One Knight in Product

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.

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.

F...

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 live...

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 bjartere...

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 accel...

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!

This episode is sponsored ...

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 "bullshit management" and tries to inspire us all to affect change in ...

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!

This episode is sponsored by June. June is a user retention hu...

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 int...

Nils Davis is a resume coach who wants product managers to realise they're AMAZING, and help others realise it too.

His hot take? That the majority of product managers are doing themselves a disservice by producing resumes that simply list a bunch of tasks that pretty much all product managers have done.

If you'd like to appear on Hot Takes, please grab a time at https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/hot

Visit Nils's site: https://per...

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

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

Marty Cagan is the founder and a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, a leading product consultancy that aims to get companies to work "the way that the best companies work". He is the author of two desk references for product managers: "Inspired", aimed at product teams, and "Empowered", aimed at product leaders. He has since come to realise that "the way the best companies work" is too vague a term, and also that many compani...

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

Debbie Levitt is a long-time UX and CX consultant who wants us all to get better at putting our users at the centre of the conversation, rather than paying lip service. She's the author of a few books, including "Customers Know You Suck" and runs a thriving community of UX professionals. Some of the stories from that community have concerned her, alongside the general perceived decline of the strategic role of UX, and she recently ...

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

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