All kinds of exciting
Finishing the year with a plate full of fun things
🎙️ New Episode
There's a very small number of people who impacted the trajectory of my career and Gib Biddle is on that list.
A decade ago, Gib joined Life360 as an Interim Chief Product Officer for 3 days a week. His goals were to level up the entire product function at the company, pull us out of the weeds to think about product strategy, and become more hypothesis-driven.
While I was a pretty junior member of the team at that point, I enjoyed full access to Gib through his product review sessions, 1:1 coffees, and his afternoon talks where he tried out new formats with the product team, his guinea pigs. I was a sponge, the osmosis was strong, and the learning was rapid.
I learned so much from Gib about tradeoffs, goal-setting, experimentation, user research, and more. But most importantly, Gib was a role model for a different kind of success: he was the first truly successful exec I met who also seemed to be fully enjoying life professionally and personally at the same time. His way of life was inspiring.
That's why this week's episode of the podcast is a special one.
In this conversation, Marc Baselga and I went deep with Gibson Biddle on:
⛰️ Gib’s transition from traditional product roles to fractional CPO work
⛰️ The motivation behind semi-retirement and redefining success personally and professionally
⛰️ Strategies for scaling impact as a product leader through content, including talks and courses
⛰️ The importance of structured feedback and how Gib uses NPS to improve his presentations
⛰️ How Gib engages audiences in both in-person and virtual settings
⛰️ Key lessons from organizing the Product Leader Summit and what makes it unique
⛰️ Insights from Gib’s first cohort on Maven and his plans for future workshops
⛰️ Reflections on balancing life and work through meaningful experiments and adventures
⛰️ And more!
If you're looking to learn more about life outside the "traditional" route, this episode is for you.
Check it out here 👇
The Supra Insider podcast continues to be a labor of love for me. It’s a way to have conversations that just wouldn’t happen otherwise. We have some exciting guests scheduled for the rest of the year so if you want more of this kind of content, be sure to subscribe/follow.
Maven Course
Another area that I’ve been enjoying is my Maven course. A few weeks ago I wrapped up the second cohort, which also had 15 students (same as the first cohort). I made some large updates to the structure of the course to generate more value and the reviews indicate that it was successful.
I’ve opened enrollment for the third cohort starting in January so if you know anyone planning to interview for PM roles at big tech companies that use Product Sense and Analytical Thinking interviews (e.g. Meta) in 2025, my course will help.
If you enroll by the end of the week, you’ll get a 25% discount as part of Maven’s seasonal promotion. Here’s a link with the promo auto-applied.
Journaling Project
I have been writing consistently in some form since 2011, both privately and publicly. It’s been incredibly valuable for me to understand my own thoughts and to express myself better.
Recently a couple friends and I hacked together a prototype of a new journaling product that helps you understand yourself better through writing and I’m already benefitting from it.
Here’s a story about how the product helped me in the last week:
By analyzing my writing, the product was able to pinpoint an emotion that never shows up in my entries: anger.
The product educated me about the likelihood that I’m repressing anger and the dangers associated with not embracing anger more consciously.
I thought about Gaia, my 2 year old daughter, and how I want her to feel 100% comfortable with all of her emotions. I would be a hypocrite not to sit with my anger.
Yesterday, I had a very therapeutic journaling session where I was able to connect the dots between my anger and some difficult childhood memories around assimilating into an Israeli classroom as a six year old who didn’t speak any Hebrew. I never made the connection between my anger issues and that experience.
I haven’t been this excited about building a product for a long time.
If you’re looking to better understand yourself through writing and want to share feedback on the alpha product, just reply to this email. We’ll be ready to start onboarding friendlies in December.
This wouldn’t be a complete post if I didn’t share a bit of what I’m loving about my life outside of podcasts and projects.
Gaia is turning 2 in January and is an absolute pleasure to be around. She’s also starting to develop a trademark sneaky/devious look 🤣
And I took a couple days off in recent weeks to do some nature hikes with George. The nature outside of NYC is not as accessible as what we had in SF but it’s extremely beautiful and grounding for me.
And Carole once again crushed the Halloween game with the group costume from The Little Mermaid.
That’s all for now - thanks for reading 🙏
