Matt Maier is a product marketer and AI enthusiast from Irvine, California, with a background spanning the Air Force, aerospace, healthcare, and startup consulting. His hot take? Within 5 years, employment as we know it will sharply decline. Matt predicts that advancements in AI will render traditional employee-employer relationships obsolete, because why would companies hire people to do easily automatable tasks? On the other hand, Matt believes this is a good thing and will enable an...

Yael Mark is a behavioural scientist turned product manager, who is passionate about helping others unlock the power of user-centred product design by embracing behavioural science. She believes that understanding human behaviour and cognitive biases can drive better product decisions and stakeholder alignment, as well as make sure we do it ethically. Episode highlights:   1. Behavioural science helps product managers design for real-world users Behavioural science is the study of how people...

Returning guest Eisha Armstrong is the co-founder of Vecteris and author of books like "Productize" and "Fearless", which talk about that tricky journey from a professional services to product organisation. She's back to talk about her latest book, "Commercialize", which gives us the skinny on how to monetise, sell, and market productised offerings in transforming B2B professional services firms. Episode highlights:   1. Product strategy is the heart of successful commercialisation A...

Andy Budd is a designer-turned-venture partner who founded one of the UK's first UX agencies before pivoting to help early-stage startup founders make good product decisions and get to product/market fit. He's recently released "The Growth Equation", a book that distils some of the common themes he sees across early-stage companies and aims to give them the best chance of success. We spoke all about the themes from the book, as well as where product management fits into the early-stage...

Jas Shah is a fintech product consultant based in London who helps small startups and management services organizations build winning products, whilst keeping his pulse on the fintech scene. His hot take? That product management is one of the least glamorous functions in an organisation. It's often portrayed as a sexy role where you're the "CEO of the product" with autonomy and responsibility, but for most product managers, the role is arduous and grating, involving invisible work like...

Victoria Sakal is a growth and go-to-market expert who loves to turn customer, market and competitor insight in product, brand and business growth strategies. Her hot take? That companies are either paying the "research tax" - spending too much time and money on research and never making a move - or the "stupid tax" - making decisions based purely on gut feel and no evidence. Both of these taxes can get your organisation in trouble, and the best path is to strike the right balance of speed...

Boluwaji Alepaye is a product manager who works for Moniepoint, a Nigerian fintech firm that aims to power financial dreams in emerging markets. He's also an active mentor, aiming to help Nigerian product managers thrive. His hot take? That the classic product management advice that comes out of the US and Western Europe just doesn't apply to Nigeria, where market dynamics mean that you have to make very different product decisions, and even the local training courses are dominated by Western...

Christina Wodtke and Danielle Barnes join me to talk about their new book "Present Yourself" and their work with Women Talk Design, an organisation aimed at increasing diversity in public speaking. We went deep on public speaking, the importance of authenticity, storytelling, and finding your unique voice as a speaker. We also talked about the value of diverse perspectives in public speaking and the power of sharing personal stories to connect with audiences. Key takeaways:   1. It's...

Mark Gray is a product manager with nearly 12 years of experience across various roles in the UK and Europe. He has worked in both B2B and B2C sectors, progressing from delivery-focused product owner roles to more strategic product management and leadership positions. His hot take? Product managers should stop defaulting to prioritisation through value divided by effort, which he argues can stifle innovation. Value and effort aren't unimportant, but they're just part of the puzzle. He...

Jordan Dalladay is a product strategist and leader who works with startup founders to help them turn ambitious ideas into market successes. He specializes in "dragging a vision kicking and screaming into reality" with his consultancy, inherent ventures. His hot take? We should invert our approach to product roadmapping. Instead of listing features to build, create a "risk-based product strategy" that outlines all the assumptions and potential pitfalls that could prevent success. This approach...

Chris Butler is a "Chaotic Good Product Manager" who has worked for companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook. He's currently Staff Product Operations Manager at GitHub, and current running an online course on AI Product Design Patterns. His hot take? That product managers don't need to be technical and that it might even be a net negative to their relationship with the engineering team. Find Chris on LinkedIn and remember to check out his AI product course, "AI Product Design Patterns"...

Jeremy Kirouac is a "Pan-Canadian" product leader and former startup founder who has thrown himself headlong into the world of fractional product leadership, as well as helping advise companies in all things product-related. His hot take? That startup founders live in information bubbles that concentrate solely on revenue and don't spend enough time teaching them good product management fundamentals. This impacts their chances of building a good product company and impacts their relationship...

Chris Locke is a long-time product leader who has taken his passion for educating product managers into his agency, Aspire, with which he aims to help product teams bridge the skills gap and equip them with the skills and resources to build products customers love. His hot take? That product leaders need to adopt the mindset of Venture Capitalists to truly drive growth through their product initiatives; placing a series of bets, backed by data, with clear stage gates for decision-making and...

Ivana Todorovic is the co-founder of AuthoredUp, the "Ultimate LinkedIn Content Creation & Analytics Tool", and wants to help YOU get better at standing out from the crowd and beating the LinkedIn algorithm. We spoke about all things LinkedIn, including the dangers of "engagement pods", whether it matters where you put your links in the post, how to engage with larger accounts, the power of secondary comments, and much, much more. We also spoke about her startup journey, the pros and cons...

Jenny Wanger is a product consultant and coach who loves to educate PMs around the world and is doing just that with her product operations course on Reforge. Her hot take? Product leaders send their teams off for training but then don't do anything when they come back, and nothing changes. This leads them to question the value of the training, but it's almost never the quality of the training that's at fault, it's what they (don't) do with it. Find Jenny on LinkedIn and remember to check out...

Nick Mehta is the CEO of Gainsight, a leading customer and product experience platform that aims to be the operating system for your customer journeys. He's a passionate advocate for Customer Success as a function and as a business strategy, an author of several books on the topic, and recently super-excited about the future of Customer Success in an AI world. We talked about all of these topics and much more. A message from this episode's sponsor - Leadfeeder This episode is sponsored by...

Rina Alexin is the CEO of Productside, a leading product training and consulting company (formerly known as The 280 Group). Rina is passionate about furthering the craft of product management around the world. Her hot take? Product managers complain about stakeholders, but they're just doing their jobs and we need to spend some of our energy on understanding them and properly collaborating rather than treating them as annoyances. Find Rina on LinkedIn or check out Productside If you'd like to...

Andy Walters is a long-time consultant who has recently focused his consulting work on supporting companies with GenAI adoption with his new firm, Emerge Haus. His hot take? Within the next few years, we're going to be moving to an AI-assistant-first operating model, and we can't stop it. There are too many financial incentives, but it might actually be better for users too; as consumers, but also potentially for their private lives too. Find Andy on LinkedIn or check out Emerge Haus If you'd...

Bjarte Rettedal is a photographer-turned looking to take his interest in behavioural economics and systems thinking and pursue a career in UX design. His hot take? AI models should be under public ownership or at the very least fully transparent. We don't let people release supplements or medicines without extensive testing, so why are we OK with something as potentially high-impact as AI models? Find Bjarte on LinkedIn or bjarterettedal.com If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a...

Greg Prickril is a B2B Product Management coach, consultant and trainer who has gone all-in on AI and is bullish about the impact that he thinks it'll have on product management. His hot take? AI is going to change everything about product management. It's going to mean fewer jobs are required to deliver products, but it also opens up opportunities for business-focused product managers to make a real impact in their jobs, and accelerate them in doing so. Find Greg on LinkedIn, Prickril.com or...

May Wong is a product operations consultant and coach who also runs ProductTO, an in-person product management meetup in Toronto. Her hot take? Product management is a team sport, and too much product management literature focuses on what the product manager should do, not what the team should do. If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time! A message from this episode's sponsor - Leadfeeder This episode is sponsored by Leadfeeder. No more not knowing who’s coming to your...

David Pereira is a product leader, speaker and regular blogger who loves to contribute to the wider Agile and Product communities with insights from his own career, including some of the mistakes he's made and not just the successes. David was recently tempted into writing a book, the newly released "Untrapping Product Teams" where he provocatively rails against "b******t management" and tries to inspire us all to affect change in our organisations (but step-by-step). We talked all about...

Dean Peters is a former opera singer turned product management leader, coach and educator who works with Productside to uplevel teams. His hot take? That there's more to say about the Instagram-ification of product management, the root causes and contributory factors. If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time! A message from this episode's sponsor - June This episode is sponsored by June. June is a user retention hub for early-stage B2B SaaS companies that enables early-stage...

Aakash Gupta is a product leader turned author and professional newsletter writer, with a huge following on LinkedIn and Twitter. He writes regularly on product management principles, and personal and career growth and recently put out an article about nailing the product leadership job search. We also recently collaborated on an article about fractional product leadership! In this interview, I spoke to Aakash about his journey into full-time content creation and some of the lessons he...