One Knight in Product

16/09/2024

Everyone's trying to crack LinkedIn these days, either to advance their career or sell their stuff. But how can people stand out from the crowd? I interviewed

Ivana Todorovic from AuthoredUp to find out more and here's her first top tip.

14/09/2024

🔥 Let's talk about how to REALLY get good at LinkedIn 🔥

On this podcast episode, I spoke to Ivana Todorovic, founder of AuthoredUp and someone who spends a lot of time investigating how people can win at LinkedIn.

We spoke all about AuthoredUp as well as some gems of advice for people who sit there and shake their fist at the uncaring algorithm.

Check it out on your favourite podcast app, or:

📹 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/

🌎 Website: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com

Key takeaways:

1. There's no "Quick Fix" for your LinkedIn profile

Beware snake oil salespeople who claim to be making millions off of their LinkedIn content and are trying to sell you frameworks to be just like them. There's no cookie-cutter approach, the algorithm is changing all the time, and the majority of these people are basically lying about the results you will get and laughing their way to the bank.

2. It's Important to Soft Sell on LinkedIn

Direct sales pitches underperform compared to content that offers value with a subtle call to action. Posts with a soft sell, focusing on the audience’s needs and delivering value without the CTA, perform better. You can't just keep selling things or trying to get people to click links... LinkedIn hates you leaving the platform and they will de-boost your posts.

3. The Pros and Cons of "Link in Comments"

Posts with external links often get down-boosted because LinkedIn wants to keep users on the platform. Adding links in the comments or at the very end of the post is a better strategy, though even this approach reduces post impressions.

4. LinkedIn doesn't want your posts to go viral

However it might look, LinkedIn explicitly prioritises real conversations and interactions rather than people mindlessly sharing clickbait. Concentrate on having real conversations, replying to comments, and replying to the comments on comments. This will boost your own impressions.

5. LinkedIn Blue and Gold Badges are Statistically MeaninglessT

here's no statistically significant impact on having either of these badges. The badges are just there to make you feel special and keep you coming back to LinkedIn so that they can keep advertising to you. People with blue badges don't obviously have better content than those without, and people with gold badges are just being rewarded for feeding the AI-training hamster wheel.

6. Beware Engagement Pods

Engagement Pods are private groups of people who share their posts with each other so they can game engagement and try to defeat the dreaded algorithm. However, these are super-easy to detect and they show up quickly even to external analysis. There are better ways to win at LinkedIn than paying exorbitant fees to snake oil salespeople.

15/05/2024

Remember to catch up with my recent "Hot Take" episode with Debbie Levitt. Wherever you get your podcasts or your YouTubes 💥

🔥 If we're "democratising" all our work, and anyone can do it, many of them are going to be doing it poorly

🔥 If we're accepting a loss of standards, AI can take our jobs today

🔥 But is it going to open up NEW jobs for us to do instead?

🔥 What are tomorrow's children going to be working on?

Check the episode out for all this and more. Do you agree? Disagree? Let us know in the comments!

https://okip.link/debbit-levitt-hot-take

https://www.youtube.com//videos

13/05/2024

I've finally released my first "Hot Take" episode, with the familiar face of Debbie Levitt. Debbie's hot take is all about AI, and how we're setting ourselves up to be replaced sooner by democratising all of our job roles. Check it out on YouTube or your favourite podcast app! And do remember to like, share or subscribe.

Debbie Levitt is a UX and CX consultant, the author of a few books, including "Customers Know You Suck" and runs a thriving community of UX professionals. He...

30/04/2024

Melissa Perri is the renowned author of "Escaping the Build Trap" and a well-known product consultant and educator. She has worked for a long time with Denise Tilles, another seasoned product leader, with whom she has been evangelising Product Operations to help scale product companies effectively. They recently collaborated on a book, coincidentally called "Product Operations", and we spoke all about the story behind the book and the themes within it.

Saeed Khan and I are planning a new course - please give us your feedback!
The relationship between product management and sales teams is traditionally tricky, and a common complaint from B2B PMs. Saeed Khan and I are looking to help with this with an online course and we'd love your feedback on your relationship with sales. This will help shape the course and, if you want to take part when the course is ready, we'll give you a special discount.

Please fill in the survey here. Thanks!

Episode highlights:

1. Product Operations is about helping product managers make faster, better quality decisions
It's important to dispel the myth of multi-armed product managers that can just do everything. There's too much for everyone to do! This creates barriers to doing great product management work and pulls product managers away from doing the real, value-add product management work that they're judged on.

2. There are three pillars of product operations...
The three pillars are ways to think about how to organise enablement. They are "Business & Data Insights", "Customer & Market Insights" and "Process and Practices". They are all the foundation of good product decision-making, and all companies will have a certain level of maturity already.

3. ... But you don't need to build all the pillars all at once
You don't need to fix everything at once. If you already have good capabilities in one or more areas, fix the ones that you don't have good capabilities in! You don't need to boil the ocean, just find the biggest gaps and opportunities to improve, and start to work on them.

4. Process shouldn't be seen as a dirty word
There's such a thing as too much process but, even if you don't call it process or try to define it, all work involves a process. It's important to have people to oversee the process at scale, prevent duplication or rework, and make sure that process is right-sized rather than ever-expanding.

5. The first step is being honest about your current state
There are plenty of ways to go with product operations as you scale, but the most important thing is being really honest with yourself about what your most important limiting factors are, what your product managers are spending time on and what's going to work for you.

Contact Melissa & Denise
You can catch up with Melissa at melissaperri.com, check out https://productinstitute.com or follow her on LinkedIn.

You can catch up with Denise at denisetilles.com or follow her on LinkedIn.

07/04/2024

Hope Gurion is a seasoned product coach and one of Marty Cagan's recommendations from his new book, "Transformed". Hope also works closely with Teresa Torres, teaching continuous discovery, as well as working directly with incoming product leaders to help them make an impact in their organisations. We spoke all about knowing your customers, gathering evidence, and whether continuous discovery is really a threat to user researchers.
Episode highlights:

1. Product coaching is more than just being there to ask good questions
When working with incoming product leaders, potentially without a product background at all, it's important to have a coach who has product experience who can help you identify your weaknesses, assess the state of play and provide actionable advice. Ultimately, it's important to empower the coachee.
2. It's really hard to make decisions if you have no idea who your customers are
It's important to define who your target customer is and what are their key attributes. This could be demographics, firmographics or whatever characteristics you need to know who you most need to learn from to calibrate your decisions as a product team. But, too many product teams end up resorting to proxies in other functions who "know the customers".
3. Many leaders are overconfident, but evidence is everything
Some people are just naturally confident about everything and can react badly if their ideas are challenged. But, as product people, we absolutely need to look beyond innate confidence and work out what informed the perspective. Which customers are we basing it on? Can I speak to some of those customers? It's not about trashing people's ideas but moving forward with confidence.
4. It's important to get comfortable with making bets and understanding the difference between one-way and two-way-door decisions
Sometimes teams get stuck into cycles of trying to do "perfect research", possibly because they're afraid that they're only going to get one shot at it. This means that they end up not making any moves at all, and everyone ends up getting frustrated at the amount of time product teams take to do anything.
5. Continuous discovery is about removing as many blind spots as possible and probably isn't responsible for mass user research lay-offs
All teams have an imperfect understanding of their product, the pain points associated with their product and their customers. Continuous discovery helps address this by removing blind spots but doesn't aim for perfection - simply evidence about how to make your next move. Is it contributing to user researcher lay-offs? It feels difficult to argue this when it feels like the majority of companies don't do any user research in the first place. User researchers and continuous discovery can co-exist.
Contact Hope
You can catch up with Hope at Fearless Product or follow her on LinkedIn.

Related episodes you should like:

Data-Informed Decision Making and the Three Cs of Product Management (Roger Snyder, VP of Products & Services @ 280 Group)
Adventures in Product Management (Dan Olsen, Author "The Lean Product Playbook")
Getting into the Habit of Continuous Discovery (Teresa Torres, Author "Continuous Discovery Habits")
Build High Growth Products by Following the Product Science Success Path (Holly Hester-Reilly, Founder @ H2R Product Science)
Selling Product Thinking by Influencing Companies at the Right Time (Anthony Marter, Product Coach)
Putting Customers at the Heart of your Product Decisions (Hubert Palan, Founder @ Productboard)
Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant)
Build What Matters with Vision-Led Product Management (Rajesh Nerlikar, Author "Build What Matters")

10/03/2024

Marty Cagan is the founder and a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, a leading product consultancy that aims to get companies to work "the way that the best companies work". He is the author of two desk references for product managers: "Inspired", aimed at product teams, and "Empowered", aimed at product leaders. He has since come to realise that "the way the best companies work" is too vague a term, and also that many companies have no idea where to get started. He's now back with "Transformed", a book that aims to get companies to adopt the Product Operating Model.

A message from this episode's sponsor - New York Product Conference
Join hundreds of other product people in New York City on April 18th 2024 for the New York Product Conference! You'll learn from some of the best minds in product today — including Dennis Crowley (Founder of Foursquare), Sahil Lavingia (Founder of Gumroad), April Dunford (product positioning expert and bestselling author) and so many others through masterclass keynotes, interactive working sessions, small group discussions and more. Topics covered include Product Strategy, Product Leadership, AI for Product Managers, Customer Research, and more.
Pricing increases on the first of the month, so you'll want to register soon. Plus, use the code OneKnightInProduct and save another $50 when you register!

Episode highlights:

1. It was finally important to give the Product Operating Model a name
Whilst Marty doesn't like to unnecessarily label things, or have any sniff of "process" for the sake of process, he started to realise that just saying "the way the best companies work" was too vague and handwavy. However, the core principles of great product companies and product teams have not changed, and this isn't a framework.
2. Marty and SVPG didn't invent any of this stuff, and you shouldn't listen to him (or anyone) uncritically
These days, it's fashionable to beat up product "thought leaders" and complain that they're being too dogmatic, idealistic, or unrealistic. But, SVPG didn't invent any of these principles, they just observed them in the best-performing product companies. It's still important to apply critical thinking and make sure they make sense to you and your organisation.
3. Product managers and product leaders have more power and more responsibility than they realise
It's not always easy to transform, and there are limits to how far you can go bottoms-up, but you can generally make progress one step at a time. There's an incredible amount of onus on product leaders to evangelise and champion this change and, if they can't (or won't) do it, they shouldn't be product leaders.
4. Not everyone in an organisation will understand why it's transforming, or want to be transformed
It's easy to see this as something that just affects product teams, but the whole organisation needs to buy into the change. Reading bits of "Inspired" at them, or talking about the number of experiments you've done this week, is unlikely to sway them, You need to show business results and real impact and make them care about it on their terms.
5. There are four key competencies for a successful transformation, and they need investing in
The competencies remain the same... Product Managers, Product Leaders, "proper" Product Designers (not just pixel pushers) and Tech Leads who care as much about what they're building as how they're building it. If you just expect to get results with a disengaged, outsourced engineering team, graphic designers and product owners, you're going to be disappointed.
6. Sometimes you need help to know what good looks like
It's easy for people like us to sit there and talk about the benefits of product transformation and how we should all definitely do it but, for some people, this is all alien. In cases like this, a good product coach can be the difference between success and failure. But, there are so many product coaches these days, so make sure you get a good one.
Check out "Transformed"
"The most common question after reading INSPIRED and EMPOWERED has been: "Yes, we want to work this way, but the way we work today is so different, and so deeply ingrained, is it even possible for a company like ours to transform to the product model?" TRANSFORMED was written to bridge the gap between where most companies are right now and where they need to be. The leaders of these companies know they must transform to compete in an era of rapidly changing enabling technology, but most of them have never operated this way before. "
Check it out on Amazon.
Check out "Empowered"
"Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products. The goal of EMPOWERED is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you’ll need to create just such an environment. "
Check it out on Amazon.
Check out "Inspired"
"How do today’s most successful tech companies―Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla―design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than most tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love―and that will work for your business. "
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Marty
You can catch up with Marty at Silicon Valley Product Group or follow him on LinkedIn.

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)
How to Build an Effective Product Organisation (Marty Cagan, Author "Empowered" & "Inspired")
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)
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 companies & instilling a product mindset (Dave Martin, Founder @ Right to Left)

18/02/2024

Miloš Belčević is a product manager and author who believes that product management principles are powerful not only when managing products, but also when managing the ultimate product; your life itself. He has written a book on the subject, "Build Your Way: Applying Product Management to Life". We spoke about the book as well as some of the lessons inside.
Episode highlights:

1. We can apply product management principles to life
We can apply product management principles to one's life, beyond just professional settings. This includes using prioritisation frameworks to manage personal goals and tasks, and considering whether there's a "North-Star metric" that can help guide personal growth and decision-making.
2. Context switching can be hell at home as well as work
Whether we're switching contexts between different roles in our careers or having to balance multiple responsibilities, we can apply product management strategies to help us prioritise our time and manage our mental bandwidth.
3. We can define "Value" for our life as well as our products
There's no magic formula for "value", but it's important to understand the deeper meaning of the concept of value, whether delivering value to customers or identifying what brings value to one's life.
4. Our time is limited and we need to prioritise what's most important to us
We don't have to use prioritisation frameworks for everything, but applying product management prioritisation techniques can help us focus on what is most important. If we practice enough, we can get into the habit, and it even becomes somewhat intuitive to our life decisions.
5. Product discovery techniques can foster better interactions and conversations in life
We can use our empathic and discovery mindset to help solicit genuine feedback and dig into people's motivations in conversations. This offers the tantalising prospect of being able to bridge ideological divides and improve the quality of our interactions with society as a whole.
Check out "Build Your Way"
"Perhaps you have heard about product management. Maybe you use it in your work. If that’s the case, chances are high that you know that product management is full of useful frameworks, principles, and tools that focus on prioritization and maximizing value, better planning, agile delivery, and more. But what if you want to use these tools in your personal life? How would you do that in a way that will make sure you will live a better, happier, and more fulfilled life? In this book, author Miloš Belčević will show you how."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Miloš
You can catch up with Miloš 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)
Practice Makes Perfect: Embracing the Messy Reality of Product Management (Matt LeMay, Product Management Consultant & Author "Product Management in Practice")
The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Productization (Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author "Productize")
Achieving Product Excellence with the Product Operations Manifesto (Antonia Landi, Product Ops Consultant & Co-Author "Product Operations Manifesto")
Paying Off Your Organisation's Human Debt Through Agility & Psychological Safety (Duena Blomstrom, Founder & CEO @ People Not Tech)
Embracing Change to Innovate in Product Management (Greg Coticchia, CEO @ Sopheon)
Fearlessly Defeating the Four Horsemen of a Product-Friendly Culture (Eisha Armstrong, Co-founder @ Vecteris & Author "Productize" & "Fearless")
Pragmatic Digital Transformation in Traditional Industries (Dan Chapman, Director, Product Line Leader @ Merck)

11/02/2024

About the Episode
Debbie Levitt is a long-time UX and CX consultant who wants us all to get better at putting our users at the centre of the conversation, rather than paying lip service. She's the author of a few books, including "Customers Know You Suck" and runs a thriving community of UX professionals. Some of the stories from that community have concerned her, alongside the general perceived decline of the strategic role of UX, and she recently came out all guns blazing against continuous discovery, PM-led research, and one particular author who champions it. We spoke about the role of UX and CX in organisations, what's happening to user researchers, and whether PMs are really to blame for it.
Episode highlights:

1. User Experience and Customer Experience used to be the same thing, and they can be again
In these digital days, it seems like most people think UX people are just there in the corner to colour in people's ideas, but UX should be a strategic role that enables user and customer-focused decision-making and makes sure we always balance our business's needs with those of our users.
2. We prize and prioritise speed over quality - we just have to get it done
We've been moving fast and breaking things for long enough now to realise how often it doesn't work. User research feels unconscionably slow to some people, but it doesn't have to be slow, and doing good user research (whoever does it) is an investment in trying to get things right.
3. No matter how much product managers feel they're disempowered, they're still the Golden Children of the company
Back in the old days, product managers were hiding in the corner with the UX people, as agilists and engineers rode through the company calling all the shots. Now the UX people are hiding with the engineers whilst the PM makes all of the decisions. There's a power imbalance, and it's not a true "trio".
4. User researchers are getting laid off, some of the jobs are gone for good and, at least in some cases, this is because leaders think they can just hand the work off to PMs
It's not fair or reasonable to lay all of this at the doors of PM thought leaders championing certain approaches. There are plenty of UX thought leaders who champion them too. But, people are getting laid off and at least some of them are blaming PM-led product discovery as the root cause.
5. We should be able to look at books and take what works from them, but apply critical thinking and ensure that we don't follow any message blindly
Most books have something useful in them, and all approaches can work in some contexts. Debbie has her approach, others have their approaches, and there's no one "right way". But, it's important to make sure that approaches can be challenged, expanded upon, and that the approaches and techniques are described clearly and without room for interpretation.
Check out "Customers Know You Suck"

"Customers Know You Suck is the how-to manual for customer-centric product-market fit. Its highly actionable models, maps, and processes empower everyone to improve the Customer Experience (CX). Learn how to investigate, diagnose, and act on what's blocking teams. Gather the evidence and data that better inform decisions, leading to increased satisfaction, conversion, and loyalty. Use our governance model for implementing and monitoring the progress, success, and failure of internal process changes and experiments."
Check it out on Amazon or pay what you want.
Check out how to use a Knowledge Quadrant
Debbie is a fan of doing good discovery, naturally. Here's a video of an approach she recommends called the Knowledge Quadrant: Workshop: Discovery Phase - Knowledge Quadrant
Contact Debbie
You can catch up with Debbie on LinkedIn or check out Delta CX.

Related episodes you should like:

Using Solution Tests to Make Sure You're Building Products Users Want (Jim Morris, Founder @ Product Discovery Group)
Getting into the Habit of Continuous Discovery (Teresa Torres, Author "Continuous Discovery Habits")
We're All Responsible For Accessible Product Design (Holly Schroeder, Senior UX Researcher & Accessibility Advocate)
Making Sure You Make an Impact through User Research (Steve Portigal, User Research Consultant & Author "Interviewing Users")
Product Leadership Principles for Tumultuous Times (Giff Constable, Author "Talking with Humans" & "Testing with Humans")
How to Deploy Empathy to Truly Understand User Needs (Michele Hansen, Author "Deploy Empathy")
Chinese Startup Culture & Putting the Minimum into MVP (Carlos Lastres, Creative & Marketing Director @ Kaiyan Medical)
Building a Culture of Continuous Discovery (Cindy Alvarez, Author "Lean Customer Development")

04/02/2024

Lloyed Lobo got his first understanding of the power of community when visiting his grandparents in the Mumbai slums, and watching people come together in his childhood during the Gulf War. He has since turned this into an entrepreneurial superpower and used community-building to catapult his bootstrapped startup into the big time. He's since written a book about all of this stuff called "From Grassroots to Greatness: 13 Rules to Build Iconic Brands with Community-Led Growth". We spoke about the book and many of the topics within.
Episode highlights:

1. Community is a company strategy, not a marketing strategy
It's not enough to just sit there and layer "community" on top of your existing marketing and expect it to pay back instantly. It has to be part of your company's DNA, something that your customers and your employees can be inspired and motivated by. Attribution is hard, but the results will come.
2. You need to show up for your community or they won't show up for you
You cannot take your community for granted. You need to provide them with constant, consistent value with no immediate expectation of reward. They will keep coming for the value, and you are engineering serendipity for future conversations.
3. Don't be afraid to have the sales conversations
That said, if you don't ask, you don't get. You cannot be afraid of trying to offer paid value to your community, even if it feels uncomfortable to ask. If you are providing value then people will be happy to talk to you. Not everyone will become a customer, but some will. Use the reciprocity bias to your advantage.
4. There is power in finding your niche and sticking to it
Don't try to go too wide chasing vanity metrics. You will get more value out of a smaller community of people who share your exact passions than out of a generic sea of people who couldn't care less. Make sure you identify your people, show up for them, and own your white space.
5. Community can be as much of a moat as technology or industry expertise
There are more communities and products to solve problems for communities than ever before but, if you have the right community, you can use it to your advantage. Having an engaged, passionate community can help prevent your company from becoming a commodity.
Check out "From Grassroots to Greatness"
"In a world where traditional marketing is losing its edge and products are struggling to stand out, a thriving community is your biggest asset. Recognizing that true success lies not in products or technologies, but in the power of people, author Lloyed Lobo explores the intricate art of harnessing the community's strength as your ultimate acquisition channel, brand differentiator, feedback source, retention lever, and catalyst for transformative change."
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Lloyed
You can catch up with Lloyed on LinkedIn or Instagram.

28/01/2024

Shyvee Shi is a Product Lead at LinkedIn, a community-builder, content creator and educator. She's been making waves through her online courses but she's now co-authored a book, "Reimagined: Building Products with Generative AI", which aims to help all of us survive and thrive in the new normal of AI-powered products. We talked about some of the themes from the book, and why it was important for her to write it.
Episode highlights:

1. Now is the time for product managers to get into generative AI
Whether you're experimenting with putting it in your own products or using it to turbocharge your product management duties, you need to check out generative AI if you want to stay ahead of the curve. It's not going to replace product managers any time soon, but it can help us dream bigger.
2. If your competitors can use AI to serve your customers better than you, your business could disappear overnight
75% of CEOs are terrified that generative AI will kill their business. It's like the Kodak story on steroids, and it's not even about tankers getting outmanoeuvred by speedboats anymore. Big companies are also getting in on the game and you need to have a response.
3. PMs have a responsibility to concentrate on the problem, not the technology
It's as important as ever for product managers to focus on solving real user problems, no matter what the tech. We can't just slap ChatGPT onto everything and call it a success. Generative AI can help us and our customers in new and interesting ways but we must concentrate on solving their real problems.
4. It can be hard to craft a workable go-to-market plan for AI products
This could be down to falling in love with the technology, struggles with pricing or quality, lack of explainability or poor understanding of your customers' most important jobs to be done. Make sure you're intentional about your go-to-market plan to avoid failure.
5. It can be hard to create moats when using generative AI solutions
So many of these solutions are built on the same back-end, and there are de facto default LLMs. In some cases, startups building on top of things like ChatGPT end up disappearing overnight because OpenAI has developed a new feature of its own. It is possible to create moats through proprietary data, excellent UX and good old-fashioned verticalisation. Make sure you create a moat!
Buy "Reimagined"
"Did you know that incorporating AI into products is now a pivotal strategy for businesses worldwide? According to a 2023 study from Accenture, a staggering 75% of C-suite executives agree that failure to integrate AI effectively in the next five years could lead to business obsolescence. "Reimagined: Building Products with Generative AI" is your essential guide in this transformative journey. It's not just about understanding AI and Generative AI technologies; it's about strategically harnessing them to drive innovation, team efficiency, and market success.
Check it out on Amazon.
Contact Shyvee
You can catch up with Shyvee on LinkedIn or check out Product Management Reimagined.