Today’s superhero guest is Kevin Perkins, a long-time technical product manager with years of experience shaping and considering SaaS product development. He joins Steve West, CEO of Project Insight, for an engaging conversation on their early entrepreneurial friendship and the evolution of project management—where it was 20 years ago, where it stands today, and where it’s headed in the future.
Can we trust Kevin’s insights on what’s next? Absolutely. His superpower lies in his ability to see the big picture, anticipate industry trends, and lead innovation before the rest of the world is ready. You won’t want to miss this discussion!
1-5 min: Kevin’s Journey in Product Management
- Kevin’s career path and how he got into product management
- Steve and Kevin’s entrepreneurial connection
- Early entrepreneurs when the internet was born
- What was data connectivity like before the internet?
- Pre-online project management and learning as you go
5-12 min: The Evolution of Project Management & Kevin's Superpower
- Early tools in the early internet
- Agile born out of necessity
- Creating products to be monetized or invested in
- Digitizing businesses
- Superpower of self-placement in the history and future of project management
12-16 min: Building High-Performing Project Teams
- How teams adapted before modern PM software
- People want software developed yesterday – agile as a response
- How Agile helps keep projects iterating and customers informed
16-23 min: How Tech is Transforming Project Management
- The first chats weren’t Teams and Slack
- Extranets – before the cloud application idea
- Taking company intranet activities and exposing them to external platforms
- Transformation of PPM tools – many tools emerged and disappeared
23-24 min: Expert Insights on Scaling & Growth
- Willingness to change – staying adaptive in tech and business
- Don’t have to be an expert, but must keep moving with technology
24-36 min: The Future of Project Management
- Project Management from the dotcom days to now
- Kevin’s endeavor with Squeezer app – making web pages mobile-friendly
- Cobbling tools together to make systems work
- Putting project management online
- Interoperability with best-of-breed tools
- Bringing in t-shirt sizes and story points and converting them into measurable data
- Tightly integrating applications to bring data to PMs
36-41 min: Riffing on the Future: AI, PM, and Beyond
- Future of project, program, product, and portfolio management
- AI skepticism & anticipation
- 2025 – the year of the agent?
Follow Kevin / kevinperkins
Project Insight Website
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