Killing Zombies – Lisa Long on The Product Experience

Ash Williams (Evil Dead); Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita and Little Rock (Zombieland); Shaun (Shaun of the Dead); Alice (Resident Evil); Lisa Long (ProductTank).  All have killed zombies, and entertained us as they did so…  but only Lisa did so on stage at London’s ProductTank, giving us practical advice on how to kill off zombie features and products – and why it’s absolutely necessary to do so.
Quotes of the Episode
The best thing that you can do is to not build something… If there’s a way you can figure out, “Hey, we should not build this feature” in the first place, or this isn’t a place we should go – that’s a wonderful situation.
Listen if you’d like to learn more about

* How to build new products with discipline, or manage legacy products productively
* The ‘Build a Widget, Get a Cookie’ theory of things
* Killing zombies

Links mentioned in this episode

* Follow Lisa on Twitter and join her at ProductTank Oslo
* Play Zombies, Run! and keep up with everything else Six to Start is up to.
* Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale episode with Slack’s Stewart Butterfield, ‘The Big Pivot‘

Hosts
The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.
Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. Lily has spent 13 years in the tech industry working mainly with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She has worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank in Bristol, the Product Managers’ meetup with regular events and talks on Product now with 800+ members and growing. This year Lily will be launching ProductCamp in Bristol and she joins the MTP team as co-host of The Product Experience podcast.
A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. After launching Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, Randy has worked with museums and arts groups, online education, media & entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. He’s spoken at Mind the Product Engage (Hamburg and Manchester), at a number of ProductTanks (London, Zurich, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford, and Brighton… so far!) and at conferences across the US and Europe.

Music
Our theme music is from Hamburg-based Pau, featuring ProductTank Hamburg’s own Arne Kittler on bass. Listen to more on their Facebook page
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