Product Perspectives

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.

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.

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: [email protected] https://www.linkedin.com/in/niloufar-salehi/

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.

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.

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?

This is a bonus episode with Brenden Kumarasamy who is the founder of MasterTalk. He coaches ambitious executives and entrepreneurs to become top 1% communicators in their industry. He also has a popular YouTube channel called MasterTalk, with the goal of providing free access to communication tools for everyone in the world. In this podcast, Brenden talks about his journey and the challenges he’s faced along the way, but also gives product managers some practical tips on how to improve their networking and public speaking skills. This is one of the episodes that gets you thinking about your career and how to go to the next level, and what you might want to practice during your shower. If you want to understand the joke, listen to this episode! Reach out to Brenden on Linkedin: Brenden 🎤 Kumarasamy | LinkedIn or watch his Youtube channel.

My guest today is Sophie Heller. Sophie leads the CX Services team at Outschool, a marketplace of live-online classes for kids. She joined the company as employee #2 as its first customer support agent and has since seen the company grow to 200; the support inbox now contains 100+ people, spread over several internal teams and an outsourcer. Sophie's team works to equip the inbox, including 50+ outsourced agents, for any changes to Outschool's website or policies, providing services including documentation, training, and quality assurance.Sophie explains how she helped to scale the business and how they support 10,000 teachers and respond to 5,000 tickets per week. She has mastered the art of knowledge sharing within her company, with a mix of different training material, good release preparation processes and also a feedback loop with the product team. I've enjoyed learning about how Outschool measures quality of the replies to customers, as opposed to usual metrics like CSAT, volume and time to resolve queries. I hope you'll love hearing her real-life stories and you'll better understand how support teams operate after this episode.

Charlie Penwarden is a British Marketing Director and UX Consultant who focuses on organic growth strategies that blend the user’s needs with the search engine’s needs, to ultimately create a master plan for long-term success. Over the past 10 years, Charlie has worked on a number of exciting projects for in-house teams, agencies and start-ups with a variety of clients including one of the world’s first adaptability assessment platform in AQAI, online course enhancements to the Futurelearn platform and event management software for Astrazeneca. He has a background in psychology, having practiced mental health care in psychiatrics hospitals and is currently redesigning a new human-centric mental health system as we speak. When I first saw Charlie's profile, I was curious: someone working in marketing and UX together, quite an unusual combination for two functions which are usually rather siloed. Charlie has showed me how marketers can learn from the user research practices, and how a new product trio (Marketing/UX/Product) could benefit an organisation. Listen and be immerged in a world of data, communication and user empathy! You can contact Charlie via his marketing agency rankrobin.com, his UX consultancy practice usercharlie.com or social media like LinkedIn. All his links are available here. Thank you Elaine, product manager at FutureLearn, for her question.

In this episode, I interview Patrícia who is Product Operations Manager at OutSystems, where she is leading an internal product management academy as well as the external product evangelism programme, helping to grow the next generation of product leaders. Patrícia is the product manager’s best friend and I haven’t see many companies who have put that much thinking and effort into helping product managers being their best self. You’ll see that despite not having a product management background, she’s very tuned to the needs of PMs and aligned to the product approach. You can contact her on all social media via direct message (in particular Linkedin). Thank you to Angela Dinis, Lead Product Manager at OutSystems, for her question. If you have feedback, comments or questions, please reach out to me directly: [email protected]