Your Product is a Joke - How to use Improv Comedy Principles in Product Management (with Amogh Sarda, Co-founder @ Eesel)

One Knight in Product

About the Episode

An interview with Amogh Sarda. Amogh is a former Atlassian and Intercom product manager turned company founder with Eesel, a company that aims to take the pain away from managing your documents. He's also a keen improv comedian, and believes there are similarities between how you create an improv skit and how you make a winning product.

We speak about a lot, including:

• The story behind founding Eesel, how they're trying to make finding your own documents as easy as finding President Obama's shoe size, and whether they can save us from Slack thread hell
• The pros & cons of starting a company with a founder who lives 10 hours' time difference away, and how to make it work for you
• The jump from big structured product company to startup life, how you have to identify your ground truths as well as accept the layers of uncertainty that will evolve as you go and making sure you don't change everything all the time
• How you should bring nuance to product principles, what this means and why sometimes it's worth spending some time in the solution space and working back to the problems
• His love of improv comedy, how he got into it, and how it maps to product management practices more than you might think:
  • The base reality - working out where you're at and the unarguable truths of your situation
  • The game - the key insights or ways that you can affect the base reality
  • The funny scene / a great product - executing and bringing it all home
  • The importance of keeping it simple, not getting sidetracked or going after everything you could

And much more!

A brief interruption from my sponsor - me!

I'm terrible at asking for money but if you would like to throw any spare change at me to prevent me having to read out tiresome generic podcast ads, you can buy me a coffee. If not, I love you all anyway!

Contact Amogh

You can find Amogh on Twitter or check his blog, The Paperclip.