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Mind the Product

Product Management Career

Sunday Rewind: Domain expert or practice expert: Your product management career

Guest Post

Product design fundamentals every product manager should know

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Strategy

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

The best resources for product managers in 2025

Three amazing speakers to learn from at #mtpcon London 2025

Does product management only work for tech and startups?

How GenAI has improved GoDaddy’s product experience – Laka Sriram (VP Generative AI, GoDaddy)

Synthesia becomes the UK’s largest AI product: Lessons for product teams

Imogen brings more than 10 years of experience in print and digital to her role as Director of Content Strategy for Mind the Product. The core of her experience comes from 10 years working as an editor for Bauer Consumer Media, a division of Europe’s largest privately-owned publishing group, and as Head of Content for Benivo, an award-winning startup.

Director of Content Strategy

Imogen Schels

So far, 2021 is turning out to be a pretty special year for <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/the-product-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Product Experience podcast</a>. Our 100th episode aired, we were <a href="https://publisherpodcastawards.com/shortlist2021/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">shortlisted in the Publisher Podcast Awards</a>, the pod even got a little facelift as part of our <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/refreshing-the-mind-the-product-brand-for-the-next-decade/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">brand refresh</a>. We think that&#8217;s all worth celebrating!
So, with more than 100 episodes to choose from (all of them epic 😉), we&#8217;re giving you a helping hand by counting down today&#8217;s 10 most-downloaded episodes of all time!
Already an avid listener? <a href="https://mindtheproduct.typeform.com/to/RKWI3FeB">Tell us </a><a href="https://mindtheproduct.typeform.com/to/RKWI3FeB">your</a><a href="https://mindtheproduct.typeform.com/to/RKWI3FeB" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> favourite episode</a> — we&#8217;ll add your comments to this post.
<h2>10. Roadmaps Are Dead. Long Live Roadmaps! – Janna Bastow</h2>
When you have questions about roadmaps, it pays to talk to someone who spends all their time thinking about them. Janna Bastow — co-founder of both Mind the Product and <a href="https://www.prodpad.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ProdPad</a> — is that person! Janna has been trying to fix the problems of roadmaps for most of her professional life. She hacked together the first version of ProdPad to solve her own problem, then began selling to other product people to help them do the same. She joins us on this episode to give advice for anyone ready to break up with their roadmap.
Says Janna: &#8220;A roadmap should be something that’s human readable. It should be something that you put in front of somebody and say: “This is where we are now, this is where we think we’re going next, and here’s where we’re going with it later. You can see for yourself what problems we’re trying to tackle, and how we’re thinking of breaking those down – what do you think?”
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/roadmaps-are-dead-long-live-roadmaps-janna-bastow-on-the-product-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Listen now</a>
<h2>9. Remote Discovery – Teresa Torres</h2>
During the Covid-19 pandemic, we can&#8217;t count the number of times we&#8217;ve heard the phrase &#8216;new normal&#8217; but, as <a href="https://www.producttalk.org/about/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Teresa Torres</a> explains in this episode, there&#8217;s nothing normal about it! We’re not simply working remotely, we’re working during a crisis. We&#8217;re not working the same way, and our customers have different needs than they did before. With that in mind, we asked Teresa to offer her advice on how to continue to incorporate discovery into your practice despite everything that&#8217;s going on.
Says Teresa: &#8220;Your opportunity space didn’t radically shift. What’s probably radically shifted is which opportunity is most important right now. Then there’s the second piece of it: What’s the part of discovery that’s going to stay stable over time? What are we learning from customers that we don’t have to worry about learning over and over again, versus what’s the part that can be disrupted at any moment?&#8221;
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/remote-discovery-teresa-torres-on-the-product-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Listen now</a>
<h2>8. How To Be A Great Manager – Claire Lew</h2>
We’ve all had that one manager that we’ll do anything to avoid for the rest of our careers but have you ever stopped to think if you’re that person for someone else? This question prompted Claire Lew to start <a href="https://knowyourteam.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Know Your Team</a> — software that helps managers become better leaders — and in this episode, she shares some practical advice.
Says Claire: &#8220;When you, as a manager, are not having your intention match your behaviour — you’re talking the talk but you’re not walking the walk, you say one thing but do something else, you promise but don’t deliver — that erodes our conception of trust in a team.
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/how-to-be-a-great-manager-claire-lew-on-the-product-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Listen now</a>
<h2>7. I Got 99 Problems – Learning From Jay-Z – Marc Abraham</h2>
If you listen to the end credits of The Product Experience podcast every week, then you already know <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/abrahammarc/?originalSubdomain=uk" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Marc Abraham’s</a> voice — he’s ProductTank’s Global Coordinator, a co-curator of the Mind the Product conference, an author, and a Head of Product at ASOS. What you might not know about him is that he’s a huge hip-hop fan, and has managed to combine what he’s learned from Jay-Z with how he approaches his daily practice. In this episode, he tells all.
Says Marc: &#8220;Look at Jay-Z; he’s tried a few things, a lot of things worked out, other things didn’t, but he’s still doing them — he’s still taking risks… he keeps learning, keeps experimenting, he will take losses as much as he will celebrate successes – and that, for me, is a strong product person.&#8221;
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/i-got-99-problems-learning-from-jay-z-marc-abraham-on-the-product-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Listen now</a>
<h2>6. The ABCs of Product – Melissa Perri</h2>
Melissa Perri is the product manager’s product manager — she’s able to do the job, explain it, and teach you how to do it better. So when we got her on the line to record this episode, we covered everything… including Japanese deployment strategies, Marmite and peanut butter, product leadership and team organisation, how companies scale, how to pick the right environment for you, and even her book, <a href="https://melissaperri.com/book" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Escaping the Build Trap</a>.
Says Melissa: &#8220;I see a lot of product managers from an enterprise company go, ‘Hey, I’m gonna work at a startup, it’s gonna be awesome’, and then they get in there and they go ‘Holy crap, what happened? This place is a mess. There’s no structure, there’s nobody to do all these things.’&#8221;
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/the-abcs-of-product-melissa-perri-on-the-product-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Listen now</a>
<h2>5. How To Say No – Gabrielle Bufrem</h2>
A manager of product management at Pivotal Software, Brazilian native Gabrielle Bufrem has worked on three continents (North America, Europe, and Asia) and hails from a fourth.  She’s delivered <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/transform-me-but-please-dont-change-anything-by-gabrielle-bufrem/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">great talks</a> at our MTP Engage conferences in Hamburg and Manchester, but, in this episode, we catch up with her after a talk about “saying no” at Edinburgh’s Turing Festival.
Says Gabrielle: &#8220;Where it gets really hard is [when it comes to] business impact, customer impact, the costs of not doing it — that’s where the rubber hits the road, and that’s where I think it’s way more art than science.&#8221;
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/how-to-say-no-gabrielle-bufrem-on-the-product-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Listen now</a>
<h2>4. Testing Business Ideas – David Bland</h2>
David Bland is the CEO and Founder of Precoil, an author, and a long-time practitioner of agile and lean startup. In this episode, he joins our hosts Lily and Randy to talk about how to create focus around what matters to your users by using different testing methodologies — a topic he and Alex Osterwalder cover in their book, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Testing-Business-Ideas-Field-Experimentation-ebook/dp/B07ZZM9FDT" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Testing Business Ideas</a>.
Says David: &#8220;So what my advice would be is just find that thing that people are worried about: in your backlog, in your strategy, in your roadmap, and find the smallest test you can do to help generate some evidence around that thing.&#8221;
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/testing-business-ideas-david-bland-on-the-product-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Listen now</a>
<h2>3. Shape Up – Ryan Singer</h2>
Basecamp is well known for its approach to product development — after starting out as an agency (37 Signals), it realised that the tools it used to manage its own projects would have value for others. What followed was a bootstrapped journey to creating an entire suite of products, using Basecamp’s own approach on how to work well together. Over the years, the company has publicly documented many of its processes. In <a href="https://basecamp.com/shapeup" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Shape Up – Stop Running In Circles and Ship Work That Matters</a>, Head of Strategy Ryan Singer shares an approach that challenges most of the orthodoxy around Agile (as a framework) but retains all of the spirit of agile (as a philosophy). In this episode, Ryan talks with Lily and Randy about Basecamp’s approach, why it works for them, and the thinking behind it.
Says Ryan: &#8220;A lot of people talk about planning or deciding what to do and, very often, this is too much expressed in the language of certainty. What we’re doing here is expressing everything in the language of risk. So when we bet on a project, we’re acknowledging the fact that we don’t actually know what’s going to happen, if it’s going to go well, if we’re going to get in trouble with it. So we are being very deliberate in what we bet on and don’t bet on and whether the odds are in our favour for making a particular bet or a feature idea.
The way that we bet is six weeks at a time. So we’re not working in little two-week sprints, because two weeks isn’t long enough to get anything done.&#8221;
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/shape-up-ryan-singer-on-the-product-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Listen now</a>
<h2>2. The Black Mirror Test – Roisi Proven</h2>
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/roisiproven/?originalSubdomain=uk" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Roisi Proven</a> is a true product person: she has a penchant for imagining the worst, which she’s turned into a superpower to put all of her product decisions through a rigorous ethics test. Sure, that’s useful — but she’s also found a way for you to engage your team in a creative way, using the model of the show Black Mirror, in an effort to make better decisions.
Says Roisi: &#8220;The point is to get as evil as possible, and not hold back, and not think about the feelings of others, it’s just about being really harsh about what your product could be used for, and then putting it into a little dystopian future that you create.&#8221;
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/the-black-mirror-test-roisi-proven-on-the-product-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Listen now</a>
<h2>1. Outcomes Over Outputs – Josh Seiden</h2>
Here is it, number 1! This much-loved episode features speaker, trainer, consultant, and author of <a href="https://www.senseandrespondpress.com/managing-outcomes" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Outcomes Over Output</a>, Josh Seiden.
<a href="https://www.senseandrespondpress.com/managing-outcomes" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Outcomes Over Output</a> — a practical guide to using outcomes to guide the work of your team — was written to be read in an hour or so, which means it&#8217;s packed with substance and minimum filler! In this episode, Lily and Randy talk to Josh about putting some of the strategies outlined in the book into action.
Says Josh: &#8220;[Outcomes] are useful in a world when we’re not sure that the thing that we make will have the result that we want.&#8221;
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/outcomes-over-outputs-josh-seiden-on-the-product-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Listen now</a>
<h2>Discover more episodes of The Product Experience</h2>
Tune in to The Product Experience every Wednesday and join our hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver for in-depth conversations with some of the best product people around the world! Every week they chat with people in the know and cover the topics that matter to you — solving real problems, developing awesome products, building successful teams and developing careers. <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/the-product-experience/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Visit The Product Experience Page</a> to explore all episodes, suggest a guest, learn about our hosts, and more.

core/freeform

Podcast

How do you avoid burnout in product management?

Understanding Product Equity in Tech – Glenn Block (Founder and CEO, ProdSense)

It’s not you, it’s them – frustrating things orgs do – Keji Adedeji (Product Leader and Coach)

How Yahoo creates a great experience for its users – Kameron Canbaz (Product Manager, Workflow and UX at Yahoo)

AI ethics advice from former White House technologist – Kasia Chmielinski (Co-founder, The Data Nutrition Project)

Building an Associate Product Manager program at Miro – Thor Mitchell (Product Executive-in-Residence, Balderton Capital)

How CX works with Product at Ikea – Hanneke Hoogewerf (Sr Strategic Experience Designer, IKEA)

How to prioritise your work for impact- Nacho Bassino (Product Leadership Coach)

How Google makes AI work at Enterprise scale – Miku Jha (Director, AI/ML and Generative AI, Google Cloud)

The Product Experience podcast: Your top 10 episodes

Imogen Schels

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