One Knight in Product

An interview with Brendan McAdams. Brendan is a long time Enterprise SaaS salesman and author of "Sales Craft", a book he hopes will help salespeople and even tech founders get better at selling their products. Brendan is keen to stand up for the sales team, the value they add to customer relationships, and work out how we can make sure sales & product teams can work together more effectively.

We speak about a lot, including:

• His book Sales Craft and how he wanted to write a very practical book to help to take the mystery out of sales
• The tension between sales & product management, some of the ways the sales team can bridge the gap, and why sales is a team sport
• Why it's important for salespeople to avoid Columbo "One More Thing" features and how they have to be prepared to walk away from a deal
• The problems with salespeople being prepared to go out, promise anything the client asks for and dumping a bag of manure on the product team's desk
• Why sales is like poker, having to play the hand you've been dealt, and how empowering it can be to say to no to a request you can't serve
• How sales discovery intersects with product discovery, the importance of getting product people into the field, and whether salespeople have a wide enough view of the market
• What Product-Led Growth means to him as a salesperson, and whether he thinks it's applicable to all stages of a product

And much more!

Visit Amazon or Goodreads for more info.

You can find Brendan on BrendanMcAdams.com or Twitter

Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. Go to Skiplevel.co and use code OKIP75 to get $75 off the program in the next 30 days.

An interview with Tessa Kriesel & Wesley Faulkner. Tessa & Wesley are passionate advocates for the craft of Developer Relations (DevRel), building communities and supporting users of products aimed at developers.

We talk about a lot, including:

• What DevRel is, what they love about it and how there's not one boring DevRel person in the world
• Their journeys into DevRel and whether there's a standard career path for people trying to get into the trade
• The types of companies that need DevRel teams and how the concept of "developer-first" and "developer plus" products informs when you need to spin up a DevRel team
• Where DevRel sits within the organisation, the other functions it intersects with and whether it's really just a part of marketing
• Why it matters that business leaders understand the true value of DevRel rather than seeing them as one team to do just about anything that comes up
• Whether we need DevRel at all when the vast majority of PMs claim to be technical enough to talk to developers anyway
• The ways that DevRel and Product teams can work together, some of the things that DevRel teams need from PMs & what they can give back in return

And much more!

If you want to catch up with Tessa, you can reach out to her on Twitter, on Polywork, at TessaKriesel.com or check out Devocate

If you want to catch up with Wesley, you can reach out to him on Twitter, on Polywork or check out his podcast Community Pulse.

I'm passionate about mentoring & think it is a high leverage activity for product managers as they develop in their careers. I mentored 76 people in Q1 2022 but have realised I don't scale so am working with a buddy to match mentors & mentees. Sign up here to be a mentor, mentee or both!

An interview with Sophia Höfling. Sophia is a former Head of Product at Babbel and now co-founder and Head of Product at Saiga, a Berlin-based productivity startup where they're aiming to save people from life admin. Sophia's passionate about life-centred design and collaborative product discovery.

We talk about a lot, including:

• The mission behind Saiga and how they have started with a Wizard of Oz product as they try to work out the most important problems to solve
• The tricky transition from established product companies to new startup foundership and having to do everything yourself
• The concept of life-centred design and why we can't just listen to users but have to consider the holistic impact of our products on all stakeholders
• What to do when your customers don't care about the ethical merits of your product but you want to do the right thing anyway
• The importance of collaborative, rather than cooperative, product discovery and how to include people from outside the classic product trio in your discovery journey
• Whether doing all this discovery slows you down, whether that's OK and the importance of timeboxing discovery efforts to avoid getting caught in an infinite loop
• How to get buy-in for product discovery from sceptical leadership and convince them of the benefits of a good discovery flywheel

And much more!

Check out Sophia's articles on Medium, including

It’s time we move to life-centered product development

The importance of collaboration in product discovery (and how to get it right)

If you want to catch up with Sophia, you can reach out to her on LinkedIn.

Petra Wille is a product leadership coach and the author of "Strong Product People" and "Strong Product Communities". Petra is passionate about helping product teams excel and found that some of the best companies she's worked with use "Communities of Practice" to support product manager growth. We spoke all about this, and how people can get started.

This episode is sponsored by SuperProduct. Have you ever wished you could simplify competitive research, reduce time commitment and effort but still get extraordinary insights? Well, have I got news for you! You can try SuperProduct's new course which teaches you how to unlock the potential of AI-powered insights about your competitors and about your market. This course demystifies AI and teaches you how to be the mega prompt maestro that will transform ChatGPT into your personal research assistant. Check the course out here, and make sure to use code KNIGHT to support this podcast.

Organisations where product teams form bottoms-up communities of practice are more up to date in their knowledge and thinking, work more closely together and break down silos. Forming these communities makes better product work easier.

Sometimes, it's just a peer learning group. Sometimes, it's a book club. Sometimes it's just a bunch of people going to conferences together. Sometimes it's just a way to share updates with each other. The precise format of a community, and the rituals it observes, are less important than that it exists.

It's easy to see community engagement as something that will atrophy over time, and this is possible, but it's relatively straightforward to build an early rhythm to bed in practices and build muscle memory to make sure that the community sticks.

It's important to focus your community on solving real problems that the team has, rather than the philosophical concept of "learning", which is valuable, but not tangible enough. Find things that matter, and get people together around those things.

You might think that communities of practice are just for bigger companies and, to some extent, they are. However, there are always communities out there that will help you; either communities of people with a specific interest or just general meetup communities where you can chat with peers.

"STRONG Product Communities is a comprehensive guide that empowers product people, product leaders, HR, and Learning & Development professionals to develop and nurture successful product Communities of Practice (CoP). The book offers valuable insights gathered from survey data, interviews with CoP leaders, and the author’s hands-on experience."

Check it out on Amazon.

"Are you a product leader looking for advice on how to be certain that every product manager on your team lives up to their full potential? Do you want to make sure your product people are competent, empowered, and inspired, and would you like to know how you can best help them on this journey? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then this book is for you!"

Check it out on Amazon.

You can connect with Petra on LinkedIn. You can also check out Strong Product People, or Petra's coaching website.

Marty Cagan is the founder and a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, a leading product consultancy that aims to get companies to work "the way that the best companies work". He is the author of two desk references for product managers: "Inspired", aimed at product teams, and "Empowered", aimed at product leaders. He has since come to realise that "the way the best companies work" is too vague a term, and also that many companies have no idea where to get started. He's now back with "Transformed", a book that aims to get companies to adopt the Product Operating Model.

Join hundreds of other product people in New York City on April 18th 2024 for the New York Product Conference! You'll learn from some of the best minds in product today — including Dennis Crowley (Founder of Foursquare), Sahil Lavingia (Founder of Gumroad), April Dunford (product positioning expert and bestselling author) and so many others through masterclass keynotes, interactive working sessions, small group discussions and more. Topics covered include Product Strategy, Product Leadership, AI for Product Managers, Customer Research, and more.

Pricing increases on the first of the month, so you'll want to register soon. Plus, use the code OneKnightInProduct and save another $50 when you register!

Whilst Marty doesn't like to unnecessarily label things, or have any sniff of "process" for the sake of process, he started to realise that just saying "the way the best companies work" was too vague and handwavy. However, the core principles of great product companies and product teams have not changed, and this isn't a framework.

These days, it's fashionable to beat up product "thought leaders" and complain that they're being too dogmatic, idealistic, or unrealistic. But, SVPG didn't invent any of these principles, they just observed them in the best-performing product companies. It's still important to apply critical thinking and make sure they make sense to you and your organisation.

It's not always easy to transform, and there are limits to how far you can go bottoms-up, but you can generally make progress one step at a time. There's an incredible amount of onus on product leaders to evangelise and champion this change and, if they can't (or won't) do it, they shouldn't be product leaders.

It's easy to see this as something that just affects product teams, but the whole organisation needs to buy into the change. Reading bits of "Inspired" at them, or talking about the number of experiments you've done this week, is unlikely to sway them, You need to show business results and real impact and make them care about it on their terms.

The competencies remain the same... Product Managers, Product Leaders, "proper" Product Designers (not just pixel pushers) and Tech Leads who care as much about what they're building as how they're building it. If you just expect to get results with a disengaged, outsourced engineering team, graphic designers and product owners, you're going to be disappointed.

It's easy for people like us to sit there and talk about the benefits of product transformation and how we should all definitely do it but, for some people, this is all alien. In cases like this, a good product coach can be the difference between success and failure. But, there are so many product coaches these days, so make sure you get a good one.

"The most common question after reading INSPIRED and EMPOWERED has been: "Yes, we want to work this way, but the way we work today is so different, and so deeply ingrained, is it even possible for a company like ours to transform to the product model?" TRANSFORMED was written to bridge the gap between where most companies are right now and where they need to be. The leaders of these companies know they must transform to compete in an era of rapidly changing enabling technology, but most of them have never operated this way before. "

Check it out on Amazon.