Top Resources for Product Managers in 2022 - Part 3 of 5
Where to look for inspiration, motivation and advice to level up your Product knowledge.
Subscribe to Melissa Perri’s Product Thinking Podcast
Who is Melissa Perri?
Melissa Perri is the CEO of ProduxLabs, a consultant, a Harvard Business School professor, author of Escaping the Build Trap and the creator and host of the Product Thinking podcast. Any of those achievements on their own is impressive but creating/managing all of them proves she’s in the S tier of product leaders.
Why Subscribe to the Product Thinking Podcast?
The Product Thinking podcast fits perfectly into my daily routine. I typically spend about 30-60m warming up my brain before starting the work day (I highly recommend you do that same). Most Product Thinking episodes normally run between 20-45m depending on the format, making this my go to warm-up in the morning. Each week, Melissa alternates between longer format discussions with guests and Q&A episodes where Melissa fields questions sent in by listeners. I don’t know how Melissa is able to release quality content like this on a weekly basis but it’s one of the main reasons I keep coming back to listen. My favorite discussions include:
I’m not an agile purist by any means, in fact I’ve never experience a pure agile process working well in product. Even further, many “purists” usually end up augmenting the process but still try to remain pure and it breaks down even more. There are a few key tenants I do like about agile but I recommend you just use the small bits that work for you and toss the rest.
Gib’s acronyms are 🔥🔥🔥. I recently brought up the GLEE model with our leadership team at Sibi and it sparked a great discussion.
Career growth is so important. My goal is to level up the team so any one of my teammates can replace me or walk into a product role at any company and succeed.
What I’ve learned
I want to share specific examples from the podcasts I listed above. There is so much I’ve learned from Melissa’s podcast but I want to keep these posts short and sweet (somewhat short at least). I’m going off memory here - that’s how much of an impact these episodes have had on me.
Jeff Patton: The breakdown of service vs product, specifically his landscaper analogy. He starts off this discussion by asking what are the things you love about your favorite product. He points out how the traits of a successful product rarely include traits of a service like, “it was done on time”. When you’re hiring someone for a service, like a landscaper, it’s their job to do exactly what you tell them to do and it’s done on time. Each house they service will have a similar set of rules but is also unique depending on the homeowners preference. This is very different from a Product mindset.
Petra Wille: Walking away from this episode, I really improved the way I identify traits of successful pms. I’ve gotten a better understanding of how to use frameworks as an influence for developing strong pms but going one step further to really customize it to fit specific needs. There is no “one size fits all” framework or solution for anything in tech. Take what works and mix it with your own flavor to create your special sauce. One other take away that’s obvious but always worth repeating - support your people otherwise they will find someone else that does.
Gibson Biddle: Failure is a very important step to success. Gib tells the story of Netflix’s set-top box, Project Griffin. While this experiment was initially a failure for Netflix and it never released, the original team went on to form Roku. This experiment also opened the door for Netflix to integrate with Xbox, which led to Playstation, which led to Nintendo. Before Project Griffin, those companies would not allow Netflix on their platform.
I touched on GLEE in my “why” section but the model is worth bringing up again. Ask the leaders in your company this very important set of questions:
What do we get biG with?
What do we Lead with?
How will we Expand Even further?
Here are a few platforms to subscribe to Melissa’s podcast - Product Thinking:
If you’ve made it this far…
I purposely try to keep these posts short. There were 2 other podcasts I had originally had listed as favorites but it made the post feel too long. I wanted to include them after the main chunk of content, so since you’re down here anyway given them a listen:
Ben Foster: While I was already familiar with some of these guests, others I hadn’t heard about until listening to the podcast - like Ben Foster. After listening to Ben share his opinion about Product, I ended up purchasing and really diggin’ his book Build What Matters.