Jason Knight

Transforming your Product Teams: Fractional Product Leader | Coach | Podcaster | Community Builder

Product management books might be lying to you. Reality can be messy. I help organisations navigate that mess to build product teams that actually deliver impact.

As a B2B Product Consultant and Fractional CPO, I bring over 20 years of experience - ranging from technical leadership at global firms like GfK to leading product strategy for high-growth scale-ups. My perspective is further sharpened by hosting "One Knight in Product," where I’ve interviewed hundreds of the world’s leading product minds to capitalise on what actually works in the real world.

How I can help your organisation: 

🎯 Fractional Product Leadership: Revitalising your product team and connecting strategy to execution.
🎯 Organisational Assessments: Deep-dive audits into your company’s "how" to provide actionable advice on transformation. 
🎯 Group Workshops: Practical, context-aware training for teams that need to shift from "feature factory" to outcome-driven delivery. 
🎯 Leadership Coaching: Working 1-on-1 with leaders to help them become true strategic partners to the business.

I am currently a mentor for Google for Startups and ULTRA.VC, helping early-stage companies find product/market fit and build winning strategies.

📩 DM me here on LinkedIn 
🎙 Listen to the podcast: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com
📅 Book a discovery call: https://okip.link/advice

Product Coach & Curriculum Advisor

🍻 A Product Owner, Product Manager, Project Manager and Business Analyst walk into a bar 🍻

I was recently asked what the difference is between these roles. It’s worth clarifying, because all of them add value... it simply depends on what you need them to do. 

To generalise:

🤔 Product Manager

Defines the product vision and strategy, driven by deep customer & user understanding. Aligns stakeholders and ensures the team is building the right thing to achieve meaningful business and customer outcomes. Balances viability, desirability and feasibility, making trade-offs to deliver product impact.

🤔 Product Owner

Originally a Scrum role which, in many cases, has these days has morphed into an actual job title. Owns and prioritises the delivery backlog, making day-to-day decisions to maximise value from the development team’s work. 

ADDENDUM! In some organisations, Product Owner and Product Manager are effectively the same role, just different titles. Where the role is split, the distinction is usually an external vs internal focus:

Product Manager: Looking outwards at commercial outcomes, market and customers, strategy and direction.

Product Owner: Looking inwards and collaborating with internal stakeholders, development and delivery teams.

This split is generally considered suboptimal.

🤔 Business Analyst

Identifies business needs, problems and opportunities, then works with stakeholders to clarify them and translate them into structured, testable requirements. A decent BA is often valuable in complex or legacy environments where precision, documentation and traceability matter.

🤔 Project Manager

Leads the planning and coordination of work to ensure agreed work is delivered on time, within scope and within budget. While they typically don’t define what should be built, it's their responsibility to make sure it happens. Their focus is on execution discipline, predictability and reporting.

-- 

None of these are protected titles, and there is often overlap. The key is clarity around the expected skillset, behaviours and focus - and making sure that they match what the organisation actually needs. 

Hit me up if you're a company leader who needs support, or follow me for more advice on building great product teams!

I want to help you get better at product management. Who is "you"? Well, you could be an entire company, a business leader, a product manager or a product leader. 

And how am I going to make you better? Well, you could hire me as a coach, a consultant or a fractional product leader:

https://www.oneknightconsulting.com

Or, check out some of my free work!

My newsletter with weekly musings on the craft of product management: 

https://oneknightinproduct.substack.com

My podcast, where I interview a wide range of thought leaders and practitioners in and around product management:

https://www.oneknightinproduct.com

If you are looking for a mentor, check out the FREE platform I co-founded:

https://www.mymentorpath.com

Or just follow me for general product management chat, discussion, thoughts and occasional memes. No cow is too sacred 🙂

B2B Product Consultant | Fractional CPO | Startup Mentor | Host “One Knight in Product” Podcast

Maybe it's just the types of company I tend to work with, but whenever I'm faced with an underperforming product organisation, the best solution is never, ever "Let's just get the product managers to write more code".

Product managers being too close to the tech and not close enough to their users, customers and the business they work for is ALWAYS the biggest dysfunction. Barging even closer because "something, something, something AI" is not the solution.

Hanging out with these cool product cats, amongst others, at Product Mastery Conference in Amsterdam: Melissa Perri, Mirela Mus, ✨ Büşra Coşkuner and Joao Moita

I'll be running a workshop called "Identifying Your Minimum Viable Improvement" and I've even finished my slides in time!

Board Member | CEO | CEO Advisor | Author | Product Management Expert | Instructor | Designing product organizations for scalability.

Founder @Product People - Interim Product Management, AI & Growth Consultancy | Partner @Lightcone Capital

❌ Booked out until July // The Metrics Lady, helping Europe’s tech companies grow beyond PMF - Build what matters, measure if it works ✨ Product Coach | Trainer | Advisor | Keynote Speaker

Founder, Educator, Community Builder | AI & Product Management | Building the Product Circle 🚀

"The Product team† can't talk to customers because they're not industry experts" is a common objection, but relatively easy to rebut.

It's true that, in organisations with deep industry expertise, there are people who probably know (and have worked in) said industry for decades and are legitimately experts. 

However, the anti-Product team argument breaks down because it's not their job to be an expert in the industry; the Product team is there to let your customers (and potential customers) be the experts and share their expertise. 

Obviously, Product team members need to be able to understand the answers, and this does get trickier in very technical domains, but the last thing any team needs to be doing is going out and lecturing their customer if they want to find the truth.

† Emphasis on "Product team", not just PMs. Designers, researchers and developers are all on the team!

One Knight at the Pub February 2026... small but perfectly formed. Thanks for nothing, weather!

Come to the next one: https://lnkd.in/eSuHPww9

I was interviewing a PM candidate this morning, and they asked me "What do you think a high-performing product team looks like?"

It's not a definitive list, but here were some top of head thoughts, and not in order: 

✅ Proactive Leadership: Driving the product forward and making things happen rather than just waiting for instructions.
✅ True Business Partnership: Acting as partners to the business, rather than just passing messages between teams.
✅ Effective Storytelling: Using narrative to align the team and win the "hearts and minds" of stakeholders.
✅ Empathy for Stakeholders: Doing discovery on their colleagues and not just their users, and understanding stakeholder motivations and goals.
✅ Collaborative Alignment: Focusing relentlessly on bringing people together and ensuring everyone is on the same page.
✅ Company Context: Being wary of obsessing over  "best practices" that might not work for the specific company context
✅ Diversity of Thought: Incorporating diverse backgrounds and perspectives to prevent ideas from slipping through the cracks.

These are some of the things I prize and aim to drive through my work with organisations... what would you add?

Prepping for a talk for CTOs tomorrow and I've chosen violence 🤣

In all seriousness, I have nothing against CPTOs in principle, as long as they treat the P and the T with equal importance†, rather than treating product management as a subset of "tech", which can lead to delivery-focused organisations, inwards-looking PMs and often a complete lack of commercial/business focus.

† I do believe that there are situations where it makes sense for the P or the T to outweigh the other, YMMV etc

Don't get so excited about whether something can be automated to think about whether it should be automated.

There's a lot of chat about building AI copilots to take away all the grunt work of product management. I'm not against this, because there's plenty of grunt work in product management, a lot of it seemingly meaningless (or, sometimes, actually someone else's job). I don't use a particular co-pilot (although I had a Mac Mini before they were cool) but I absolutely use AI to speed me up. 

Where I draw the line is seeing things like "I've got an AI assistant that automatically collates, categorises and priorities emails and support tickets, RICE scores them and generates me a roadmap".

Congratulations, you've automated the feature factory!

And it's not even going to lead to good results! How could it? There are always more ideas than there is time to do them, and most ideas aren't even that good! Prioritisation frameworks introduce fake quantitative rigour over guesswork, but they're at least good as conversation starters. But now we're bypassing the conversations?

There are plenty of good ways to use LLMs as a time saver, a thought partner or a pressure tester. But, remember the golden rule, "Inputs not outputs". You still need to do the work.

🔥 The Heat Death of Product Management (and we're doing it to ourselves) 🔥 

There are two key constituencies for "AI PMs" using LLMs for everything:

A) The people who know what to do and use LLMs as a force-multiplier to do everything better, while still keeping the real thinking, judgement and collaboration human. These people know what to do, and use "AI" to do it better.

B) The people who DON'T know what to do and use LLMs as a quick emergency fix, don't check their half-assed work and wave it through with a smile before moving onto the next thing. They don't know what to do, and they're never going to learn because everything looks good when you don't know what good looks like.

AI tool vendors will, probably in good faith, claim to be targeting group (A), but group (B) is undoubtedly bigger, and both groups look the same in ARR and MAU terms. 

The second order effect is that people in group (B) will either prove one of two things:

(1) Product management is easy to automate, humans don't add any value, and therefore anyone can do it. Net result = product management is dead

(2) Product management is not easy to automate, humans do add value, but the majority of people are doing it badly so leaders don't trust it anymore. Net result = product management is dead

Product managers would be doing themselves, their companies and their customers a favour by relentlessly focusing on being in group (A). Who's with me?

🤔 Help a lot of people a little, or a few people a lot? 🤔

I will confess to being exhausted of social media content, and LinkedIn in particular, which is 90% garbage and AI slop now. 

(Top tip: No one wants your ChatGPT-generated description of how a company you never worked for does something you've never done. Write about *your* experiences, not someone else's.)

And, as a recovering "content creator" myself, it makes me wonder - give in and contribute to the slop, or keep plugging away, or just give up. I've never been interested in content for content's sake... It's always been a way to share perspectives and experience whilst relentlessly doing the work.

If anyone would like to spitball solutions to their actual problems, rather than feeling good reading someone's template that doesn't solve anything, hit me up!

If you want to see me looking something like this, maybe wearing a different shirt, I'm coming back to Amsterdam to give a workshop at the Product Mastery Conference on March 9th, and you should come along too!

I'll be talking about "Finding Your Minimum Viable Improvement", but, aside from me, you'll also see and hear from Melissa Perri, Teresa Torres, Büşra Coşkuner, Mirela Mus, Meg Porter, Willem-Jan Jansen, Viktoria Korzhova, Youssef Hounat, Joy Adamson and, of course, your host with the most, Martijn Versteeg.

Did I mention that you should come along?

Author, Speaker, Product Discovery Coach @ ProductTalk.org

The Mary Poppins of Product ✨ | Inclusive innovation for founders & changemakers | Growing startups with empathy & action | Co-Founder: The Female Product Lead Community | Neurodivergent product founder building Unfold

Product management & leadership for online marketplaces and digital platforms - shaping products and the teams behind them, so they work for customers and deliver results for the business

Business Leader @ Product People 🍙 Interim Product Management, Product Ops, Growth, and Transformation of Your Product 🧠 Fueled with Neuroscience

Telling Stories and Saving People Time from Manual Work

Head of Product & Digital | Scaling SaaS, DTC & Consumer Brands | Nike, PVH, Rabobank | Coaching Product Leaders

Organising the Product Mastery Conference!

Friday night networking seems to be getting smaller, and smaller, like in George's Marvellous Medicine†, but the beauty of 1:1 conversations is you can still get value! Thanks for coming Jock Busuttil, Violeta Shmitko, Francesca Negri Smedberg and Russell Cooper!

† Come along to the next one, and let's recreate the first half of the book where grandma gets huge!  Sign up here: oneknightknetworking.com

Product Management & Leadership Coach, Product Leader, Author

Product manager

Product Leader | Turning Insight into Outcomes | Building Teams That Solve, Not Just Ship

Product Leader | Driving Growth & Innovation in B2B SaaS

I have been asked to do a couple of "content partnerships" recently, and here's the message I've replied with. TL;DR - thanks, but no thanks & good luck. Yes, I've got a moderately large audience, but everything you read from me here is written by hand and represents what I actually think (for better or worse!)

I didn't do video on my podcast for 201 episodes, but the last 63 have all been in glorious technicolour. 

It was interesting learning how to "do video" and having to invest in over-the-top influencer lights and expensive cameras etc. I also don't really watch long-form content on YouTube myself (mainly because I listen to podcasts when I go for a run). That said, it can be super interesting watching people's non-verbal reactions!

Consumption of my podcast is still heavily, heavily weighted towards audio, but if you would like to see me having a chat with the great and the good of product management, subscribe and hit that bell button:

youtube.com

One Knight in Product

For the most part, no business leader cares about you being "product-led" or "empowered" or anything like that. They do care, but only as much as:

1) It delivers superior results for your business 
2) It motivates, attracts and retains talent (but only if (1) is satisfied)

Our job as product people is to prove (1) if we want a chance of getting (2), and the time to start proving it is now.

🧟 Beware zombie feature requests! 🧟 

Every PM has seen it - a backlog as long as your arm with requests dating back 5 years... a good proportion of the requestors have since left the company, and there are more requests coming in all the time. Yet, still there's an expectation that "we'll get to them all eventually". 

Spoiler Alert: You won't

The key thing to remember is that "length of time" on backlog is a poor predictor of importance. Similarly, just RICE scoring the list isn't going to help either. Your only chance to cut through the noise is to make some tough decisions and say "no" (and "why") rather than endless "maybe" - and remember that the mark of a high-performing product team is being able to say "no" to good ideas (anyone can say "no" to bad ideas!)

Friday (k)night networking! With Mike Davison, Adam Cox, Peter Hilton, Hein Ragas, Jock Busuttil and me. Come along to the next one (I promise it's not always just men)

Register here: oneknightknetworking.com

IBM Champion 2024, 2025, 2026. Fighting the good fight for IBM Power, Security, System Administration and DevOps on IBM i, AIX, RHEL, SUSE, Ubuntu, VIOS.

Senior Product Manager @ MPB

Product manager, JetBrains Qodana

Product Manager Alfresco at Hyland

Friday night (k)networking with Peter Hilton, Abhishek Katiyar, Chris Heap, May Wong, Alexander Tacho, Violeta Shmitko, Jasmine W., Dean Peters and little old me. Come to the next one - oneknightnetworking dot com, and have a happy weekend!

Product Leader @ Amazon | Built AI Agents, ML & AI products from 0→1→scale | Series A to Amazon | $400M+ FCF, 50M+ users

Senior Product Manager at Procode | B2B SaaS Product Management | Field Service Management

Product Operations for complex B2B companies.

Helping technical founders escape day-to-day execution by turning intuition into shared product judgment | Fractional Product Leader and Advisor

AI Product Manager | 9fin | ex-Accelex (acquired by Carta)

Product Management Consultant & Trainer | AI Strategist & Implementer | Product Leadership & Innovation Enabler | Dangerous Animals of Product Management | Hakawati (حكواتي)

Here's my first podcast interview of 2026 with the wonderful Jessica Hall, CPO at Just Eat Takeaway.com! Check out what Jess has to say about leading product at a multinational three-sided marketplace, the importance of Product Management being a true partner to the business, and find out what her favourite Just Eat cuisine category is.

Check it out on YouTube now, or grab it on your favourite podcast app. Like, subscribe and share! 🚀

B2B Product Consultant | Fractional CPO | Startup Mentor | Host ‘One Knight in Product’ Podcast

I'm all for judicious use of LLM-coding, but we've gone from "PMs are there to make sure we build the right things, and devs are there to make sure we build the things right" to "PMs are there to make sure we build the wrong things wrong" far too quickly

taplio

Jason Knight's Linkedin Analytics

Jason Knight

Performance ScoreJason Knight's LinkedIn Performance

What is Jason talking about?

Who is engaging with Jason

Jason Knight's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

.css-6ytdur{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39, 43, 72, 1) 0%, rgba(33, 47, 183, 1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Jason Knight's Linkedin Analytics

Jason Knight

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Jason Knight's LinkedIn Performance

What is Jason talking about?

Who is engaging with Jason

Jason Knight's Best Posts .css-1emoo84{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:400;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);}(last 30 days)

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Jason Knight's Linkedin Analytics

Performance ScoreJason Knight's LinkedIn Performance

Jason Knight's Best Posts (last 30 days)