DISCLAIMER: This is not medical advice.

Join us for happy hour in your sweatpants! 🍻 In this episode, Era and Ajay tear down their new favorite product: Signos! They walk through how to break down a product’s experience and strategy with Signos, the CGM app that they can’t stop talking about.

🎥 Check out the video on YouTube, And please DON'T FORGET: 📣 subscribe to our channel, hit the 👍 like button if you like what you watched, and 💬 comment what you think or what else you'd like to learn!

You can also subscribe, listen and rate the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts!

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✍🏾 Show Notes

00:00 Intro & Drinks

3:18 What is Signos?

6:55 product tear down starts: target audience

09:23 Signos competition & differentiators

14:07 Defining features and user benefits

19:22 Pricing uniqueness & distribution

24:15 Design & ease of use

30:16 Data accuracy, precision

34:00 AI Insights & data management

38:55 Price to value ratio

43:46 How we’d change the Signos product strategy

45:26 Our net promoter score for Signos

https://www.signos.com/about

Join us for happy hour in your sweatpants! 🍻 In this episode, Era and Ajay provide the inside scoop about what product managers that hire other product managers are looking for. We know a lot of people that are impacted by the recent layoffs, hopefully these tips and tricks are helpful for those of y'all actively interviewing.

🎥 Check out the video on YouTube, And please DON'T FORGET: 📣 subscribe to our channel, hit the 👍 like button if you like what you watched, and 💬 comment what you think or what else you'd like to learn!

You can also subscribe, listen and rate the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts!

📣 Subscribe for the latest episode updates! 🙏 If you haven't become a paid subscriber, now's the time to support the show! It’s either $5/month or $30/year, that’s one Starbucks latte a month or one Doordash order a year!

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✍🏾 Show Notes

00:00 Summary of episode

00:22 Intro

03:20 What's That Drink?!

04:52 Drinking Game: Practice

05:40 Key Traits of PMs We Gave the Job To

22:38 What are the Main parts of the PM interview

31:28 Preparing for Product Manager Interviews

32:28 How to prepare with 2 weeks out

41:44 How to prepare with 6 months out

46:37 How to approach rejection and negotiation

53:19 Outro

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Join us for happy hour in your sweatpants! 🍻 In this episode, Q&A! Era and Ajay answer questions from you, our listeners, about burnout, failure, working with customer facing teams & parenting as product managers. It's an action-packed episode, and we're so glad to share this great insight with all of you!

🎥 Check out the video on YouTube, And please DON'T FORGET: 📣 subscribe to our channel, hit the 👍 like button if you like what you watched, and 💬 comment what you think or what else you'd like to learn!

You can also subscribe, listen and rate the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts!

📣 Subscribe for the latest episode updates! 🙏 If you haven't become a paid subscriber, now's the time to support the show! It’s either $5/month or $30/year, that’s one Starbucks latte a month or one Doordash order a year!

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✍🏾 Show Notes

00:00 Summary of episode

00:16 Intro

01:34 What's That Drink?!

02:41 "How do you deal with burnout as a product manager?"

23:16 " How do you deal with failure as a product manager?"

31:20 "What product management learnings can you apply to being a parent? What parenting learnings can you apply to being a PM?"

43:42 "How should product managers work with customer facing teams? (CX, Sales, Account Management, etc.)"

51:37 Outro

📚 Resources

Ajay's Medium article: https://medium.com/@ajaywaghray/23-th...

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Join us for happy hour in your sweatpants! 🍻 In this episode, Era and Ajay talk about how to develop 🪄 product sense. If you’ve ever wondered how product managers have that 🕷️ spidey sense for what users need in their products, this is the episode to check out!

🎥 Check out the video on YouTube, And please hit the like button and subscribe on YouTube for more great product content.

You can also subscribe, listen and rate the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts!

📣 Subscribe for the latest episode updates! 🙏 If you haven't become a paid subscriber, now's the time to support the show! It’s either $5/month or $30/year, that’s one Starbucks latte a month or one Doordash order a year!

Subscribed

✍🏾 Show Notes

00:00 Intro

01:54 What's That Drink?!

02:24 Drinking Game: "Intuition"

02:39 Misconceptions of Product Sense

03:35 What is Product Sense?

04:48 Steve Jobs & Product Sense

06:04 Two Main Areas: Priming Your Heart & Priming Your Mind

06:21 Be Empathetic

12:49 Be Open to New Ideas & Seek Inspiration

17:00 The Value of Experimentation

21:00 How to Prime Your Mind: 3 Hacks

21:17 Process for Deconstructing Products: Teardowns

26:28 The Best Product Teams Do Teardowns

28:48 The First iPhone & Product Sense

30:37 Summary of Product Sense Strategies

32:29 Product Sense Bootcamp: YouTube Key Plays

38:30 Outro

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We will start with killer strategies for your Jira user stories and bugs, then cover technical specs like PRDs and end with killer hacks for your product roadmaps. This is Era’s favorite episode… and not just because of the drinking game...🍸😎

📣 Subscribe at https://www.producthappyhour.com/ for the latest episode updates! 🙏 If you haven't become a paid subscriber, now's the time to support the show! It’s either $5/month or $30/year, that’s one Starbucks latte a month or one Doordash order a year!

Subscribe now

🎥 Check out the video on YouTube, and please hit the like button and subscribe on YouTube for more great product content:

✍🏾 Show Notes

00:00 Intro

01:50 Life Updates

09:10 Why you should care about being a good writer

13:04 Hacks for writing Jiras & User Stories

21:25 Pre-writing PRD doc-hacks

25:00 5 hacks for PRDs

41:35 Product Roadmap writing hacks

47:18 Punch list of PM documentation hacks

50:48 Cool Product Thing - ChatGPT3

56:45 Wrap-up & Outro

Resources:

Joel on Software - Painless Functional Specifications – Part 4: Tips

Lenny’s Newsletter - What makes a great 1-Pager/PRD?

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📣 Subscribe at https://www.producthappyhour.com/ for the latest episode updates! 🙏 If you haven't become a paid subscriber, now's the time to support the show! It’s either $5/month or $30/year, that’s one Starbucks latte a month or one Doordash order a year!

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👨‍🔬 John’s Bio

John Meakin is Staff Data Scientist at Meta. John has worked with top tech companies Expedia and Meta specifically on the art of A/B testing. 

He began his career as a researcher at the American Institutes for Research, managing experiment design on research projects there. From AIR, he joined Vrbo, part of Expedia Group, as a statistician focused on experimentation, which is where we met and embarked on many experimentation adventures! John eventually became Head of Experimentation at Vrbo prior to joining Meta in San Francisco. At Meta, John continues to be focused on all things experimentation in his role on Meta’s experimentation platform.

✍🏾 Show Notes

00:00 Intro

01:30 Welcome John!

01:46 John's Bio

04:10 What's That Drink?!

05:14 Hard Truths about A/B Testing

09:39 What to Watch Out For When Experimenting

17:34 Exposure, SRM Level-Setting, How to Do It

24:15 Choosing an Evaluation Metric

26:14 Binarized vs. Non-Binarized Metrics

29:25 How Product Managers Prepare for A/B Testing

34:07 Being a Skeptic 38:24 Issues with A/B Testing Evaluation

46:35 Process for Product Managers When Engaging in A/B Testing

51:29 Clarity on Experimentation Policy Required

53:50 Parting Thoughts

58:44 Outro

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Hi all! Hope everyone had a great week this week.

We had a special moment happen in the Waghray household this week with the birth of our second son on Saturday. 🎉

As you can imagine, there has not been much space for anything except diaper changes and not sleeping 😵‍💫 so we’ll be skipping the pod this week.

BUT, we’ll be back next week with our interview with John Meakin! Subscribe so you don’t miss it:

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It’s shaping up to be a great episode, so I hope you’ll tune in for that next week.

See y’all very soon!

-Ajay

📣 Subscribe at https://www.producthappyhour.com/ for the latest episode updates! 🙏 If you haven't become a paid subscriber, now's the time to support the show! It’s either $5/month or $30/year, that’s one Starbucks latte a month or one Doordash order a year!

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✍🏾 Show Notes

00:00 Intro

02:37 What's That Drink?!

04:29 Quant & qual insights about Twitter

12:27 What are the user problems?

21:10 What are the business problems?

25:55 Diagnosis of strategic problems to solve

28:17 Guiding policies for our Twitter product strategy

35:09 Coherent actions to fulfill guiding policies

54:26 Wrap-up & Outro

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Hi all, and Happy Thanksgiving week for everyone in the US! 🦃

As you can imagine, this is a wonderful time to pause and reflect before diving into the mad scramble that is the end of this year. We are doing the same, so we will be taking a break this week on the pod.

BUT, we will be back next week! Subscribe so you don’t miss it here:

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And we have a doozy of an episode for y’all: an episode on this question:

We use our product strategy framework from Episode 7 to work it out. We also have a great interview queued up with John Meakin that y’all are really going to enjoy.

So enjoy all of the tryptophan, and we’ll see y’all next week! 👋

📣 Subscribe at https://www.producthappyhour.com/ for the latest episode updates! 🙏 If you haven't become a paid subscriber, now's the time to support the show! It’s either $5/month or $30/year, that’s one Starbucks latte a month or one Doordash order a year!

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👩 Lisa’s Bio

Lisa Roberts is Chief Marketing & Product Offer at FloorFound, an end-to-end Recommerce platform and marketplace for oversized retail items. Lisa has almost 25 years of experience working in product and marketing with some of the best in tech. She started her career at Garden.com, one of the biggest properties from Dot Com Bubble in 1998. From there she joined the product team at Dell, where she more officially learned product management (her words not mine!).

After Dell, she found herself at nFusion as an Interactive Product Manager before joining the Austin rocketship Bazaarvoice as an early employee, eventually Director of Marketing. Post Bazaarvoice, Lisa embarked on a journey into consulting before landing at Starmount, which is where she hired me as an Associate Product Manager, my first ever PAID PM gig! (definitely going to discuss this one.)

Post Starmount was a tour of some of the hottest start-ups in Austin including VP of Marketing at Adlucent, VP of Marketing at Edgecase.io, VP of Marketing at Civitas, and Chief Marketing Officer at Yonder before joining us back again (at least 50% of the time?!) in Product Land at FloorFound where she runs FloorFound’s product and marketing teams. And if that’s not enough, she founded Great Catch Consulting to consult with start-ups and is a board member at the Andy Roddick Foundation.

✍🏾 Show Notes

00:00 Intro

01:14 Lisa's Bio

03:04 Welcome Lisa!

03:44 What's That Drink?!

05:12 "How did you get into product management?"

13:17 "What do you look for in those entry-level product manager roles?"

17:07 "What makes a product manager great?"

26:03 "What are things product managers do that drive you crazy?"

32:20 "What skills and knowledge should product managers acquire early on?"

35:38 Tech-Heavy vs. Business Heavy PMs

44:52 Up-level by shadowing great people you work with

46:10 How Lisa kills it at saying no, her secrets to the process

48:42 Start-Up vs. Large Company Product Management

01:04:09 Commonalities & Differences between Marketing & Product Management

01:13:06 Moving from Marketing to Product Management

01:17:51 Parting Advice: Ask for What You Want

01:20:48 Thank you, Lisa!

01:21:27 Outro

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Hi all! 👋 Hope everyone has had a fantastic week this week in Product Land.

Part of what makes our show great is that Era and I are both working PMs. We can give y’all an unvarnished perspective of what it’s like to be a Product Manager because we’re doing it day in and day out.

This week I had the pleasure of running a highly fulfilling offsite with my team here in Austin. It was really great getting to know folks on the team, many of which I had never met in person before!

While it was an amazing experience, it did mean that I didn’t get the opportunity to edit our next episode. Womp womp. BUT, we’ll be back next week with our next episode: an interview with a former boss of mine who is really great. I’m excited for y’all to hear it. Subscribe now so you make sure to get new episodes right when they come out:

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Back next week, hope y’all have a great weekend! WAKANDA FOREVER!!!!

-Ajay

📣 Subscribe at https://www.producthappyhour.com/ for the latest episode updates! 🙏 If you haven't become a paid subscriber, now's the time to support the show! It’s either $5/month or $30/year, that’s one Starbucks latte a month or one Doordash order a year!

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🎥 Check out the video on YouTube:

✍🏾 Show Notes

00:00 Intro

00:35 Episode overview

01:51 What's That Drink?!

02:23 Drinking game: drink on the word "listening"

03:00 Our sponsor: US!

03:38 Why you should learn how to say NO

07:05 Our framework for saying no: LAPATO

08:22 LA: Listening Actively

10:11 P: Pitch

13:22 ATO: Articulate the Tradeoff

16:00 Role Play: Applying LAPATO in a real life example

24:26 Cool Product Thing: Amazon Pre-Filled Grocery Carts

28:57 Outro

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For reference, here are the questions we answered:

1. When taking on a product as a new PM, what are some critical first steps one must do?

2. How do you deal with experiment results that are not stat sig yet, only directional?

3. How should project managers and product managers best work together?

Apologies in advance for Ajay’s audio, his mic gave out so he had to go to the backup from his headphones. 🤦🏻‍♂️ Hopefully the great quality of the content makes up for it!

Enjoy, and shoot us questions for the next Q&A session by responding in the comments! We answered 3 questions this time, I think we can expect to answer about the same amount next time.

📣 Subscribe for the latest episode updates! 🙏 If you haven't become a paid subscriber, now's the time to support the show! It’s either $5/month or $30/year, that’s one Starbucks latte a month or one Doordash order a year! Subscribe below:

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✍🏾 Show Notes

00:00 Intro

00:42 When taking on a product as a new PM, what are some critical first steps one must do?

08:26 How do you deal with experiment results that are not stat sig yet, only directional?

13:55 How should project managers and product managers best work together?

18:02 Outro

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📣 Subscribe for the latest episode updates, and our new paid feature: Q&A! If you're a paid subscriber, you can ask us ANYTHING and we'll do our darndest to help out. Check out our post on Q&A for more.

🙏 If you haven't become a paid subscriber, now's the time to get the above! It’s either $5/month or $30/year, that’s one Starbucks latte a month or one Doordash order a year! Subscribe below to get your personalized help today:

Subscribe now

🎥 Check out the video on YouTube:

✍🏾 Show Notes

00:00 Intro

01:24 Episode overview

01:46 What's That Drink?!

02:44 Drinking game: drink on the word "bias"

02:56 User testing definitions

06:08 What is NOT user testing

09:59 What does user testing do for you and your product?

17:13 Tools of the Trade

24:36 5 hot tips for Product Managers to participate in user testing

27:48 Cool Product Thing: Zero Fasting App Activity Tracker

31:10 Outro

📚 Resources referenced in this episode

Tools we love:

• Fullstory

• Hotjar

• UserTesting.com

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Hi all! We are SO EXCITED 🎉 to start answering the great questions y’all have via video on Thursday.

We’ve already gotten some pretty tough questions, and are looking forward to sharing some hopefully insightful answers.

Have something you’d like to ask us? Guess what?! As a paid subscriber, you can send in a question to us and we’ll answer it.

Best way to do that is to comment on this post before EOD tomorrow or call our voicemail box and leave a message at 737-400-9026.

Looking forward to your questions! See you on the pod!

-Era and Ajay

📣 Subscribe for the latest episode updates, and our new paid features: Q&A and templates. If you're a paid subscriber, you can ask us ANYTHING and we'll do our darndest to help out. Check out our post on Q&A for more. Templates also help you execute on the most critical PM tasks.

🙏 If you haven't become a paid subscriber, now's the time to get the above! It’s either $5/month or $30/year, that’s one Starbucks latte a month or one Doordash order a year! Subscribe below to get your personalized help today:

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🎥 Check out the video on YouTube:

✍🏾 Show Notes

00:00 Intro

03:34 CELEBRATING 10 EPISODES OMG 🎉 🍻

08:46 1. Block out focus time on your calendar

13:31 2. Find work to do during status meetings

17:50 3. Use already scheduled meetings

22:02 4. Determine your priorities, CANCEL CANCEL CANCEL

27:18 5. Delegate to your team

30:08 6. Use calendar as to-do list

36:43 7. Keep running decks

40:03 Cool Product Thing: Yelp's Quote Feature

43:36 Outro

📚 Resources referenced in this episode

There are a number of great resources out there for time management. The ones we mentioned:

• Deep Work by Cal Newport

• Indistractable by Nir Eyal

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Well guess what?! As of today, as a paid subscriber you now can ask us all of your 🔥 burning questions about product management. We will answer ANY question you have about all things product.

Think of us as a superpower in your pocket/email that you can use to help you level up. 👾 You can ask us about specific issues you’re running into at work, a topic you didn’t completely understand that you ran across, how to manage stakeholders, craft a strategy…ANYTHING MEANS ANYTHING! 🤯

Now, with great power comes great responsibility. 🕷 For this to work, we’re going to have to do this in a systematic fashion. And when we asked y’all how to approach doing Q&A, most people preferred to do Q&A asynchronously.

Thus, some rules & deadlines for us to help ensure everyone has the best experience possible out of the gate:

1. To ask a question for our next Q&A session, comment on this post by 11:59pm on Tuesday, 10/18. (you’ll have to be a paid subscriber to comment.) We’ll send out a couple of reminders, you can comment on those as well for your question to be considered.

2. The Q&A video with our responses will be posted for paid subscribers the following week.

3. If the question doesn’t involve anything sensitive, that’s it! We’ll include it in our next Q&A session.

4. If the question does include anything sensitive, we will message you directly with a video response. If you’d like for your question to be answered privately, let us know and we’ll answer separately!

5. If you prefer leaving a voicemail instead, we’re going to leave the number to our virtual voicemail at the end of post behind a paywall. Give us a call with your question!

And that’s it! We’re so excited and are looking forward to helping y’all out and answering your questions! 🕵️

And if you’re not a paid subscriber already…give it a try! You can sign up for a paid subscription below and grab that phone number too while you’re at it. ☎️ We’re looking at more ways to make the paid subscriber experience even better, it’ll be worth it we’re sure of it.

See you in Q&A Land!

-Era and Ajay

Heyyyyyy you made it down here! Here’s the phone number you can call us at:

(737) 400-9026‬

Give us a call! We’ll be waiting…

📣 Subscribe for the latest episode updates, and please consider a paid subscription to support the show 🙏 It’s either $5/month or $30/year, that’s one Starbucks latte a month or one Doordash order a year! It helps us keep the party going and keeps ads off the show:

Subscribe now

We would love to hear what you think! Have any other EPIC writing ideas for Russell? Any ideas for great drinking games?! Let us know in the comments! 💬

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✍🏾 Show Notes

4:35 What is an Epic

8:10 3 main parts of an Epic

10:40 A real Epic use case

12:55 Characteristics of a well written Epic

15:27 How to decide Epic scope

20:32 Cool Product Thing: iPhone Pro line evolution (14 Pro)

📚 Resources referenced in this episode

Where Epics fit in organizationally. We stole this graphic from a great Atlassian article

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🤔 We are thinking through some things and could really use your help! As paid subscribers, we really value you your opinion in making the paid experience even better. 🚀

We are considering doing live Q&As and wanted to get your thoughts.

And one more follow-up question, if the answer is yes to the above question, which evening would work best for y’all?

Any and all feedback appreciated! Let us know what you think about the above, or if you have any general feedback for us happy to field it.

Leave a comment

Hope everyone is enjoying the pod, stay tuned to our next episode coming out this Friday! 🎉

If you're already a PM, congrats! 🎉 Please share with anyone looking to make the change!

📣 Subscribe for the latest episode updates, and please consider a paid subscription to support the show 🙏 It’s either $5/month or $30/year, that’s one Starbucks latte a month or one Doordash order a year! It helps us keep the party going and keeps ads off the show:

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We would love to hear what you think! Have any other process ideas for Russell? Any ideas for great drinking games?! Let us know in the comments! 💬

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✍🏾 Show Notes

6:00 How to tell if PM life is right for you

14:08 Mindsets that don’t work in PM life

19:55 How to transition into product management from school

22:28 Transition into product management from a product-adjacent role

24:17 How to transition into product management from a non-tech company

29:21 5 Skills you need to be a solid Product Manager

41:40 Key things you can do NOW to transition into product management

52:14 Cool Product Thing: Cognitive development & slow feeding dog toys 🐶

📚 Resources referenced in this episode

• Tips on how to diagnose issues with your product in Episode 7

• Mentally Simulating dog toys Era recommends, here & here.

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