When Luke Hefson, now Senior Product Manager, first joined the product team at GitHub he was curious, as most PMs are, about what users honest thoughts were on the product. So he tweeted a simple question asking GitHub users what, if anything, annoyed them about the product. Unexpectedly, received hundreds of responses, retweets, and follow ups from the open-source web dev community. Almost all of the responses and requests they received through were not necessarily groundbreaking, innovative id...
Dec 29, 2021•34 min•Ep. 13
A lot of product teams like to say they are agile, but when it comes down to it most teams continue to be driven by sales, roadmaps, and the same “waterfall” strategy of the past. “Most teams are good at delivery but lacking in discovery,” says Marty Cagan, author of Inspired. Cagan notes that frequently product teams are just shipping products and features to launch and don’t give enough attention to the step that actually qualifies a team as agile. Agility is “not about the religion or process...
Dec 17, 2021•48 min•Ep. 12
To succeed in a constantly evolving industry, Product Managers can’t afford to settle for the status quo and need to be constantly hungry for new answers to old questions. “Every great product manager is an entrepreneur,” Vlad Gasan, Principal Product Manager at OfferUp and author of The Ultimate Guide To Becoming a Product Manager , says in the episode. Vlad shares how his experiences as a business owner and “side hustler” have helped him learn how to quickly adapt to new and ever-changing prod...
Nov 22, 2021•26 min•Ep. 11
As a product manager, there is nothing more exciting than seeing the feature you built be greatly received and widely adopted by your users. But how do you ensure that your roadmap will be valuable to both existing and prospective customers? “If you only listen to your existing customers they will keep your roadmap buzzing for a while, but in the long run it may not help you grow or become madly successful,” cautions SK, VP of Product at Productboard. To unlock true growth, you need to be sure y...
Nov 03, 2021•50 min•Ep. 10
Thank you for tuning into People Drive Products by Sprig, formerly UserLeap. After a name change, a site re-brand, and a couple product additions, we are ready to bring you season 2 to share more episodes with new guests!
Sep 28, 2021•1 min
At fintech company Wise (formerly TransferWise), product managers — and all employees from designers to engineers — are empowered to speak directly with customers to advance the product. But the company, which enables people to transfer money abroad at lower costs, also recognizes that you can’t have innovation without failure. “We are quite open to people failing because if you're not open to people failing, they're not going to take risks,” Clara Nobre, Wise’s Senior Product Manager, says in t...
Jul 08, 2021•29 min•Ep. 9
Adam Johnston is not a car guy. Yet, two-and-a-half years ago he took on the job of Director of Product and Design at Shift, an ecommerce platform for buying and selling used cars. Adam was drawn to the position and company because of its vision — making car buying and owning a simple and trustworthy process for everybody. It’s that customer-focused philosophy that Adam carries with him in every meeting he attends. A few people had product management job titles at Shift when Adam began but all h...
Jun 24, 2021•37 min•Ep. 8
As a Senior Product Manager at music and podcast discovery platform Pandora, Ananya always keeps the end-user in mind as she delivers on her passion for building user-centric search experiences, driving value both for target customers and internal leadership teams. After working as a product management intern, Ananya was sure of her career path. Now, she's helping to create successful, people-driven products at Pandora. Her latest product launch was Pandora Voice — a personalized voice assistant...
Jun 17, 2021•46 min•Ep. 7
As the VP of Products at cloud content management platform Box, Alok Ojha leads security and enterprise product portfolios, driving Box's product strategy, long-term roadmap and vision. Alok has extensive experience launching products in the enterprise software industry — he's worked at leading enterprise SaaS companies like Proofpoint and RSA, as well as startups, such as CloudPassage and Syncplicity. Typical cybersecurity companies tend to lack focus on the experience of the end-user — Alok ev...
Jun 10, 2021•45 min•Ep. 6
As a Senior Director of Product Management at job site Indeed, Nissim Lehyani is helping the company adapt to shifting job seeker needs for about 250 million people who visit the platform every month. For Nissim, product management is about reducing friction and enabling a better path that gets people to a desired outcome. Product managers need to weigh decisions based on delivering the maximum amount of value to the largest group of people as quickly as possible, he says on this episode of Peop...
Jun 03, 2021•31 min•Ep. 5
Laura Marino, Chief Product Officer for TrueAccord, started her career in civil engineering developing software for reservoir operations and hydrologic simulation. When she realized she truly wanted to work in software, she went back to school, got her Master’s degree in management, science, and engineering and has since managed 20 different products across all stages and led product teams in B2B software for more than 20 years. Laura knew she enjoyed working at companies in the growth stage, bu...
May 27, 2021•44 min•Ep. 4
The role of a product manager is not to be a mini-CEO, according to John Cutler, Head of Product Research & Education at Amplitude. The product manager should not be the only decider. Instead, the product manager should function as a team facilitator bringing context and guiding discussions. John was fanatical about that view of the product manager’s role. He still agrees with it, but he’s softened his stance a little. In the three years he’s worked at Amplitude, which offers digital optimiz...
May 20, 2021•49 min•Ep. 3
As a Senior Product Manager at Atlassian, Matt Tse uses his experience in product discovery and design thinking to help customers find success with products, such as Jira and Confluence Cloud. A native of Canada, Matt found a welcome change of pace when he moved to Australia and joined the Atlassian team. At the time, Atlassian was in the midst of rolling out its second version of the Jira Cloud. During his onboarding, Matt began digging into customer feedback — a lot of it. That experience led ...
May 13, 2021•41 min•Ep. 2
As the Senior Director of Product Management at Wealthfront, Dan Slate oversees teams that are building products to create a financial system that favors people over institutions. Wealthfront's CEO, Andy Rachleff, is famous for saying you can't iterate your way to product market fit, "Either the dog eats the food or they don't." This rings true in everything Dan does throughout his product development process. From delighting early adopters to utilizing data from his consumer insights team, Dan ...
May 06, 2021•41 min•Ep. 1
