Build with Maggie Crowley

Experience and a fancy degree can only get you so far.    If you've listened to Drifts founder and CEO David Cancel on Seeking Wisdom, you've probably caught that he doesn't exactly love hiring product managers with experience and those with their MBAs. They don't give you the right to tell people what to do; all they can do is help you get your foot in the door (he says).   But that's where Maggie breaks the mold...

What do you do about failure? I’m not talking about a test that you took that failed. I’m talking about true product failures. Products that, for whatever reason, just bombed. Failures far outside the acceptable scope of “fail fast.”

Every employee wants to feel like they’re a part of a truly autonomous team. A team where they’re a part of the decision making process. A team where their voice matters. Where their opinions can make a difference. Maybe you’ve never been a part of a team like this. Or maybe you’ve only been a part of teams like this. Regardless, autonomy is something that everybody wants. But what does it look like in the real world?

In this one, Maggie shares a recent Tweet that got her the most impressions she’s ever had—and her first internet troll. It went something like this: “Stop wasting time talking about tools and backlogs. It doesn’t matter. Go talk to your sales team, figure out what hurdles they’re running into, and solve for them.” Listen in to hear why this struck such a nerve in the product community. On Twitter @maggiecrowley and @seekingwisomio

The most important thing we can all do as product people is also something that most of us continue to fail at: talking to customers. Getting customer feedback is an example of something that’s simple, but not easy. It’s incredible that talking to customers and getting feedback is the one thing that we all know is the key to building great products—but apparently we don’t all do it...

In this one Pratima Arora, Head of Product at Confluence, discussed how she scaled two product teams - one for Salesforce and one for Atlassian, bringing genuine diversity to her teams at both companies in the process.

Maybe you're in product dev, maybe you’re in marketing. Either way, you have customers, and your goal is to provide value for them, drive revenue, and surpass goals. Chances are, you’ve seen someone miss it. Maybe you’ve missed it. Sandhya’s path went from IIT Bombay to Stanford GSB, to founding her own startup to her current role as VP of Marketing at Amplitude. She’s never really been one to miss it...

Pluralsight's Nate Walkingshaw literally wrote the book on product leadership. On this episode of Build, Nate dives into the importance of empathy in product and how his own background as an EMT helped him build more empathetic, more intuitive products. Plus, Nate shares his framework for the "product heart" – all of the key elements for what a healthy product should look like...

It’s a special episode of #Build. Host Maggie Crowley is joined by members of Drift’s Product and Engineering teams. Meet Alexa Nguyen, Senior Product Manager, Trevor Rundell, Director of Engineering, and Peter Karl II, Lead, Product Efficiency. The group chats through how product and engineering can work together most efficiently. That means breaking through the perception that engineers should be wholly removed from the customer...

On today’s episode of #Build, host Maggie Crowley sits down with Joff Redfern, VP of Product at Atlassian. Together they talk through Joff’s time as VP of Product at LinkedIn, building a product org from 12 people to 650, the concept of a shipyard, why talent is priority 0, why he chose to join Atlassian and much more. Before you go leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review and share the pod with your friends! Be sure to check out more insights on the Drift blog at drift...