Wicked Hard Decisions

Ken led the Product team at Say Media, where he broke through barriers to bring together 3 companies and build a culture to last. We discuss the importance of building a shared language & trust to unify teams, and lessons learned from the tough calls Say made along the way. Guest cameos from Dave Lerman (CTO Boulder Care), John Vars (CEO Mixhalo, former CPO Task Rabbit), Arthur Nicolls (Product Director at Spotify), Rachel Wolan (GM of Dropbox Core), and Yuko Takahashi (Product Design at Masterclass). For more insights from Ken, check out: https://influentialpm.com/book/

Today’s guest is Sean Cook, Director at Quip Labs. Sean’s focused on bringing new ideas to life and “shocking from within” to help Quip & Salesforce stay ahead of the innovation curve. We discuss how “shocking from within” means making the right bets, and validating them early. It means pushing back against requests that don’t make sense, rapidly testing what might, and evangelizing across the organization for success. It means breaking down barriers and building trust between your teams. And most of all, it means having a laser focus on your user - even if that means helping a competitor in the process.

Today’s guest is Himanshu Singh, a product and business leader in the edtech space who helped launch Coursera’s online degree programs. By focusing on the learner and driving decisions with data, Coursera simplified how they made tough choices and designed new courses with their partners - building a roadmap to bring affordable education to learners everywhere. In this episode, we discuss how education is changing, Coursera’s decision to build this new offering, and how they took a user and data-centric approach to define their content, partnership, and launch strategies.

Our guest today is Satyajeet Salgar, a product leader at Google. We talk about Google Plus, how Google launched games on the platform, how they decided to shut it down, and the leadership lessons Satyajeet learned along the way.