Product Agility

Jason Knight: Product Management Isn’t Like the Books — and That’s Okay - Productised 2025 TalkInTen

• Ben Maynard, Barbara Fazeka, Jason Knight

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Live from Productized Lisbon: The Productized conference in Lisbon, Portugal is one of the most energising gatherings for product leaders — insightful, practical and human. We’re honoured to partner with Productized for this series and grateful to Bobcats Coding for making our Lisbon episodes possible.

Welcome to a concentrated Talking 10 from Lisbon: we sit in the Cloudflare offices with Jason Knight and Barbara (co‑host and CEO of Bobcats) to unpack why product management rarely matches the tidy frameworks in books — and why that’s not a failure, it’s the reality of making change in real organisations.

Key topics discussed:

  • Why product books are useful but often idealised
  • How to make peace with imperfect organisations and still deliver
  • Translating product thinking into language that stakeholders care about
  • Practical advice for startups deciding how (or whether) to use AI
  • Ethics of experimentation and not treating users as test subjects


Guest bio:

Jason Knight is a product coach, consultant and host of the One Night in Product podcast. He helps teams translate product theory into practical change while navigating real organisational constraints. Co‑host Barbara is co‑founder and CEO of Bobcats Coding, a Lisbon and Budapest-based digital product studio specialising in AI engineering and end‑to‑end product development.


Thank you to our sponsor Bobcats Coding — download their new AI economics guidebook at bobcatscoding.com and learn more about their work. We’re proud to partner with Productized Lisbon for another exceptional year.

Thanks to Bobcats Coding for supporting this Lisbon series.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Product Agility Podcast

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Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast where we explore the ever changing world of product leadership and org design, helping you navigate complexity and build better outcomes for your people and your customers. This week we're coming to you live from Lisbon for the third year in a row at the Productize conference where I'm grabbing 10 minute conversations with product thinkers, leaders and innovators from around the world. These quick fire chats are all about what's shaping our industry right now, from AI and product strategy to the human side of building great products. Now a huge thank you goes out to Bobcatz Coding for making this Lisbon series possible. Bobcats is a Budapest and Lisbon based digital product studio specializing in AI engineering and end to end digital product development. They're also on a mission to educate the market, exploring a new topic every six months and this fall is no exception. Their latest AI economics guidebook is out now and you can download it for free@bobcatscoding.com now here's your talking 10. So we find ourselves not in the usual conference center. We are in the Cloudflare offices at a moment there. Cloudflare. Looking behind me to see it and the massive sign over there as well. In the Cloudflare offices where it's the leaders day for Productise 2025 and I'm with two leaders who are far, far more accomplished than I think I'd ever dreamed to be. One of these leaders, my co host, Barbara, co founder and CEO of Bobcats. Do you want to say hello, Barbara? Yeah, you said it exactly right. And thank you for having me. I'm very excited about this conversation. And the other leader, leader of podcasts is somebody I've always wanted to meet and was never expecting to get an invite onto the podcast. So it's nice to have you on mine. Is that the one Only Jason Knight. Jason, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. And I can only say that most people who dream of meeting me are very disappointed halfway through meeting me. So I'm hoping that, you know, we get to at least by the end before you get disappointed. Oh no, it came very quickly actually, so I think we're fine. No, I'm joking. No, it only is an honor. We got there, we got there. It's an honor. I think your podcast is fantastic and the people you get on there, fantastic. And if you haven't heard One Night in product, do look it up. Subscribe. It's definitely, it's definitely a podcast. It's been going for a little Bit longer than yours, I think. But yeah, we both put good shifts in like we were just talking about before. So, yeah, I think we both deserve a. Not a pat on the back at the moment because it'll muck up the microphones, but we can pat each other in the back afterwards. Nice mutual backpacking. Anyway, we haven't got a lot of time because this is the talking 10 for your talk, Mr. Jason Knight, which is product management isn't like the books, and that's okay. Could you tell our listeners a little bit then about what your talk's about? Yes. So, so alongside being the best or joint best podcast host in the product space. Sorry, Lenny. So, yeah, so alongside the podcast, I also do a bunch of coaching and consulting work and just working with a lot of companies. And one pattern I see again and again, well, it's kind of two patterns, one of which is the fact that companies just don't work like a lot of these books say. And secondly, a lot of people are getting depressed about it. So from my perspective, it's not just about, for example, giving up and saying, well, actually, yeah, that's fine, just go and do what you want. But it's about trying to help people understand that these books are almost like points in time or frameworks that people have seen work once or twice and they really want people to do them again. And they kind of come out and tell the world about them, but they never got to do them in all the places that they worked at, quite obviously, because so many companies don't work like that. All of the things from a book, just try and do some of the things from the book and sort of, you know, basically build and iterate and try and kind of create change step by step versus saying that you're failing if you haven't done all of the things in all of the books. Because there are too many books. And most of them paint a relatively rosy picture about how much you can actually get done in a company that maybe isn't, you know, perfect or, you know, product first or all these other kind of words that get chopped around. So I kind of just want people to make peace with product management a little bit and just basically get down to doing the work and doing their best and iterating that change rather than not doing anything because they're like, well, this place sucks because this book said it should be like this and it's not. The problem is in so many of the books, and this goes back to many, many years ago when a friend of mine wrote a book. And if he listens to this, and I have an interesting conversation with him afterwards. But it's when people hit upon what they think is a pattern or a framework and then look to history to prove the evidence of the thing that they fought up. And when someone says to have you ever actually done the thing from scratch numerous times and seen the output that, oh, no. But Kodak, it's always Kodak, who invented a digital camera but didn't then do anything about it. And I think the books are a problem. They're great for inspiration, but they are really problematical. Is there any particular pattern that you've seen in this lovely idealized future state that the books present and then the reality? I think, and this is something that it's not just me that thinks this, but there's just this idea that it's almost like it's kind of going back to that same point, like that people just see a list of principles or a list of activities, as you say, in some cases, kind of someone's drawn a circle around them after the fact and made them into a framework because they thought that it worked. Well, I guess what I see, though, is that people that aren't in product, they just don't care about that and they don't care about it on those terms. So you sit there and you've got this kind of CFO or CEO or someone else from a company that's maybe not quite so product focused yet. And you sit there and you say, well, actually, and I've done this myself, by the way, in the past, trying to win the battle if it's not working the way you want it. Winning the battle on principles and kind of book talk. Well, Marty Kagan said to do this, or whoever, Theresa Torres said to do this. And you think that that's somehow going to win you the argument with someone that doesn't believe in any of this stuff, has never read any of the books, doesn't really naturally trust all of the things that these people are saying because their mindset is different. So I see people trying to persuade skeptical stakeholders based on principles and kind of words that don't make sense to them, vocabulary that doesn't make sense to them, principles that don't make sense to them, rather than trying to translate stuff into things that these people already care about. It's a big thing that I'm always trying to get people to do, frame things in ways that people already care about because it's much easier to make people care or try to fix things that they care about already versus trying to get them to care about something and then also care about the solution. I have a related question here because I assume that AI makes this game even more tricky, am I right? Sure. Benefits and disadvantages, as with everything. Yeah. And so my question is actually I'm interested in your opinion about the dilemma because at Bobcats we are building a lot of AI driven products and Sam Altman has a statement that there are two ways for startups to go. And I read you are in startup mentorship programs, they can bet on building a fairly functional MVP on the existing functionalities of AI or, or they are betting on that it's going to develop in an exponential way. So they are creating MVPs with like low technical functionality, hoping that in the meantime one of the big players will go to market with a more developed LLM. What do you see on this? Like how startups are. Could be a big long question which I'm sure I'll get kicked in the feet if I, if I talk too long about it. But I think for me the big thing that I always go back to. And we'll probably talk about this later in the panel talk as well, just pick a problem and try and solve it really well, either with or without AI. I know that there's investor pressure and board pressure and all these other types of pressure, but you know, just do your best to actually focus on an actual problem that needs to be solved rather than just try and do what so many people do at the moment, which is just cram AI into everything. And to your point, betting on the inevitable future rise and exponential rise of LLMs, which I don't think. I'm not going to say that it's not going to happen, but it's also not definitely going to happen. Like there are limits to these things. So you know, be realistic, do what you can, but focus relentlessly on. And I say this to startups as well, you can put AI into your products as much as you want, but make sure you're doing it for the right reason rather than just cramming because I see too many people cramming at. The moment AI for impact rather than just because it's a thing to use. Solve a problem, solve problem. That's what we're here for. We're not here just to, no matter what people on LinkedIn and other places might say. We're not just here to cram tech into our platforms and build loads of useless MVPs that don't go anywhere and experiment on our users Saw someone the other day saying, oh, it doesn't matter if the products are good, we just need to be able to experiment with them. Okay, but we're experimenting on users. People are logging in, they're paying for this stuff and you're sitting there saying, oh, well, oh, it's okay. It doesn't matter if it's crap. Yeah, you can swear you like, mate. It doesn't matter. Well, it's not me swearing again. It doesn't matter if it's crap. It just, it just matters that you do it and try it. I don't want to be tested on and I'm pretty sure that most of the users don't either. So, yeah, just again, pick a problem, something important, solve it the best way. If it's AI, brilliant if it's not, do it that way. Kind of fundamental product management for me. Well, our time is up. We've gone over a little bit, but I think it's worth it because that's probably one of the most content dense talking 10 we've had so much covered. Content dense. High content density is what we're after, you see on these episodes. Exactly. Anyway, before I digress, to talk about how we don't know if that's possible stats, it's been so great to have you here. Jason and Barbara, so nice to co host with you for the first time. Thank you for having me. And now we are lucky because we can go and grab a coffee with Jason and continue this talk. Well, you two like, I'm going to edit the episode. Everyone, thank you very much. Listen to us, another talking 10. We've got loads more to come. Jason and Barbara, thank you so much.

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Ben Maynard

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