One of the hardest skills for product people to acquire is that of saying no. After all, when everyone comes at you with ideas, prioritisation can be a massive challenge. So it’s refreshing when we get a chance to come at it from the opposite direction in order to generate good ideas. Gal Josefsberg, VP Product Management at Guidewire and a guest lecturer at General Assembly, has spent a lot of time thinking about how to create, manage and recognise a good idea.
Quote of the Episode
99% of your time is going to be spent saying no to the horde of feature requests that are coming your way from all your stakeholders, and finding the few good ones to make evolutionary changes. Big revolutionary changes – those are rare and you probably don’t need them every day; you need them once a year, to sort of shape the vision for the year. I think you need to be aware of what kind of ideas you are looking for – is it the evolutionary or the revolutionary?
Listen if you’d like to learn more about
- Ways to generate ideas
- How to manage ideas
- Artificial Intelligence
- Scalable Data Science
Links mentioned in this episode
Hosts
The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.
Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. Lily has spent 13 years in the tech industry working mainly with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She has worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank in Bristol, the Product Managers’ meetup with regular events and talks on Product now with 800+ members and growing. Now the Product Director at Symec, Lily also runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.
A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. After launching Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, Randy has worked with museums and arts groups, online education, media and entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. Now a trainer, Discovery and Leadership consultant, he’s spoken at Mind the Product Engage (Hamburg and Manchester), the Business of Software, Turing Festival, a number of ProductTanks (London, Zurich, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford, and Brighton… so far!) and at conferences across the US and Europe.
Music
Our theme music is from Hamburg-based Pau, featuring ProductTank Hamburg’s own Arne Kittler on bass. Listen to more on their Facebook page
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