The Product Perspective

The episode recycles well-known PM curriculum (OKRs, RICE, MoSCoW) with one reasonably concrete Invoice2Go anecdote, but offers very few non-obvious insights per minute. Large chunks of runtime are consumed by the host's self-referential tangents about Userback, further diluting density.

“I think a really good starting point for prioritization is getting a grapple on what the company's strategy and objectives are and how you contribute to their success”

“I think the most important thing here is to ensure that you keep delivering small incremental value to your customers. This means breaking down your features into really small increments and shipping often”

Almost every idea presented is a textbook PM framework (OKRs, RICE, MoSCoW, customer personas) that circulates constantly in product communities, with no contrarian, first-principles, or counterintuitive arguments offered. Even the book recommendation is a decade-old mainstream title.

“I think a common one is rice. So RICE stands for reach, impact, confidence and effort.”

“I think a really good book, uh, about decision making in general, uh, is decisive by the, um, Heat brothers.”

Gil Pollock is a genuine practitioner with real cross-industry operator experience and a current senior role at ING Australia, which gives him credibility, but he is a mid-senior PM rather than an exceptional-caliber operator who has built and scaled something at a remarkable level.

“Gil has been in and around product management for over a decade across Australia, um, and the US Building solutions for customers across fintech, uh, health tech and B2B SaaS”

“when I first joined Invoice2go, I was an IC and my challenge was to diversify the company away from just being a one product company”

The Invoice2Go OKR cascade and RICE prototype-testing stories name a real company and reference concrete artefacts (estimate approval rate, payment revenue target), but numbers are explicitly acknowledged as paraphrased and the prototype outcomes are described only qualitatively.

“he set an objective, you know, get payments to be equal to our SaaS revenue, get payments, revenue. Uh, the key result would have been, and I'm paraphrasing but something like, you know, 20% revenue 20 year on year”

“the engineering team Worked out that if we are to build this, it's a ton of work. So just using that RICE framework, this scored really poorly”

The host routinely converts questions into lengthy monologues about his own company's roadmapping process, never challenges a claim, and asks only generic PM prompts; there is no productive disagreement, no probing follow-up, and no pressure applied to any assertion the guest makes.

“So here at User Back we actually um, kind of timely for this chat, but we had a Roadmaping discussion yesterday. And um, in that roadmapping discussion the question or we're basically looking at what are we doing over the next 12 months?”

“Um, I have 100% learned some new things, um, in this episode and I think our listeners will have as well.”