Shows
Somehow I Manage Product TeamsPeople-first Product Leadership and tactical advice for newly minted Group Product Managers | Diana Stepner (CPO at Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative)I’m joined by Diana Stepner who is the Chief Product Officer at Chan-Zuckerberg initiative and has held product leadership roles at SimplePractice, Pearson, Kayak, Razorfish and Monster.com in the past. Diana also runs a cohort -based course on Maven called Product First Leadership - topic that talk about on this episode.
We talk about :
1) What's unique about product leadership role
2) Tactical advice for things a newly minted group product manager : how to organize the team, conduct 1:1s, handle the hard conversations and manage your personal ca...
2023-10-1041 min
Somehow I Manage Product TeamsStory behind Instagram Shopping, scaling product teams, leadership lessons from resurgence of Airbnb | Sanchan Saxena (ex-VP Product Coinbase, Head of Product Airbnb, Instagram shopping)Sanchan was most recently VP of Product at Coinbase. Before Coinbase, Sanchan was Head of Product and GM at Airbnb, founder and Head of Product of Instagram Shopping, Director of Product Management at Yahoo, and Lead PM at Microsoft.
In this episode we talk about :
1️⃣ Story behind Instagram Shopping - Hypothesis, Pitch and Execution, Decision making frameworks
2️⃣ How Sanchan built the Product Org at Airbnb - scaling from 40 PMs to over 200
3️⃣ Airbnb COVID-19 war story and leadership lessons from the experien...
2023-09-0257 min
Somehow I Manage Product TeamsWhat makes B2B PMs standout, Using ReadMe to share your leadership style | Cassidy Fein (ex.Snr Director of Product, Pendo)Cassidy was the Senior Director of Product at Pendo and Vimeo and has spent the last decade on product, particularly in B2B. More interestingly worked all remote (we’ll talk a little bit about it in the end) . Cassidy also teached for Mind the Product in her spare time, and occasionally coach PMs early in their career.
In this episode we talk about :
1. Myth behind building B2B products
2. How Cassidy built products at Pendo
3. Cassidy’s ReadMe doc and how she’s successfully managed her career and gr...
2023-07-3045 min
Somehow I Manage Product TeamsMary Poppins of Product, What's your brand? | Nicole Castillo, VP Product, News CorpNicole leads the News Corp's mobile application development platform, which is the foundation for 32+ iOS and Android apps for News Corps brands - some familiar names like News York Post, WAllstreet journal, The Times, Sun and many more.
In this episode we talk about :
1️⃣ How Nicole's built her personal brand as Mary Poppins of Product
2️⃣ How the Mary Poppins characterization has evolved over time
3️⃣ How folks listening can build their own version of "about me" that's catchy
2023-06-0337 min
Somehow I Manage Product TeamsIncubating 0 to 1 Products and story behind GameSnacksDescription
I’m joined by Ani Mohan from Google.
Ani leads the product team at Google Labs building three new generative AI products across (1) software development, (2) video, and (3) 3D.
Previously, Ani was co-founder and general manager of GameSnacks, a web gaming platform reaching 35M+ monthly players. GameSnacks was funded by Area 120 and acquired by Google Ads in Jan 2022.
Ani was also featured in Forbes 30 under 30 under the games section during his time leading the GameSnacks products and business.
...
2023-05-2035 min
Somehow I Manage Product Teams"She is not strategic enough" | Shelly Kalish (Head of Partner Product and Design, Ex-Meta)Shelly built the product & design team focussed on Partners at Meta. We’ll definitely talk a lot of about how she went about building this team in the episode. Prior to Meta, Shelly spent sometime at American Express in a product leadership position building the consumer mobile app that had over 17M+ monthly active users.
Shelly recently started a 4 part blog series on LinkedIn sharing her thoughts on Product Strategy, Women in tech called You Belong Here. We explore some of those topics in this episode.
We touch on 4 key areas :
Talk a ab...
2023-05-0549 min
Somehow I Manage Product TeamsCrafting the Product Manager Growth Equation and Building Fintech Products | Bandan Jot Singh, Business Unit Lead Riverty (ex-Booking.com, Gojek)Bandan is a Financial services and Payments product leader, has directly led financial services products and teams for tech companies and regulated financial institutions. Bandan currently leads the Buy Now Pay Later Business Unit for Riverty (Europe’s second largest BNPL player) leading Product Development, Product Management and UX teams. Prior to Riverty Bandan led Product at Booking.com, Gojek and Aditya Birla Capital. Bandan also manages a subtack newsletter - Productify - collection of high quality product case studies, innovation & growth articles, product upskill narratives and more
In this episode we covered 3 main topics , starting with
Product Manager Growth eq...
2023-04-1539 min
Somehow I Manage Product TeamsBuilding product against Big Fish in Red Ocean | Faraz Jamal, Director of Product at Banyan SecurityI’m joined today by Faraz Jamal - Director of product at Banyan Security
Faraz and I were colleagues at VMware and someone that I’ve worked closely with for few years and even watched him transition into Product Management. Faraz left VMware to join an enterprise B2B security startup few years back and has symbiotically grown with the startup in it’s early stage growth. We spoke about how to go against the Big Fish being an early stage startup in the enterprise space, how they prioritize, make decisions and some hot takes on making gut ba...
2023-03-2644 min
Somehow I Manage Product Teams2 SaaSy 2 B2B | Ibrahim Bashir (VP Product, Amplitude)Ibrahim Bashir is VP of product at Amplitude. Prior to Amplitude, Ibrahim led products at Box, Twitter was also part of the team that launched Kindle Fire at Amazon. Ibrahim shares his thoughts on a very insightful newsletter on substack about building products, frameworks and thoughts from his personal experience. Ibrahim also runs a cohort based program for scaling B2B SaaS - we’ll talk a little about this on the episode.
We spoke about B2B strategy, decision making frameworks, writing and somehow meandered to talk about Windows Phones!
References
Fail Wh...
2023-03-0458 min
Somehow I Manage Product TeamsHunting Product Talent, Defending Product Strategy | Kent Keirsey (Head of Product, Universe)Kent is the Head of product at Universe Software (a holding company for Vertical Fintech Businesses) And is also the Head of product for one of its’ subsidiary - Goldie. Prior to Universe, Kent was Director of product at Greenlight financial - building financial products for families and empowering parents to raise financially smart kids.
Kent is also the founder and managing director of Atlanta’s largest product community - ProductATL - we’ll talk a little more about this community later in the episode
We spoke about hiring and what to look for in produc...
2023-02-0851 min
Somehow I Manage Product TeamsManaging Up, Down and Sideways | Chantal Cox (Meta, Amazon, Adobe)Chantal Cox is a prolific product Leader at Meta leading 4 pillars (Discovery, personalization, new experiences and notifications) on Instagram focusing on creating communities and new messaging experiences for teens and 50M creators leveraging Machine learning. Prior to Meta, Chantal was working on building the future of streaming and Entertainment: Watch Parties with Amazon Prime Video content on Twitch. And stints at some other large tech companies like Adobe, CreditKarma, ebay along with an entrepreneurial journey building “Let’s App”.
Chantal’s a public speaker, mentor and has over 30,000 followers on LinkedIn who enjoy her posts and shares - including...
2023-01-2136 min
2023-01-1301 min