One Knight in Product One Knight in Product

May Wong is a product operations consultant and coach who also runs ProductTO, an in-person product management meetup in Toronto.
Her hot take? Product management is a team sport, and too much product management literature focuses on what the product manager should do, not what the team should do.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

A message from this episode's sponsor - Leadfeeder
This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your website, convert more leads and get a free trial at Leadfeeder.com: Check out Leadfeeder here.

David Pereira is a product leader, speaker and regular blogger who loves to contribute to the wider Agile and Product communities with insights from his own career, including some of the mistakes he's made and not just the successes. David was recently tempted into writing a book, the newly released "Untrapping Product Teams" where he provocatively rails against "bullshit management" and tries to inspire us all to affect change in our organisations (but step-by-step). We talked all about themes from the book, as well as what it meant to have an endorsement from Marty Cagan.
Episode highlights:
 
1. When someone starts doing something differently and delivering value, people get curious
Sometimes it can seem almost impossible to change things yourself, but you don't have to change it all at once. If you can start showing the impact of smaller changes that deliver value then you can get both interest and buy-in from stakeholders. This gives you permission to try more things.
2. The more bullshit you handle the less value you create
David coined the term "b******t management" to represent the work you have to do in many low-performing product companies. B******t management is where you spend all your time working on the work around the work, prioritising requirements with no context and being actively prevented from delivering value to your users, and it has to stop.
3. Collaborative flow trumps coordinative flow
Coordinative flow is when you spend more time in meetings about the work and struggle to align people than you do actually doing the work. It's focused on outputs and gives you someone to blame when it goes wrong. Collaborative flow is when teams come together to work on problems... collaboratively and use what they know to uncover what they don't know.
4. You don't need to die on every hill
Sometimes you have to hold your nose and do things in ways that you don't believe are effective, or actively destructive. This is part and parcel of the job and something you have to get used to. As long as you can find small ways to make an impact in some areas, you can give way in other areas. Rome wasn't built in a day.
5. If you really want to make an impact, ask more questions than you give answers
We're all primed to look clever and give answers as quickly as we can but product people need to think deeper than that and ask good questions. Why do we really need that? What does success really look like? What don't we know?
Check out "Untrapping Product Teams"
"Untrapping Product Teams guides you to simplify what gets unintentionally complicated and equips you to overcome dangerous traps while steadily driving customer and business value. This isn't just another book about product management. It's a thought-provoking guide filled with simplicity, encouraging you to act today for a better tomorrow."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact David
You can catch up with David on LinkedIn or check out his website.

Related episodes you should like:
 

Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude)
Build High Growth Products by Following the Product Science Success Path (Holly Hester-Reilly, Founder @ H2R Product Science)
Pragmatic Digital Transformation in Traditional Industries (Dan Chapman, Director, Product Line Leader @ Merck)
Optimising Product Planning with the Quartz Open Framework (Steve Johnson, Product Coach)
Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant)
Surviving a Lack of Product Thinking & Riding the Product Maturity Curve (Nis Frome, VP Product @ Feedback Loop)
Is this Seriously Game Over for Scrum? (David Pereira, Editor @ Serious Scrum)
Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")

Dean Peters is a former opera singer turned product management leader, coach and educator who works with Productside to uplevel teams.
His hot take? That there's more to say about the Instagram-ification of product management, the root causes and contributory factors.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!

A message from this episode's sponsor - June
This episode is sponsored by June. June is a user retention hub for early-stage B2B SaaS companies that enables early-stage B2B SaaS companies to understand and act on their product usage, dig into activation, churn and key feature usage. Check out June here.


Related episodes you should like:

Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude)
The Five Dysfunctions of Product Management Teams (Saeed Khan, Founder @ Transformation Labs)
Practice Makes Perfect: Embracing the Messy Reality of Product Management (Matt LeMay, Product Management Consultant & Author "Product Management in Practice")
John Cutler's Hot Take - The Instagram-ification of Product Management is Driving us Crazy (John Cutler, Product Educator & Author @ The Beautiful Mess)
Applying Product Management Principles to Life (Miloš Belčević, Author "Build Your Way")
Nils Davis's Hot Take - Product Managers Need to Tell Better Stories on their Resumes (Nils Davis, Resume Coach & Go-to-Market Consultant @ Confidence & Impact LLC)
Debbie Levitt's Hot Take - Democratising our Work means AI is Going to Steal all our Jobs Sooner (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck")
Build Better Products at Scale with Product Operations (Melissa Perri & Denise Tilles, Product Consultants & Co-authors "Product Operations")

Aakash Gupta is a product leader turned author and professional newsletter writer, with a huge following on LinkedIn and Twitter. He writes regularly on product management principles, and personal and career growth and recently put out an article about nailing the product leadership job search. We also recently collaborated on an article about fractional product leadership! In this interview, I spoke to Aakash about his journey into full-time content creation and some of the lessons he learned about the product leadership job search.
Episode highlights:
 
1. The product leadership job market is slowly coming back to life
It's been tough out there, and loads of amazing people have been laid off and struggled to find new roles. Some might doubt they'll ever get another job again! But there are good and great jobs available if you know where to look.
2. Many of the best jobs aren't advertised in public and relationshps are everything
There's a "dark web" of networking and personal relationships, without which you might struggle to get introduced to some of the jobs. At the highest level, the majority of jobs are not posted publicly. Whether you like it or not, you need to play the game and build strategic relationships with boutique recruiters and especially investors.
3. You need to prioritise the type of job you want and it's not all about money
Most people are trying to optimise for something in their new job. Maybe it's a big pay packet. Maybe it's a mission they believe in. Maybe it's the stage of company, influence and impact. There's no wrong answer, but make sure you know what you're getting yourself into and what success looks like.
4. Try to make your career look linear to land the role you want
Many of us have squiggly careers and we've bounced between industries or types of company. This is fine, but if you're looking to get a job in a particular niche then you need to optimise your career narrative to tell a story about why YOU are the person for that niche.
5. Many leaders are still biased towards Big Tech employees, but you can beat the odds
Some founders or business leaders will always prioritise someone with a stellar name on their CV, and this can leave people who have worked for lesser-known companies feeling adrift. However, you can take a strategic view of your job search, outwork and outsmart your competition.
Contact Aakash
You can catch up with Aakash on LinkedIn, or Twitter or check out his newsletter.

Related episodes you should like:

Connecting Product Management to Business Goals by Mastering your Product Strategy (Gabrielle Bufrem, Product Leadership Coach & Advisor)
Moving Beyond Founder-Led Product Development & Setting PMs up for Success (Jennifer Yang-Wong, VP of Product @ Contrary)
How to Build Products when the Founder IS the Product (Saagar Bains, Fractional Product Leader & Former Head of Product @ The Body Coach)
Landing That Perfect Role by Finding Your Inevitable Edge (Erika Klics, Job Search Strategist & Founder @ ErikaKlics.com)
Supporting the Next Generation of Female Product Managers with Women in Product UK (Namrata Sarmah, Founder @ Women in Product UK & CPO @ INTO)
Making our Product Teams Stronger through Building Communities of Practice (Petra Wille, Author "Strong Product People" and "Strong Product Communities")
Nils Davis's Hot Take - Product Managers Need to Tell Better Stories on Their Resumes (Nils Davis, Resume Coach & Go-to-Market Consultant @ Confidence & Impact LLC)
Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")

Nils Davis is a resume coach who wants product managers to realise they're AMAZING, and help others realise it too.
His hot take? That the majority of product managers are doing themselves a disservice by producing resumes that simply list a bunch of tasks that pretty much all product managers have done.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time at https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot
Visit Nils's site: https://perfectpmresume.com/Nils on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilsdavis/

John Cutler is a systems overthinker, product educator and author of "The Beautiful Mess" newsletter.
His hot take? That the Instagram-ification of product management sets unrealistic standards, and is driving us all crazy.
If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time!