Conference, where she shared her observations on change management (and resistance to it) within t...

As a profession, product managers have been battling through some pretty lean times of late. Layoffs in big tech, market uncertainty across the board, and steep competition for fewer vacancies keep many of us up at night. All the more reason, as Denise Tilles explains, that product operations is more important now than ever.

In this episode of Product Momentum, recorded live at the NY Product Conference, Denise introduces us to this fairly new phenomenon called product operations (aka, “product ops”). She says that exploring product ops solely through the lens of sustained market challenges is short-sighted.
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In this episode of Product Momentum, Laura Barnard invites us to imagine the strong business outcomes our organizations can realize when we create space for strategy and execution to work in concert, instead of at odds. Founder of PMO Strategies and author of The Impact Engine (available Sept. 2024), Laura has been a driving force behind the integration of project management and organizational strategy, helping clients discover the mindset shift that improves how organizations execute strategies through projects.

Sharing the Mindset Shift

The power behind this approach is that the burden for the mindset shift is...

When you’re communicating as a product leader, how often do you consider what your audience needs to hear…at that precise moment in time? How do you deliver your message in a way that they can understand? Product coach Gabrielle Bufrem, in her keynote at the New York Product Conference (NYPC), says that “communication is effective only when it’s actually heard and interpreted.” In other words, just because you’ve said it doesn’t mean you’ve landed it.

Communication Is a ‘Soft Skill’?

This is especially relevant for product teams and their leaders, Gabi contin...

As the saying goes, not to decide is to decide. And, as April Dunford explains in this episode of Product Momentum, ‘not to decide’ — that is, the customer’s own inability to make a decision — swipes 40-60% of the average B2B salesperson’s revenue pipeline. (source: The JOLT Effect, by Matthew Dixon). B2B selling is hard, but the purchase side of the transaction is no walk in the park either. Call it what you want: dissonance, doubt, second-guessing. The anxiety that comes with the customer’s desire to avoid making a mistake can be paralyzing.

Recording Live...

Integrating AI tools into the product management workflow isn’t about cutting humans out of the loop. There’s nothing in the product manager playbook saying, “yeah, yeah, just build this idea and ship it.” Instead, as ProdPad co-founder and CEO Janna Bastow suggests, use AI tools to remove some of the grunt work so that we can spend more time working on the important stuff that’s helping to transform product management.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Janna rejoins Paul and ITX Product Manager Sean Murray to discuss how AI tools are driving the transformation of Product...

When product development teams build new software tools and systems, they like to start with the end in mind by nudging quality assurance and security scanning closer to the early stages of the process. Paul Connaghan, Principal Application Security Consultant at RiverSafe in London, UK, says this “shift left” approach goes straight to the heart of business operations by embedding a security mindset in the underlying architecture, in UX and UI design, and in the QA and app hosting apparatus.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Paul sat down with Paul Gebel and Jonathan Coupal, ITX’s VP of...

Product strategy is the guiding light that illuminates the path to success for any product. However, articulating and executing this strategy is often easier said than done, says product management expert Roman Pichler. In this episode of Product Momentum, Roman shares valuable insights into the essence of product strategy and how to effectively navigate its complexities.

Defining Product Strategy

Strategy means different things to different people, Roman says. “I would suggest the strategy is a high-level plan: it describes the approach that we’ve chosen to make or keep a product successful.” Strategy and vision are no...

When Jared Spool first visited Product Momentum a few years ago, he talked about the struggle designers feel when they’re directed to add new features to a design without first understanding the problem to be solved. “Great designers don’t fall in love with their solutions,” he advised us. “They fall in love with their problems.”

In today’s episode, Jared chats with Paul Gebel and co-host Christina Halladay, Director of UX at ITX. With his trademark wit and wisdom, he doubles down on that advice by describing what he’s been up to since we last spoke, as a...

Trust is the glue that sustains personal relationships. Likewise, trust in AI’s source data holds the key to its future and our confident use of it, says Scott Ambler, Agile data strategist, consulting methodologist, author, and keynote speaker. Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Scott joins Sean and Paul to dig into the importance of data quality in AI applications, understanding and managing bias in AI, and the essential role humans play in harnessing AI’s potential – and its risks.

“If you’re trying...

In this episode, Building Better Games co-founders Ben Carcich and Aaron Smith join Product Momentum, offering an inside look at the contributions the video game industry has brought to enterprise tech – and vice versa. Specifically, Ben and Aaron share a fresh take on how holistic leadership and product management help us build things that matter to the people who use our products.

Aaron shares his personal journey where games provided a safe space for him to reinvent himself, shaping him into the leader he is today. And Ben reflects on how his experiences in game development nurtured hi...

On the eve of its 20th anniversary, Flickr’s approach as a community-centric product continues to propel the company forward. For Stephanie Cantor, Flickr’s Senior Director of Product, the Flickr community extends beyond its 112 million global users; it is integral to the product itself. From ideation to prototyping, Flickr involves its users in every step, sustaining a platform that fosters creativity, connection, and serendipity.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Paul and Stephanie reminisce about her “amazing journey” to Flickr and reflect on the impact she has made in just her first year on the job...

Product managers seem to enjoy talking about how tough it is to be a product manager. And it is no matter the context of your specific business. Fortunately, as the role becomes more professionalized – and more populated – product communities are popping up and providing ready access to others we can learn from, network with, and vent our frustrations to. All of which, Petra Wille says, underscores the significance of product communities and the need for a collaborative mindset.

Petra is a product coach, author of STRONG Product People and STRONG Product Communities, and co-organizer of the Product at H...

In product, it’s easy to lock in on a user-focused or customer-centric mindset. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be if we lose sight of the bigger picture. As product managers, we have a business to run. We have team members to grow and develop. We’re responsible for broader financial metrics. Shelly Kalish describes this “zooming out” approach as a way to take a more macro view of our role and establish some context for it.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Paul Gebel is joined by Shelly Kalish, a global product leader with ove...

“I have Cerebral Palsy,” says Dave Dame, Senior Director of Product Accessibility for Windows at Microsoft®. “But my money doesn’t. So if you want my money, you better build a product or a service I can use, or I’m going to spend my disposable income somewhere else.”

Imagine hearing that from the estimated 2 billion individuals worldwide who identify as having a disability. Not to mention those have a disability but don’t identify as such.“ So that’s 2 billion minimally that we know of,” Dave adds.

The fact is, he continues, we’re all going to be disable...