Product Perspectives Magali Pelissier

My guest today is Julie Robles. Julie is leading the Product Ops team at PayFit, and her role is to maximise efficiency, and impact of the Product and Tech teams.
She has over 13 years of experience in product and program management for both startups and large corporations, exploring ecosystems in Europe, Middle East, and Asia. She is also a product and OKRs mentor (for Google for Startups and ADPList).

I’ve split my conversation with Julie into 2 episodes, because there were lots of topics to discuss. In this first episode, we talk about her background and journey into product ops, and the relationship between product managers and product ops - how the roles overlap, when is the right time to set up a product ops functions and how to ensure everyone has time for glue work.

In the second episode, we talk about how AI is changing the role of product managers, and how product ops can help leverage this technology. We also discuss the different types of complexities to manage, including the biggest ones: managing change with human beings.

If you’re tired of doing the ops work yourself because you don’t have such dedicated team, if you dislike your product ops team who keeps on giving you processes to follow, these two episodes are here to reconcile you with product ops and giving you hints to move forward and be a better product organisation.


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My guest today is Julie Robles. Julie is leading the Product Ops team at PayFit, and her role is to maximise efficiency, and impact of the Product and Tech teams.
She has over 13 years of experience in product and program management for both startups and large corporations, exploring ecosystems in Europe, Middle East, and Asia. She is also a product and OKRs mentor (for Google for Startups and ADPList).

I’ve split my conversation with Julie into 2 episodes, because there were lots of topics to discuss. In this first episode, we talk about her background and journey into product ops, and the relationship between product managers and product ops - how the roles overlap, when is the right time to set up a product ops functions and how to ensure everyone has time for glue work.

In the second episode, we talk about how AI is changing the role of product managers, and how product ops can help leverage this technology. We also discuss the different types of complexities to manage, including the biggest ones: managing change with human beings.

If you’re tired of doing the ops work yourself because you don’t have such dedicated team, if you dislike your product ops team who keeps on giving you processes to follow, these two episodes are here to reconcile you with product ops and giving you hints to move forward and be a better product organisation.


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Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/product-perspectives/message

My guest today is Niloufar Salehi. Niloufar is an assistant professor in the School of Information at University of California, Berkeley. She studies human-computer interaction, with her research spanning education to healthcare to restorative justice. Her research interests are social computing, human-centered AI, and more broadly, human-computer interaction (HCI). Her work has been published and received awards in premier venues and has been covered in Venture Beat, Wired, and the Guardian. She is a W. T. Grant Foundation scholar for her work on promoting equity in student assignment algorithms and is a member of the advisory board on generative AI at NVIDIA. She received her PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2018.

In this episode, Niloufar shares her inspiring journey into Human Computer Interaction, reflects on the field's evolution and the interaction between corporate world and academia. We delve into her dual expertise in UX and AI, her impactful research, and the critical role of product managers in responsible tech development. Stick around for personal insights, audience questions, and Niloufar's advice for PMs aspiring to dive into AI. Let's get started!

Mentioned in the podcast:
https://tarotcardsoftech.artefactgroup.com/

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/

Survey: https://allourideas.org/PM-magicwand (You can vote as little or as much as you want, and you can stop voting at any time.)

Thank you to Ketaki Vaidya, AI product manager at Oracle, for her question.

To contact Niloufar:

nsalehi@berkeley.edu

https://www.linkedin.com/in/niloufar-salehi/


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My guest today is Agnieszka Rzesniowiecka.
Aga is a Senior UX Researcher at Wise, where she leads research on Wise’s business customers.
As Product teams at Wise are cross-functional and autonomous, she collaborates with PMs, Engineers, and Designers every day.
After graduating from the MSc Human-Computer Interaction course at UCL, she's worked in-house in B2B and B2C companies ranging from fintech start-ups to corporations like IBM.
Agnieszka is the president of City Women Speakers, and regularly does speaking engagements on breaking into the UX industry.
She also founded Hevelianum Science Days, one of the biggest science festivals in Poland.
Outside of work, Aga does personal branding photography and likes to learn new dance genres.



In this episode, we dive deep into the world of UX research! We talk about her career in B2C and transition to B2B, witnessing remarkable growth and transformation, and working as an embedded researcher within product teams. Data, customer empathy, AI, influencing, we touch on all the topics that UX teams and Product Managers should be collaborating on to make great products.




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Anne Cooper is the Vice President of Global Customer Care at Board International. She started her career in sales and has an MBA with an emphasis in Brand Management and Marketing. She has worked in Loyalty Marketing for Visa and managed relationships with vendors on behalf of Visa. She then transitioned into Account Management, which is now called Customer Success. Afterward, she made a switch to Operations at Best Buy Corporate, where she learned the Customer Care side of the business and managed a large organization focused on phone, in-home, store, and remote delivery of service and support. However, she decided to return to her Customer Success roots in a software company because she missed direct customer roles. At Anaplan, she was fortunate to merge these two roles, allowing her to work with customers while applying her love for operations and support delivery.

In this episode of the podcast, Anne Cooper discusses the significance of customer care in product management. Anne Cooper shares her career journey, from marketing and advertising to customer care at a large corporation, and her transition into the software industry. The conversation covers the importance of empathy, collaboration, and understanding customer pain points to drive product improvements. Anne Cooper talks about key metrics in customer support, the proactive management of products post-launch, and the challenges of orphaned features. She stresses the value of customer feedback, the need for humility in product management, and the importance of a collaborative relationship between product and customer support teams. Anne Cooper's assertive style and cultural adaptability in her ascent to the C-suite are also discussed, highlighting her dedication to customer care and the emotional aspects of support work.

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Product organisations have faced challenges and undergone a huge amount of change over the past few years, and this isn’t slowing down in 2023 and beyond in the aftermath of the global pandemic and in light of ever-faster technology development. The session will cover the trends we’ve seen accelerating recently in Product management, from the lenses of people, processes, data and technology. Then I’ll share my predictions about what is going to shape Product Management in the future, and have the most impact in the way Product organisations work. The talk will help both leaders and individual contributors in the audience get ready for the future of Product, with take-aways for them to think about and implement in their organisation, as well as insights into what other people in the audience think since the session will include interactive polling. From the use of data to the talent and skills challenges, through leveraging technology to support product decisions and evolving the very definition of “product”, let’s dive into the future of product management. Are you ready?


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