One year Product Bakery! 🥳 Let's do a retrospective 🧐

Alex, advertising tobacco, alcohol and other things is not our mission at the Product Bakery. I think this cigarette that we're smoking right now in a dark park in Berlin is well deserved. First of all, people know that I smoke because I smoke all the time. People also know that we drink sometimes while we're recording. And yes, it's our anniversary. One year Product Bakery. Actually, we are one month too late because it was the 10th of September we started. I think it's a good time today to reflect on one year of podcasting, what we have learned, how we feel and where we want to go into the future. Let me just share. So we're currently sitting and that's what makes this session beautiful. There's the dog pooping. What makes this session especially nice. We're sitting in the same park where we had the initial idea of starting the Product Bakery, where it all started. We wanted to take this opportunity to take you outside with us. We just had the same burger again that we also had that day. So, yeah, a lot happened. I think it was a crazy year. It was the year where Covid hit us all. Nobody expected that. Our first sessions were in-person sessions. True, true. I mean, our very first episode we never launched because that was also recorded outside. And at the beginning, we weren't sure if we want to have this idea of always sitting outside and recording. But then we were a little bit unsure because of all the noises around. You maybe hear sometimes a firefighting car. So sorry for that. But we're not sorry. However, it's good that we didn't stick to the concept because otherwise with Corona, we wouldn't have launched a single episode. It's true as well. But yeah, Alex, I think it's quite a lot of content we have produced. And just from a personal growth product point of view, what are your takeaways? I learned how to launch a podcast. I'm launching a product. It's a lot of work. Yeah. I learned a lot about different tools. I think it was extremely interesting to also find things like Descript or Descript AI language processing and cutting for the podcast. I extremely well thought through product. At the same time, I think we've become a little bit better at interviewing people. And I think the most important thing and also one of the motivations why I wanted to launch a podcast is we had the chance to talk to a lot of extremely knowledgeable and experienced people. And I think the learnings that I took from that and like the growth that I also took from talking to a lot of like industry experts and people in the product world, that's probably the biggest point or the biggest takeaway, the biggest growth point that I took from Product Bakery. I have the feeling like with every episode we record and especially with every interview we do, I have the feeling that I'm every time becoming a much better product manager. And what many people maybe don't know is with... You're not a product manager, Christian. You're right. Product person. But it's also very important to know that we do our best to have in-depth interviews, to go into the details, to ask people to be as specific and as actionable as possible. However, the real talk is always before and after the episodes where you talk about stuff that you can't share, unfortunately, because we're all working in companies. There's always shit going on. There are always challenges you're facing, but it's so insightful to also see that leaders in the industry are still struggling with the same things. Even authors who are writing amazing books who realize, okay, as nice as it is to come up with the concept or the realization that Lean Startup is the way to go, there are still challenges you're facing and we're all humans. And it's also a nice humbling experience to not forget that at the end of the day, it's all about interactions. And that's something that you usually know, but still, it's very enlightening to see that even the very successful people have the same challenges. Yeah. And it's a good point because I think, especially as someone with a pretty strong imposter syndrome, you always think like everything or everyone else is doing things better. And you look at companies and you're like, oh my God, why are they so much better at craft, at launching products compared to the company that you're in? But at the same time, when you talk to those people, it's the same. It's like everyone struggles with the same. I mean, at the end, a business comes down to the people that work in there, it comes down to communication issues, it comes down to interpersonal problems. So I think it's also always a nice reminder of, okay, we're all trying to give our best. It's not perfect. There is no perfect solution out there, or there's no one out there who has the holy grail and builds the product by the book. Perfect is the enemy. Yeah, pretty much. So I think it also helped me a little bit like with the imposter syndrome, let's say. And also bringing it back to our podcast, at the beginning, we were asking ourselves, okay, why should we launch a podcast? There are so many podcasts out there. And some people, some of our friends asked us the same question. But here's the thing, whether you launch a new product, a new restaurant, a new platform, a new SaaS tool, or just a new podcast, there's always an audience who likes to hear what you have to say and who want to benefit from experience. At least I do that when I'm listening to podcasts. So it's also a big thank that I want to speak out to our audience, to people who regularly writing us emails, giving us feedback, sharing the episodes. It's just amazing to be with you. And we would love to continue to stay in touch. We will definitely not stop. So yeah, I'm just very grateful. Yeah. And we can also say that there was development, right? The way we planned the sessions and the way we organized everything, the way we run them. I think this summer you had to live with me and Christian talking a lot like on our own, or just having one-on-one chats and sessions. So yeah, I'm glad for everyone who sticks around the whole time. I'm glad for everyone who joined later. Maybe some people only were part of us, like at our initial journey, especially friends. I know a lot of my friends listen to the podcasts out of curiosity of what we're doing, but by now they're not listening to that. Obviously it's not their profession, so totally fair. But yeah. I think we should spend some minutes on the future of Product Bakery and giving a small outlook. Because a lot of stuff has happened. And the good thing is once you start such a project, you start realizing what people need, you get feedback. And based on that, we came out to the conclusion that there is much more than just a podcast. We can deliver much more value to people by sticking more around, doing more in-depth interviews. But also we just had a new idea a couple of minutes ago that we want to share because we thought, how can we stick even closer to you? And how can we give you more insights and more information? And we just thought... Don't say it. I say it. Otherwise we need to do it. Yeah, put the pressure on spot. And we thought we just want to launch a short PDF book, something small to just write down our experiences, some best practices on how to combine product and design. And I think, especially for the future episodes, I would like to stress more the point of product design collaboration and building up a product and experience that solves people's problem and at the same time also delivers the value to the business. Because it's all about surviving money, infrastructure, economics, and you need to find the way of the middle. So therefore, I think crafting something together will be a nice project in the next weeks and months to give it to the world. You guys keep an eye on the calendar. It's September 28 as we're recording this. And let's see how fast we get our ebook series done. And let's see how the feedback will be. And a reminder, there is the product-bakery.com website. So feel free to subscribe to our newsletter. We will start being more engageful and shooting out more content in the future. And whenever you have ideas or people that you think should join, even if it's yourself, we're more than happy to get in touch. You just use our website, reach out to us via our contact form. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn. We are more than happy to have conversations. And we were also thinking about doing more live coaching in the future. So if you are a product person, a design person, product manager, and you want to work on your personal development, it would be super cool to do it just live. And I mean, it's not easy sometimes to share company-specific information, but it would be cool to do some real-world examples and also that we can share our day-to-day coaching work. It always comes back to the fact that the podcast heavily relies on the people that listen to it. So it's also up to you. I mean, we read every message. We try to answer to every message that we get from you. So if you want to hear something, let us know. I think we're trying to adjust. The episodes are shorter now than they used to be in the past. Some of the candidates came through you. So thanks a lot also for making those connections and keep it up because that's what helps us also going. So one year, we will continue. Much more episodes are coming. And yeah, keep your eyes and ears peeled. Have a beautiful evening. Bye-bye.