June, 2025

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Stakeholder Engagement: The Overlooked Superpower in Product Leadership

Business of Software Conference

One of the most critical, and most overlooked, skills in product leadership isn’t technical or even strategic. It’s stakeholder engagement. As Bruce McCarthy puts it: “Even the most perfect plan can fail if your organization isn’t aligned.” Early in his career, Bruce launched a promising new product, only to watch it flop. Why? He hadn’t brought sales or marketing into the process.

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Product Operations vs. Product Management: Key Differences

The Product Manager

Product management is about building the right product. Product operations is about building the right system to support it. Knowing the difference isn’t just semantics—it can improve team efficiency, clarify responsibilities, and help you scale smarter. Whether you’re leading a team, filling a hiring gap, or just trying to untangle the roles, this guide breaks it down for you.

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How to Conduct Mobile Usability Testing That Drives Real Improvements

Userpilot

Throughout my career as a product manager, I’ve seen too many promising mobile apps fail; oftentimes not because they lacked great features, but because the user experience fell short. With 88% of users considering leaving after a single bad experience , every usability flaw costs you lost revenue. That’s why I never ship without mobile usability testing first.

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How Companies Are Funding User Research in 2025: Insights from the User Interviews Research Budget Report

DevelopmentCorporate

How Companies Are Funding User Research in 2025: Insights from the User Interviews Research Budget Report User Interviews 2025 Research Budget Report is a crucial resource for understanding how modern organizations are approaching the financial side of user research. Based on responses from 180 professionals involved in research budget decisions, the report provides deep insight into spending levels, priorities, and future expectations.

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Airflow Best Practices for ETL/ELT Pipelines

Speaker: Kenten Danas, Senior Manager, Developer Relations

ETL and ELT are some of the most common data engineering use cases, but can come with challenges like scaling, connectivity to other systems, and dynamically adapting to changing data sources. Airflow is specifically designed for moving and transforming data in ETL/ELT pipelines, and new features in Airflow 3.0 like assets, backfills, and event-driven scheduling make orchestrating ETL/ELT pipelines easier than ever!

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Heatmaps: Your Team’s Secret Weapon for Uncovering Website Gold

AB Tasty

What are heatmaps? (and why your team needs them) Think of heatmaps as your website’s truth-teller. They’re visual snapshots showing exactly where visitors click, scroll, and linger. No guesswork required. Here’s how they work: Warm colors (reds, oranges) highlight the hotspots where users engage most. Cool colors (blues, greens) reveal the overlooked zones that might need attention.

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From Stacking Features to Shaping Value: A New Product Building Model

UX Planet

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash For decades, software development has mirrored the construction industry — a manpower-heavy model where effort, hierarchy, and sequencing define how value is created. But that model is no longer working. Not for users. Not for businesses. And certainly not for the kind of dynamic, value-led experiences today’s market demands.

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Stop Asking When It’s Shipping: Why Strategic Product Teams Focus on Outcomes, Not Outputs

ProductPlan

The post Stop Asking When Its Shipping: Why Strategic Product Teams Focus on Outcomes, Not Outputs appeared first on ProductPlan.

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Evolving as a Product Leader: From Execution to Capability

BrainMates

Evolving as a Product Leader: From Execution to Capability By Adrienne Tan At a Glance The Future of Product Isn’t Just Technical. It’s Human. Product leaders are quick to invest in tools, platforms, and tech upgrades but often overlook the human capability needed to bring those technologies to life. Despite human talent being the largest contributor to cost of revenue, organisations invest far more in tech than in developing their people.

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How to Run 3 Health Checks to Improve Your Product Discovery Phases by David Pereira

Usersnap

Too many discovery efforts fail silently. Teams run interviews, ship features, and sprint ahead – only to realize months later that nothing moved the business. Why? Because most discovery is just activity. Not alignment. To change that, we partnered with David Pereira , a product leader & product coach who’s made a name for calling out “fake discovery” and showing teams how to course-correct with ruthless clarity.

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Struggling to Scale Test Coverage Under Pressure?

When test coverage falls behind release velocity, quality suffers, and your team feels the consequences. This guide outlines when it makes sense to outsource quality assurance (QA), the risks to watch for, and how to scale testing without increasing headcount or slowing down engineering. You will learn how leading teams are leveraging external QA partners to expand coverage, enhance defect detection, and remain aligned with CI/CD timelines.

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The Ultimate Guide to Product Manager Interview Questions (with Sample Answers)

The Basics of Product Management

Welcome to the ultimate guide to Product Manager interview questions. In this post, we’ll break down the types of questions you’ll face and how to answer them with confidence. Types of Product Manager Interview Questions Behavioral: “Tell me about a time…” Product Sense: “How would you improve…” Technical: Understanding systems, APIs, and trade-offs Case Study: Real-world scenarios to test your thinking How to Answer: “Tell me about a product you admire” This is a common question to assess your

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Preparing Leaders and Stakeholders to Support Product Operating Model Pilot Teams

Product Talk

A single champion can often inspire an organization to shift to the product operating model —especially if that champion is the CEO or CPO. But that’s only the first step. Your transformation will get stuck without support from people throughout your company. Over the past few months, I’ve been discussing this topic with Hope Gurion. We’re reflecting on what we’ve seen after years of coaching hundreds of teams and companies.

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From Bias to Better Leadership: Harpal Singh on Self-Awareness and Team Growth

The Product Guy

Product managers are often praised for high standards, but what happens when those standards cause more harm than good? In this episode, Harpal Singh reflects on the tough leadership lessons he’s learned, from navigating hiring bias to managing across cultures and growth stages. What You’ll Learn: Leadership Biases : How good intentions can create unnecessary pressure Team Culture : Why the best PMs learn to listen, adapt, and own the outcome Hiring Smarter : Moving beyond instinct to stru

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10 Mobile App Push Notification Best Practices to Reduce Churn

Userpilot

Nearly 60% of mobile teams still rely on self-hosted push tools. They trade short-term savings for long-term pain: no analytics, poor timing control, and zero personalization. This leads to errors like sending a product update notification at 1 AM or showing the wrong message to the wrong user segment. If youre serious about building a mobile app, you cant afford to make such costly mistakes. 78% of users churn in the first week after installation when brands dont have a clear engagement strateg

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Data Talks, CFOs Listen: Why Analytics Are Key To Better Spend Management

Speaker: Claire Grosjean, Global Finance & Operations Executive

Finance teams are drowning in data—but is it actually helping them spend smarter? Without the right approach, excess spending, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities continue to drain profitability. While analytics offers powerful insights, financial intelligence requires more than just numbers—it takes the right blend of automation, strategy, and human expertise.

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Wheels Falling Off Your Product? The Growth Stage of the Product Lifecycle (Part 3)

BrainMates

Wheels Falling Off Your Product? The Growth Stage of the Product Lifecycle (Part 3) By Jana Paulech At a Glance The growth stage of the product lifecycle begins after achieving product-market fit, requiring sustained exponential growth and a strong, evolving value proposition and positioning to capture and expand the target market. To sustain growth, products must outpace the competition by understanding customer segments deeply, moving swiftly in response to needs, and strategically innovating.

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UX Moments: Sell me this pen

UX Planet

Why E-commerce is no longer just about selling, but about understanding and creating value for the user The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) Do you remember the iconic scene from “The Wolf of Wall Street” where Jordan Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) hands over a pen and says: “Sell me this pen” ? It’s a test of salesmanship. But not just about listing features.

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Sunday Rewind: Essential KPIs for data-driven product managers

Mind the Product

This week’s Sunday Rewind is a 2021 post from John Allen, then Director, Global SEO at RingCentral, on the importance of KPIs in tracking product success. John runs through a number of performance indicators, explaining how to choose the correct ones to make informed decisions and providing examples. He looks at: customer acquisition cost, conversion Read more » The post Sunday Rewind: Essential KPIs for data-driven product managers appeared first on Mind the Product.

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Building Skills: Setting Pilot Teams Up for Product Operating Model Success

Product Talk

Change is exciting, but too much change can feel chaotic. When making a big change like adopting the product operating model or continuous discovery , how do you tap into the excitement while also controlling the chaos? This is a question that Hope Gurion and I have been exploring over the past several months in our series on organizational change. After working with hundreds of teams who are going through this transformation, Hope and I have seen firsthand which approaches tend to work and whic

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How to Achieve High-Accuracy Results When Using LLMs

Speaker: Ben Epstein, Stealth Founder & CTO | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO, Aggregage

When tasked with building a fundamentally new product line with deeper insights than previously achievable for a high-value client, Ben Epstein and his team faced a significant challenge: how to harness LLMs to produce consistent, high-accuracy outputs at scale. In this new session, Ben will share how he and his team engineered a system (based on proven software engineering approaches) that employs reproducible test variations (via temperature 0 and fixed seeds), and enables non-LLM evaluation m

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🚀 The AI Product Manager: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming the PM Role

The Basics of Product Management

Introduction: The Rise of the AI-Augmented PM Welcome to the era where product managers don’t just manage products—they orchestrate intelligent systems . The traditional PM toolkit—spreadsheets, sticky notes, and stakeholder meetings—is being supercharged by AI. And no, this isn’t about replacing PMs. It’s about amplifying them. Get ready to become an AI Product Manager.

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EP 85 The MVP of My Career: Starting Small, Scaling Fast, and Surviving the Pivot

The Product Coalition

Summary In this episode of the Product Coalition podcast, host Jay Stansell interviews Raksha Vashishta, a FinTech product leader and founder of HerTechStory. They discuss Rakesh's journey as an immigrant woman in tech, the challenges she faced, and the importance of mentorship and community.

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How Great Product Teams Deliver Strategic Impact

BrainMates

How Great Product Teams Deliver Strategic Impact By Kathryn Shepherd-King At a Glance Great Product Teams Don’t Just Ship Fast. They Deliver Strategic Impact. Too often, product success is measured by speed and outputs—features launched, tickets closed, timelines met. But great product teams play a bigger game. They drive alignment, translate strategy into action, and make bold decisions that balance customer value with commercial outcomes.

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How Smart PMs Scale Their Careers in Any Org [TPG Live Recap]

The Product Guy

This month’s roundtable brought together a powerhouse panel to explore one of the biggest challenges in product careers today: How do you grow, scale, and stay effective across radically different company environments? Before we dive into the highlights… Want the full, enhanced recap with strategy tools you can use right now? You can get access to all of it on The Product Way Patreon plus weekly content including: product frameworks, case studies, deep dives, and more!

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Your Guide to Product Management Interviews: Top Questions with Answers

Stand out in your product management interview with guidance from Priyanka Upadhyay, an experienced product leader and Stanford Online program coach. In this guide, Upadhay dives into five key competencies interviewers will likely want to assess. She provides sample questions with detailed answers spanning: Product strategy Product design Execution Market estimation Teamwork Confidently land the product management role you want by pre-empting what interviewers are looking for and demonstrating y

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Dual Track Agile with Ant Murphy: How to Balance Discovery and Delivery Without Losing Your Mind

Usersnap

If you’re sprinting with delivery while discovery is stuck in the parking lot, you’re not agile. You’re just speeding blind. Most product teams talk about dual-track agile, but few actually do it well. Discovery gets sidelined. Delivery sprints forward. And by the time you ship, no one’s quite sure who you built it for. To fix this disconnect, we teamed up with Ant Murphy , product coach and dual-track specialist, to break down exactly how to run discovery and delivery side by

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Design Thinking in the Age of AI: The Process Is the Product

UX Planet

Why the designer mindset matters more than ever, even when AI writes the code. There’s a common myth floating around these days: that working with AI is just about crafting the right prompt. Write a clever line, press enter, and voilà — magic happens. But anyone who’s actually built a product — especially as a designer — knows that the real work starts long before that prompt.

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💰 Product Manager Salary Guide 2025: How Much Do PMs Make at Google, Amazon, and Startups?

The Basics of Product Management

Why This Guide Matters If you’ve ever typed “Google PM salary” or “Amazon product manager compensation” into a search bar, you’re not alone. In 2025, product management continues to be one of the most lucrative and in-demand roles in tech. But compensation varies wildly depending on company, level, geography, and even negotiation skill. Don’t miss – The Ultimate Guide to Product Manager Interview Questions (with Sample Answers).

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What does it take to build world class products today? Ezinne & Oji Udezue (Co-Authors at ProductMind, ex-CPOs of Calendly, Typeform & WP Engine)

Mind the Product

What does it mean to build world-class products in the age of AI? In this episode, Randy Silver talks to Ezinne and Oji Udezue, co-authors of Building Rocketships, a playbook for building high-growth companies in today’s fast-evolving tech landscape. Together, they unpack what product looks like now, how AI changes collaboration, and why ambition, clarity, Read more » The post What does it take to build world class products today?

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Effective Risk Management: Balancing Safety, Compliance, and Opportunity

Effective risk management in product development balances safety, compliance, and opportunity. Risks can't be eliminated, but they can be mitigated through structured assessments, clear documentation, and expert guidance. Engaging specialists ensures efficiency, regulatory adherence, and product security while reducing costly oversights. A well-executed risk management plan includes frequent evaluations, defined assessment criteria, and a structured decision-making process.

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How Product Management Strategy Turns Struggles into Structure

Productside

Productside | Product Management Courses & Training How Product Management Strategy Turns Struggles into Structure We’ve worked with hundreds of teams stuck in reactive delivery cycles, constantly shipping features but never sure if they’re actually moving the needle. In our webinar, Chaos to Clarity , Kenny Kranseler and Tom Evans shared a fictional case study that hits close to home for many PMs: WellNest Health , a company with a strong reputation and a bloated backlog.

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[PATREON EXCLUSIVE] The Power of No: How to Say It, Mean It, and Lead with It

The Product Guy

Saying yes is easy. Saying no is what separates strategic product leaders from the rest. In this Roadmap to Mastery article from The Product Way Patreon , we focus on one of the most essential, high-stakes skills in product management: knowing when and how to say no — and making that decision stick. Inside the article: Why “no” is often the right answer, but rarely the comfortable one Five failure patterns that emerge when PMs avoid conflict and overcommit A practical framework for turning “no”

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How to build prototypes that actually look like your product | Colin Matthews (product leader, AI prototyping instructor at Maven)

Lenny Rachitsky

Watch or listen now: YouTube // Spotify // Apple Brought to you by: WorkOS —Make your app enterprise-ready today Notion —The best AI tools for work Colin Matthews is a product manager, founder, and hobbyist engineer. After spending the past eight years in healthtech, he recently left his role as a PM at Datavant to go full-time on building his own products.

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