Starting a podcast as a Product Team 🥐

Hello again and welcome to the Product Bakery. My name is Christian and I'm here today with Alex my dear co-host. Hi Alex. Hi Christian. So I hope you had a great Easter break. Absolutely I had just got back actually from my nice trip through Turkey. I feel like I'm still traveling a bit too much but yeah everything Corona free and tested. I'm happy to be back to reality. What about you Christian? Me too. I am also back from a nice relaxing weekend but yeah I think as you it hit me today with going back to work and taking care of what needs to be taken care of. But before we get started Alex I want to say thank you to our audience for the amount of follows likes and also comments on our website and for sure I want to emphasize you to continue doing so and sharing our content to grow and grow even faster. Alex I think we promised a while ago to talk about how we got started with the podcast from a product management and design point of view. And I thought we should keep our promise and start sharing how we got started with the podcast back then. So how to launch your podcast as a great from a product management and design point of view. Our product manager launches products. I think we see anyway more and more podcasts being launched and I guess thanks to Corona or because of Corona I don't think we should thank Corona. But it's definitely a format that is getting even more popularity than it used to already have. Yeah super excited to share a little bit more and maybe get some people inspired to share their stories with everyone. And I remember I started listening to podcast in 2012. It's quite a while ago. I also had a couple of breaks in between but yeah I remember. What did you use in 2012? iTunes. Oh yeah of course they always had their podcast. Back then you had the iTunes app that was actually used for everything. And yeah there was a German podcast called Bits und so and they were talking about Apple products, Apple software updates. I think there were three guys back then and there was no function of listening into double speed. So I was just taking one hour, one and a half hours and listening to their conversations and trying to be as updated as possible on Apple products and the software. So that's how I got started. But it's also interesting to see how that has shifted because back then I was only listening to one podcast and these days people are listening to more than one except the product bakery I would say. How many podcasts are you currently listening to Christian? So right now two. How about you? Which ones? So apart from the product bakery you mean? You're listening to our podcast? I think I cannot count that but I'm listening actually two German podcasts. So one is from Christian Bischoff. It's a motivating podcast from a coach as well as Gemischte Zeitung if I want to laugh and here's some trash talk. Nice. I also have to say right now I'm taking a break from product design organizational podcast because sometimes it's just like too much. Actually I shouldn't say that, right? I mean it depends, right? You have to listen to our voice as well when editing. I have to say I also listen to different kinds of podcasts. I have this podcast when I'm outside going for a walk where I want to listen to something lightweight and something more fun. So I'm listening to my favorite comedians here around. And then it also depends. I honestly sometimes go and simply search for specific topics that I'm curious about and listen to single episodes besides the ones that I'm following. There's a podcast around investments that I'm following at the moment like general financial markets. There's one around cryptocurrencies like especially the smaller coins. I forgot to mention that. Yeah, I do the same. I listen to some but not specific ones but whenever I see some good podcast recommendations on Twitter regarding crypto investments I just pick them up. Yeah and I think there's this difference, right? Do we want to consume knowledge? Do we want to listen to some people because I care about what they say and or do I simply want to follow some conversations which makes me feel like I'm sitting in the room with some guys and listening to whatever they're talking to. Yeah, I think there's something for everyone but we wanted to tell you how we started the product bakery and I guess if you've been following our first episodes we mentioned that we were sitting in a park having our burger whatever but that's only where the story started. That's where we had the idea but from there how did we make it happen? And I think also why did we sit together to talk about it at some point, right? Because the problem that I was facing back then when I was listening to products and design podcasts I was realizing that quite often there are discussions around the perfect world and the perfect state and how very amazing and successful companies are interacting which is at one point very inspiring but on the other hand I was sometimes like okay but how do I get there and I was always missing like the podcast that goes really into the depth that helps me to really understand the little steps and the little nitty-gritty things you have to do in order to get there. I think that was back then my motivation to get started with a podcast even though I would say sometimes we do it better sometimes not but the goal is to provide the extra mile of information that you maybe don't get when you listen to or read a book like Inspired which is super nice but also very high level. So Christian you're the product manager between us so as a proper product manager what are the steps that we took or that someone has to take if they have an idea and they want to make it real right and they want to start their own podcast? I would say you and I we were lucky because we had immediately the branding so we know product bakery it's a nice name it's nowhere on the internet so just took it and that's what we actually did. Right after our conversation I went back I just bought the domain I just set up a gsuit account I set up some email addresses and apart from that a google folder structure a reference for our episodes for our interview guests a little bit of documentation from our side and next to that the last thing that I was doing back then was just setting up an empty Trello board. I didn't know what to do with it but I knew that you will. Yeah of course a product manager needs a project management tool but yeah this takes off a little bit like one of the first steps right the organizational part or let's say having the domain having a name having the branding around it as lo-fi as we made it and it still is. We took it we took the low fidelity very literal and when we created our croissant but yeah I guess from there there are a couple of important steps right I mean our concept was that we invite people and that we talk to people so we needed to have these people and I think one of the first steps that we then did in this Trello board besides having our classic to-dos which we then separated and and I think like everyone who works in sales would think at it like a little bit like as a sales pipeline but we created this board where we had some ideas around potential candidates let's call them leads and then the different stages also of how do we reach out to them how do we schedule them when do we record with them what are the topics we thought also about a process of okay how do you work with interviewees and guests to make sure that we tackle the topics that they're currently interested in or that are currently top of their minds how does it fit our overall concepts and so on up to the final podcast launch and I think one big step for us was also understanding what does it mean to even record a podcast and yeah and I think here also apart from product manager and product designer I would say I mean you and I we are a team and if we see this as a kind of entrepreneurial project or however you call it right so you have two founders in quotes you have two different types of personalities and therefore we also split up our work I focus a lot on reaching out to people and spamming them until they say yes I join leave me alone but that's what that's what you can do best right exactly that's what I can do best and on the other hand you spend a lot of time in researching the tools and understanding how we can cut episodes and what's the best way to record and what is the best hardware to use while I'm sometimes not the best person doing so we just naturally identified actually without talking we just did it so you just told me hey Christian I'm going to take care of that and I said okay I'm going to reach out to people and we just started realizing we both have our strengths in certain areas and we just try to make it work yeah and I think it's it's also a little bit like the bias to action right it wasn't about okay who would like under which role it falls and I think yeah small I'm now using the metaphor of a startup but small teams usually don't look at okay whose responsibility is it they simply do things and then it comes a little bit natural and I think this is also a little bit like the idea behind having cross-functional and small teams that can act fast and be agile or lean I think lean is the right word yeah and I think that's a little bit like how we did it what should we talk about Christian should I talk about tools uh is that relevant should we talk about you tell me we should both talk about it no I think one thing that it's also maybe interesting to share is the the way of iterating and the way of so tooling is definitely very important but it goes a little bit hand in hand to me on the format that we're planning because we said we definitely want to do interviews with experts or people who are very deep in certain topics like a couple of weeks ago we talked to uh Matthias Kluger who gave us deep insights on churn or since a while ago we we talked to to Marco Saffelner from Bitmoving about stakeholder management and pricing we thought it's really nice to have conversations that go very deep and also sometimes uh more high level but then we realized we could do more at the moment we are launching twice a week so we're having also the conversations between you and me where we're experimenting with different formats for example recently we just picked up stuff that is happening in our day-to-day business but you just came up with the idea of product reviews exactly yeah yeah and i think it's a good point right that's it's also a little bit about we are all not really podcast professionals like we didn't have a single clue it was terrible for me to listen to my own voice in the first episode oh super awkward i think now it's getting a little bit more yeah you start you get more comfortable with it over time but obviously we followed this approach of like just getting started and i think that was also important for me to not like over plan it because i think otherwise i would like knowing myself also i would have never done it and i think as we simply started inviting people and figuring it out on the way and then we said it from the beginning let's keep it iterative let's follow test and learn mvp kind of approach and yeah the product reviews were just like an idea i mean we are all working with different products and different tools all the time and i think besides use cases and let's say theory also on on how to approach product development as a product manager as a product designer as a developer agent coach whatsoever it might also be interesting to to simply take tools and look at them and look at okay what was the job to be done that they were trying to solve how did they solve it what is good what is maybe bad i don't know and i think as as i said we see so many things that sometimes it's actually really interesting also to have a professional conversation around that one so i think it's also a good idea to sometimes just hate and blame products that just fucking suck yeah not not to destroy the people just to inspire them to improve their products and productive feedback in a different way which leaves us again too right we're always super happy when someone writes us an email or leaves some comments right on on how we can improve because as i said we are learning we're changing the format we're not religious about it we are not like i don't know we have no famous names or something that we can or that we have to stick to and follow religiously yeah for us it's a little bit for us it's a fun project and it's really nice to meet great people and we are slowly getting more comfortable to talking to a microphone knowing that people are listening to us yeah but the community effect is something that i love because since we started we connected to many people who reached out to us gave us a lot of feedback on things we can do people we can talk to things that can be improved so it makes a lot of fun to just grow when it comes to meeting people and also getting input and inspiration and just that you mentioned at the beginning this topic of cryptocurrencies i see a lot of similarity there because the whole product roadmap of cryptocurrencies is defined and decided by communities so they vote on what should be built next and that's also what we're doing with our podcast is talking to people getting the feedback and then just adjusting and changing the plan if needed so if you like one of our formats or if you would like to see a different format you can always reach out to us and give us some input and yeah share some wishes and thoughts around if you want us to just like shut up because you think that we talk too much with that thank you very much and goodbye