Platform Product Management & Getting Ready for Launch Day

About the Episode

An interview with John Zilch. John is Director of Product Management at Upland, adjunct professor at Providence College and founder of Launch Day, a new startup that’s aiming to take the pain out of launching new products to market.

We talk about a lot, including:

• The pros & cons of working as a platform product manager and integrating various product lines & features into a new platform
• When it’s appropriate to replatform and when not, and whether a platform product manager gets a lot of customer contact
• John’s journey into product management from a computer science background and how, like everyone, he kind of fell into it, and how analysts get more love than PMs
• How his dissatisfaction with the way software gets launched led him and a former colleague to build their own platform to make it better
• Why he’s started teaching at Providence College, how teaching is the best way to learn, and how academia is a fertile ground for hiring the best talent
• What he thought of Marty Cagan’s <a href=‘https://svpg.com/the-mba-pathology/’ target=‘_blank’’>recent takedown of MBAs, why he’s tired of everyone being against them, and what they’re good for
• Why there’s a problem with experimentation culture and why it shouldn’t be a replacement for good customer discovery
• How’s it’s OK to do things that don’t scale as long as you have a plan to make sure that it can scale in the future
• The problem with people concentrating on “Agile” as a method of delivery rather than a way to get close to customers

And much more!

Contact John

You can check out the Launch Day website or connect with John on LinkedIn or Twitter.