Podcast appearances and mentions of eric boduch

Eric Boduch of Venture Studio 24 and Up and Revcast joins Nick to discuss Scaling Unicorn Pendo, When to Hire Your First Sales Leader, How To Construct a Team Pre and Post PMF, and How to Balance Stretch vs. Strain. In this episode we cover: Pendo's Origin, Product Development, and Customer Acquisition Product Market Fit, Growth Strategies and Team Composition for Early-Stage SaaS Startups Hiring and Company Culture at a Fast-Growing Startup Building and Optimizing Revenue Organizations - Metrics and Assumptions AI's Impact on Software, Dashboarding and Agent Orchestration Guest Links: Eric's LinkedIn Eric's Twitter/X Revcast LinkedIn Revcast Website Pendo Website The hosts of The Full Ratchet are Nick Moran and Nate Pierotti of New Stack Ventures, a venture capital firm committed to investing in founders outside of the Bay Area. Want to keep up to date with The Full Ratchet? Follow us on social. You can learn more about New Stack Ventures by visiting our LinkedIn and Twitter. Are you a founder looking for your next investor? Visit our free tool VC-Rank and we'll send a list of potential investors right to your inbox!

Welcome to another episode of The SaaS CFO Podcast. Today we have an exciting conversation lined up for you as we dive into the world of revenue planning and optimization with our distinguished guest, Eric Boduch, the founder of Revcast. Eric brings a wealth of experience, having been deeply involved in the SaaS space since its early days. In this episode, he'll discuss the journey from working with early SaaS models to developing a solution that empowers revenue organizations to optimize their operations with predictive insights. You'll hear about the inception of Revcast, their focus on rev ops leaders, and how they manage to raise $3.1 million in their seed round pre-beta. Get ready for enlightenment on building credibility with investors, the importance of community within the Rev Ops space, and Eric's outlook on growth within the SaaS industry. Whether you're a startup founder, financial professional, or just curious about SaaS, you won't want to miss Eric's valuable insights. So plug in, stay tuned, and let's get ready to unlock the secrets of succeeding in SaaS revenue operations with Eric Boduch on The SaaS CFO Podcast. Show Notes: 00:00 Experienced professional in early SaaS industry reflects. 04:03 Rev ops software empowers sales leader's understanding. 07:48 Targeting revenue management, agility and system limitations. 10:04 Salesforce deal data usually clean, minimal issues. 13:26 Deep expertise and focus on credibility in revenue operations. 17:03 Researched, developed, and raised funds for startup. 19:44 Key metrics are important for growth evaluation. 23:24 Focus on building community and product content. 25:48 Email address shared and thanks exchanged on podcast. Links: SaaS Fundraising Stories: https://www.thesaasnews.com/news/revcast-raises-3-million-in-seed-round Eric Boduch's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-boduch-a1b61/ RevCast's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/revcast/ RevCast's Website: https://www.revcast.com/ To learn more about Ben check out the links below: Subscribe to Ben's daily metrics newsletter: https://saasmetricsschool.beehiiv.com/subscribe Subscribe to Ben's SaaS newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/df1db6bf8bca/the-saas-cfo-sign-up-landing-page SaaS Metrics courses here: https://www.thesaasacademy.com/ Join Ben's SaaS community here: https://www.thesaasacademy.com/offers/ivNjwYDx/checkout Follow Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benrmurray

This week's Friday Nooner featured Eric Boduch, the founder of 24&Up, CEO of Revcast and the co-founder of local unicorn Pendo. Tune in to learn more about Eric's career, latest ventures, etc.

Eric Boduch is the Co-Founder of Pendo. Pendo tracks 1.5 billion user actions a day and improves the product experience for 80 million users every month. The company raised $150M in Series F round on Jul 27, 2021. This brings Pendo's total funding to $356M and its valuation to $2.6B. Previously, Eric served as the CEO of Brainstorm SMS Technologies LLC (dba SMaSh, Inc.) and was also the Co-Founder and CEO of several other companies. Listen to this podcast and know Eric's amazing entrepreneurial journey and how to build a billion-dollar company with no product. Please Enjoy! If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider being 1% and leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/ iTunes? It takes less than 30 seconds, and it really makes a world of difference in reaching new interesting guests! To sign up for Kevin's Podcast email Newsletter and to view the show notes & past guests please visit-https://officialkevindavid.com/podcast Follow Kevin: https://mmini.me/@FollowKD

Join us for a Product Management conversation with Eric Boduch, Co-Founder of Pendo, a product cloud that provides user insight, user guidance, and user communication for digital product teams and application owners. Get the FREE Product Book here

Everyone knows the value of understanding your product market fit. But getting there is never straightforward. For this live episode, we’re delighted to share a recording of a Zendesk webinar, in partnership with Pendo. Listen for insights and practical advice from two product experts: Mike Gozzo, VP of Product at Zendesk, and Eric Boduch, Co-founder at Pendo. You’ll learn:  How to define product market fit is and measure it effectively The right time to prove your fit—should you ever stop? How to get feedback to guide your efforts, and metrics to prove your fit to investors Why product market fit must be a company-wide initiative

Brett Queener, partner at Bonfire Ventures: investing in early stage products by Eric Boduch

Brett Queener, partner at Bonfire Ventures: product, growth, acquisition by Eric Boduch

Prince Kohli, CTO of Automation Anywhere: automation in product by Eric Boduch

Daniel Scrivner, CEO of Flow: Exploration by Eric Boduch

Michael Grinich, CEO of WorkOS: Enterprise ready features by Eric Boduch

Product Love Podcast: Bella Renney, Head of Product at Tray.io: product vision and design by Eric Boduch

Bella Renney, Head of Product at Tray.io: north star metrics by Eric Boduch

Matt Fleckenstein, Innovation Marketing at Microsoft: Innovation and SaaS by Eric Boduch

Eric is an experienced founder that understands the complications of building a business. Recently Pendo was ranked #26/5000 of the fastest growing companies in the US according to Inc. making it a huge sucess. On this episode Eric discusses when executives should build vs buy and the data scientist's role in an organization. The conversation then changes to augmented and virtual reality opportunities and how AI will play a role in those. Eric is an expert in product and is the host of the Product Love podcast.

Nancy Hensley, Chief PRoduct and Marketing Officer at Stats Perform: growth by Eric Boduch

Ziad Ismail, Chief Product Officer at Convoy: decision frameworks by Eric Boduch

Todd Olson, CEO of Pendo: The Product-Led Organization by Eric Boduch

Ben Keyser, VP of Product at Contentful: delivery models by Eric Boduch

Wayne Duso, VP at Amazon Web Services: customer-centric cultures by Eric Boduch

James Norwood, product leader and advisor: product marketing by Eric Boduch

Robin Beers, SVP of Customer Insights and Experience Design at Wells Fargo: experience design by Eric Boduch

Ibrahim Bashir, VP of Product at Box: product value by Eric Boduch

Des Traynor, Chief Strategy Officer of Intercom: frameworks and feedback by Eric Boduch

Ben Taylor, Chief AI Evangelist of DataRobot: AI and start-ups part 2 by Eric Boduch

Ben Taylor, Chief AI Evangelist of DataRobot: AI and start-ups by Eric Boduch

Nik Parekh, author of The Future of Extraordinary Design: service design, and user experience by Eric Boduch

Don't even trip dawg, this one's a bit meta, but we got you on this one, broh. The Growth Stage Podcast explores the nature of problems being solved with products, and in this episode, we look at the problem of Product itself. Product is a proper noun here. We’re joined by Co-Founder of unicorn Pendo, Eric Boduch, and Rick Zullo, of Equal Ventures, to discuss Product's ecosystem and roots in every success story. 

Product Love Podcast: David Nash, principal product consultant at 280 Group: alignment and product ops by Eric Boduch

Justin Dilley, VP of Product at Fullstory: sunsetting features and products by Eric Boduch

Marc Abraham, Head of Product at ASOS: product mindset by Eric Boduch

Dan Olsen, product management consultant and author of The Lean Product Playbook: product planning by Eric Boduch

Nancy Wang, Head of Product at Amazon AWS, talks about Advancing Women in Product by Eric Boduch

Product Love Podcast: Lisa Reeves, SVP of Product of Zenefits by Eric Boduch

Product Love Podcast: Rahul Vohra, CEO of Superhuman by Eric Boduch

Product Love Podcast: Ryan Singer, Head of Strategy at Basecamp and author of Shape Up by Eric Boduch

Product Love Podcast: Matt Lemay, co-founder and partner at Sudden Compass by Eric Boduch

"As founders, we all had product backgrounds … we all understood this pain … like we all had this issue of how do you get data about how your software is being used? ... We install a snippet of code and then it just works. It captures everything that's like super empowering to me as a product manager" Eric Boduch, co-Founder of Pendo

"We looked at each other one night when we were working rather late, which we had a tendency to do. Right. Do we really want to run a consulting company? We looked at each other and we;re both like .. No! So then we start thinking, well, what do we want to do? And from that we said; ‘Well, we really like the idea of building a product!'" Eric Boduch, Co-founder of Pendo

"We looked at each other one night when we were working rather late, which we had a tendency to do. Right. Do we really want to run a consulting company? We looked at each other and we;re both like .. No! So then we start thinking, well, what do we want to do? And from that we said; ‘Well, we really like the idea of building a product!’" Eric Boduch, Co-founder of Pendo

"As founders, we all had product backgrounds … we all understood this pain … like we all had this issue of how do you get data about how your software is being used? ... We install a snippet of code and then it just works. It captures everything that's like super empowering to me as a product manager" Eric Boduch, co-Founder of Pendo

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia joins Product Love to talk about Product School by Eric Boduch

Dan Smoker joins Product Love to talk about product in the B2B and B2C space by Eric Boduch

Jason Mueller joins Product Love to talk about product ops and communication by Eric Boduch

Darren Chait joins Product Love to talk about self-service and culture by Eric Boduch

Gerard Fitzgerald joins Product Love to talk about product design by Eric Boduch

Acquiring new customers has become really difficult and expensive. Instead of focusing on sales and marketing, Product-led companies now focus on improving their product and making it their main marketing channel. In this interview with Eric Boduch, co-founder at Pendo, we discuss Product-led growth. What the heck is that and how can a new SaaS business become product-led? Key takeaways: - How to structure your organisation in a product-led manner - How traditional roles evolve in the product-led era - How can a product with a steep learning curve apply the 'show/don't tell' principle without risking. The interviewee: Eric Boduch serves as the Founder, Board Member, VP of Marketing and Chief Evangelist of Pendo.io. The interviewer: Aggelos Mouzakitis is the founder of Growth Sandwich. He created Growth Sandwich, back in 2017 with a sole vision: to help promising early-stage teams get their products to market in a solid manner. He has worked or trained more than 500 marketers and founders on how to get to the market with the right mix of tactics and a product that drives engagement and happiness. About Growth Sandwich: Growth Sandwich is the first European Product-led Go-to-Market Strategy agency. We specialise in helping SaaS products and businesses that operate in the subscription economy. Our approach is 100% customer-centric and we help post-Product/Market fit companies establish a repeatable selling motion and recurring revenues.

Jake Sorofman joins Product Love to talk about the 2020 State of Product Leadership by Eric Boduch

Rahul Vohra joins Product Love to talk about product-market fit and positioning by Eric Boduch

Johanna Rothman on Programming Leadership, Thomas “Tido” Carriero on Product Love, Adam Davidson on Lead From The Heart, Josh Wills on Software Engineering Daily, and Amitai Schleier on Programming Leadership. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting January 20, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. JOHANNA ROTHMAN ON PROGRAMMING LEADERSHIP The Programming Leadership podcast featured Johanna Rothman with host Marcus Blankenship. Marcus started out by asking Johanna why it is important to think about managing ourselves. Johanna says that when we don’t manage ourselves, we don’t have the capability to manage other people. For example, if we insist on micro-managing people, they cannot grow and we prevent them from doing their best work.⁠ ⁠Marcus asked her what micromanagement has to do with managing ourselves. Johanna says that micromanagement comes from fear. You need to learn to manage yourself to manage this fear and reduce your need to micromanage. ⁠ ⁠She says the reason the first book is about managing yourself is that if you can avoid doing the things that make people feel badly, you can create an environment where people can excel.⁠ ⁠They talked about surveys and Marcus asked Johanna’s opinion on anonymous versus named survey responses. Johanna says that when you have a culture where there is a lot of blaming and micromanagement and little coaching, she would recommend an anonymous survey.⁠ ⁠Marcus talked about how technical managers often know how to do the work itself very well and he asked Johanna when this can trip us up. One way it trips us up, she says, is that people on the team don’t get a chance to practice if the manager is writing code instead of managing. Second, when you have not been in the code in a while, you do not know what it looks like anymore. ⁠ ⁠Marcus asked how managers can get time to think in today’s high time-pressure environments. Johanna says that if you are spending a lot of time in meetings, you should be looking at whether you can delegate any of those meetings to the people doing the work. This delegating is not sloughing off your responsibilities, but making sure you are not part of a team that you are not supposed to be a part of.⁠ Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/becoming-better-manager-means-starting-yourself-johanna/id1461916939?i=1000460138590 Website link: https://programmingleadership.podbean.com/e/becoming-a-better-manager-means-starting-with-yourself-with-johanna-rothman/ THOMAS “TIDO” CARRIERO ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Thomas “Tido” Carriero with host Eric Boduch. Tido oversees all of engineering, product, and design at Segment. Segment provides customer data infrastructure or CDI, helping companies collect, unify, and connect data about their own interactions with their customers. It gives these companies a unified view of their customer data across all channels.⁠ ⁠When he joined Segment, Tido was blown away by how robust the ecosystem was and by the attractive idea of empowering business teams, marketing teams, and product teams by installing application tracking once and being able to turn on integrations with the flick of a switch. Often, he says, a lot of business and marketing and less technical folks are blocked from doing the best job they could do because of tough integration problems that Segment solves.⁠ ⁠Segment naturally has a lot of adjacencies. They touch critical customer data and they need to decide whether to use that to empower engineering, marketing, or others. This requires being clear at the beginning of the year that they will pick two or three bets as an organization to focus on.⁠ ⁠Eric asked Tido what product leaders often do wrong. Tido says the biggest mistake product leaders make by far is not looking in the mirror and making an honest assessment of where things are. Getting attached to an idea makes it harder to give it a critical look. Often, you’re only a small pivot away from a valuable product. As the leader of an organization, he sees his job as creating a culture where failure is not just okay but celebrated. If people are getting slapped on the hand for failure, they will just get even more committed to their first ideas. Healthy teams that seriously innovate look at the data and are willing to pivot when it tells them unpleasant things.  Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/thomas-tido-carriero-joins-product-love-to-talk-about/id1343610309?i=1000459980786 Website link: https://www.spreaker.com/user/casted/edited-tido-joins-product-love-mp3 ADAM DAVIDSON ON LEAD FROM THE HEART The Lead From The Heart podcast featured Adam Davidson with host Mark C. Crowley. Adam Davidson is the creator of the Planet Money podcast and is staff business writer at The New Yorker. He has a new book called The Passion Economy. The theme of the book is that choosing your career used to mean choosing between work that makes your heart sing and work that pays well but disconnects you from your passions, but the new world order demands that we follow our passions and pursue work that leverages both our talents and our interests.⁠ ⁠Adam’s grandfather worked his entire career in a ball bearing factory and only made a good living by working double shifts. He believed that people who follow their passions go nowhere in life.⁠ ⁠Adam’s father was the opposite. Making money was far less important to him than following his dream of performing as a Broadway actor.⁠ ⁠These two men represent the dichotomy of having to choose financial success or your passion but not both.⁠ ⁠The people of Adam’s father’s generation and his grandfather’s generation had to choose between a life of passion and a life of financial success, but people today, Adam says, are lucky. They are lucky for the reasons that terrify us. Adam says, “All of these forces that have done so much damage to the stability of the 20th century economy also provide exactly the tools that allow us to figure out what we uniquely love and are good at and find those people, even if they’re thinly spread all over the country or all over the globe, who also crave what it is we can provide and are willing to pay for it.”⁠ ⁠Mark summed up the book as being about combining your training and expertise with a personal passion to find your own niche. According to Adam, some people take a total left turn and go into a completely different field later in their lives, but the most successful people he has met combine their passion with the skills they have previously acquired.⁠ Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/adam-davidson-new-rules-for-thriving-in-twenty-first/id1365633369?i=1000462188105 Website link: https://blubrry.com/leadfromtheheartpodcast/54035306/adam-davidson-the-new-rules-for-thriving-in-the-twenty-first-century/ JOSH WILLS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured Josh Wills with host Jeff Meyerson. Josh Wills was the director of data engineering at Slack when Slack was building out a solution to scaling its data infrastructure. When the first analysts at Slack were hired, their only option was to spin up their own little databases that had cached copies of Slack’s main transactional database. Eventually, Slack hired data engineers that built systems that could scale up what an analyst could do. They built up a lot of infrastructure involving Airflow jobs producing Parquet files on S3 that were queryable through tools like Presto and it was, according to Josh, a “ghost city” for a while. All the while, the analytics team was still using the existing infrastructure of ETL jobs running on the transactional database. It wasn’t until Slack started aggressively hiring analysts, data scientists, and engineers from the Googles, Facebooks, and Twitters of the world that they had people who knew how to use the stuff Josh and his team were building. Jeff asked how the various design philosophies coming from the new hires from Google and Facebook got resolved. Josh said it got resolved by him making all the decisions. There were a million things to do, so the design direction was often the result of whoever was the first mover. If Josh had it all to do over again, he would do many things differently, but he knows that nobody would appreciate it because they would have never experienced the inferior designs. It is hard to appreciate the pain that something saved you. Most of your good decisions are invisible and taken for granted while your bad decisions cause pain and suffering forever. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/slack-data-platform-with-josh-wills/id1019576853?i=1000462100792 Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/01/10/slack-data-platform-with-josh-wills/ AMITAI SCHLEIER ON PROGRAMMING LEADERSHIP The Programming Leadership podcast featured Amitai Schleier with host Marcus Blankenship. Amitai talked to Marcus about his fork of qmail called notqmail. Qmail is a Unix program for running an email server that, unfortunately, hasn’t been updated in twenty years and has a number of rough edges. Over the last twenty years, Amitai has invested time into softening qmail’s rough edges through improved package management. More recently, Amitai started thinking about getting the people who are working on their own forks of qmail to collaborate on a single fork. The first step was getting some advice. A key piece of advice came from Llewellyn Falco. Llewellyn said, “Qmail already has a lot of nice seams and interfaces. Without too much more work and risk, you could add a couple more seams so that whatever modernization is required could be done as plugins or extensions. The next problem to think about is egos. Not all ideas are going to win.” He then gave Amitai the best piece of advice: “Whatever you do, offer yourself to other programmers to get their code converted to extensions first. As to which implementation of a particular new feature is to be incorporated, that decision is not your call. Take as extensions as many implementations as people want to give and let users decide.” Marcus asked about how to influence a group of people on a project without being coercive. Amitai says that he discovered years ago that when a situation is a little confused, his default response is to seek to lower his perceived social status. Otherwise, he cannot influence the way he wants to if he’s a big shot that people are supposed to listen to. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/collaboration-and-notqmail-with-amitai-schleier/id1461916939?i=1000462047766 Website link: https://programmingleadership.podbean.com/e/collaboration-and-notqmail-with-amitai-schleier/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Brandon Chu joins Product Love to talk about entrepreneurship and building teams by Eric Boduch

This episode's hosts: Zach LaGreca Kevin Gentry Resources: pendo.io

Scott Belsky on Product Love, Beth Long on Maintainable, Mark Schell on Agile Uprising, Daniel Mintz on Product Love, and Kelsey Hightower on On Call Nightmares. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting December 23, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. SCOTT BELSKY ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Scott Belsky with host Eric Boduch. Scott founded Behance in 2005, which he calls a “LinkedIn for the creative world.” They were acquired by Adobe in 2012. He is now Chief Product Officer there. He wrote two books: Making Ideas Happen and The Messy Middle. Scott founded Behance because his designer and artist friends felt a sense of frustration at how their careers were at the mercy of circumstance. He pitched them on the idea of a social network for creatives and they hated it. So he asked what problem they wanted to solve. Many said that their portfolio sites were always out of date and hard for clients to find, they never got attribution for their work, their potential clients found it hard to look them up if they saw their work for another client, and there was a lack of software that catered to the business aspects of being a professional designer or artist. This was a community of customers who didn’t realize that what they needed is what they didn’t want. Behance needed to pull their customers through their first mile of doubt. When they put out a beta, they asked customers to put their portfolio on it and the customers said no because they had a portfolio site already. So they asked their customers if they could interview and write a blog post about them and they said yes. So Behance made a blog of leading designers and asked them for portfolio images. Customers agreed and let them put the images in Behance. They found a backdoor way to get some of the most beautiful portfolios into Behance upon launch. People who now looked up their favorite designers found them on Behance and thought, “I should be on there.” This taught Scott the lesson that, while the science of business is scaling, the art of business is the things that don’t scale. The best businesses find the non-scalable things to prime the pump for their products. Scott says businesses need to nail it before they scale it. In other words, they should aim for high product-market fit with a hundred or so users. Eric asked where the average product leader struggles in making the transition from being hands-on to more strategic. Scott says a common struggle is not empowering design sufficiently. You want to find the right design leaders and empower them sufficiently at the right point in the process. Great product leaders don’t say much at all. They are conduits that are working behind the scenes to get people aligned and to get designers and engineers working together. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/scott-belsky-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-exploring/id1343610309?i=1000458667222 Website link: https://www.spreaker.com/user/casted/belsky-edited-audio-mp3 BETH LONG ON MAINTAINABLE The Maintainable podcast featured Beth Long with host Robby Russell. Beth is a software engineer at New Relic. She says that maintainable code is code that prioritizes intelligibility and is oriented to the way humans interact with it. It is simple, clear, and emphasizes readability over conciseness. The infrastructure the code deploys to and the deployment mechanisms themselves should also prioritize intelligibility and clarity to be considered maintainable. Intelligible code is code that tends to make sense even to those that aren’t intimately familiar with it. This might be someone who hasn’t worked extensively in the codebase or someone who worked in it two months ago and has just now come back to it. Robby asked about technical debt. Working at New Relic, Beth has had opportunities to talk with Ward Cunningham, the originator of the term. When Ward coined the term, he was working on a financial system and he described technical debt, like financial debt, as something you deliberately take on. You sacrifice some maintainability in the short term and pay it back over time. Robby asked how developers can bring up maintainability concerns with stakeholders. Stakeholders are often focused on velocity, so they says things like, “Can we have the person who is on call due the sustainability engineering work?” This doesn’t work. What works is giving the team focused, protected time. Developers need to step out of their own experience of the world enough to understand the pain and pressure that their stakeholders live under and make a compelling case to them. Beth has seen it work. She has seen New Relic customers make slide decks to present to stakeholders about the value of doing the work to add observability to their systems and getting executive buy-in as a result. Robby asked about second system syndrome. She says it comes from the book The Mythical Man-Month and refers to the tendency to replace small, elegant systems that work well with bloated, over-engineered systems. You have a system that works well enough but people want more features and there is a temptation to replace the old system with something new. The old system is full of known flaws and, in the potential new system, the flaws are not yet known and you can pretend they are not there. This is why she recommends against rewrites. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/beth-long-maintainable-code-prioritizes-how-humans/id1459893010?i=1000458429284 Website link: https://maintainable.fm/episodes/beth-long-maintainable-code-prioritizes-how-humans-interact-with-it-XHdDZOQF MARK SCHELL ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Mark Schell with host Andy Cleff. Mark started out working at an organization that had reached CMMI (that is, Capability Maturity Model Integration) level 5 (that is, the highest level: optimizing) but he struggled to see the worth of it. Eventually, a friend of his introduced him to Extreme Programming or XP and this got him energized about Agile. They got into a discussion about a talk Mark attended at the Philly XP conference that was given by Ryan Lockard. Ryan described the benefits of cleaning up old code. Mark says that the less you clean up after yourself, the more stuff you have to step around. This also means being careful not to add too much complexity, as this makes things more complicated for the user and for the developers. Andy asked Mark where he starts in such a situation where you inherit a system where there hasn’t been a great deal of taking out the trash. Mark referenced Foot and Yoder’s paper on the big ball of mud. He says you start with the smallest pieces you can find. Don’t be afraid to delete things; that’s what we have code repositories for. If you are using a compiled language and you have tools like Resharper, make use of them. Mark talked about tools like OpenGrok for making code files more searchable.  He says there are going to be cases where you have to take a leap of faith; you have to delete something that you know you may need to revert if you discover a previously unknown use. If you never take that risk and you’re always afraid of that code, you’ll never get to a cleaner state. Andy asked about how things get this way. Mark says that most developers’ passion is often around the building of new things. Combined with schedule pressure, doing chores like code cleanup becomes a low priority. Mark says that, ideally, it should be baked into the red-green-refactor cycle. Andy asks how we can push back as craftspeople when the business says, “More, more, more.” Mark says you need to find a way to tie this retirement of complexity to revenue. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/clean-code-refactoring-and-deleting-w-mark-schell/id1163230424?i=1000459008564 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/clean-code-refactoring-and-deleting-w-mark-schell DANIEL MINTZ ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Daniel Mintz with host Eric Boduch. The work Daniel did in politics informed everything he does everyday. It helped him understand how people interact with products, how to scale and grow, how data can inform product decisions, how data can mislead product decisions, and how tools get built. When you’re running a giant volunteer political organization, that’s the lowest-attachment user you can imagine. Your product has to be good at grabbing users and getting them in the door or else it’s not going to work. Daniel says we often fall into the trap of being data-driven. He thinks of the episode of The Office where Michael Scott drives into the lake because the GPS tells him to turn right. There is a difference between being data-driven and data-informed and when data conflicts with your intuition, your qualitative research, and your experience, you should interrogate that. Eric asked how Daniel ended up at Looker. Daniel described his first experience with their sales team. After the salesperson struggled to describe what Looker was, he eventually asked Daniel to let him show off Looker by connecting to Daniel’s database and letting Daniel ask Looker any question about his own data. In ten minutes, the salesperson had shown him things about his data he had never seen before. Seeing Looker in this way, Daniel felt like he did when first encountered the power of SQL, but this time it was something that anybody could use. Just as any good product manager would try to get to the real problem when a customer comes to them with a solution like, “I want to make this button blue,” when a customer asks a data analyst to show them sales by salesperson by region for the last six months, a good analyst will ask them why. They might say, “I want to see if there is a big difference in how salespeople ramp over different regions.” The analyst might then respond, “What if we narrow that down and only look at people recently hired?” Product managers need to do the same thing when thinking about how they use data. For example, if you are trying to understand where people get stuck in the on-boarding path, then usage data may be useful. If you are trying to understand whether people’s impression of the product has changed over time, net promoter score might be what you need. Start with the question instead of saying, “This is the data I have available and here is what I can make of it.” Daniel says that good operational metrics are ones that, upon looking at them, you immediately know what you should do in response to them. Alternatively, dashboards of vanity metrics can be disempowering for people: if you are a product manager who isn’t working on a revenue-creating part of the product yet, a dashboard tracking a vanity metric like revenue is not something you can do anything about. Daniel gave an example of vanity and operational metrics for a company like Uber or Lyft. A vanity metric might be rides taken or cities served. It is the kind of metric that might be valuable to investors, not for the people that work there. An operational metric might be percentage of rides cancelled and that is only operational if you dig a level deeper to find out why they were cancelled. Eric asked Daniel for his take on net promoter score. From the consumer perspective, Daniel says, NPS is a great innovation because it is so simple and easy to administer that your response rate is going to be higher than any other survey question. Being a single question survey makes it easy to ask in-product rather than in a survey email and thereby increase response rate even further. He says that tracking NPS over time makes it even more useful. When it is used to just ask if something is good or bad, however, it just becomes another vanity metric. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/daniel-mintz-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-data/id1343610309?i=1000459282754 Website link: https://www.spreaker.com/user/casted/daniel-mintz-joins-product-love-to-talk- KELSEY HIGHTOWER ON ON CALL NIGHTMARES The On Call Nightmares podcast featured Kelsey Hightower with host Jay Gordon. Kelsey talked about what he calls “learning in public”, in which you share things as you learn them. He says that when you learn in public, you tend to not skip over the interesting bits from zero to getting started. A lot of times, we’re afraid to share that because we want to be seen as experts. Kelsey talked about his truest introduction to on call. He described how his CTO made it clear just how important their work was to customers. Hearing about the consequences for customers of system downtime put things in perspective for Kelsey. Kelsey says that if you fail to explain it, on call can feel like you’re overtaxing your employees. It is less like on call and more like glorified overtime. Another lesson Kelsey learned about on call at that company happened when he took on all of the on call work for two months. His goal was to find the patterns and make it go away. Over the two months, he made sure the issues were documented and the documentation was made consistent. The rest of the team saw Kelsey as “taking one for the team”. The team was able to do work in their areas of expertise to improve the on call experience. The number of incidents dropped from 1-2 per week every week to having weeks without any incidents. They had been in a cycle in which on call pain was spread out enough that nobody did anything about it. Stepping up and showing leadership by doing changed things. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-45-kelsey-hightower-google/id1447430839?i=1000460193573 Website link: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/oncallnightmares/episodes/2019-12-19T08_16_15-08_00 LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Thomas "Tido" Carriero joins Product Love to talk about finding product market fit more than once and uniting teams by Eric Boduch

In this episode of the Pragmatic Live podcast, The Pragmatic editor Andrea Ozias is joined by Eric Boduch, co-founder of Pendo. Listen in as Eric shares his thoughts on his recent article in our latest edition of The Pragmatic magazine. Learn how to scale faster with product-led growth, and Eric’s tips and tricks on how this method has transformed from products he’s marketed and launched in the past. Get tips on how to leverage your product’s performance to accelerate, expand and retain customers, with Eric’s thoughts on: Taking steps to identify hurdles and challenges to align product-led growth within the organization Recognizing the ways to utilize the data, features or usage of your product to help drive growth  Identify what makes people the most excited about your product

This week's episode of the SaaS Revolution Show is a live recording from SaaStock 2019. We're talking to Eric Boduch, co-founder and chief evangelist at Pendo. It was a great conversation in the middle of the show floor, on the Podcast Stage, where we really talked about product-led growth, scaling a massive company like Pendo, and how Eric personally deals with that growth.

Brianne Kimmel joins Product Love to talk about product-led sales by Eric Boduch

Eric Boduch and Dan Olsen chat about his experiences building products, trends in product management and his advice for young and aspiring product managers. Oh and we chat about DURF, we can't forget about that.

April Dunford joins Product Love to talk about product positioning by Eric Boduch

Wes Bush joins Product Love to talk about product-led growth by Eric Boduch

Mihir Nanavati joins Product Love to talk about alignment in product management by Eric Boduch

Deborah Hartman Preuss on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, Jessica Kerr on Legacy Code Rocks, Nir Eyal on Product Love, Dave Snowden on The Jim Rutt Show, and Mike Bowler on Legacy Code Rocks. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting October 14, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. DEBORAH HARTMANN PREUSS ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Deborah Hartmann Preuss with host Shane Hastie. Deborah was once an Agile coach. She wondered why she didn’t have anything in her toolkit to help people with the discomfort they were feeling with the change Agile was bringing. She didn’t find the answer in Agile, but she found it in coaching. Deborah says that one of the important things she does as a coach is to bring balance to the excitement of our dynamic lifestyles by helping us to slow down long enough to hear our own wisdom. Deborah tries to ask the biggest questions she can come up with. Typically that elicits a “Huh! I need to think about that for a minute.” Sometimes she has to say, “Don’t think about it. Feel it.” She sees her skill as being able to see what is in you, reflecting it back, and helping you notice what’s there. She says that when she can see herself clearly, she can stand in front of other people with less fear, more courage, and more love. She says we have good methods to bring, changes to bring, and skills to teach, but if we are stressed out when we’re doing it, that becomes part of our message. She says that for too long we’ve been told, ”Suck it up! Life is hard. You don’t have to love your job. The stress is part of the package.” In contrast, she believes that people who are not constantly stressed out can bring so much more to their work. Creating a joyful workplace starts with authenticity. When you are not trying to conform to somebody’s idea of who you should be, all that extra energy is left over to simply do great stuff. Authenticity both reduces stress and frees your uniqueness. Shane pointed out that authenticity requires vulnerability. Deborah says that is where leadership comes in: to create safety. A leader who doesn’t feel safe will have trouble creating safety for others. When we ask people to be vulnerable, it has to fall into a place of trust. That trust must be built first and that is a leadership skill. Shane asked how one builds that trust. Deborah pointed to the book Liftoff by Larsen and Nies (https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Start-Sustain-Successful-Agile/dp/1680501631). We build trust, she says, by talking openly about things and being accountable to one another. She also referenced The Speed of Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey (https://www.amazon.com/SPEED-TRUST-Thing-Changes-Everything/dp/1416549005) for building trust and repairing trust when it is broken. Shane asked about the state of diversity. Deborah said that part of the state of diversity right now is, “Oh look at how diverse we are!” but this is not the same as everyone feeling welcome to contribute their differences. Inclusion is honestly welcoming differences and giving those differences a proper reception. Shane asked about Ten Women Strong and Deborah described how the Ten Women Strong #WomenInAgile program lets women start from a common set of values from Agile. The group helps them to recognize their authenticity, celebrate it, and start designing to turn that into what they need. She described how the program helps women meet their own needs so that they fill the well and have more to give out to others. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/deborah-hartmann-preuss-on-creating-joyful-workplaces/id1161431874?i=1000449085542 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/interview-deb-priuss JESSICA KERR ON LEGACY CODE ROCKS The Legacy Code Rocks podcast featured Jessica Kerr with hosts Andrea Goulet and M. Scott Ford. Jessica has been a software developer for twenty years. One of her obsessions is how, as developers, we have a unique power to change our own environment. It gets even more interesting when we change the environment our team works in.  They talked about symmathesy. It starts with systems thinking, where people realized that you can’t reduce a system to its parts, understand the parts, and expect that to extend to an understanding of the system as a whole. You need to understand the relationships between the parts. Anthropologist Nora Bateson took this idea further when she realized that it is not just that the relationships between the parts matter; each part is constantly changing as a result of its relationships to the others. She called this symmathesy. Scott asked how awareness of the symmathesy of software development has changed the way Jessica does her work. Jessica says that if you look at a software team as a socio-technical system of humans and software based on mutual learning, the trickiest part is the line between the humans and software. The interface between the humans and the software is low bandwidth and this has made Jessica appreciate the value of tooling and how tools need to be customized for every different software system and every group of people. Andrea asked how Jessica can explain those benefits to those who are in charge of budgets and in charge of predicting what will be delivered. Jessica says that people are starting to notice developer experience and developer productivity. For example, these topics show up at conferences more today than they used to. Jessica related the symmathesy of software development back to Andrea’s article on technical debt as communication debt. When you have a mental model of the software, that software is alive to you because you can change it. But if you add another person who doesn’t yet have that mental model, that software is dead or legacy to them because, to them, that software is not safe to change. They talked about 10x developers and how much of their productivity comes from being the original author of the system. Building a mental model from a system that somebody else wrote is much more difficult than writing a system yourself.  Andrea pointed out that from the original system author’s perspective, the other engineers seem less capable because they are struggling to understand something that seems obvious to the original author. Jessica says to always replace the word “obvious” with “I can’t explain it, but...” Jessica says she’s learned that whenever she thinks someone else is stupid, chances are they know something she doesn’t, and this is why their actions don’t make sense to her. Jessica is talking about avoiding the fundamental attribution error. She went on to talk about the difficulty of transferring knowledge. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/symmathesy-with-jessica-kerr/id1146634772?i=1000449136678 Website link: http://legacycoderocks.libsyn.com/symmathesy-with-jessica-kerr NIR EYAL ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Nir Eyal with host Eric Boduch. Eric asked Nir what inspired him to write his new book Indistractable. Nir says that Indistractable is a pro-human, pro-tech book about being able to control your attention and manage all sorts of distraction. Half the book is about how individuals can become indistractable and the rest is about how to help others or our environments become indistractable. When Nir was researching the book, he was surprised to discover that all of our behaviors are driven by a desire to escape discomfort. He says that if you want to become indistractable, you need to start with mastering your internal triggers.  We also need to be aware that the companies we work for are creating much of the distraction. If a company has the wrong kind of culture, that is, one that is high expectation and low control, it causes psychological discomfort. In these cultures, we strive for control by sending more emails, calling more meetings, and distracting ourselves and others. Another surprise for Nir was learning that technology at work is not the source of distraction. Distraction at work is a symptom of a dysfunctional workplace culture. For example, group chat apps like Slack are considered distracting. If the technology was the culprit, he asks, shouldn’t the people who work at Slack and use it most be the most distracted people? Slack doesn’t have this problem because they have a healthy workplace culture. This is relevant to managers because, unless you have three factors in your workplace, you will always have distraction. The three factors are: 1) an environment that provides psychological safety, 2) a forum for people to air concerns, and 3) leaders who exemplify what it means to be indistractable. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/nir-eyal-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-creating/id1343610309?i=1000449384509 Website link: http://productlove.libsyn.com/nir-eyal-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-creating-better-products-and-meetings DAVE SNOWDEN ON THE JIM RUTT SHOW The Jim Rutt Show featured Dave Snowden with host Jim Rutt. Jim asked Dave to explain Cynefin, the conceptual framework that Dave created to aid in decision-making. Dave says that Cynefin is based on a fundamental divide into ordered systems, complex systems, and chaotic systems. There is a phase shift between these types of systems rather than a gradation. An ordered system has a high enough level of constraint that everything is predictable. An example is such a constraint is how we all drive on the left in the UK and on the right in the US. This is called an “obvious” approach to order. The relationship between cause and effect is obvious. Another type of order is “complicated”, where there is still a right answer and, for experts, it may be obvious but, for the decision-maker, it isn’t. You sense/analyze/respond and you may discover the right answer with less precision. It is the domain of good practice, not best practice. If you over-constrain a system that is not naturally constrainable, sooner or later it fragments into chaos. If you fall into chaos accidentally, you no longer sense/analyze/respond, but instead you act/sense/respond. An example is Clayton Christensen’s notion of competence-induced failure: being so good at the old paradigm that you don’t see the change coming and the change becomes catastrophic for you. A complex system is one that has enabling constraints. Everything is somehow connected to everything else but the connections aren’t fully known. One concept is the dark constraint, referencing dark energy, where we can see the impact of something without knowing where the impact is coming from. You may want to compare this to the notion of symmathesy from Jessica Kerr’s appearance on Legacy Code Rocks. In a complex-adaptive system, the only way to understand it is to probe. One of Dave’s definitions of “complexity“ is: if the evidence supports conflicting hypotheses of action and you can’t resolve those hypotheses within the timeframe for a decision from the evidence, the situation is complex. In Cynefin, you don’t try to resolve it, you construct a safe-to-fail micro-experiment around each coherent hypothesis and you run them in parallel. That, in turn, changes the dynamics of the space and a solution emerges. The final domain is the domain of disorder. This is the state of not knowing which of the other systems you are in. It is a type of inauthenticity. If your natural tendency is to bureaucracy, you are likely to impose order when it is inappropriate. If your natural tendency is towards complexity and emergence, you may choose not to impose order when it would have been more appropriate to impose it. The essence of Cynefin is to say, “context is key.” Dave got fed up with management fads that said things like, “business process reengineering is universal” or “the learning organization is universal.” None of these are universal. They all work within a specific context. So part of the function of Cynefin is to decide what context you are in before you decide what method you will use. They went on to talk about Apex Predator theory, agent-based modeling, “anticipatory triggers”, artificial intelligence, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, and many other topics. I particularly liked what Dave had to say about what people who work on artificial intelligence should be trained in. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep11-dave-snowden-and-systems-thinking/id1470622572?i=1000449087845 Website link: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/dave-snowden/ MIKE BOWLER ON LEGACY CODE ROCKS The Legacy Code Rocks podcast featured Mike Bowler with hosts Andrea Goulet and M. Scott Ford. Mike has been writing code for thirty-five years. In the late nineties, he got frustrated with watching projects fail. He was working for a big bank and they would celebrate when they shipped something, but they knew it wasn’t what the customer wanted. Looking for something better, he found the XP community. He decided he needed to get better at the “people stuff.” This took him into neuroscience, psychology, hypnosis, neurolinguistic programming, and body language. He talked about Clean Language. Clean Language came originally from therapy. It was modeled on the style of therapy used by a therapist named David Grove, who himself never formalized his process. Clean Language is a set of questions that don’t contaminate the metaphors of the people you are questioning. He used the example of a metaphor of a head “exploding” with ideas to describe how to avoid contaminating a person’s metaphor. They talked about Judy Rees’s Lazy Jedi questions which are named that way because, if you only ask those two questions over and over, it is like you are using Jedi mind tricks. The questions are, “What kind of X is that?” and “Is there anything else about X?” If the metaphor is “my head is exploding with ideas,” the Lazy Jedi questions become: “What kind of exploding is that?” and “Is there anything else about that exploding?” Some people tell Mike that, as a software developer in a highly technical environment, they don’t use many metaphors. Mike begs to differ. He says that the metaphors are so deeply embedded that they don’t notice any more. A bug is a metaphor. A cache is a metaphor. Some metaphors are blatantly obvious, like “the band was on fire,” and some are really subtle, like, “I have a lot of bananas.” You aren’t using the exact definition of the word “lot” but are using it as a metaphor. They went through a clean language exercise in which Mike asked Scott about what he is like when performing at his absolute best and, based on his answers, got deeper and deeper into Scott’s metaphor. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/unconscious-behavior-in-coding-with-mike-bowler/id1146634772?i=1000447835119 Website link: http://legacycoderocks.libsyn.com/unconscious-behavior-in-coding-with-mike-bowler LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Stephane Kasriel on Unlearn, Melissa Perri on Build by Drift, Will Larson on Software Engineering Daily, April Dunford on Product Love, and Claudio Perrone on Agile Atelier. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting July 22, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. STEPHANE KASRIEL ON UNLEARN The Unlearn podcast featured Stephane Kasriel with host Barry O’Reilly. Barry asked Stephane about what unlearning he has had to do as CEO of Upwork. Stephane said that when Upwork started, they developed software in a waterfall process. Development cycles were long and it was frustrating for people. When the product failed in the field, the level of investment was high and everybody would be pointing fingers at everybody else. When they switched to an Agile model, there was a lot of unlearning to be done. They stopped trying to specify everything up front and instead tried to build minimum viable products, get feedback from customers, and iterate quickly. When they went looking for Agile trainers in 2012, it was hard to find anyone willing and able to train Upwork’s remote teams. Many trainers at the time told them that being Agile meant being colocated. Today, there are many companies doing distributed Agile development and some best practices have been built up and shared. I liked what Stephane had to say about company values. He said that what you don’t want as a value is one in which you are a good person if you have it and you are a bad person if you don’t. You want instead to have values that say, “This company is not for everybody. If you don’t believe in these values, there are plenty of companies that more closely match your values and you should go there. But if you want to be here and you want to be successful, you should be excited about this company’s values.” Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ceo-school-and-the-future-of-work-with-stephane-kasriel/id1460270044?i=1000443495925 MELISSA PERRI ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build by Drift podcast featured Melissa Perri with host Maggie Crowley. Maggie started out by asking Melissa how she defined the build trap she references in her book Escaping The Build Trap (https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Build-Trap-Effective-Management/dp/149197379X/). Melissa says that the build trap is a situation an organization finds itself in when it gets too concerned with how many features it is shipping and not concerned enough with the value for the customer and the business that those features are producing. She says that these businesses fail to retrospect on the impact that the features they shipped had on customers and the business. Maggie asked how companies get into the build trap in the first place. Startups, Melissa says, don’t typically have this problem, but as they scale and get more money, the distance to customers increases, they talk to customers less, and have more runway. They tend to go into an execution mode where they just keep asking themselves, “What’s the next thing we can build?” and forget to go back to their customers and make sure that what they build for them is producing value for them. Maggie described the challenges Drift faces in having teams that locally optimize for particular features and Melissa says this comes back to how the company thinks about strategy. Small companies don’t need a strategic framework but, as you scale, you want all the new teams you are creating to move in the same direction and a strategic framework can help with this. Maggie asked what Melissa prescribes when she consults with a company that is stuck in the build trap. Melissa instead gave an answer on how she assesses a company before making a prescription. She first looks for how the company sets strategy and how it deploys it. Second, she looks to see if the company has the right people in the right roles. She also looks at whether the company has the right processes to learn from customers and incorporate feedback. Next, she looks at product operations, such as a cadence for revisiting decisions and the right data infrastructure to support decisions. Last, she looks at culture and how people are incentivized. Maggie asked what Melissa would change first if the company had problems in all of those areas. Melissa says that she starts by making sure the company has good product leaders and product managers who can learn from those leaders. Many companies had product leaders who didn’t start in product management themselves and can’t train or help the product managers. As Maggie points out in this podcast, this echoes what Marty Cagan said when she had him as a guest in an earlier episode. I referenced that Build by Drift episode in the 14th episode of this podcast, named Safety Is Not A Priority. Melissa says she spends a lot of time translating what the teams are working on into something that executives can get behind because executives don’t care about the list of features that the teams are shipping; they care about what those features are going to do. Melissa says that storytelling in these situations is about relating your story to the goals people care about. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/whats-the-build-trap-what-does-it-mean-for-product-managers/id1445050691?i=1000443704053 Website link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/fbfcff04 WILL LARSON ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured Will Larson with host Jeff Meyerson. Jeff started by asking whether Will thinks Google, where they once had a very flat management hierarchy, could work with no managers today. Will said that today’s hyper-scaling companies are so fast-growing that you need people to help manage that growth while dealing with tools and systems that are constantly becoming out of date. Jeff asked about the psychological ramifications of working in an environment of rapid growth. Will said that the best part of rapid growth is every week you raise your head and look around and see some really smart, talented person who is sitting next to you and wasn’t there the week before and can help. During change, he says, you have to stay open. Don’t try to control the change but you can help to facilitate it. You should be aware of your needs and take action to ensure those needs are being met so you can be the person you want to be for longer, rather than peaking in your first months in a role. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/elegant-puzzle-with-will-larson/id1019576853?i=1000441481446 Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/06/14/elegant-puzzle-with-will-larson/ APRIL DUNFORD ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured April Dunford with host Eric Boduch. April talked about product positioning. She says that many treat the product positioning exercise as a Mad Libs-style template to be filled in. The actual thinking of how to position your product is often ignored. She says that the first thing you have to do is get a handle on what the real competitive alternatives to your product are in the minds of your customers. For many startups, their real competitor is Excel, or hiring an intern, or doing it manually. Next, she says, is to look at what you have feature-wise that the competitive alternatives do not. This is usually a giant list of things. As you go down this list, you ask yourself what value for customers each feature enables. She says that an interesting thing happens at this point: the value tends to theme out. There are usually two or three big buckets that three quarters of your features fall into. Those buckets get you to your differentiated value. That, she says, is your secret sauce. She uses the analogy of building a fishing net specifically for tuna. You have a choice. You can travel to the part of the ocean where you will find tuna and see if your net works or you can go to the part of the ocean where there are all kinds of fish, throw the net in, and see what you pull up. People at startups often think that a certain segment of the market is going to love their product, but they might be surprised to learn that there is a segment that they didn’t even think of that is actually dying for their product. You don’t want to get the positioning so tight that you exclude those people. You want to keep it loose, cast the net wide, and see what happens. April says she doesn’t believe in product-market fit. She says that nobody has given her a good answer to the question, “How do you know you got product-market fit?” You may have a product that people like, but if you don’t know why, you don’t know if it’s at risk of going away or tapping out its market. She asks, “If I can’t measure when I have product-market fit, why am I even trying to get product-market fit?” Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/april-dunford-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product/id1343610309?i=1000441988263 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/productcraft/april-dunford-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product-positioning CLAUDIO PERRONE ON AGILE ATELIER The Agile Atelier podcast featured Claudio Perrone with host Rahul Bhattacharya. Claudio talked about his Popcorn Flow model. He says that Popcorn Flow is based on a pragmatic anti-fragile philosophy and starts from the idea that inertia is our enemy and provides a set of principles and steps to fight inertia in organizations. I saw Claudio give a presentation on Popcorn Flow at the Agile Testing Days 2017 conference, so I was excited to find him being interviewed on a podcast. Popcorn Flow applies ideas from The Lean Startup to organizational change. As an entrepreneur, Claudio realized that in entrepreneurship you are dealing with an environment of extreme uncertainty and, as an Agile coach, he saw the same kind of environment of uncertainty in how people react to change. Lean Startup deals with environments of extreme uncertainty by running frequent experiments. Popcorn Flow applies the same approach of frequent experimentation to organizational change. Popcorn Flow is most known for its decision cycle of seven steps from which the POPCORN acronym is derived: Problems & Observations Options Possible experiments Committed Ongoing Review Next These steps are visualized like a Scrum board or Kanban board. Claudio gave an example of running through the seven steps for the problem of poor quality code: Problem: poor quality code Options: pair programming, test-driven development Possible experiments: pair program for three days and see if the code is better and see if we want to continue with the practice Committed: put a review date on the calendar for evaluating the results of the experiment Ongoing: Track the experiment as it proceeds Review: The experiment is not finished until you review it. Compare the reality against the expectation and discuss what you learned and what are you going to do next. Next: The review may indicate that you do not know enough yet, so you may choose to persist, launch a new experiment based on what you learned, or revisit the problem. I liked what Claudio had to say about Agile: “I felt it was about being humble. If we knew the perfect way of developing software, we would use the perfect way. It is because we don’t know that we start with what we have and we continuously inspect and adapt.” Claudio also talked about some of the principles of Popcorn Flow: If change is hard, make it continuous: borrowing ideas from continuous integration and delivery, replace big change programs with small incremental change and do it all the time. Small bets, big payoff (the venture capitalist principle): when you run a lot of experiments, it doesn’t matter that you failed. What matters is how much does it cost to fail and how much do you gain when you win. It is not ‘fail fast - fail often’, it is ‘learn fast - learn often’: without feedback, your experiments are not small bets and you are not experimenting; you are committing to what should instead be an option. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-9-experimentation-popcorn-flow-claudio-perrone/id1459098259?i=1000443480071 Website link: https://rahul-bhattacharya.com/2019/07/02/episode-9-experimentation-and-popcorn-flow-with-claudio-perrone/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

* This podcast was captured during our recent webinar We all want our products to be profitable, right? Well, at some point, yes. But maybe not right now. Profit isn’t always the right metric. Depending on where your product is in its lifecycle, there may be other ways to measure your product’s success. But how do you know what the right metric is for measuring product success?In this webinar, Eric Boduch from Pendo and Steve Johnson from Pragmatic Institute examined a number of strategic approaches for identifying the right success metrics to measure throughout the product lifecycle. So which metrics are the right metrics for your product now? Listen to our recent webinar and find out!  

April Dunford joins Product Love to talk about product positioning by Eric Boduch

Wes Bush joins Product Love to talk about product-led growth by Eric Boduch

Mihir Nanavati joins Product Love to talk about alignment in product management by Eric Boduch

Melissa Perri on Deliver It, Jenny Tarwater, Laura Powers, Linda Podder, and Cheryl Hammond on Agile Uprising, Michael Sippey on Product Love, Ryan Jacoby on Scrum Master Toolbox, and Phil Abernathy on Engineering Culture by InfoQ. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting April 29, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. MELISSA PERRI ON DELIVER IT CAST The Deliver It Cast podcast featured Melissa Perri with host Cory Bryan. They discussed Melissa’s book Escaping The Build Trap and what motivated her to spend three years writing it. Melissa says she wrote it because she found herself answering the same questions about product management over and over again. They talked about what the build trap is (project-oriented, no product managers, spinning up teams for CEOs that prioritize work, never talking to customers, and getting rewarded for shipping features) and how demoralizing it can be. They talked about Stephen Bungay’s The Art Of Action and his notion of the knowledge gap, the alignment gap, and the effects gap, and Melissa told a story of how she applied these concepts for a client by introducing ways to address these gaps by learning how to communicate strategic intent. Melissa says she always hears from her clients that their CEOs and leaders care about points and velocity but she says that this is only because they have don’t know how else to measure success. When you give them goals that they can relate to, they no longer need to latch onto points and velocity. I particularly liked what Melissa said about getting leaders to work together as a team by getting rid of individual goals. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep85-escaping-the-build-trap-with-melissa-perri/id966084649?i=1000434062102 Website link: http://deliveritcast.com/ep85-escaping-the-build-trap-with-melissa-perri JENNY TARWATER, LAURA POWERS, LINDA PODDER, AND CHERYL HAMMOND ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Jenny Tarwater, Laura Powers, Linda Podder, and Cheryl Hammond with host Chris Murman. They talked about the Women In Agile community and events and what they have learned so far. Cheryl said that they have learned that there is interest among all genders to learn about Women In Agile and get involved in the pre-conferences. Laura learned that it was giving her an opportunity to pay it forward to the next generation. Linda described being a recipient of what Laura has been paying forward and Jenny talked about meeting people through these events who helped her both professionally and personally. She also described how the huge number of attendees of the main conference that Women In Agile is attached to makes her feel lost and how the pre-conference helps her ease into the conference community. They talked about the Launching New Voices program and how it provides a stage and mentoring on how to give a talk to create a more diverse body of speakers. Linda was a protégé in the 2017 program and she described how it taught her not only how to present her topic but also taught her the psychology behind it so that she could help her audience internalize her message. Laura described being a mentor in the program and I loved what she said about authenticity. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/women-in-agile-2019/id1163230424?i=1000434352507 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/women-in-agile-2019 MICHAEL SIPPEY ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Michael Sippey with host Eric Boduch. Michael Sippey became VP of product at Medium after spending some time running product for LiveJournal at SixApart and at Twitter. He was also one of the first bloggers. They talked about how many of these early blogging technologies developed into today’s modern social media platforms and how Michael wishes he could have thought more about the downsides of the technologies and planned for them. This led to a discussion of scenario planning and the the natural tendency towards optimism that product people have. They talked about the history of Twitter and some of the reasoning behind the restrictions Twitter introduced in their API in 2012 and some of the improvements Medium is making now to prevent amplification of low quality content. Then they got into a discussion of hypotheses and hypothesis testing as being fundamental to product management. Michael encourages his product managers to have hypotheses that are bold enough that the users are going to notice and that will drive enough change that it is worth the development time to pursue it. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/michael-sippey-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-hypotheses/id1343610309?i=1000434598454 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/productcraft/michael-sippey-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-hypotheses RYAN JACOBY ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Ryan Jacoby with host Vasco Duarte. Vasco started by by asking Ryan about his book, Making Progress - The 7 Responsibilities of an Innovation Leader. Ryan described the seven responsibilities as: 1) define progress, 2) set an innovation agenda, 3) create and support teams that build, 4) cultivate the ingredients of successful innovation (customer insights, well-defined problem statements, strategic questions, and ways of communicating evidence of what works and what doesn’t), 5) give great feedback, 6) inspire progress, and 7) reward progress. Vasco asked about how Scrum Masters can contribute to innovation. Ryan suggests picking some of the techniques they discussed, applying them to your team, and then sharing them widely. He then referenced Teresa Amabile’s work on finding out what makes people happy and work. He says that by helping your team make progress, you will be improving morale and people’s job satisfaction. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/bonus-ryan-jacoby-on-7-responsibilities-innovation/id963592988?i=1000434879127 Website link: http://scrummastertoolbox.libsyn.com/bonus-ryan-jacoby-on-the-7-responsibilities-of-an-innovation-leader PHIL ABERNATHY ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Phil Abernathy with host Shane Hastie. Phil talked about how happier employees make for happier customers. For producing happier employees, he starts with purpose, autonomy, and mastery as popularized by Dan Pink and he adds fairness. He distinguishes between fairness and equality. He says employees don’t expect equality — there are different levels of capability, maturity, experience, and salary but this is not seen as unfair. They then talked about org structures, going back to Conway’s law and how it relates to complexity. Phil talked about the KPI-driven organizations today that take anything that is not working and put a vice president in charge of it. This leads to things like having a head of “digital.” He asks, “What’s the difference between the IT department and this new digital department?” Nobody can explain it. He says that this obfuscation of accountability and responsibility is at the heart of complex structures and that instead we should copy the great companies. They all have small, simple, loosely-coupled teams delivering a service to a direct customer group, internal or external. Phil says people confuse empowerment and self-direction with no management and no direction. He says there needs to be a hierarchy, but it should be flat, with spans of control over ten. He has a metric he calls the bureaucracy mass index, which is the ratio of enablers such as managers to total employees. A healthy BMI is typically around 10% and in some companies he sees BMIs as high as 45%. He says healthier BMIs lead to happier customers and happier companies. Regarding the structure of the work itself, Phil says too many companies he works with are overloaded. The reason for the lack of prioritization is a lack of strategic clarity: there’s a digital strategy, an innovation strategy, IT transformation strategy and no one can figure out the real strategy. A simple strategy that can be explained in three to five bullet points does not exist. He then got into a description of OKRs and how they are developed collaboratively. The companies who get these right, he says, don’t have a prioritization problem. Last, he adds leadership style because structuring the organization and structuring the work is not enough. A good leadership style, he says, is based on an agreed set of values like trust, respect, transparency, courage, and experimentation. Every organization says they have these values but they don’t all practice them. He says it comes down to holding people accountable. He references Patrick Lencioni’s work on having trust at the foundation and he connected this to accountability and results. He says that the courage of senior leadership to call people out for breaking the values is the deciding factor. He then related this all to Carol Dweck’s book Mindset. This interview is only twenty minutes long, but Phil doesn’t waste a single word. iTunes link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/phil-abernathy-on-employee-happiness-bureaucracy-mass/id1161431874?i=1000435046419 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/phil-abernathy-on-employee-happiness-and-the-bureaucracy-mass-index FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Brianne Kimmel joins Product Love to talk about product-led sales by Eric Boduch

Andy Hunt on Greater Than Code, David Sohmer on SPAMCast, Josh Seiden on Scrum Master Toolbox, Tim Herbig on The Product Experience, and Wyatt Jenkins on Product Love. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting April 1, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ANDY HUNT ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Andy Hunt with hosts Janelle Klein, Avdi Grimm, and Jessica Kerr. Andy talked about the origin of his book The Pragmatic Programmer and his workshops on iterative and incremental development where he has students play Battleship while making all their shots upfront. He talked about one of my favorite iteration strategies, the walking skeleton, which he introduced back in 2000 in the same book. He talked about the need people have to be given an estimate and how it comes from a cognitive bias to have closure. He also talked about why scaling Agile doesn’t work at a lot of places: people are ignoring the context that made Agile work for the pilot teams. He suggests that instead of trying to “lock it down”, you should “open it up.” iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/120-expect-the-unexpected-with-andy-hunt/id1163023878?i=1000431206698&mt=2 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/expect-the-unexpected DAVID SOHMER ON SPAMCAST The Software Process and Measurement Cast podcast featured David Sohmer with host Tom Cagley. David started by saying that a key ingredient for an agile or lean transformation is to first help the organization understand the “why” of the transformation because things are going to get worse before they get better by design and when that happens, it is good to have already discussed the “why” so that the focus can always be on how to fix the problems that come up rather than falling back to the old way of doing things. This deeply resonated with me because I have seen people fall back to the old ways of working even after half-heartedly trying and even actually succeeding with more agile ways of working because their expectations were so different from reality, especially about the amount of work they would have to put in to see results. David also talked about the shift away from individual contributors and toward self-organizing multi-skilled teams and how this can be controversial in organizations that have weak teams and strong individual contributor heroes. He says part of the trick is getting people who actually want to be T-shaped rather than specialists. He went on to talk about intermediary groups who are not on the business side or the technology side but want to be the handoff between the two and create the documentation and have control and power in the organization and are quite destructive to the relationship between technology and the business. He talked about the things he aimed for during the transformations he has done such as ensuring XP technical practices are part of the transformation and he listed the things he tried to avoid. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/spamcast-536-executives-view-agile-transformations/id213024387?i=1000430995898&mt=2 Website link: http://spamcast.libsyn.com/spamcast-536-an-executives-view-of-agile-transformations-an-interview-with-david-sohmer JOSH SEIDEN ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Josh Seiden with host Vasco Duarte. Josh talked about how, in the early days, there was a focus on producing beautiful deliverables: wireframes, research reports, personas and other work on paper that teams had to interpret and act on. He described Lean UX as way of working in the UX problem space with less focus on deliverables and more focus on results. Josh described the “lean” in Lean UX as coming from knowing that the work we do with technology is filled with uncertainty, so the best way forward in those environments is to test our assumptions continuously. The activities of Lean UX then become: declaring assumptions, writing hypotheses, and thinking about your work as tests and experiments to help you learn. The people doing the work of Lean UX, he says, are small, cross-functional, colocated, collaborative teams that minimize handoffs and get different points of view that build on each other’s ideas. Vasco asked Josh how he defines the minimum viable product. Josh prefers the Eric Ries definition in which it represents the least amount of work that one can do to learn what one needs to learn next. Vasco also asked Josh what he means when he uses the word experiment. Josh clarified the difference between an experiment in the product development sense from simply abdicating decision-making. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/bonus-josh-seiden-on-lean-ux-toolbox-for-product-owners/id963592988?i=1000431422661&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2019/03/podcast/bonus-josh-seiden-on-lean-ux-a-toolbox-for-product-owners-and-agile-teams/ TIM HERBIG ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE The Product Experience podcast featured Tim Herbig with hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver. They discussed Tim’s new book, Lateral Leadership, and what he means by the title. He describes it as how to lead and influence people without formal authority. From conversations Tim had with product people, not many of them are aware that they have a leadership responsibility, but the implicit expectation from the environments and the stakeholders is that they step into leadership responsibility. He talked about how he recommends product people attend developer community-of-practice meetings to listen, learn how to ask better questions, show that they care, and gain credibility. Randy asked about warning signs of ineffectiveness as a lateral leader. Tim said a big warning sign is when people become resigned to just ask for more granular specs to simply get their job done. He says that this would show an unhealthy hierarchy in the team. Another potential warning sign is whether your peers feel safe about opening up about what really makes them struggle at work in the environment you have created. Lily asked about what tools Tim uses to set the mission or goal for the team. He referenced Stephen Bungay’s mission briefing idea from The Art Of Action. Tim likes the mission briefing because it helps you develop a shared language together and it lets product teams and the people within them have the autonomy to succeed in their specific job by improving the clarity you create up front. Randy compared the Bungay Mission Briefing framework to Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Tree concept. Lily asked whether the mission briefing is defined by just the product manager and team or other stakeholders as well. Tim says that, in the early stages of an idea, he uses it to capture his own thoughts. He may then do another iteration with the team in which he holds back his input. Then he runs it by his boss and boss’s boss to ensure there is alignment and buy-in. Lily asked about what happens when you don’t get alignment. Tim started his answer by distinguishing between alignment and agreement. He then quoted Jeff Bezo’s statements on being able to disagree and commit. He sees reaching alignment as something that would allow you to get started with an idea that you can adjust along the way. He says alignment is much easier to obtain when you don’t feel the need to also get agreement before you start anything. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-influence-without-power-tim-herbig-on-product/id1447100407?i=1000431209799&mt=2 Website link: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2019/03/how-to-influence-without-power-tim-herbig-on-the-product-experience/ WYATT JENKINS ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Wyatt Jenkins with host Eric Boduch. After a discussion of Wyatt’s career journey from disc jockey to product manager at Shutterstock, Optimizely, and now Patreon, they got into a discussion about the why and how of market-testing your features and ideas. For Wyatt, such tests are about understanding customers better and de-risking product ideas before rolling them out. Some of Wyatt’s favorite kinds of tests are the price tests that were popular at Shutterstock. Eric related how pricing seems to be particularly challenging for product managers. They got into a discussion of pricing tests like the painted door test and what to do for the customers who signed up for a service at prices lower and higher than the final chosen price at the end of the test. Eric asked what Wyatt would recommend to a product manager wanting to learn about pricing. Wyatt recommended the book Monetizing Innovation and he recommended reading up on the stories of the companies that have had some of the most successful pricing changes and some of most disastrous ones. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/wyatt-jenkins-joins-product-love-to-discuss-pricing/id1343610309?i=1000431181574&mt=2 Website link: https://productcraft.com/podcast/product-love-podcast-wyatt-jenkins-svp-of-product-of-patreon/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

On March 6, 2019, WRAL TechWire held its first TechWire Live event of 2019. Wells Fargo sponsors the event series, and this was the first of four subject matters scheduled for 2019. The content centered around leadership and the itinerary divided the night into two sessions. The first session took a macro look at how effective leaders move the ball forward in their communities. The second session took a micro look at how to make the most significant impact within each person's own organization.    James Amato, the Strategy and Business Development manager of WRAL TechWire hosted the event to a packed house. The crowd at WRAL-TV's historic Studio A was comprised of community leaders, CEO's, serial entrepreneurs, and industry thought leaders. The audience gathered to discuss ways to realize their leadership potential in an increasingly divisive environment fully.    This episode of Tech on Tap is an edited recording from the first panel discussion of the night featuring Jesica Averhart, of the Leadership Triangle, as the moderator. Brenda Berg, CEO and president of Best NC, was featured on the panel and spoke in depth on the gap in education and economic mobility within North Carolina as a hurdle that we as a community must take on to raise the profile of North Carolina in the evolving business and tech economy. Eric Boduch, the co-founder of Pendo, lent his expertise on the need to locally shift focus from competitors within our state lines to companies on the global stage. Both spoke on the region's diversity of thought and workforce as opportunities that make the Triangle, and North Carolina as a whole, attractive to businesses and individuals on the move.    Listen to Tech on Tap and look out for the announcement of the next TechWire live event.

Mike Cottmeyer on Leading Agile, Daniel Goleman on Coaching For Leaders, Christina Wodtke on Build by Drift, Joe Vallone on Agile Amped, and Cindy Alvarez on Product Love. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting February 4, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. MIKE COTTMEYER ON LEADING AGILE The Leading Agile podcast featured Mike Cottmeyer with host Dave Prior. To kickoff 2019, Dave and Mike got together to talk about the year ahead. What I liked most about this conversation is how it got into a discussion of how to introduce Agile to an organization that is just beginning to move away from traditional waterfall methods. Mike talked about how meal prep services got his wife interested in cooking for the first time and contrasted this with the way Agile is often introduced to enterprises: exclusively showing the end state and leaving out details about what Agile looks like when you’re just starting. Just as the meal prep services show more respect for people beginning to take up cooking, Mike says that the Agile community needs to show more respect for people beginning their Agile journey. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/kicking-off-2019-w-mike-cottmeyer/id995790407?i=1000427423678&mt=2 Website link: https://www.leadingagile.com/podcast/kicking-off-2019-with-mike-cottmeyer/ DANIEL GOLEMAN ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Daniel Goleman with host Dave Stachowiak. As a fan of Daniel’s work on Emotional Intelligence, I was eager to hear this interview. Daniel talked about three different kinds of empathy: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern and compared and contrasted them. I loved what Daniel had to say about distinguishing between a healthy and an unhealthy showing of vulnerability, especially since I read so much advice telling leaders they need to be vulnerable. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/391-getting-better-at-empathy-with-daniel-goleman/id458827716?i=1000428075330&mt=2 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/391/ CHRISTINA WODTKE ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build by Drift podcast featured Christina Wodtke with host Maggie Crowley. Christina’s book, Radical Focus, has been showing up on the recommended lists of most of the people I follow, with some saying that it was the first book they read that really showed how to apply Objectives and Key Results or OKRs, so I was quick to hit play on this new-to-me podcast. What I heard was a great conversation on high-performing teams, avoiding traps in setting OKRs, and most importantly, the fact that OKRs are supposed to be stretch goals. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/build-15-christina-wodtke-on-radical-focus-living-your/id1445050691?i=1000426996091&mt=2 Website link: https://www.drift.com/blog/christina-wodtke-okrs/ JOE VALLONE ON AGILE AMPED The Agile Amped podcast featured Joe Vallone with host Adam Mattis. While there was a lot of talk about the Scaled Agile Framework in this conversation and I’m still working out how I feel about that, there was also a great conversation about lean startup ideas, particularly innovation accounting and Joe provided concrete examples from the SR21 Blackbird to self-driving cars to make his point. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/innovation-accounting/id992128516?i=1000427846817&mt=2 Website link: https://solutionsiq.podbean.com/e/innovation-accounting/ CINDY ALVAREZ ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Cindy Alvarez with host Eric Boduch. Cindy Alvarez is the author of a book in Eric Ries’ Lean series: Lean Customer Development. I loved how Cindy took the old saw about Henry Ford and the faster horse and talked about how maybe Ford should have rephrased the question to get the customers to talk about problems instead of solutions. I also loved her emphasis on good listening techniques and how this can mean having to tolerate an uncomfortable amount of silence. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/cindy-alvarez-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-customer/id1343610309?i=1000428744289&mt=2 Website link: https://productcraft.com/podcast/product-love-podcast-cindy-alvarez-product-manager-at-microsoft-and-author-of-lean-customer-development/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Courtney Eckhardt on Greater Than Code, Teresa Torres on Product Love, Johanna Rothman on Developer On Fire, Jeff Patton on Scrum Master Toolbox, and Jeff Gothelf on Scrum Master Toolbox. I'd love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two weeks period starting January 7, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the week when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. COURTNEY ECKHARDT ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Courtney Eckhardt with hosts John K Sawers, Sam Livingston-Gray, Jamey Hampton and Coraline Ada Ehmke. It was great to hear another conversation that built upon the human factors conversations with Steven Shorrock and John Allspaw in previous episodes. I like how Courtney highlighted the importance of good communication in incident response by helping us picture what the lack of good communication looks like from the customer’s point of view. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/110-human-incident-response-with-courtney-eckhardt/id1163023878?i=1000426093173&mt=2 Website link: http://www.greaterthancode.com/2018/12/19/110-human-incident-response-with-courtney-eckhardt/ TERESA TORRES ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Teresa Torres with host Eric Boduch. I felt that, while A/B testing is a powerful and useful technique, Teresa makes a great point that it is not appropriate in all circumstances and she lists several other techniques that teams should consider when doing product discovery. I also liked the bloodletting metaphor. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/teresa-torres-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product/id1343610309?i=1000425622664&mt=2 Website link: https://productcraft.com/podcast/product-love-podcast-teresa-torres-product-discovery-coach-and-writer-of-product-talk/ JOHANNA ROTHMAN ON DEVELOPER ON FIRE The Developer On Fire podcast featured Johanna Rothman with host Dave Rael. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone make a distinction between management and leadership. I always felt that it let managers off the hook. I feel that a manager needs to be a good leader to do his or her job well and vice versa. Johanna captured that sentiment. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-402-johanna-rothman-learning-and-delivering/id1006105326?i=1000426413335&mt=2 Website link: https://developeronfire.com/podcast/episode-402-johanna-rothman-learning-and-delivering JEFF PATTON ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Jeff Patton with host Vasco Duarte. Jeff talked about how, when he got into software development, he quickly learned that building software was about making as many people as happy as you could while still making money. When he found himself on XP and Agile teams in the first decade of the 2000s, he felt something was missing. When he later fell in with product people, he realized that the missing piece was product thinking. They discussed how Jeff came up with user story mapping and Jeff cited three books that emphasize product thinking: Inspired, Escaping The Build Trap, and Inspired. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/product-owner-role-what-scrum-masters-can-do-to-help/id963592988?i=1000426507266&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2018/12/podcast/jeff-patton-shares-his-view-on-the-product-owner-role-and-what-scrum-masters-can-do-to-help/ JEFF GOTHELF ON SCRUM MASTER TOOLBOX The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast featured Jeff Gothelf with host Vasco Duarte. Vasco asked Jeff about the key ingredients in Agile transformations that get organizations to continuously think about how the product they’re creating relates to the business and the market. Jeff gave a great answer that finished with an example of how even a change in the name of the team changes the way that the team thinks of themselves and their mission. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-redefine-measure-success-for-software-development/id963592988?i=1000426560415&mt=2 Website link: https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/2018/12/podcast/jeff-gothelf-on-how-to-redefine-the-measure-of-success-for-software-development/ Feedback Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website: https://www.thekguy.com/ Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus

Eric Boduch is the Chief Evangelist and co-founder of Pendo.io. Boduch was formerly the Vice President of Marketing. Pendo delivers a complete platform for product teams that helps companies create products that customers love. With Pendo, product teams can understand product usage, collect feedback, measure NPS, onboard users, and announce new features in app - all without requiring engineering resources. Founded in 2013 and backed by Meritech Capital, Spark Capital, and Battery Ventures, Pendo has raised $56 million, and grown revenue by 400% in the past year. Used by hundreds of innovative software product leaders, Pendo tracks 20 billion user actions, and improves the product experience for 22 million users every month. Eric Boduch has been involved with both startup and publicly traded software companies in senior management positions since 1995. He has extensive technology marketing, product management, strategy development and business development experience. He has been a co-founder of 3 different startups that have raised over $75 million in aggregate and has been an executive at two different public companies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pendo's overall mission is to make work easier for product managers. Co-founder Eric Boduch discusses Pendo's product cloud and how it was created. A product created out of pure necessity for his own work became the basis for an entire company. Eric shares how Pendo integrates easily with other established, popular applications. He also discusses how close proximity to Silicon Valley can actually be a negative when building a company up.

The following podcast was captured during our live webinar (Six Ways Product Management's Role Will Change in 2018). The role of product management is undergoing a dramatic rethink. Success is shifting from measuring velocity and roadmap delivery to measuring how well a product performs, how much value it drives and the loyalty of its users. In this episode of PragmaticLive, Kirsten Butzow, a Pragmatic Marketing instructor, and Eric Boduch, founder of Pendo.io, discuss these emerging shifts in product management. Want to learn more about Product Management's role? Register for a Pragmatic Training today!

Eric Boduch and Dan Olsen chat about his experiences building products, trends in product management and his advice for young and aspiring product managers. Oh and we chat about DURF, we can't forget about that.