Platform Product Management & Getting Ready for Launch Day (with John Zilch, Director of PM @ Upland & founder @ Launch Day)
An interview with John Zilch. John is Director of Product Management at Upland, adjunct professor at Providence College and founder of Launch Day, a new startup that's aiming to take the pain out of launching new products to market.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The pros & cons of working as a platform product manager and integrating various product lines & features into a new platform
- When it's appropriate to replatform and when not, and whether a platform product manager gets a lot of customer contact
- John's journey into product management from a computer science background and how, like everyone, he kind of fell into it, and how analysts get more love than PMs
- How his dissatisfaction with the way software gets launched led him and a former colleague to build their own platform to make it better
- Why he's started teaching at Providence College, how teaching is the best way to learn, and how academia is a fertile ground for hiring the best talent
- What he thought of Marty Cagan's recent takedown of MBAs, why he's tired of everyone being against them, and what they're good for
- Why there's a problem with experimentation culture and why it shouldn't be a replacement for good customer discovery
- How's it's OK to do things that don't scale as long as you have a plan to make sure that it can scale in the future
- The problem with people concentrating on "Agile" as a method of delivery rather than a way to get close to customers
And much more!
Contact John
You can check out the Launch Day website or connect with John on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Information
- Show
- FrequencyUpdated weekly
- Published14 July 2021 at 22:23 UTC
- Length45 min
- Season1
- Episode70
- RatingClean