How can product leaders navigate product growth and communication challenges? In this episode of Product Talk hosted by Barbara Bermes, Atlassian Fmr Head of Product Jens Schumacher speaks on building a strong product culture, navigating communication challenges, and implementing effective decision-making frameworks to scale a successful SaaS business. Discover strategies for managing stakeholder expectations, leveraging data to drive product decisions, and fostering a collaborative, customer-centric approach to product development.
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Show Notes
- Importance of being at the right place at the right time for product success
- Value of developers having direct customer interaction and feedback loops
- Evolution of product management roles as a company scales
- Benefits of rotating product managers across different teams and domains
- Implementing a decision tree model to empower teams and manage escalations
- Challenges of maintaining open communication channels at scale
- Strategies for asynchronous communication and managing stakeholder updates
- Pitfalls of an open public issue tracker and managing customer expectations
- Leveraging AI and automation to streamline release communication
- Advice on picking battles and not getting overly attached to specific outcomes
- Importance of adopting a growth mindset and continuous learning
- Power of pair programming and learning from experienced developers
- Balancing founder involvement in product decisions as the company grows
- Transitioning from developer to product manager and building credibility
- Focusing on smaller, less prominent products to gain experience and visibility
- Aligning product roadmaps and communication across distributed teams
- Maintaining product momentum and excitement through regular updates
- Integrating product data and insights into stakeholder communication
- Addressing the challenge of outdated roadmap presentations
- Recommended business books and podcasts for product leaders
About the speaker
Jens spent the first 15 years of his career at Atlassian, where he went from Graduate Developer to Head of Product, managing big names like Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Bitbucket. From 2019 to 2022, he took the reins as Chief Product Officer at Search.io, where he handled everything from product strategy to partnerships. Search.io was acquired by the French search giant Algolia in 2022. Today, Jens is the Founder and CEO of Released.so, helping product teams keep their customers and stakeholders in the loop.
About the host
Barbara Bermes is an extremely passionate data-driven product leader, a previous International conference speaker, and a book author, with a comprehensive technical background and deep experience in B2B SaaS products at growth-stage companies. Motivated and driven by customer happiness, she is a decisive leader and executive with a proven track record of leading high-performing product teams with empathy, evangelizing product strategy and delivering world-class customer solutions. She frequently writes about product under https://bbinto.medium.com/