How To Succeed In Product Management | Jeffrey Shulman, Red Russak & Soumeya Benghanem Jeff Shulman, Red Russak & Soumeya Benghanem

Are you looking to elevate your product management career and your peers? Apply to join Elevate, an exclusive program for high-performing product managers to learn from Executives in Residence and each other.
 
Learn more at: https://elevate.info.foster.uw.edu/
 
In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman welcomes Charles Stewart, Chris Kuang, and Jamie Lambert, CSPO, LSSGB to talk about PM roles and opportunities in the U.S. Digital Corps. The U.S. Digital Corps serves as an impactful avenue for individuals interested in public service and various tech-related fields, including product management. This program is designed to offer a meaningful platform for talented professionals to contribute their skills and expertise to government initiatives. Whether you're passionate about digital transformation, user-centered design, or product management, the U.S. Digital Corps provides a unique opportunity to make a difference in the public sector while helping to shape the future of government technology.
 
Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.
 
What to Listen For:
00:00 Intro
09:25 U.S. Digital Corps PM Opportunities
13:38 PM Roles and Responsibilities in the U.S. Digital Corps
15:55 Tech and Design in Public Service
18:01 Aligning Stakeholders and Overcoming Challenges
22:36 The Power of Curiosity in PM
24:04 Serving The Government
27:02 Introducing PM Practices in the Public Sector
32:44 Opportunities for Both Early Career and Seasoned Professionals
37:41 Finding Your Niche in Public Service
41:05 Job in The Public Service as a TV Show
42:28 Eligibility Criteria for Public Service Fellowships
45:30 Mastering the U.S. Digital Corps Assessment
47:01 Final Thoughts

Get involved with The Product Management Center. Learn more at https://ipma.info.foster.uw.edu/
 
In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak welcome Larry Apke (T-Mobile) as they discuss how to become agile. It's important for PMs to become agile because Agile methodologies promote adaptability, collaboration, and customer-centricity. In today's fast-paced business environment, products and market conditions can change rapidly. Agile practices, such as Scrum or Kanban, enable PMs to iterate quickly, gather frequent feedback, and adjust their product strategies accordingly. This approach helps teams deliver value more efficiently, respond to customer needs effectively, and stay ahead in competitive markets.
 
Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.
 
What to Listen For:
00:00 Intro
06:29 Waterfall vs. Agile
07:54 The Agile Manifesto
09:32 Waterfall tendencies
11:04 Who is responsible to drive agile?
12:11 Common misperceptions about what it means to be agile
13:57 Discrepancy between philosophy and frameworks
16:09 Safe certifications
18:15 Understanding the why
21:51 Embracing negative feedback
25:18 Implementing agile
29:53 Proper sequencing of the backlog
31:55 Having leadership understand the cost of delay 
36:06 Investing time in the discovery phase
39:04 How to get leadership out of the priority mindset?
44:39 Avoiding horizontal slicing 
50:13 Golden Rule of Agile

In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and  Soumeya Benghanem welcome Charles Stewart (Autodesk) and Dimple Singhania (Walmart) as they discuss product managing internal tools. PMs should know about the internal tools that companies use to help automate workflows, store data information for security, and connect the different organizations in a company like marketing or finance. 
 
Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.
 
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
 
What to Listen For:
00:00 Intro
09:42 Measuring success when building an internal tool
11:25 Associate satisfaction
12:38 Building a common language for people to use
14:05 Think about the employee experience
16:18 Take into account the consistency of human behavior
18:28 Communication channels for PMs
22:03 Creating a tool that works for the entire enterprise
24:19 Taking a product market mindset to internal tools
26:08 Build vs. buy
32:09 Competitive advantage in terms of build vs. buy
34:15 Compatibility with your own already built or bought tools
38:45 Product shift
42:23 Pushing forward with the modernization approach
45:52 The friction unique to internal tools
48:37 Final thoughts

In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board member Red Russak welcome Peter Kazarian (Yahoo), Ryan Caddell (SounderMind), and Carolyn Carter (Wayfair) to talk about being a growth product manager and how to grow as one. Being a growth PM matters because their focus is to identify the key growth opportunities and growth strategies for businesses and improve business metrics.
 
Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.
 
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
 
What to Listen For:
00:00 Intro
06:31 Growth PM vs. other PMs
09:03 Growth PM vs. marketing
14:03 Metrics of growth PMs
15:08 Ask their KPI
16:35 Is growth PM consumer focused?
18:31 Are growth PMs replacing sales?
20:41 Well designed products doesn’t need sales
22:33 How to make growth happen through testing & optimization
25:12 Understand your secondary KPIs
28:43 Retargeting 
33:22 What to do during a conversion problem?
38:31 Difference between product marketing manager, growth PM, and PM 
42:16 There’s no vision involved
47:50 Final thoughts

In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and  Soumeya Benghanem welcome Anna Marie Clifton to talk about prioritizing people over product. A good PM should be able to manage products, people, and of course, both. A team has its own unique members and managing these people is an important part of a PM’s job.
 
Disclaimer: All opinions of the speakers are their own.
 
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
 
What to Listen For:
00:00 Intro
09:11 Influence without authority
11:42 What works in a different company won’t work in another one
13:59 Building trust relationships
16:26 Everyone is motivated by very different things
19:07 Framework or exercise for working with people
27:16 Clearly Product Book Club podcast
29:44 Politics in the workplace
30:54 Understand the unwritten rules
33:07 Frameworks are a waste of time
37:02 Definition of framework
39:02 Framework are for beginners
41:53 Managing young stakeholders
46:07 How to talk to people who disagrees
48:55 Final thoughts

In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board member Soumeya Benghanem welcome Matthew Landry (Cisco Meraki) to talk about what makes a good PM in the networks and security field. A good PM is someone who is intellectually curious and one who has an element of unhappiness with the status quo because in this field you will have to formulate strategies as you collect information while satisfying the end users or customers.
 
Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.
 
What to Listen For:
00:00 Intro
04:21 How metrics change in different technology industries
06:12 Metrics in networks and security
11:10 The need to deliver value and build instrumentation
15:02 Trade off between collecting information vs. satisfying the customers
24:24 What makes a growth PM
27:59 Defining the product management roles
31:47 Switching across different subdisciplines of product management
34:24 What kind of person fits the product management role?
39:25 When to know if this is not right for you
41:33 Collaboration between multiple departments