Host Roddy Knowles argues marketing, research, and design are all product management.
This is Product Management uses guest-led conversations to test a simple recurring claim: adjacent disciplines often are product management. Episodes turn investigative reporting, experience design, marketing to Black audiences, PLG, and relationship-building into practical operating lessons.
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This is Product Management is a one-on-one interview show; host Roddy Knowles (credited in places as Rodney Knowles) speaks with a different product, research, marketing, or CX practitioner each episode. The recurring format is a titled thesis — 'X is Product Management' — where the guest's specialty is argued to be a form of product management in disguise. Guests recur around a small set of professional profiles: UX researchers (e.g., a former police detective turned Twilio UX research lead), customer/employee experience designers, multicultural marketing researchers, product-led growth strategists, and senior product managers discussing career development. Episodes reference named frameworks introduced by guests, such as 'intentional vs. unintentional experience gaps,' 'positive realism' in marketing, and structured PLG rollout steps, along with real brand case studies like Fenty Beauty's 40-shade launch, Aldi's quarter-cart policy, and H&M's 2018 marketing misstep. Several episodes address representation and inclusion directly, covering focus-group equity for Black participants and inclusive product design principles. The show also touches on softer PM skills — stakeholder relationships, mentorship, and imposter syndrome — through guest career narratives. Episodes typically close with a personal recommendation from the guest, such as a book. Episodes run roughly 20 to 35 minutes and favor a conversational, single-thread structure over panel or narrative formats. The show is aimed at working product managers, UX researchers, and CX or marketing professionals looking for practitioner-level interviews rather than industry news or theory.
Made for: Practicing product managers, UX researchers, and CX or marketing professionals seeking practitioner interviews on research methods and product strategy.
What sets it apart: Each episode is built around proving a single adjacent discipline is 'really' product management, grounded in a named framework and specific brand case study rather than general PM advice.
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Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Roddy Knowles connects product strategy to the research, relationships, and cross-functional decisions that turn customer knowledge into business value.
This is Product Management follows product decisions beyond the roadmap and into the relationships, research, marketing, and organizational mechanics that shape them.
Customer research becomes detective work here, so you can build a case before making the call.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A useful case for treating product research like evidence gathering and translating it into business value.
Roddy Knowles brings Ari Zelmanow, head of UX research for Twilio's communications business, into a product conversation about evidence, influence, and value.
A grounded product conversation about using customer signals to find experience gaps before they harden into business problems.
Experience design is framed here as an operating discipline, not a layer of polish. Roddy Knowles' conversation with Tricia Houston, founder and COO of the Experience Build Group, keeps coming back to a practical idea: companies often already have clues about where customers or…
Pepper Miller makes multicultural marketing feel like product diligence, with cultural context tied directly to brand risk.
Marketing to Black audiences is framed as a product management issue, not a side brief for the comms team. Roddy Knowles gives Pepper Miller space to challenge the familiar "market to everyone" logic, then asks the budget question operators actually face: if resources are tight,…
A practical B2B product conversation on why customer trust can matter as much as the expansion model.
Roddy Knowles' conversation with Jamin Brazil frames product management less as a feature discipline than a customer relationship discipline. Brazil is strongest when he links account growth to trust: a company may start with one research tool, then add qualitative recruiting or…
A grounded PLG conversation about making self-serve growth work across product, sales, marketing, legal, and finance.
Product-led growth is framed here less as a product tactic than as a company-wide operating shift. Tiama's clearest point is that PLG touches every place a customer meets the business, so product, sales, marketing, legal, and finance all need to understand the strategy and their…
A grounded, people-first product management conversation about trust, mentorship, and making team work less brittle.
Relationship-building comes across here as practical product management work, not office nicety. Rodney Knowles marks the 300th episode of This is Product Management with Ranki Majikodumi, a Senior PM at PayPal, by focusing on the habits that make teams work better: lunches with…
Arvid Kahl walks through AI, data, and SaaS engineering decisions using his own product, PodScan.
Rob Marsh interviews copywriters on client acquisition, pricing, email, and persuasion tactics.
Ari Zelmanow treats research like evidence work.
Host Roddy Knowles interviews Tricia Houston, founder and COO of the Experience Build Group (EBG) within MMR Research Associates, about bridging customer and employee experience design.
Host Roddy Knowles interviews Pepper Miller, president of Hunter Miller Group and multicultural marketing researcher, on seven blind spots that lead brands to misunderstand and alienate Black American consumers.
Human relationships are the point here.
PLG is bigger than the product team.
Episode 300 opens on a milestone.