Interview With Hubert Palan, CEO of ProductBoard, Part 2 – Podcast Season 2, Episode 2

This second part of our interview with Hubert Palan is the third episode of our new podcast season of All The Responsibility, None Of The Authority, crossposted from alltheresponsibility.com. I will be crossposting the new episodes from the new site to this feed as they are published (I’m a little behind now but will catch up!).

This is part two of our interview with Hubert Palan, found and CEO of ProductBoard, and long time product management leader and executive.

Part 1 of the interview is here.

Three things you can start doing today

As always, we like to give you actionable takeaways from our podcast episodes. The three ideas below come directly from our interview with Hubert.

1. Create a central repository, not just about the features you’re building, but about the market inputs you gather to help you find and validate the business problems you are solving. You can use a tool like Hubert’s ProductBoard, or you can try to roll your own (Nils had a podcast about this last year). This information comes from Support, Design, Product, Sales, Marketing, and your own conversations with customers and prospects. A central store of this input, and the relationships between this information and the product decisions it supports, helps mitigate some of the cognitive biases Hubert mentioned. And by gathering all this information together, you are better able to detect market signals in all the noise, and make better holistic decisions about the product.
2. As Hubert pointed out many times in the interview, Context is King. Make sure your team, and your whole organization, knows not just what features you’re delivering, but what problems those features solve, and for whom. This not only simplifies many of the issues of prioritization, it also serves as a basis for communicating across segments of your organization.
3. Clarity and communication are the heart of the Product Leader’s role. The better we get at clearly communicating about prioritization, context, and decisions made in the product team across the organization, the better the organization can execute on creating and selling solutions to customers.

Thanks to Hubert!

Rob and I want to reiterate our thanks to Hubert for participating in our new podcast as our first interview! If you want to learn more about ProductBoard, you can visit productboard.com. You can follow Hubert on Twitter at @hpalan, and ProductBoard tweets at @productboard.

As always, we’d love to ask two small favors from you:

• First, please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access the podcast directly on this feed.
• Second, please rate the podcast on iTunes or “recommend” it on your podcast app.

Finally, we really appreciate getting your opinion, so we’d love to hear from you in the comments, or via Twitter (@atrnota) and our Medium publication, All The Responsibility.