TEI 036: Product Development Lessons for Software Product Managers

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 036 of...

The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD.

The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers.

Our Guest: Jeremy Dillingham has a long list of skills and experiences as a seasoned product manager, including leading teams, roadmap planning, portfolio management, Lean Startup, Customer Discovery, Agile Development, and SaaS architectures. He is a mentor at Techstars, an accelerator for technology startups. He currently serves as a Senior VP at Return Path, a company that helps organizations promote and protect their brands.

Some favorite product management tools:

• Discovery – the process of talking with customers and validating what you are learning about the problems and needs. This involves writing a script of interview questions, prioritizing the questions, talking with customers to gain responses, and analyzing the data. Discovery sessions with customers should be done by two interviewers so one can focus on asking questions and the other can focus on taking notes.
• Experiment – one pass through the build-measure-learn loop (per Lean).
• Metrics – dashboards, KPIs, another important indicators.
• Lean Canvas – see TEI 010 episode with the creator of the Lean Canvas.