In this episode, Brian Anderson interviews Michael Sacca, founder of Rocketship.fm—the very popular digital product management podcast—and vice president of product at Dribbble, the leading destination to find and showcase creative work for design professionals.

Michael had an interesting introduction to the industry. About 20 years ago, he moved to Los Angeles to work in the music business. While struggling to find a job, his roommate taught him PHP coding. Michael began taking his roommate’s freelance scraps, and found that design was where he had the most natural inclination. He built up a small agency that worked for Scholastic, GE, and Kobe Bryant.

From there, Michael joined Crew, working on experimental products as the company developed the highly successful Unsplash—which later was acquired by Dribbble. Along the way, the holistic insight Michael gained built him into a great product leader.

Michael thinks of the product mindset as solving the problems of businesses, becoming the focal point of companies’ revenue generation. He sees product teams quickly becoming the foundation of organizations and product leaders as the people who have to balance the needs of the board, customers, CEO, marketing and sales teams, and much more.

The two then dive into the main players in a solid product team before analyzing the importance of scaling appropriately for growth and discussing product management frameworks.

Michael shares several examples when the product and engineering relationship has gone wrong—typically because one team doesn’t feel bought into the solution or when people want to build stuff just because they think it’s cool.

Finally, Michael provides advice on how he sources product engineers and designers via contractor networks and freelance agencies.

We thank Michael for his time on the Augusto Podcast and wish him the best of luck in all his future projects!

Augusto Digital focuses on custom software design and development, cloud computing, and support solutions to enable our clients to realize their digital vision in Healthcare, financial services, logistics, and manufacturing.