Rockin’ it

What’s Next for Clearly Product

You help us decide!

Have you ever driven through Vacaville, CA in 93° heat with no air conditioning? Let me tell you, it wouldn’t be my first choice.

But exactly a year ago that’s exactly what Sandi MacPherson and I were doing as we made our way to a friend’s birthday in Tahoe.

We kept rolling down the windows to get some air flow and then rolling them back up in our excitement to hear each other. I always loved hearing about her day-to-day as a product founder, and she always found my challenges as a PM at a large company fascinating.

It dawned on us—if we were so curious about one another’s work life, other people in product would probably benefit from listening in, too. Why didn’t we start a podcast to share what we know!

The idea took hold like a wildfire and we starting brainstorming on format and content.

• Interviews with product people? No. That already exists, and it wouldn’t help us share what *we* know with product people around the world.
• Lectures or prepared discussion from us? No. That’s an epic amount of prep work for a monthly podcast. We knew we couldn’t keep that up.
• But what about a guided discussion…. What about a conversation around a preset piece of content? What about a book club? Bingo!

With the book club idea, we could read seminal books around product management skills and use that content to discuss how we use (or don’t use!) that skill in our day-to-day product work.

We set to work picking out the early topic areas and looking for books that would help us have productive conversations. Within the quarter, we launched our first episode featuring The Inmates Are Running The Asylum by Alan Cooper.

Since then, we have launched 7 full episodes and grown to over 4,000 monthly subscribers!

🎉Over 4,000 monthly subscribers! 🎉

Here’s what we covered so far:

(1) Working with engineers (2) Negotiation (3) Writing (4) Data (5) Data: Part II (6) People Management (7) Conversation (8) Creativity (Not yet released!)

Now we’re looking to you, our listeners to help us figure out what to cover next.

Here’s a (somewhat prioritized) list of topics we’re considering:

1. Human nature/psychology/bias (users)
2. Growth
3. Marketing
4. Accessibility/Localization/inclusive design
5. Machine Learning for PMs
6. Motivation / inspiring your teams/investors
7. Design Thinking
8. Productivity/time management
9. Roadmapping/planning
10. Systems Thinking
11. Grit/self-starting
12. Ethics
13. Networking/external relationships
14. Hiring/interviews
15. Career planning/management
16. Selling ideas

Here’s our ask:

We’d love your feedback on what you’d like to hear about, and any particular books in these areas that you would recommend.

Respond below or ping us on Twitter.

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