This week we were excited to see The Product Experience podcast reach 1 million downloads!

The podcast team of Lily Smith, Randy Silver, Luke Smith, and Louron Pratt, have enjoyed seeing new guests join us every week for unique insights and experiences from so many different areas of product management. It’s been an awesome ride.

With us hitting this big milestone, we thought we’d look back at our most popular podcast episodes of all time. Read on to find out what these are!

Outcomes Over Outputs – Josh Seiden on The Product Experience

In this podcast back in 2019, we invited Josh Seiden, author of Outcomes Over Output. Josh is a respected author, speaker, trainer, and consultant, and the book is a fantastic read. We talked to him about putting some of his strategies into action.

Getting started with User Story Mapping – Jeff Patton

There’s nothing more useless to a product team than a big backlog. Bringing backlogs to life—making them usable, relevant, and getting value from them—is something that transforms ordinary teams into extraordinary ones. To guide us on how to do that, we asked Jeff Patton, creator of User Story Mapping, to join us on the podcast. An episode that resonated well with a lot of product managers when we published this in late 2021.

OKRs can be simple – Storm Fagan

OKRs are a simple concept — but deceptively hard to get right.  There are an awful lot of horror stories about implementations gone wrong, along with a number of gurus and guides on how to get it right. Back in November 2021, Storm Fagan—now the Chief Product Officer at the BBC, formerly at JustEat—joined us on the podcast to break down how she made OKRs scale at a big company by keeping them simple. (Hint: that wasn’t her first approach.)

5 product principles for every product manager – Esha Shukla

If you’re the kind of person that listens to the Product Experience and reads articles on MTP, then you’re already familiar with any number of frameworks, methodologies, and principles to make you a better product manager.  But knowing them isn’t enough to do the job—or, at least, not to do it well. Figuring out what works for you is way more important.  That’s something we discussed with Esha Shukla, Product Manager at WhatsApp, for the last podcast episode of 2021.

Vision and strategy – Marty Cagan

Last year, we welcomed someone who needs no introduction. Marty Cagan, Founder and Partner of Silicon Valley Product Group, and Author of ”Inspired” and “Empowered” delved into a plethora of topics including strategy, vision, ethics, and ways of working. We struggled to fit so many product insights into one episode, so we decided to split it into two parts! (Part 1 seemed to win the battle of the parts…)

The Black Mirror Test – Roisi Proven

Back in 2019, we spoke with Roisi Proven, who is a true product person: she has a penchant for imagining the worst, which she’s turned into a superpower to put all of her product decisions through a rigorous ethics test. That’s useful – but she’s also found a way for you to engage your team in a creative way, using the model of the show Black Mirror, in an effort to make better decisions. We discussed exactly that on this memorable podcast episode.

Outcome-driven product teams – Becky Flint

We’ve talked about avoiding and escaping feature factories a number of times, but how do you take the next steps to become an outcome-driven product organisation? Becky Flint, CEO at Dragonboat, was able to provide all of the answers — after all, she built the product portfolio organisations at Paypal, Shutterfly, and others.

Who does what? Organising your product teams – Mike Hudack

We always encourage people to experiment with their product development techniques — but experimenting with your team can be a step too far. To get some expert advice, we talked with Monzo Chief Product Officer, Mike Hudack (ex-Facebook, Deliveroo) back in September 2021, about how he approaches this, what’s worked and what hasn’t, how to avoid cross-team dependencies, the key to effective communication and collaboration, and much more.

Shape Up – Ryan Singer

After starting out as an agency (37 Signals), those at Basecamp realised that the tools it used to manage its own projects would have value for others. What followed was a bootstrapped journey to creating an entire suite of products, using Basecamp’s own approach on how to work well together. Over the years, the company has publicly documented many of its processes. In the publication Shape Up – Stop Running In Circles and Ship Work That Matters, Head of Strategy Ryan Singer shared an approach that challenges most of the orthodoxy around Agile (as a framework) but retains all of the spirit of Agile (as a philosophy). In this iconic episode, he talked with Lily and Randy about Basecamp’s approach.

Roadmaps Are Dead. Long Live Roadmaps! – Janna Bastow

When you have questions about roadmaps, it pays to talk to someone who has spent way too much of her life thinking about them. Janna Bastow – co-founder of both Mind the Product and ProdPad—has been trying to fix the problems of roadmaps for most of her professional life. She hacked together the first version of ProdPad to solve her own problem, then began selling to other product people to help them do the same. In this infamous episode, sponsored by Amplitude, she joined us to give advice to anyone ready to break up with their roadmap.

Once again, thank you to all those who have joined us, listened in, and shared feedback since we started on this podcasting journey. There are plenty more exciting guests to join us on The Product Experience podcast this year. So make sure to stay tuned for a new episode every Wednesday!