Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

How one serial inventor brought a revolutionary approach to flossing from idea to launch Today we are talking about the journey from initial insight to launched product. The featured product is Instafloss, a revolutionary approach to flossing your teeth. With us is the creator of Instafloss, serial inventor, and two-time founder, Eli Packouz. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:03] Tell us about Instafloss. I found myself in a position that many people may find themselves in—you’re in a rush and trying to clean your teeth and flossing is just taking too long. I thought there had to be a way to make this go quicker. At the time I had already founded a company, and we had come out with seven products. I was thinking about how we could solve this problem, and within a week about five other people told me they hated flossing and asked if we could make a product to do something about that. I started reading periodontal textbooks and finding out more about the problem. I found there are two problems: In the U.S. 70% of people regularly skip flossing, and of the people who do floss almost all of them are flossing incorrectly. If we break down the first problem, there are three reasons people don’t floss: It takes too much time. It hurts. And it’s difficult to do correctly. I looked at existing solutions. Water flossers have been on the market since the 60s, and research shows they are more effective than string floss if done correctly. However, there are a few issues: Nobody does it correctly; in order to do it correctly, you have to hold the jet at a 90 degree angle, trace the gum line, and do it on the inside. It’s messy, and it takes even longer. We had to create a floss that people will love and that will be quick and automatic. After five years, it’s been quite a journey, but I believe we’ve accomplished that. [6:10] What is the form of the product? The insight was that in order to floss correctly you need the water jets at a 90 degree angle to the gum line and they need to cover 100% of the gum line. The first iteration was a mouth guard with jets pointing at various areas. There were two issues with this: The mouth guard is stagnant, so the jets mostly point only between the teeth, and we would need to create a customer mouth guard for every individual, so the product would have to be $900. That didn’t seem like a path we wanted to go down. The breakthrough was taking a cross section of the mouth guard and moving it across the mouth. We have an H-shaped manifold. The top of the H goes over the top of the teeth, and the bottom of the H goes over the both teeth. It spins around in the middle, which is attached to the handle. It flosses the top, front, back, and bottom simultaneously. It has 12 jets aimed at the correct 90 degree angle. We can ensure 100% coverage at the right angle, and we can do it in just 10 seconds. The water pressure is adjustable, and it is painless. [9:20] Were there other paths you went down before you got to a water jet? Yes, I did a deep dive into all the possibilities. My initial sketches were trying to figure out ways to automate flossing with string, but that requires an insane amount of dexterity and intelligence. You don’t want to cut your gums and cause problems in your mouth. I looked into air as a medium, but that is incredibly ineffective. Overflossing might be the only thing worse than not flossing. That was a problem we ran into in the development. We had giant reservoirs of water because we don’t want people to have to refill the reservoir often. We noticed that people were enjoying it so much, but they were used to flossing for two to three minutes. Ten seconds with Instafloss is the equivalent of two minutes with an alternative flossing method, so two minutes of Instafloss is equivalent to 36 minutes of flossing. If you’re doing that two or three times a day, that’s a big problem. Sometimes when you solve a problem you uncover a problem you had not realized existed before. We had to develop into the UX a way to let people know the floss is over and they should stop. We built in a stop and LED feedback and made the reservoir so it must be filled before each use. [13:13] What was your prototyping process? One of the first things we started with was math. What is the capacity for water jets in the mouth? How much power would the necessary flow rate take? How much room is there in the mouth? We had to know what those constraints were. First we made sketches and then we 3D-printed some parts to get measurements. We ordered basic parts and then machined parts out of metal. After we had something we thought worked, I started talking to local scientists and professionals in dental science. I got connected to Dr. Ana Mascarenhas, who was the chair of the American Dental Association Council of Scientific Affairs. We showed her diagrams and prototypes, and she guided us on a long journey of te

How to stand out as an applicant for a product management position We are talking with Erika Klics. Erika is a former Head of Talent for tech companies who became a Job Search Strategist for startup and scaleup Directors, VPs, and department Heads for Product Management and other functions in tech. She sent me an email message that got my attention, and I’d like to read part of it. She wrote, “In a past life, I sat on the other side of the table supporting hiring teams to define processes, find candidates, and make great hires. And I noticed a few patterns along the way….When it comes to PM leadership roles, hiring teams would share the same small handful of reasons for rejecting candidates. ‘They just weren’t quite strong enough.’ ‘I liked them, but who else do we have?’ ‘We need them to be more strategic.’ ‘They’re great, but I’m not sure they’re senior enough.’ They used different language, different lenses, but it was the same across almost every scorecard. Candidates were missing something, but hiring teams couldn’t articulate what it was. So I started paying attention to who was getting the offer and what they did differently. Erika will help us not make the mistakes that lead to you not getting the job—she even has a system for job seekers she calls the Inevitable Edge Method. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:24] What are some reasons you see product leaders not getting the jobs they’re trying to get? There are different flavors of product managers and different focus areas. Often, hiring decisions depend on whether you have experience in the area the company needs. I see a lot of product management leaders get all the way through the hiring process and then get generic rejections. Why is that happening? It’s about building trust at every level of the interview process with other leaders, the team, and cross-functional leaders. Build trust that you can do the job they’re looking for and take the product wherever they need to take it next. [5:28] How can product leaders get feedback on why they were rejected? Build relationships along the way. The stronger a relationship you have with the recruiter, the more likely you’re going to get feedback from them and the more likely you will land the role. Even if you’re not the right fit, if you’ve built the relationship and connected on a more human level, it’s a lot harder for them to ignore your email when you ask for feedback. This feedback is not always actionable but it can give you peace of mind. It’s usually not you; it’s the company. It’s not that you’re bad at your job. The company was looking for something else. Often startups do a couple of months of interviewing not to find the right person but to figure out whom they want to hire. If you’re the first candidate going through a hiring process, it’s pretty hard to get the offer. [8:41] How can product managers build trust and position themselves to get the job? Build a relationship from the beginning, starting with the first recruiter screening. Get to know the person who’s going to guide you through the process. Give small signals—when they ask, “How’s it going?” give a little anecdote instead of just saying, “Great.” Warm people up in conversation. It sounds simple, but a lot of people get into interview mode and it has a very different feeling than just a conversation. Read between the lines—a skill products managers need every day anyway. Think about the context clues you can pick up and what’s not being said. Are there particular challenges in the product? Are there cross-functional collaborators? Where does the product fall within the suite of products? These clues can help you position yourself as a better candidate and build trust with the people you’re meeting along the way. Think about how you can meet the needs of each person you meet in the interview process. If you create an interview environment where it feels like you’re actually working together, then they’re envisioning you in the job. [13:58] What should applicants know about the company before the interview? Do research for the right stage of the interview process. Don’t spend hours talking to the recruiter for the role at the very beginning of the process because they may not be able to answer deep questions about the product or team. However, before the conversation with the recruiter prepare by learning about the company. Look through job descriptions to see who else they are hiring. This can give a lot of signals about what they’re planning on building next or where the company focus is. Know who’s on the team and who the executives are. Look through the history of funding. Where were their big growth spurts? Collect some clues that can give you context so you share stories that are most r

How to build connection and empower product management teams Tami Reiss is with us. She is an experienced product executive who works with tech product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths to advance toward their goals. She guides product leaders through defining their personal product vision then taking the right steps to make it a reality. Right now, Tami is focusing on coaching product leaders, speaking around the world about management and strategy, and interestingly, writing a children’s book called What do Product Managers Do? She will be sharing with us how product leaders increase team performance. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [12:09] How can product leaders improve product team performance? Connection—help people feel connected to each other and the larger mission and vision of the company. People need to see themselves not as cogs in a wheel but as pieces of the puzzle. Each person owns their piece, but it is just one piece, so they have to help out the other pieces. I often see siloed teams, where the team members may have never met in-person. Inter-team connection is important. It is important to talk to your customers, but it is also important to talk to prospective customers. Generally, the only way to talk to them is through salespeople, so you must have a strong connection with your salespeople. Product leaders should encourage their product managers to establish relationships with internal stakeholders that will assist them in getting a better pulse on the market. [18:23] How can product managers build those relationships? Reach out to the customer success manager or implementation manager. Tell them you’re looking to learn more about how your product gets implemented and ask if there is somebody you can form a partnership with. You’re not looking to do research; you’re looking to create an ongoing partnership with somebody that will allows you to understand the impacts of your choices on their team. When you meet that person, get to know them. This is not a transactional moment. Form relationships with many people to access different kinds of customers. Establish empathy for who they are, what their aspirations are, and how you can help them with that. Treat them like a human and learn about their personal life to create a relationship that isn’t only transactional. [24:23] How does empowerment relate to helping product teams be more effective? Part of empowerment is not being overly prescriptive. When you’re doing strategy deployment, you’re not supposed to tell someone what to do; you’re supposed to give them goals and guidelines that help them feel empowered within those guidelines to spread their wings and make choices. The other part is teaching someone how to advocate for their ideas—how to navigate interpersonal relationships, have empathy for people, and spin what you’re talking about so people get on board with you. Influence without authority is the most crucial skill we have, and that is a matter of advocating for your idea in way that is respectful and brings other people on. Someone recently asked me what the difference is between leadership and management, and I said management is the day-to-day, one-on-ones, signing off on PTO, etc. Leadership is what you are doing that makes people follow you. Product management is always about leadership. We teach people to be better leaders using “I do, we do, you do.” First, you invest time showing someone how you would do it. Then you do it together. Then they do it on their own while you watch. By the end of those three rounds, the person you’re training feels a lot more confident because they know why certain things are done and how you make decisions. By the end, they become a functional leader who knows how to influence without authority. They can move ideas forward without your support. This is the best empowerment you can give them. At the end of this, the product manager, rather than coming to you asking what to do, will come to you as a manager, having analyzed the problem and created a plan. They will trust you as a mentor to tell them where their plan might need adjustments. That’s what you want in an employee. Action Guide: Put the information Tami shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Tami on LinkedIn Visit Tami’s website Innovation Quote “Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless.” – Mary Kay Ash Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

A four-layer framework to create a winning product strategy Today we are talking about creating product strategy. Our guest is Bob Caporale. Bob is the author of the book Creative Strategy Generation. He is a strategic practitioner, having spent 20 years leading product, marketing, and business functions for large international corporations. I first heard of Bob when he was the president of Sequent Learning, the product management training company. He has since founded and leads the Strategy Generation company. Bob believes that strategy is derived from a combination of experience, insight, and creativity. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:09] What is product strategy? Strategy is a plan to achieve a set of objectives under a set of anticipated conditions. What makes strategy strategic is anticipating the situation you’re going to be in and putting a plan in place within that context. Product strategy is doing that at a product level. The job of product managers is to take the company’s bigger strategies and objectives and break them down to their impact on product. They put together a strategy that details what they need to do for their product to contribute to the overall business strategy. The product strategy is still at a big-picture level. Often, companies approach me asking for help with their product strategy and they’re really focused on the roadmap. While the roadmap and choosing features is the last step of product strategy, it’s not the whole picture. If you’re just focused on what features to build into the product, you could still take a lot of random actions that make no sense because you don’t have the bigger picture. [9:00] Who is responsible for developing product strategy? Whoever is responsible for the P&L (profit and loss) of the product is ultimately responsible for the product strategy. I’m a big proponent of developing strategy with a team, but there does need to be one person accountable for it. The P&L owner varies from business to business. In some businesses, the product manager own the P&L and is accountable for the strategy. In small businesses, the general manager or owner may be responsible for the P&L and they would be accountable for the strategy. [11:03] How is senior leadership involved in product strategy? If there’s any problem in alignment between the product team and senior leaders, that’s a better problem to have than leadership not being involved in product strategy at all. Especially in larger companies, one of the biggest deficiencies I see is that companies don’t have a verifiable and disciplined product strategy process. Strategy can easily fall to the back burner because product managers are doing so many other things, most of them reactive. If you aren’t required to build a product strategy, you might not. I like to see leaders involved in product strategy, asking product managers to update the product strategy on a quarterly or annual basis and present it to them, because this ensures some level of alignment. As long as there’s a process where product managers are responsible for developing strategy, a negotiation will happen. In lieu of product strategy, the leaders will tell you what you need to do with your products, and some of that might not be right. The best-case scenario is an organization that has a disciplined strategy process between leadership and product managers. [14:24] Share your Strategy Generation framework for developing product strategy. Download the framework. The framework has ten steps in four layers in a circular framework. When you build a strategy, you will go through the strategy in steps, so the steps are numbered. However, I developed it in a circular way because in real life when you’re executing on your strategy plan, things don’t happen linearly. It’s important you follow a process, but if something changes you know where in the process you need to change something. The first layer is the context layer. Because strategy can be developed at so many different levels in a company, it’s important you know the context. Along with this is the vision—the big picture of your purpose. The second layer is the analysis layer. This is where you look at your situation, including customers, competitors, and your own company. Try to predict what your situation will be in the future. The third layer is the planning layer. This is where the strategy lives and where you put together your goals. Look at the options that are available to you based on situation analysis and choose which actions to take from those options. The final layer is the execution layer. Here you put together your roadmap, determine your investments, and determine what results you will get from your strategy. If you’re using this framework to develop a strategy from scratch, you would go through each of those ten steps. If you’r

What product managers need to know about the Decision Sprint framework for faster problem-solving Today we are talking about faster problem-solving to speed innovation by using a three-part framework including Exploration, Alignment, and Decision-Making. Our guest is Atif Rafiq. He invented a system for problem-solving based on his 25-year career spanning Silicon Valley and the Fortune 500. His ideas proved so impactful as a competitive advantage that they sped his rise at Amazon and later to C-suite positions he held at companies, including McDonald’s as their first Chief Digital Officer, and at Volvo and MGM Resorts. He has written DECISION SPRINT: The New Way to Innovate into the Unknown and Move from Strategy to Action. He joins us to share how it works. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:03] Why do we need Decision Sprint? We’re in an era of economic austerity, so the bar for innovation has been raised in most organizations. This means we need a way of innovating that is more purposeful. It’s one thing to have a promising idea and another thing to get the buy-in for it. CEOs are talking about sharpening the pencil to be more confident about the ideas they’re supporting. If you’re a product manager and you have promising ideas, the bar has been raised. Even if the times were a little brighter, we have the problem of getting the organization to agree to a good idea and getting stakeholder alignment. Rather than leaving it to personalities, we need a methodology so that we can objectively take good ideas forward. To solve big problems to innovate, we have to create shared understanding for everybody who is involved in pulling off the big idea. What are the components of a design sprint? [5:25] Exploration The first step is to define the problem statement. If people have a different interpretation of that, and you only realize that a month down the line, that’s problematic. Next, canvass the key unknowns behind the problem statement and create a good question list. I recommend independently sourcing questions from your team. This is powerful because you make it a deliberate step in the process. Having questions come up organically is potentially detrimental because it can cause you to find blind spots too late. By sourcing questions independently, you get a more diverse set of questions that are more relevant with fewer blind spots. If you have a great question list, you have the basis of an exploration. [8:19] Tell us more about making a question list. The initial understanding of the problem is usually a little bit murky. For example, if Netflix has a problem with password sharing, that’s not the problem statement. The problem statement is something more like, “How do we do the right thing for customers while minimizing the abuse of sharing passwords?” You’re trying to balance to things. A good problem statement usually includes some trade-offs. The problem statement is nuanced; the answer is not obvious. Before rushing ahead to opinions and recommendations, teams should spend time building an exploration. This could take just a few days. I independently ask people to make question lists asynchronously over about two days. Then we share the questions with the team and see the patterns and overlap. It’s fun to see the collective intelligence of the team, and this builds a lot of positive team dynamics because you see the power of a team. Team members are glad we did it independently because each person sees ideas they wouldn’t have thought of. We assign people to answer and review questions. I share the question list with sponsors, such as a commercial leader, legal team members, and a product leader. This allows the sponsors to see the progress and have the ability to contribute without micromanaging. [17:51] Alignment It’s important to have exploration before alignment. In companies I often find alignment before exploration. There’s a lot of judgement preceding the exploration. However, alignment is important after exploration. Meaningful ideas cannot be executed by one corner of a company. It takes contribution from multiple parts of the organization. If we create a shared understanding of the direction we’re going and why we’re doing that, people are more confident taking the idea forward. Alignment is about creating the bridge between the problem that was explored and the conclusions that are being recommended. In order to get those heads nodding around the table, people have to understand how you arrived at those conclusions. I ask people to draw conclusions from FAQs individually and then aggregate insights and patterns. Conclusions are often very layered. For example, when I was at Amazon, I led a business unit around self-publishing. There was a raw idea around creating an exclusivity program where authors are rewarded for publishing only with Amazon. The program was a smashing succes

Thrive Market’s VP of Product Management discusses mission-driven product process Jonas Klink is joining us. He is the Vice President of Product Management & UX Design at Thrive Market, the health-first membership for conscious living. He is responsible for the company’s entire product portfolio, shepherding a lean virtual team of 10 Project Managers & UX Designers. He has established a system allowing the team to focus on understanding customer needs more deeply, creating Outcomes through hypothesis-based testing, and measuring progress through Velocity, Win Rate and impact towards their North Star Metric. In a minute, he will tell us how to do the same thing. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:17] What is Thrive Market? Thrive Market is an online grocery platform where we are on a mission to make healthy and sustainable living easy, affordable, and accessible to all. Inspired by that mission, our team has put together one of the first online platforms that offers a pre-curated selection of the highest quality, healthy, and sustainable products. It’s a membership-based ecommerce experience. Everything we carry is non-GMO and organic, and there are over 500 ingredients you’ll never see in our products. We support over 90 different values and diets. Working here has been a homecoming for me, where I’ve been given the opportunity to put my background in ecommerce product management to work for a mission that I deeply care about. [5:54] Take us through the customer-centered product process you have created and use at Thrive Market. It’s important to me to experiment with the craft of product management. I’m looking to perfect my craft over time and develop my brand of product management. I care just as much about how we do things as about what we do, because I believe regardless of the size of the company, there’s no excuse for not approaching product management and UX design in a way that feels best-in-class. I like when I’m able to distill things down to the core principles of how things work, and I try to strip away fluff that is not helping and might cause confusion. I put a hierarchy in place where every single person, not just on my team but within the company, is able to draw a straight line from what they are working on this minute all the way up to the company’s mission. I do that by starting off looking at the mission. That straight line starts at the top with the mission. As a purpose-driven organization, we take a measurable approach to the mission, which is the North Star goal. The mission is usually a goal you’ll never actually reach; it’s meant to inspire and set people on a path. However, the conversations I started with were very pragmatic. Our mission is to make healthy, sustainable living easy, affordable, and accessible to all. We talked about what we mean by healthy, what our design targets mean by healthy, and whether those definitions align. Similarly, we talked about how we would measure “easy,” “affordable,” and “accessible.” As a purpose-driven organization, you should treat your mission as a goal. Even though you may never get there, you should still be able to measure progress toward it. The second part of the process is the product vision, which outlines how you will make progress toward the mission over the next two to three years. That feeds into the product strategy, which is typically set on an annual basis or for six month. The product strategy goes hand-in-hand with your KPIs and goals. The last part of the process is priorities. They define how you will make progress toward the strategy in the next quarter. These priorities or focus areas must be focused. You need to have a small number of priorities that the OKRs line up with. Each OKR includes three to five objectives each with three to five key results, each of which is value-based, measurable, and time-bound. If someone is working on a key result, they should be able to easily see the connection from the key result to the objective, strategy, vision, and mission. [15:07] What was your involvement in discussing Thrive Market’s mission? The conversations I had with the co-founders were about getting the mission out of their heads and onto paper in a brief one-page format. We quantified some of the things the mission mentions to make sure we can treat the mission as a goals that drive culture and behavior, not just an inspiration. If you want to be a truly purpose-driven organization, you need to treat the mission as a measurable goal, even if you know you’re never actually quite going to get there. [17:02] What are some examples of measurable goals at Thrive? The baseline goal for making our product affordable is that we want every customer to save at least three times their membership fee based on their annual purchases. Now that we had a definition, we worked with our data engi

How to solve common dysfunctions in product management Today’s guest is Ben Foster, the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at Prodify. He is convinced that product is the single most important success driver for tech companies, which is why he founded Prodify to share what he learned from being an advisor to over 50 tech companies to realize their full potential. Ben has led successful technology products for the last 25 years. He is also the co-author of Build What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management. He’s with us to share the advice he most frequently gives to the company leaders he advises regarding creating products. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:22] Can you take us through the primary challenges you encounter advising companies and what they need to overcome the challenges? I founded Prodify so my team and I can help companies by sharing knowledge from our previous experiences. We have identified several different areas where companies typically struggle when it comes to product. The three areas in which we tend to help companies the most are: Direction—core metrics, product vision and strategy People—structure of the product team, coverage, empowerment, accountability Process and practice—ongoing development and learning, communicating with the rest of the company Every company I’ve ever spoken with, no matter what stage they’re in, has some flaws across each of these areas. It’s not because they’re bad at what they do. It’s because it’s just really hard to get right. [9:24] What issues do you see with strategy? A lot of companies have a mission statement that they think is a strategy or vision. The reality is those two things are very different from one another. A mission statement is why you’re doing what you’re doing. The vision is where you intend to be in several years. The strategy is the plan of attack for how you’re going to get there. A lot of work that goes into a vision. When I was the Chief Product Officer at Whoop, I left the company with a 70-page vision about the future state of the product and how were going to manage it. It provided a lot of clarity. There’s no way any mission statement could ever fulfill that need. Often a CEO tells me something like, “Our vision is to get to $3 billion revenue in five years.” That’s the byproduct of you being successful and executing your vision. What’s the actual vision itself? What’s the customer value that you’re going to deliver? Too often the vision is not tied to customer outcomes and not focused on customer value that needs to be delivered. Product management is concentrated on the creation of customer value from which you’re then in a position to derive business value. Even those companies that build a strong vision and strategy may have a complete disconnect between the work the PMs on the ground are doing and the vision and strategy documents that sit on a digital shelf collecting digital dust while no one is paying attention to them. [12:41] How can leaders better communicate strategy? Often the senior leadership team thinks they talk about strategy a lot, but the employees under them don’t understand the strategy. When I see that type of thing happening, I tell the senior leadership team to ask their CEO, “What’s your strategy?” and then ask the people doing the work, “What’s the strategy?” Either they don’t have an answer or they have a completely different answer from the CEO’s. That’s an indication that the CEO or senior leadership team may feel like they’ve communicated the strategy well or they may feel like it’s well understood within their organization, but their perception is not reality. The leaders are usually shocked by the results that they get when they ask their team members to explain the strategy to them. Communicating strategy requires a lot of repetition. The leaders will think that they’ve communicated it, and maybe they have communicated, but new employees have joined since then and people have been having conversations around the water cooler about the strategy that have gone off on different tangents. You just need to be repeating those same messages. Don’t just talk about the things that are included in your strategy. So much of strategy is about all the things that you have to say no to and the way that you focus. If everybody can repeat what you’re saying back to you, then it’s usually a really good indication that you’ve done a good job as a product leader. [16:05] What problems come from working on product work not aligned with the company strategy? There’s only so much that you can do in product yourself. A lot of it has to do with pulling together a bunch of other groups. There needs to be coordination and alignment that spans acros

The value the Product Development and Management Association provides for product mangers and leaders Today we are talking about the most influential professional product association you’ve likely never heard of. The association is PDMA, and we’ll talk about what the they do and why you should know about them. Susan Penta is with us. She is the Chair of PDMA and has served in other volunteer roles with the association in the past. She is also the co-founder and managing partner at MIDIOR, which has been providing professional services for 26 years to product organizations in a number of areas from product insights, product development and management, and technology platforms. It’s worth noting that PDMA is a volunteer-led organization and, like Susan, most of the people involved in its leadership have fulltime jobs in product roles yet make time to contribute to the professional association. On and off, I’ve been one of those contributors as well because PDMA has been vital in my career development and I want to help other product managers. I’m currently serving PDMA by being an author on the 3rd edition of their body of knowledge for product innovation, which Wiley is publishing in early 2024. This episode is sponsored by PDMA so we can find out more about the association. Register for PDMA’s 2023 Inspire Innovation Conference on September 16th-19th in New Orleans, LA, USA.   Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:15] What is PDMA? PDMA is the Product Development and Management Association. We exist to advance and nurture the discipline of innovation, product development, and product management. We do that through academic research, academic-focused professional development, education, certification, and community. We were founded in 1976 by a group of individuals who at that point powered some of the most respected, recognized, and innovative companies. Today we are still doing that, and we are one of the only associations, if not the only professional association, to bring together academics, practitioners, and service providers around the discipline of product management to advance the discipline. [4:13] Why is PDMA not better known among product managers and leaders? You can talk about it as a marketing problem, but I think there is some root cause in our mission. Because we are about nurturing the discipline of product management itself, PDMA isn’t the place where individuals who work in product roles come to get jobs. Because our focus is on thought leadership and often the kind of content we bring to the table is heavy—academic or at least well researched and thought through—we are for those who are not faint of heart when it comes to product development and management. For many individuals who work in product management and product development roles, the discipline is a stop on their career path, so they don’t necessarily get jazzed about the discipline itself. Our work in our communities is through our chapters. We are not putting commercialized content out there. We don’t have a big marketing engine. While we are a global organization, our grassroots are in each individual location where our chapters are. We should be better known, and organizations trying to professionalize the discipline of product development and product management inside their company give our certification visibility, but many people in small to medium businesses might not engage with PDMA unless they come across a chapter or our journal or somebody like Chad or me. [12:47] What value have you found by being a PDMA member? I fancy myself a lifelong learner. I care about nurturing the discipline of product management and development. In PDMA, you’re always learning. It’s fascinating to hear how other industries deal with product development, product management, organizations, process, and so forth. PDMA provided me with colleagues and an opportunity to look through many different lenses. Because I was starting to teach and the individuals in my classes were from different industries, that ended up being super valuable. It kept me at the forefront of where the research was headed because a big piece of our organization is focused on academics and research for the future. The PDMA Body of Knowledge is synonymous with entrepreneurship and how you think about starting a company. A startup is a single-product company. The Body of Knowledge chronicles the product journey from cradle to grave. Even if you are focused on research and development, or if you’re focused on product marketing—two different ends of the life cycle—the Body of Knowledge gives you the entire context. It makes you a better individual, a better leader, and more appreciative of what other teams are doing. We have a body of work that is highly relevant to many. [18:22] What are some other reasons product managers and leaders should know about PDMA? First, if you think

Starting from the customer experience to build products customers love Today we are talking about the “working backwards” approach to product that was created at Amazon. To give us the details on this approach, Colin Bryar is with us. He joined Amazon in 1998—four years after its founding—and spent the next 12 years as part of Amazon’s senior leadership team. For two of his years at Amazon, Colin was Chief of Staff to Jeff Bezos, AKA “Jeff’s shadow,” during which he spent each day attending meetings, traveling with, and discussing business and life with Jeff. Colin is co-founder of Working Backwards where he coaches executives at both large and early-stage companies on how to implement the management practices developed at Amazon. He is also the co-author of Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:07] Where did “working backwards” originate? Working Backwards started at Amazon in the early 2000s. We were trying to figure out how we were going to move into the digital space. Amazon’s first leadership principle is customer obsession, and we realized we weren’t as customer-obsessed as we needed to be. Jeff Bezos wanted to create a new type of process to make sure that the customer was with us for the very beginning of an idea all the way through the journey to when the product was released. And we had tried a bunch of standard tools to build products, but we realized that the one person who wasn’t in the room was the customer, and that was the most important person to have with us on the journey. We created a process called Working Backwards, which is starting from the customer experience and then working backwards from that to build a new product. [4:39] What is the “working backwards” approach? The primary tool that we use is the PRFAQ document, short for press release and frequently asked questions. When someone has an idea for a product or service, the first thing they do is write a PRFAQ document. The first part is the press release, which must: Be one page or less Clearly define who the customer is Clearly define the problem you’re trying to solve for that customer State your solution Convince the customer that this solution is worthy enough for them to change their behavior from the alternatives Be in written in language that a customer can understand Be written to the customer After reading that press release, if you’re not excited to go out and buy the product or use the service, go back and rewrite it. It’s an iterative process. Once you have a press release you’re satisfied with, write the frequently asked questions. Some people break this up into two parts—external FAQs that the customer or press will ask and internal FAQs that you’ll have to answer in order to make the idea a reality. [8:55] Do you involve the customer in writing the PRFAQ document? You don’t need to involve the customer necessarily, but you do need to figure out ways to get the customer needs out in front of everyone in the group. Look at data about how people are currently using your product or service. The best way to understand the customer experience is really to deeply immerse yourself in the data and the problem at hand and come up with conviction that this is a solution to a real customer problem. Then you can do some surveys and focus groups to validate or disprove that hypothesis. When you’re writing the PRFAQ document, typically a product manager takes the lead. You can’t write it overnight. Allocate an appropriate amount of time to do it. It’s best to show people drafts of the document before you bring it to the leadership. They’ll help refine the idea and make it better. [12:02] How long are the FAQs and how do you discuss them with your team? We try to keep the document to six pages or less for a one-hour meeting. You spend about the first 20 minutes reading the document, and then you have 40 minutes of discussion. You don’t have to comprehensively cover the whole product in each meeting. Start off with the idea. At the next meeting, narrow down the pricing model, etc. The body of the document needs to be six pages, and you can have appendices added onto that which can run well over six pages that you can refer to as needed. [15:50] Why have a meeting about the PRFAQ document? There are two reasons to have a meeting with the team rather than individually reading the draft. First, people will update the document until the very last minute before the meeting starts. If you read it the night before, you’re reading a draft that has gone a little stale. Second, during the first 20 minutes of the meeting everyone is guaranteed to read the document. Despite best intentions, things come up, and some people might not be able to read it ahead of time. [16:52] Who is at the PRFAQ meeting? The meeting includes the per

How product managers can create a portfolio and manage innovation Today we are talking about portfolio management—creating a portfolio, adjusting it, selecting projects for it, and managing innovation. Our guest is Gareth Bradley, Director of Product Management at Planview. Planview is a leading provider of product portfolio management solutions. Previous to Planview, Gareth held Product VP roles and managed innovation portfolios. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:42] What is a product portfolio and why do we care about it? Product portfolios allow companies with multiple products to align work tracks around particular products. Companies organize their product portfolios either at the product level or around groups of products or services. [3:12] What are some ways organizations structure portfolios? There are two worlds. The traditional world is where the structure of portfolios is around projects—how a work item starts, is worked upon, and is delivered to the market. These projects run in groups called the portfolio. Each project has a start date and end date. The traditional view is prevalent, but we’ve observed a shift from a project mindset to a product mindset. In the product mindset, work is more continuous. You work in the product development lifecycle, thinking about a continuous evolution of a product or service that goes into market. The way your portfolio is structured needs to adapt for new innovations. The product mindset is the new frontier. One of the biggest challenges for many organizations is striking the balance between a project- and product-oriented mindset. They may have been working in the project mindset for a long time. Now because of disruption in the market, they have to shift the way they think, and that’s tough to do. [6:29] What are some example of project-driven and product-driven portfolios? Organizations delivering smart-connected products have had to make the jump to product-driven portfolios. When you’re manufacturing a physical thing, you work on one version and it’s complete. The development cycle is long. As more companies are dealing in software, the product mindset comes in. You cluster work to support the overall family group. For example, automotive entertainment requires a lot of software for a vehicle. There’s a family of supporting projects for that vehicle. Once the vehicle is out, there’s continual work on the software. As my CEO says, “Good software is not like fine wine. It’s more like sushi. It doesn’t get better with age.” As an organization, you have to think about how you can maintain your position in the market. Think about the structure of getting the product out to market and balancing the portfolio to manage the whole lifecycle. [10:03] How do you use buckets or horizons in portfolio management? The three horizons approach is dividing work into short, medium, and long term. Some companies organize their portfolios to keep each horizon contained. In other organizations, like those spending a lot on R&D for medical devices, horizons one and two can become more muddled so you have incremental innovation to support the product that has gone to market. Other organizations are purely doing R&D innovation. They work in horizon three. [23:27] Where do innovation ideas enter the portfolio? Start with the end in mind—what do we want to put into market? Organizations that win at this game are the ones who think about the end in mind, predominantly around funding—how do we fund innovation in and around our portfolios? Organize crowd structure into three buckets: incremental, disruptive, and breakthrough. (The crowd is employees, supply chain, partners, and customers—anyone you collaborate with.) There is a middle space before the portfolio, an incubation area where you select 10-20 ideas from a thousand. The incubation area can be where pre-funding happens and where market fit is thought about. If you don’t do that middles step or if you don’t execute it well, you end up with a lot of good ideas but you can’t execute them. I’ve worked with engineering companies who do this very well. They know what type of innovation they’re looking for and will line up the end with the start. In the incubation process, they make sure those ideas are viable. As a project manager, you need to be in touch with the portfolio people to understand what kind of projects they have funding for. As a product leader or product VP, you would want your portfolio to have funding allocated for receiving new ideas. [30:36] What are some indications we need to rethink how we’re allocating our resources in our portfolio? I look at throughput. What are we getting out into market? Are we finishing things on time as predicted on budget with the resources we have? We look at the whole lifecycle. What is happening in the market with what we already delivered? What are cust

Lessons from the discoverer of Stage-Gate for product managers Today we are talking with a legend in product management. Our guest is Dr. Robert Cooper, who discovered the now famous Stage-Gate process and was named the “World’s Top Innovation Management Scholar” by the prestigious Journal of Product Innovation Management. Besides his best-selling books Winning at New Products and Portfolio Management for New Products, he has published more than 130 articles on R&D and innovation management. He is frequently helping organizations succeed while also holding the role of Professor Emeritus at McMaster University and Distinguished Research Fellow at Penn State University. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:05] What key challenges are medium and large organizations encountering today when trying to get new products into the marketplace? We’re facing new uncertainty and risks. Companies have to think about what to do short-term to keep the lights on and what to do long-term for bolder innovations. Some companies will retreat and cut their spending by cutting bolder long-term innovations, and we saw in the recession around 2010 that was a bad strategy. In some mature industries, it is increasingly difficult to find opportunities for new products. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was no absence of problems in telecommunications. They couldn’t even send a long-distance call because there were no amplifiers, no vacuum tubes, and no transistors. They had to invent all those things. When you have no absence of customer or user problems, if you’re reasonably intelligent, you can usually come up with the inventions and the necessary breakthrough new products. Today it’s harder in the telecommunications business because there are problems but not as evident as formerly. Other industries like IT are still going strong with many opportunities and problems to solve, but it’s becoming increasingly tougher to find fantastic voids in the marketplace. Another challenge is fortitude of the general manager to keep spending at the same level when it is tougher and tougher to get the return on investment you need. On the other hand, there are all kinds of new technologies like AI, biosciences, and new opportunities in the medical field. These technological possibilities should generate all kinds of new product opportunities. [7:38] What advice do you give leaders about making strategic decisions? There are many risks and uncertainties like the supply chain, market size, and expected profitability. The numbers we put in our business cases are notoriously wrong often by a factor of two. Many business cases are fantasy because there are so many unknowns, which people usually don’t factor in. Take a hard look at how you do your business case in light of increasing uncertainties and build that in somehow. I have a new article coming out on expected commercial value, which builds likelihoods into the business case. How do you estimate likelihoods? We didn’t know how to do it in the past, but now we have estimates from companies like Dow Chemical and 3M. They have put together probability tables that give the likelihood of success under certain circumstances, because they’ve studied enough projects to know. Do the net present value calculations with correction factors for likelihood of success. The other piece of advice is getting the product right. Sometimes people do voice-of-customer analysis and think they understand the customer’s needs, then spend a year designing a prototype, then do field trials and everything goes wrong. The customer’s needs have changed or the customers didn’t understand their own needs. Instead, we recommend iterative innovation. Build something really fast and demo it to the customer to get instant feedback. Get the product out in their face fast, early, often, and cheap. The first version doesn’t have to be the real product. You can create a computer simulation or animation. Show the customer something in the first three weeks of development and repeat every four weeks. Demo to management too because you need their buy-in and support. [13:07] What’s an example of using iterative innovation? Steve Jobs said, “Customers don’t know what they want until they see it.” LEGO has a B2B business called LEGO Education, which sells learning products to schools and teachers. It’s a combination of IT software and LEGO blocks. There was a new product coming out that LEGO had been working on for about four years and couldn’t get right. It was a creative writing curriculum to teach younger children how to be more creative writers. LEGO had several panels of teachers, and they asked them, “What are you looking for in this product?” And the teachers weren’t sure. One of the teachers finally said, “Why don’t you build something and show it to us? And then we’ll t

How product management teams can better make decisions Today we are talking about disruptions that impact our product work. Whether it’s supply chain disruptions, the great resignation, AI impacts, market competition or something else, continued disruption is expected. How can we navigate such an environment? To help us make decisions in this environment, Alexis Gonzales-Black joins us. She is an organization design expert and author, with experience in organization design, transformation, and team leadership. She is currently leading organization design at August Public and previously at IDEO, Zappos, and other organizations. She also authored The New School Rules: 6 Vital Practices for Thriving and Responsive Schools. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:13] What does an organization designer do? We look at the factors of an organization like purpose, strategy, structure, process, systems, talent, and incentives. We make sure those factors are accelerating the organization toward its ultimate outcome— its mission and vision. The cycle of disruption is so fast that it consistently pulls our structure and processes away from what we are trying to achieve. We need an ongoing awareness of sensing and adapting to change at all levels. [4:35] Tell us about your framework for making decisions in turbulent environments. First I want to talk about “Why decision making?” Why do we use that as a way to talk to companies and product teams? No matter where we go in any organization, folks have feedback about how decisions are being made. Typically, there’s a lot of dissatisfaction with the way decisions are made in organizations. Decision making is a great proxy for many other factors in an organization, like trust, empowerment, psychological safety, speed, efficiency, power, and authority. We often use decision making as a concrete way to improve and accelerate teams because it brings in so many different factors of how teams work together. When we look across all of the research about decision making, we see that three common levers emerge: Clear decision ownership Explicit decision process Decision capture [6:49] Clear decision ownership The most ubiquitous decision ownership tool is RACI. It falls hopelessly short of providing the type of clarity that we want it to provide. We end up just documenting the dysfunction of our teams rather than providing clarity about how the decision is made. We like to introduce single decision ownership. That doesn’t mean that person is making an autocratic decision, but it means you have one decision owner. Who is responsible for shepherding the decision process, for getting the inputs and ultimately making the final call? That level of clarity helps accelerate teams. We encourage folks to consider who is closest to the work, has expertise, and is closest to the data. A lot of folks default to consensus as the model for decision making because they’re afraid of being responsible if something unforeseen happens. Consensus is overused and misused. It is preferable is for one person to make a decision using the information they have at the time and to have an environment where it’s okay to say, “Oh, maybe that’s not what I would’ve done, but I trust you,” or “Maybe it didn’t turn out the way that we wanted it to, but let’s just learn and pivot moving forward.” [10:04] What tools do you use for clear decision ownership? Select the best decision owner for each decision. We use a proposal where somebody on the team says, “You know what? I think Chad is closest to this information. He’s been working on this project and driving this forward. I propose that Chad is the decision owner.” Have a quick moment to see if there are any objections. As long as we agree that Chad is going to make sure that his stakeholders are heard and considered, we consent to Chad being the decision owner. Then we do a really rigorous stakeholder map where the decision owner names his key stakeholders—the people he needs to keep in the loop and who will impacted by the decision. He doesn’t necessarily invite them into the decision-making moment, but he gets their input. The decision maker has to make a great stakeholder map, engage us appropriately, get our data, and make sure that the decision is considering the most relevant data. [11:58] Explicit decision process We use a disagree-and-commit process, where you detail the steps of a decision-making process. The first step is a proposal. The second step is an opportunity for the stakeholders to ask clarifying questions. Often we jump right into reactions, but we need to understand and clarify before we get into our opinions. After we’ve clarified, we’ll have a round of advice or reactions where each person, one at a time without interruption, gets to say their advice. Then we will end the decision-making moment with

How established organizations can overcome barriers to digital transformation – for product managers Today we are exploring digital transformation in large organizations as well as other challenges leaders are facing in a digitally transforming business environment. With us is David Rogers, an expert on digital transformation, a member of the faculty at Columbia Business School, and the author of five books, including The Digital Transformation Roadmap. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:38] What kind of problems are executives of organizations talking about now? There’s a tension between the external and the internal. Established organizations are seeing a lot of external change—new technologies, new behaviors among customers and employees, and digital change. The pace at which each new wave of change comes is speeding up. On the other side, businesses find it hard to adapt internally to respond to change. Many companies are working on digital transformation, but they’re struggling to see results. Seventy percent of large organizations are failing in their efforts to transform. I’ve been diving into the key problems that are holding organizations back from digital transformation. They understand the urgency to transform, but inertia is holding them back. [5:43] What is digital transformation? Digital transformation is the transformation of an established business to thrive in a digital age of constant change. This is about established businesses. Creating a new startup is a different challenge. In an established business, you have a business model, customers, ecosystem of partners and distribution channels, employees, and a brand reputation. The challenge is adaptation. How do we turn a giant battleship in the water? Digital transformation is not, at its heart, about technology. We need to change because of changes around us, which are driven by new technologies, but to change our organization, we have to focus much less on the technology and much more on the customer and our own business. To respond when things seem to be changing so fast, keep an eye on the technology, but don’t lose sight of your real mandate, which is to solve customer problems, solve business problems, and pursue opportunities for sustainable growth. [7:36] What part does artificial intelligence (AI) play in digital transformation? The current wave of change is around generative AI. A lot of companies are pumping out demos of AI passing the bar exam or creating a marketing plan in 30 seconds. It’s uncanny how an algorithm can put things together that are shockingly similar to what a person might write. Is it actually useful though? Most of the examples I see are not useful. The marketing plan created in 30 seconds is not good enough to implement. It’s a B-minus student’s effort. Other people are using AI to actually solve problems. Khan Academy is using large language models to provide one-on-one tutoring. There is a lot of evidence that learners perform and progress better and faster if they have one-on-one tutoring, but human tutors aren’t scalable. Khan Academy is building an incredible application to provide tutoring that is as good as or even better than what a human tutor can provide. We have to follow and track these fast-moving changes, but we cannot be distracted by them from the strategic question, “What problems are we trying to solve?” [10:51] Tell us about your framework for digital transformation. My framework address five barriers to digital transformation: Lack of shared vision: A lot of companies have a generic intent to become more digital or futureproof the business, but those phrases are meaningless and generic, as opposed to a vision that is specific to the company. Where do we see our world, context, customers, and industry going? What is the role that we see ourselves in, in this rapidly evolving future around our particular organization? Your vision must be rooted in your particular business and unique capabilities. Lack of clear growth priorities: Sometimes a company has no focused strategic process at all and is chasing after the latest shiny object. Other companies are purely looking at cost savings and efficiency, which is important, but if all you’re trying to do is optimize your longstanding business, you’re going to miss out on the biggest growth upside. Focus on planning instead of experimentation: Product management is all about iteratively learning through experimenting and getting customer feedback. Some companies lack that process and rely on detailed, traditional planning processes based on third-party data. Lack of flexibility in governance: If you have no flexibility built into governance processes, such as allocating resources and starting and stopping projects, you will have an inability to effectively scale good ideas. Lack of change in capabilities: Your technology stack may not have been bro

Why product managers need to understand customers’ needs We have had a lot of valuable guests on this podcast, and one of my favorites is Ken Gray. When we talked a few years ago for episode 046, he was the Global Director of Innovation for Caterpillar. Since leaving CAT, he has worked on 3D printing, advanced manufacturing, robotics, and more. He has also been a long-time supporter of the University of Iowa Institute for Vision Research, which is creating cures and solutions everyone can afford for vision diseases. Ken will be sharing lessons learned from years of product innovation wisdom. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:43] How do we discover what customers want and need? Innovation is people, culture, vision, and execution. Understanding what customers need is about having the right people on your team and building deep relationships with customers. You need people who spend a tremendous amount of time with customers to learn what they need. Customers generally don’t like to be on the bleeding edge of technology. They don’t want technology for technology’s sake or innovation for innovation’s sake. They have specific needs to improve their business. The most important product marketing work a company can do is understanding what customers need to improve their business performance and translating those needs into functional specifications, which define what a product needs to do to serve the customer’s needs. Functional requirements are the definition of what the product is, and technical requirements are the definition of how to engineer the product to deliver those functional requirements. [9:10] What tools do you use to understand and meet customers’ needs? Never write a product requirement document that isn’t prioritized. Never give engineering a flat list. Give them a prioritized list—at least high, medium, and nice-to-have. Otherwise you’re going to get the cool stuff first, which doesn’t necessarily align with what customers need. There are things customers need that they don’t tell you they need. You need to understand why customers behave the way they do beyond their spoken word. Whatever appeals to them psychologically needs to be satisfied as well. Those buying decisions are harder to uncover than purely technical ones. To uncover them, you have to get to know your customers really well. Maslow’s Hammer is the idea that if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. This is unconscious bias. We tend to think if we have a technology that’s really cool or better than other technologies, people are going to come. It’s not that easy. You have to spend time understanding what drives success to the business and create an optimal product that helps your customers. You have to learn what customers need and explain your product to them. It isn’t about features and benefits. It’s about how your product improves your customer’s business—why they want it. If you can’t explain that to your customer on one sheet of paper, you’ve lost. [15:10] What are some other lessons you’ve learned related to product innovation? I would rather have an empty seat on my team than the wrong person in that seat. Don’t settle. Nurture the dissenting voice. Have people on your team who will tell you when you’re wrong and ask hard questions. [19:23] What tips do you have for working with team members? We had town hall meetings with employees. I would sit on stage and have people fire questions. I always learned more about what was going on with my customers, my product, and my team culture in those settings than in any other place. We always started these meetings with talking about safety. Everyone you work with—your team, customers, suppliers, and visitors—ought to have an expectation of getting to your facility safely, being there safely, and getting home safely. Then we got into how we were performing as a business. We showed profit and loss statements and took everyone through the numbers. We discussed the quality of the product and how it was performing. We talked about feedback we were getting and how customers were responding. We did these town halls on a routine basis so people got comfortable asking hard questions. My philosophy is I will always answer questions as long as they don’t violate insider trading rules or something like that. [26:51] How have you dealt with team members’ being afraid of you? I met with anyone who wanted to meet one-on-one. I started scheduling one-on-ones with people I didn’t know very well. I have lunch every day anyway, so I invited people to have lunch with me. When I was in Japan, in the factory there was a breakfast area where many of the leaders would meet before work to have breakfast. Everyone was invited. I started going to breakfast with the leaders, and they would discuss the topics that wer

How product managers can build trust and alignment on virtual teams Today we are talking about making virtual product teams more effective. Our guest is Anna Marie Clifton, Head of Product at Vowel. She is leading the effort to make virtual meetings more effective by turning them into searchable, sharable knowledge. Before Vowel, she held senior product management roles at Asana, Coinbase, and Yammer. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:57] How do you build trust among product team members on virtual teams? Trust is at the foundation of everything. Trust builds velocity. Trust builds product. It’s hard to build trust in virtual environments. When I had a distributed team at Coinbase, we were in a hybrid setting where some of the team was co-located and some of the team was not. That’s the hardest setting for building trust because there’s a local clique and remote participants. At Coinbase, we developed a mascot to give ourselves team culture. We chose the Count from Sesame Street because our team was working on trading, buying, and selling. We sent the Count stuffed animal to our colleagues who were not co-located with us as a symbol of our cohesion. One of the most important ways for leaders to build trust is being vulnerable and admitting mistakes. I go out of my way to call out any time I make a mistake in front of everyone whom I work with. You can do that not just in the moment but also in reference to a past mistake. That really humanizes yourself and sets the tone that it’s okay to make mistakes—this is a safe space. One of the best ways to build trust is to share vulnerability. If I’m being vulnerable with you, you can definitely trust me, because you have something you can hold over me. I’m in a position to be trusted because you have power. It’s critical especially for leaders to be vocal and vulnerable about current and past mistakes and set the tone of trust. For product managers joining a new team or organization, one of the best things to do to build a foundation of trust is to build early commitment. Say you’re going to do a thing and do that thing. Find things you are very confident you know how to do and that have a very short time window, say you will do them, and do them on time. Those actions give promissory notes that build trust, rapport, and expectation that you are a reliable person. When you move to a new organization, you start from a clean trust slate, and you have to really quickly build that balance sheet up. Giving people little commitments you can deliver on in the next 24 hours and doing that repeatedly in your first few weeks is one of the best ways to accelerate that. [10:30] How do you keep virtual teams aligned on product goals and priorities? Alignment is the most important aspect of team functioning, but maintaining alignment is challenging. Until you’re in an organization where there’s a lack of alignment, you don’t notice how completely frenetic it can be. If you move really quickly forward and you move really quickly backward, you’ve moved at a high speed but low velocity—you haven’t gone anywhere. One of the best ways you can improve velocity, especially as an organizational leader, is by focusing on alignment, not necessarily speed. Everything is always trending toward less alignment. The default state is as time moves forward, people are becoming less aligned. Your job as a product leader is to continue to pull people back into the alignment you have created. It’s all about communication. The adage “people have finally heard something once you’re tired of saying it” is true. At Vowel, we do an all-hands meeting every two weeks. Our product team will share a product update, and most product updates will include a high level reminder of product strategy. Every quarter we do a detailed all-hands meeting about the product strategy. What is our current product strategy? How, if at all, has it changed since the last quarter? If it stayed the same, you still have to say it again. I strongly encourage good posts in Slack or Teams. Communication with your teams in one-on-ones is important. One of my favorite ways to start a one-on-one conversation is with the question: “What’s the most important thing?” It’s a great question to pull your colleague out of the minutiae of tactics and into thinking about the most important thing for the company right now. People as individuals and teams as groups of individuals have a certain capacity for change. They can only absorb so much change so quickly. The capacity for change is a budget you get to spend as a leader. Give people a lot of heads-up notice of when a change is coming. That gives them a lot of confidence and security to execute the change and prepare to shift to the next thing when it’s time. You don’t necessarily need to know what the next thing is going to be. Y

Tools for planning and executing product projects Today we are talking about the skills product managers need to grow their careers. To help us, Neha Bansal is with us. She is the Head of Merchant Growth and Monetization for Google’s B2B ecommerce business, where she is leading efforts to build the next $1B+ B2B business for the company. Before joining Google, Neha worked as a Management Consultant at Essex Product Consulting, where she helped organizations build products. Outside of her day job, she has guided many PdMs in reaching their career goals, and consequently, has good insights about the skills they need. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:10] What key topics do you discuss when you mentor product managers looking to further their careers? First, how can product managers establish processes to enable their teams to succeed? Processes include forums to sync with different members of your team and other teams, forums to get leadership alignment, ensuring high quality of deliverables, and OKR planning. Second is setting up the right funnels for access to users. I strongly believe that as a PdM, the biggest value you bring on your team is speaking to users and having a pulse of what your customers need. Third is setting goals. I have often spoken with PdMs who say they don’t think their team understands what they want. I help them rethink what they want in a quantitative way to determine a metric that defines success. [6:10] Tell us more about processes to help our teams succeed. Typically, there are two big phases in bringing a product from vision to launch: planning and execution. Planning includes the product vision, strategy, and roadmap. How do you set the vision, strategy, and roadmap? At what cadence do you do that? Who are the right stakeholders and partners to work with as you are setting your vision, strategy, and roadmap? What would be some tools to do that? Those are all important processes to be intentional about. At Google we do annual planning early in Q3 when I think through the vision and strategy for my product. We write a document that evolves over four to six weeks during which all of the leads from different teams contribute. First, we go out and talk to customers. I talk to our customer support team and sales team to understand what challenges they have been facing. We keep a pulse of where the industry is headed and what headwinds we expect. We tap into all of that to write the vision document. [8:27] What do you put into the product vision statement? Typically we create a vision for the next three to five years. We break that down to where we see the product in five years, three years, and two years, and what we need to do to deliver on that vision. The document includes at most two pages about the vision. The portion about strategy goes into more depth. This is where we think about how will we get to our vision. We start by looking at the data to substantiate why we think we can achieve that vision. We think about our strengths, weaknesses, and competition. The strategy document provides North Star metrics. We describe the metric we care about, the target we want to achieve, where that metric is right now, and how much growth is expected each year. Finally we write the roadmap for year one. The roadmap provides specific projects that will help us hit our North Star metrics. [12:31] What tools do you use for planning and whom do you involve? As a product manager, I bring together the team to have equal ownership of the planning. I always do a two or three day offsite where I’ll bring the team together in person. We spend time understanding each other’s areas and then think about ideas. There are a lot of workshopping techniques you could use to help people come up with ideas. One of my favorite ones is having people take one minute and list all of the shortcomings in the product. Then we’ll have people talk through those and put them on sticky notes on a whiteboard. Then we’ll ask, “What do you think from here can actually be solved easily? And what is going to be a harder lift?” We’ll lay that down on a graph. You end up with a distribution of problems that have value in solving and can be solved right away as well as problems that have value in solving but will take more time. You as the PdM can put the brainstormed ideas into the first draft of the vision and strategy document. [15:34] How have you gotten product managers to spend time with customers? I tell PdMs who are in the early stages of their careers that it’s definitely important to make sure you talk to customers. I have had engineering teams applaud that I meet with at least three customers every week, regardless of whether it’s prescheduled for a particular project or not. That gives engineers trust that whatever I am asking them to build is actually required by the market and by our users. I cannot emphasize enough the need

Understanding the roles of product managers, project managers, and product owners Today we are talking about a frequently asked question, which is how are product and project management related. We’ll discuss the differences and similarities between the two. Joining us is Peter Monkhouse. He is a product owner and entrepreneur, with NewGenP being his latest company. Peter is an experienced speaker, educator, and consultant with over 40 years of experience leading teams and organizations to deliver value through projects. He has held several roles with the Project Management Institute, including Chair and Director of the Board. Peter’s latest book is Gen P: New Generation of Product Owners who Care about Customers. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:09] Can you share an example of a project that resulted in a new product? The definition of a project is a temporary endeavor to create a unique product, service, or result. One project I worked on was the installation of telephone billing systems. A telephone billing system is a product that a telephone company uses to send you those awful monthly telephone bills. We had a project to customize a telephone billing system to meet a company’s unique needs for their customer and then to install it for them to create the telephone bills. That’s an example of a project being used to create and deliver a product. The telephone company used the telephone billing system to generate invoices to get revenue. That allows them to continue to provide telephone service and add new functions and features to their telephone company. Every project we’ve worked on has delivered a product. And conversely, if we want to add a new feature to an existing product or create a new product, we’re going to do that through a project. [5:05] What are the key roles involved in project and product management? The project manager is the person who leads a team to deliver the product or service. Typically, the project manager is successful when they deliver the product on time, on budget, and within the scope and quality that’s expected by the client or the user. A project manager typically will report to a project sponsor, someone who is accountable for having that project completed on time, obtains the benefits of the product, and funds the project. A project sponsor could be a product owner or a product manager who owns the product and is worrying about the full lifecycle of the product, continuing to add more features and functionality to it to extend the lifecycle of the product and deliver more value to customers. A product owner could be the project sponsor or a business owner. They could also take the role of a customer—someone who makes sure the product meets the necessary criteria. In the telephone billing system example, my customer was the IT department, which was the product owner for the billing system. I would deliver the product to my customer who would then test it to make sure it met the necessary criteria to go into production and start being used to generate telephone bills. They also had a product owner on the business side who involved people from the finance department, customer care, and new product development to make sure the billing system would function appropriately. The product owner will be looking after the product from birth to death. They are trying to understand what value the customer is looking for from the product and what problem the customer has that the product is solving. Then they take that feedback from the customer to see how they’re going to enhance the product to better meet the customer needs and deliver more value to the customer with the objective of trying to make sure the product will stay current and relevant for as long as possible. I see the terms product manager and product owner being used very interchangeably now. In my book Gen P, we are talking about a product owner as someone who has a passion for the product and who will be the advocate and key spokesperson for the product. The product owner is future-oriented—asking, how is the product going to grow and help the organization be successful? The product manager might be a more transaction-oriented individual who is just working on getting the product from point A to point B. [14:51] Can you tell us more about the product owner role and how it’s different from the product manager role? One of the reasons my co-author Joanna and I wrote our book, Gen P, was we felt that the Agile world had inappropriately used the term product owner. Scrum has used the term product owner to refer to someone who is the internal voice on the project team to represent the voice of the customer. I think this is a disservice to the term. We are talking about a product owner as a higher level role—someone who directs a team of people who will support the product as it goes through its lifecycle. They collect feedback from customers,

What product managers need to know about augmented reality Today we are talking about augmented reality and what product managers and leaders need to know about this rapidly changing field that is becoming part of many digital transformation programs. Our guest has created several products using augmented reality, including a phone-based vision test at Warby Parker, the Neiman Marcus digital mirror that makes trying on and selecting clothes easier, the SalesForce conversational balance table, and much more. His name is David Rose, and he’s an MIT lecturer, an author, and a serial entrepreneur who offers a unique perspective on the next platform of spatial computing—what he calls SuperSight. This is also the title of his latest book, SuperSight: What Augmented Reality Means for Our Lives, Our Work, and the Way We Imagine the Future. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:13] What is the real-world metaverse? I’m trying to highlight the difference between virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). A lot of people, when they think of metaverses, think about roadblocks, Minecraft, multiplayer games, etc. Those are all virtual environments where you are sealed off and the real world is obscured from your vision. By the real-world metaverse, I mean laying information over the existing architecture, city, and water of the places that we go in order to make those places easier to navigate or imagine how they might change in the future. I’m talking about taking all of the internet and spatially anchoring it in the real world. [3:57] You have created several products related to this real-world metaverse. Tell us about how you get ideas for products. For me, good ideas for projects or innovation come from a confluence of three things: The first is user need or insights about people. I’ll give an example of an application to boating. I’m a boater, and I’m regularly disoriented out on the water. That’s the user need component. The second thing is a technological maturity component. In the case of the boating application, it’s computer vision. Computer vision can now identify things in front of your boat. The third thing is the viability of the business idea or a way to scale. For me, this usually comes from meeting a go-to-market partner who could help commercialize the technology. [9:14] Can you tell us more about the boating product example? I was speaking about my new book at a healthcare conference. We had shown how we could see through the human body for surgery planning. A fisherman approached me afterward and said he wanted to be able to see through the water to avoid hazards and see where to fish. Underwater maps existed, but he wanted to be able to see without using his hands. I wondered if we could spatially anchor the underwater maps in glasses so you could see the terrain underwater as if you’re in a glass-bottomed boat. We started off using Unity, a 3D game engine. We got the maps from ArcGIS, which is a spatial company. We made a mockup using glasses called Nreal, which are now at Verizon stores. We started prototyping the magic moment of seeing through the water. It was pretty compelling, but the more we used it, the more we realized that the glasses really weren’t the way to scale this and get it to market. We talked to a company called Freedom Boat Club that has a boat membership model for new boaters who don’t have a boat or for people who are going to boat in a new place. We figured out that the best way to image the world around you was to put a camera on top of the boat. We used computer vision with a 360-degree camera system that sits on top of the boat. It uses computer vision to see everything that’s around you that might be a hazard, and then it mixes that with cartography, so that the screen that’s sitting next to you when you’re driving the boat shows you ideal paths, safe passage tracks so you won’t run aground, other vessels, or other objects in the water. It took a lot of learning to do this project. Product innovators need to be dauntless in their ability to learn and quickly prototype. We learned a lot from America’s Cup, which is work done by Stan Honey to use augmented reality to make sailing more accessible for normal people to watch and understand. He made the race look like a football field with little virtual flags to tell you how fast the boats are going. The innovation lesson for product managers is use familiar metaphors. Make your big innovation look incremental. Stan Honey could have done a lot, but instead, his incremental innovation was to make sailing look like football. As product managers, even though we may have big, bold ideas of how to remake something in a totally new way, it will probably get more adoption and understanding if you use a familiar metaphor, iconography, or naming. [18:28] What changes in the real-world metaverse or trends in technolo

How product mangers can improve collaboration in cross-functional teams Today we are talking with Maziar Adl, the co-founder and CTO of Gocious, an organization that creates product roadmap management software. When I met Maziar and he told me about his company, I asked why does the world need another roadmapping company given the abundance of current options to product managers. His answer intrigued me because it identified a clear pain point that isn’t getting enough attention. Then when I heard his backstory in technology leadership roles at Xerox and Experian and the challenges he encountered with product roadmaps, I was eager to invite him to be a guest on this podcast. As the title of this episode conveys, our discussion will weave together topics for aligning customers’ needs and business strategy. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:36] What problems have you ran into related to aligning business strategy and product work? In product management, I often saw silos coming from top to bottom. The executive team makes decisions and translates those decisions to different parts of the organization, but mission for everybody to walk toward got lost in translation. Bottom up, there were also issues. The engineering team works on progressing the product but doesn’t communicate information back up to product management or executive groups. The role of product management is extremely in flux. It’s evolving so fast. There are courses in product management, but 15 years ago you couldn’t get a PhD in product management and come out knowing how everything works. Product managers bring many skills together to make it work. The role isn’t well defined, and processes and tools are evolving too. When I was the director of engineering, I often saw that what I understood the product to be was different from how directions of other departments in the organization understood the product. There was a big gap in communication at the executive level. That’s when I realized there was a need for a tool that can bring cross-functional teams together. [6:52] Did you find a gap in the roadmapping tools that were available before you started Gocious? There were two types of tools that were available. Many of the tools product managers use on a day-to-day basis are engineering-focused ticketing systems. They’re about cutting sprints and prioritizing user stories. An executive or someone in sales or finance cannot understand much from these tools about what product is coming out next month or next year. These tools don’t help product managers explain features to others. There are other tools that do some of this work of explaining features for you, but they don’t show the portfolio of products. They aren’t organized in a way that somebody in sales can look at a product and see the history of innovation on that product or what else is coming into the market. These tools mostly show initiatives. You can see activities that are going on to improve areas of the product, and you can see how those initiatives are organized, but you can’t see how an entire product evolved over time. You don’t see the big picture. I realized that if everyone at the company is on the same page about the company’s portfolio of products and can see the evolution of the products, it will make a huge difference in the way cross-functional teams come together to discuss the next stage of the products that have to come out the door. [10:31] What was your experience at Experian? I was the CTO in a part of the organization called consumer services. We had a direct-to-consumer product. We had a lot of feedback from focus groups and call centers. We had meetings to discuss opportunities for new products. Later, we went through a major transformation and started focusing more on driving the business from a customer’s perspective. Product management became more central in receiving customer feedback and making sure it was properly translated and analyzed. Prior to that, it was a much slower process and not everything was analyzed. The product team wasn’t as central to everything we did. Engineering had a lot of power. Product helped prioritize, but engineering often built a product and expected us to try to sell it. [14:27] What did you do to better align customer needs and business strategy? At Experian, when I was CTO, I worked with our chief product officer to reorganize my team of 150 engineers so we had proper product management coverage for engineering efforts. The CPO heled me align how product management and engineering coordinated with each other and the rest of the business. At the same time, our group started putting more rigor into product management. The CPO put together a product board, which met on a regular basis to review the major items coming in. Product managers from different parts of the product would review cases to open new mark

What a community can do for your product – for product managers Today we are talking about building a community for a brand or product. Which reminds me that this episode is sponsored by the Product Mastery Now Community—that’s right, we have a community for listeners of this podcast. Do you want to meet the podcast guests and ask them questions? We make that happen because community members are invited to the live recordings, which take place three months before they are published publicly. Want additional expert sessions? We make that happen too. Want to join a mastermind for peer-learning? That’s also part of the community. You can also search all the past episodes (over 400 at this point) to learn insights on any topic. Find out more and apply to be a member at ProductMasteryNow.com/Community. So this episode is about communities. What can a community do for a brand or product? It can provide growth, help clarify messaging that resonates with your ideal customer, and provide co-creation opportunities. LEGO, Starbucks, Wyze Consumer Electronics, and many more companies have found customer communities essential to their growth. To help us explore what is involved in creating a community, Bri Leever is with us. She is a community strategist who designs and implements communities for brands. She is also the person who helped me create the Product Mastery Now Community, and she shared many valuable insights with me in the process. You’ll find her at Ember Consulting, which she founded to help companies build meaningful communities. She and her colleagues also post dissections of public communities on Youtube at her Bri Leever channel. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:49] Why should product people care about communities? I like to frame community work in a product-driven perspective—What’s a problem our customer has, and how can we create a product that can help solve that problem for them? The community-led approach asks, What’s a problem our customer has, and how can we foster a space where that customer can start to solve that problem with other people who are solving a similar problem? When you’re coming from a product perspective, once you’ve solved the problem you lose insight into how that problem continues to evolve for the customer. The community-led approach creates a space where that conversation about the problem is happening. You can stay extremely attuned to the problem you’re trying to solve, whether you have a product that helps solve that problem or just foster the community space. Product and community work well together because a community gives you the landscape to test new ways to solve that problem and keeps you attuned to how the problem evolves for your target customer. [6:51] What are some different kinds of communities? Ambassador community—community members have sales incentives to sell products. Customer support community Product community—where you can get input from your top customers Customer success community—focused on learning, especially for highly technical products that requires a course to enhance the customer experience A healthy community is highly cross-functional and hits different objectives across different departments in your organization. Usually the best place to start is to pick one, get some traction, and go from there. [8:55] What is an example of a public community that does many things well? The LEGO IDEAS community is a product community where members can propose a CAD design of a new LEGO set, people can vote on it, and it can be brought to production. There was on highly engaged member who had earned a special badge in the community, which they had put in their Instagram profile. When someone’s status in an internal community becomes so important to that they share it externally as an identifier, that’s when you know something really powerful is happening in the community. Another example is the Spotify community. They have focused their community efforts more on their product, the Spotify app. One of my main critiques is they have not fostered micro-communities for their artists. [14:26] What are some practical tips for making a community happen? To get started, regardless of where you’re at in the community-building journey, get on the phone with your top customers. You have to understand what your customers are looking for and what types of people they’re looking to connect with. Get on the phone with 30 or 100 people. You’ll have a community strategy born out of those conversations. A slightly more scalable approach is hosting a focus group with some of your top customers, which is something Chad and I did when launching the Product Mastery Now community. There was one member up at 2am in Eastern Europe for the focus group. It was crazy how committed these people were that they were willing to get up in the middle of the night to be part of co

Learn from the 2022 winner of PDMA’s Outstanding Corporate Innovator award – for product managers For each of the last 36 years, the Outstanding Corporate Innovator award has been provided by PDMA to an organization that excels in innovation. At the time of this recording, the last winner was Hershey, and I was at their award ceremony. There were boxes of Hershey chocolate treats for everyone. It was a good ceremony :) We are going to learn what has made Hershey an outstanding innovator, gaining insights that might help you and your organization. With us is Charlie Chappell, the VP of Innovation and R&D at Hershey, and Greg Coticchia, the CEO of Sopheon. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:54] Charlie, why did Hershey decide to apply for the OCI award? We thought we were having some success as an innovative company, but it’s always good to get an external perspective. We decided to pursue the OCI award as a learning exercise and a moment of inspiration for the company. Applying proved to be a galvanizing effort because we had a lot of people in the company involved as we thought about our innovation process from end to end. It helped bring the team together. Winning provided great external validation and energized the team to ask, what more could we do now with innovation? I recommend applying for the OCI award to colleagues working in other places, especially if you’re at a stage where you’re assessing your innovation operations now. Applying for the OCI award is a great way to document what you’re doing. It’s not for the faint of heart. There’s a lot you put into the application. You get a lot of feedback from PDMA. They do a site visit. It is a lot of work, but the benefit we’ve gotten out of it has been well worth the effort. [4:01] Charlie, what are the innovation practices that makes Hershey an outstanding innovator? Everything for us starts with strategy—both innovation strategy and corporate and total enterprise strategy. In the application, we shared our enterprise strategy and specifically the significant role innovation plays in that. We highlighted how we translate that strategy into the projects we pursue. We had clear KPIs of what innovation had to deliver. We shared how we set up a process and tools to manage and govern projects so we’re hitting our goals. We demonstrated we were meeting and beating our goals. We also emphasized how innovation isn’t just an R&D function or innovation group. We bring in the entire organization and involve everybody in innovation. Everyone plays a role, whether that’s our supply chain partners, sales partners, marketing partners, finance partners. Everybody contributes to what innovation is at the Hershey company. [5:58] How do you communicate the organization strategy throughout the organization to help keep everyone on the same page? Communicating strategy starts at the highest level of the company. Our CEO and executive committee members make a very concerted effort to share the enterprise strategy with every employee in the company. By the time I go to my team, they’ve already heard the strategy from my bosses. I communicate what that means to us. We make sure all our projects align to the strategy. We don’t want to pivot too much on our strategy, but we also need to evolve. Especially at the front end, we’re having discussions all the time, asking, “Does this project still fit with the strategy? Where does it fit in the priorities of everything we’re doing? If it’s not a high priority, what else could we do with those resources?” And then we pivot. At the same time, at the front end we need to see what’s coming next and make a pivot in strategy because of what we’re seeing happen in the marketplace. [10:08] Is there a tool you use for aligning projects to your strategy? We don’t use tools so much, but we do use organizational structures around where we put priorities. Within the innovation team, if we have total enterprise priorities, we organize our teams by which teams are working on each priority. The plans keep getting more and more granular as you go down into the organization. We have a rigorous process of setting individual and team priorities and goals for the year. We do goal sharing meetings were we make sure our teams and partners are aligned. We find where the pinch points are and discuss what problems we have to solve collectively to be able to do everything we need to do. We have a ten-year vision that sets big priorities. Then we do strategy planning for the next three to five years. Then we do annual planning. As the annual plan is finalized, everybody sets their individual goals based off that. Those are the goals our performance is measured against at the end of the next year. [12:51] How do you make innovation’s everyone’s job? For us, there are two definitions of i

Using product ops to standardize product management processes Today we are talking about product ops—what it is, if you need it, and how to get started. Joining us is Steve Johnson, a returning guest. He is an author, speaker, and product coach. His market and technical savvy allowed his career to develop from Product Manager to Chief Marketing Officer. Steve is the author of Turn Ideas Into Products and co-creator of the popular Quartz Open framework. Before co-founding Product Growth Leaders, his product management consulting company, he was a Pragmatic Marketing lead instructor for over 15 years. Now he empowers product teams with training and coaching that remove the chaos from product strategy and planning. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:57] What does product ops do? Product ops is product management for product management. It’s looking at the friction of doing product management and standardizing it so we’re all using the same artifacts, methodologies, and research. Product ops involves getting clarity on roles and responsibilities and standardizing methodologies and artifacts. There are many methods for product ops, like BRICE, RICE, and Kano. I don’t care which one you are using, as long as everyone is using the same method. Product ops should involve standardizing onboarding, access to data, and systems. It involves guiding and coordinating customer research. Product management’s primary job is to scale our product business, and product ops is about scaling product management. I work with teams, and often I find it’s the first time they’ve ever gotten together to talk about how they do product management. If everybody is doing their own thing, you end up with an overwhelming number of things to keep track of, and everything the team produces or presents to the leadership team looks like it came from a different company. [14:37] How does an organization know it needs product ops? You should start thinking about it when you have three product managers and have product ops in place when you have four product managers. That’s when you start seeing deviation among product managers’ work. I strongly encourage product leaders to have monthly get-togethers on Zoom where product managers present a topic and the product team discusses how they do product management in the organization. Have the “how do we do things here?” conversations frequently. [20:26] How can organizations start putting in place a product ops capability? If you have three or four product managers, a product ops role would be part-time. If you have seven to ten, you want to hire somebody full-time. Follow a product project from idea to market and map the best process for the company. I recommend the Quartz Open Framework, which involves six steps from idea to market. For each step, you figure out the artifacts and ceremonies, and the framework provides you a structure for getting from idea to launch. Learning occurs at every step, not just the beginning and the end. One challenge a lot of product ops projects run into is trying to make a company-wide holistic process. Limit it to what the product manager is doing and whom they’re doing it with. It’s key to recognize products are built by teams, not by individuals. We need to be really clear on what artifacts I’m going to create, how I’m going to hand them to you, and how we’re going to collaborate. I don’t like the phrase handoff, which implies I throw it over the wall. Instead, think of a baton handoff in a relay race—a carefully practiced interaction involving explicit communication. Take the idea all the way from idea to market and figure out where you coordinate with UX, development, marketing, and sales and how to have that communication. Write it down. Now you have a playbook and an onboarding guide. [26:42] How can senior leadership be involved in product ops? I have found that if somebody on the leadership team is not supporting your project it will ultimately fail. That said, I don’t think most executives have any concept of the scope of roles and responsibilities, and I certainly don’t want the VP of sales telling me what product management ought to be doing. Having a product management-savvy senior leader involved is critical, but let’s apply product management to creating product ops. Interview stakeholders and see where their friction is. Interview the VPs of sales, marketing, etc., and ask, “What can we do to better serve you in our roles as product managers?” Action Guide: Put the information Steve shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit ProductGrowthLeaders.com Connect with Steve on LinkedIn Check out Turn Ideas into Products Learn more about the Quartz Open Framework and get free, ready-to-use templates Innovation Quotes “Our opinions, while interesting, are irrelevant.&

The ABCD framework for dealing with tensions in product management and innovation As product innovators, we encounter many tensions. To name just a few of these, perhaps meeting this quarter’s objective or creating the breakthrough of the future, perhaps the team building we want to do or having more personal flexibility, or what about process improvement or just getting the job done that is in front of us right now. Research has found that such tensions reflect underlying paradoxes, and they might actually be something that can help us in the end. How can we be more effective in dealing with these tensions or even using them to our benefit? Our guest, who has been researching this for over 20 years, is Dr. Marianne Lewis. She is the dean and professor of management of the Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati. She is a thought leader in organizational paradoxes and among the world’s top 1% most cited researchers in her field. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:59] What is “both/and” thinking? “Either/or” thinking tends to be our default. We experience tension or a dilemma, weigh the pros and cons, make a decision, and move on. That’s the default because it makes us feel like we have control, clarity, and consistency in our decision-making. “Either/or” thinking is a potentially detrimental approach because it’s limited to a binary, not considering other possibilities. Often in innovation, I see the false dilemma, “Are we focused on today’s products or are we focused on bold, new innovation?” If we only do one or the other, we soon hit a real challenge, because those two behaviors feed each other. “Both/and” thinking is about seeing tensions as opportunities for learning, creativity, and growth rather than paralyzing moments when you must make a call. Instead of thinking about tradeoffs, think about a paradox. I picture the yin yang. One side is the bread-and-butter current products, and one side is the bold, new innovations. The current products fund radical R&D, and new innovations become our core products. See current and new products as two parts of a bigger hole and as a persistent tension. [9:33] How have you seen organizations deal with the tension between tactical work and strategic work? We studied product design firms in Silicon Valley, which were incredibly financially successful. You might assume all their work is radical product development, but they pay their bills by doing version 2.0 of a phone or a mouse. We found the tension between three different levels—strategy, team, and individual. At the strategy level, these firms were really good at thinking about their project portfolio and making sure they always had a mix of incremental projects that pay the bills and projects that were potential award-winning showcase projects. They didn’t need many showcase projects, and when they didn’t have enough they would start their own. At the individual designer level, they would rotate designers among different projects. If they kept designers on incremental projects, the designers would feel they weren’t actually doing design, but if they kept designers on only the showcase projects, the designers would think about it 24/7 and get burned out. After some time on a showcase project, a designer needed to be on an incremental project to hone their skills and rebuild their confidence. These firms fostered the identity of practical artist in their designers. They helped people feel good about both types of projects. As another example, the chief digital officer of Fifth Third Bank told me, “If I’m not careful, urgency will always, always, always push out creativity and innovation.” I asked her what she does about that, and she said she needs people hitting the targets, and at the same time she needs to compartmentalize. Some companies compartmentalize using micro-sabbaticals—taking a day or two in a month for a new project—while others do job rotation. Resolving the paradox between tactical and strategic work means carving out time or creating different spaces. That could mean different teams, or it could mean an innovation center that’s physically a different building. The point is to make it intentional. If not, the urgency will push out the bold. [15:46] How do we put “both/and” thinking into practice? We think about is as a system of tools. We use the ABCD framework: Assumptions Boundaries Comfort Dynamics [16:18] Assumptions How do we change the question we’re asking? A psychology expert at Stanford said, “The problem is not the problem. The problem is the way we think about the problem.” As soon as we frame our problem as a question, we have constraints. When you say, “Do I focus on my current products or do I focus on what’s big and new?” you’ve dichotomized it rather than a

How organizations can empower product managers Today we are talking about what a product-led organization is, barriers that can prevent an organization from being product-led, and actions to create the product-led organization. Our guest is Paul Ortchanian, a problem-solver by nature and founder of Bain Public. He has a great deal of experience that has helped him be well-rounded in product management. Paul acquired the breadth of experience through his leadership roles at San Francisco Bay Area startups and high-growth companies. He helps rapidly scaling early-stage startups craft their Product Strategy and everything related to it. He also helps middle market and scrappy companies generate new product strategies for significant, sustainable growth. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:35] What does it mean to be a product-led organization? When I was interviewing product managers, I realized most of them had spent only a year or a year an half at each of several organizations. I eventually got fired as a product manager. I wondered why product managers last such a short time at each organization. If the leadership team doesn’t have a good understanding of how to engage with a product manager and what to expect from them, then any reason is enough reason to move on and find someone else. The second you have friction with the IT team or the engineering team, you’re going to be in trouble. Product managers often end up in organizations where they’re not being empowered. The leadership team is not giving them the guidance, process, tools, and support needed to do product management the way we all want to do it. Often, product managers move from one company to the other seeking the elusive product-led organization. The product-led organization comes from the leadership team creating space for product managers to do their jobs right. [4:32] Does empowering product managers require an organization to be structured around product? Not really. It comes down to making sure there is a product leadership team. Usually that’s the same as the regular leadership team. Product managers have to pitch initiatives to the leadership team, which makes decision on what to put their money toward. I noticed when I left San Francisco and went to cities like New York City, Montreal, and London, that these cities don’t have the heritage of product management. Leadership teams have often worked in service organizations or organizations that don’t have digital products, so they don’t know how to engage with a product manager. It’s not uncommon to realize your chief sales officer doesn’t understand that everything has to go through the product manager for prioritization, and they’ll just go straight to the CEO or engineers. As a product manager, you’ll feel like you have to create order within all of this. You might feel stuck managing your product while also trying to train the leadership team to understand how to work with you and adopt processes and correct behaviors. The job of a product manager is hard enough without having to establish a process. If you try to put in a process, often you get fired for not doing your job. A lot of product managers either accept they’re in the wrong type of organization that isn’t product-led or they decide to leave. As a product manager, you want to be in an organization where the leadership team is empowering product managers. [9:21] What have you seen are some of the issues that make it difficult to create a product-led organization? Often there’s a lack of awareness of product management. Often different teams don’t have a collective understanding of how to work with a product team. Road mapping is a collaborative effort, but the product, sales, and marketing teams might all be working in different ways. Awareness at the leadership level needs to be there for teams to understand they’re not working with product managers in the most efficient way and they need to fix that. Often product managers think they’re doing a great job creating value for the customer, but the business might not be getting as much value. For example, the marketing team might not support the features that the product team has just delivered through the engineers. You need to make sure there is buy-in from all stakeholders. I find that companies need a third party to come in and ask, “How do you hire and fire your product managers?” I want to hear it from marketing, sales, the CEO, and the CFO. Everyone needs to agree with how they’re going to engage with product managers and teams. You need to make sure there is a process and tools in place that people agree on. As a product manager, you’re the glue of the organization that is supposed to tie all these different groups together, but you can’t force them to engage and work with you if they don’t think it’s par

The steps in ranking and valuing Jobs-to-be-Done—for product managers We have talked a few times about Jobs-to-be-Done in past episodes. It is a customer discovery tool for uncovering the unmet needs of customers—the tasks they want to complete or objectives they want to achieve. When using this approach, we may find the customer has multiple Jobs-to-be-Done and each job has a variety of attributes. We then need to know what is most important to tackle first. Our guest has an approach for ranking and valuing jobs to be done. His name is Doug Stone. He is an expert at leading human-centric innovation and product design projects. His work has informed over $1 billion in revenue growth for Fortune 100 companies. He has a Masters of Product Design and Development from Northwestern University and teaches Innovation Strategy internationally. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:03] Can you give an example illustrating why ranking and valuing Jobs-to-be-Done is important? We did a project for a large quick-service restaurant about breakfast and came back with 20-25 unmet needs a quick-service breakfast can satisfy. After testing them and understanding which brands a consumer would want to satisfy each job, we found the second most important job to be done in quick-service breakfast was owned by a competitor, and it had to do with feeling strong, competent, and capable. My client’s brand attributes were more around wholesomeness, fun, and casualness. It was important to have those additional criteria around the Jobs-to-be-Done. We recommended the first five most important Jobs-to-be-Done, and as a grouping they aligned with their brand accurately. They developed communications and promotional ideas and reversed a three-year decline in their books. The grouping of Jobs-to-be-Done from the marketplace is really influenced by the brand the company has and what’s most important to consumers. As another example, we were working with health insurance companies. We collected Jobs-to-be-Done that people wanted in healthcare. That collection process grabbed jobs that health insurance companies are responsible for and jobs healthcare providers are responsible for. We had to pull those jobs apart. We asked consumers, “Which brand do you want to solve this?” One of our health insurance clients had a very different brand characteristic from most health insurance companies. We asked, “Do you want a health insurance company to solve this?” For certain jobs, consumers said no. Then we asked, “Do you want this specific health insurance brand to solve it?” and consumers said yes. That gave us a good understanding of what to bring into ideation and how to show a deep partnership between the health insurance company and the healthcare provider that was very believable for the client. [10:32] Take us through your Jobs-to-be-Done ranking and valuing approach. When you do qualitative interviews to get the Jobs-to-be-Done, use a cognitive framework to organize the discussion guide. For example, a financial services company told us their consumers wanted control. Control is too high level of an unmet need for a Job-to-be-Done. When you look at control theory from a cognitive perspective, it has three components: a point a reference, sensitivity to that point of reference, and real and imagined levers that people pull to get closer to or further from that point of reference. We used that cognitive model in the discussion guide. Once you have a transcript, pull out pieces of the transcript that have to do with people’s actions, the reasons they’re doing things, and the tensions they feel. Go through a diverge-converge process. We’ve been able to use artificial intelligence to do much of this, but currently we do this as a workshop with clients. Arrange the actions, reasons, and tensions into “because…but” statements. For example, “I eat fast food because it’s convenient, but I worry it’s bad for my health,” or “I eat fast food because it’s affordable, but I worry about its impact on the food chain.” Those are very different “because…but” statements with different reasons and tensions. Once you’ve collected those statements, categorize them into emotionally-based categories and refine them down to ones your business can actually do something about. Next create a linguistic prototype, which is very formatted, and I have a checker that allows you to make sure you have formatted it properly. Find the jobs that are most important that your company can do the most to solve. Then quantitatively test them. We use a Likert scale. Ask whether consumers agree with the full statement and whether they agree with the action, reason, and tension separately. Then flip the tension into a positive statement: “Do you want this benefit delivered by this brand or industry?” Finally

How product and marketing teams can work together Today we are talking about the interdependence of product and marketing and how marketing trends have changed. To help us, Ali Plonchak is with us. Ali is the COO of Crossmedia. Since 2006 at Crossmedia, she has helped clients navigate the changing marketing landscape. As the company’s first female partner, she proudly leads the agency to deliver on its mission of trust, reason, and happiness every day. Her responsibilities include building and evolving Crossmedia’s services in ways that reflect their commitment to do the right things for their people and their clients. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:53] What is the definition or purpose of marketing? Marketing, when done well, delivers on a need a consumer didn’t realize they had. It’s about using data to uncover insights and the best place, time, and way to speak to a consumer on behalf of a brand. Then deliver that in an effective way and measure the success of that against brand goals. [7:14] What trends or big shifts have you seen in marketing? Access to data and how we use it has changed. Data, digital media, and advanced analytics to measure effectiveness have skyrocketed. Everything from smartphones to social media has allowed there to be more data out there. It created a lot more complexity in the supply and demand of digital advertising inventory and pricing mechanisms. Now, you can track advertising exposure all the way through to the brand’s ultimate success measure. Now, success in marketing is not only about the brand, values, and whom you want to reach, but also about having technical acumen. Another trend is data enrichment. You can pay a data service to get data on your customers. A few years ago, there was suddenly all this data on people, but there started to be questions about how the data is being sourced, how recent it is, and what its quality is. There’s been a big shift in the past couple of years for organizations to maintain a centralized source of data and know with more clarity how that data was procured and how it applies to audiences. This year, there’s a ton of new legislation that will continually impact the type of data that consumers willingly give to a website. That’s sparking a lot of interesting innovation in the way we target advertising and measure effectiveness. Another shift is around using media responsibly. Consumers are starting to recognize the societal impact media can have on consumers—positive or negative. How can we think about using media for good? That’s a conversation we’re frequently having with our clients. How can we use media to deliver positive actions? How can we stay away from some of the places and spaces that might be impacting people in a more negative context? [13:42] Have you seen any shifts from outbound (getting information to people, e.g., billboard, advertisement) to inbound (people coming to you, e.g., on social media) marketing? Absolutely, and that’s related to having so much more data out there. Most consumers expect if they engage with your brand, you will provide them something of value. It could be functional—if they sign up for your email list, you provide 20% off their first purchase. Or it could be something cool—you provide a branded filter they can apply on a social media platform. Most of these interactions allow marketers to find consumers who are “hand raisers” for their brands. They can then look for more people who raise their hands like that, finding the attributes that are common to hand raisers and using those to fuel everything from advertising to product development. [15:14] How is changing legislation impacting marketing? This legislation impacts the way we target advertising and the way we measure effectiveness. Marketers now can’t use some of the data they’ve gotten accustomed to using. This is creating a renaissance of tactics that were widely used before the rise of so much data. For example, one strategy is to target consumers in the right context. If they’re in a grocery store, it makes sense to be advertising food content. [17:02] Can you give an example of newer measurements? Early digital advertising was all about click-through rate and cost per click. Then everybody realized there can be a lot of fraud in the advertising landscape, and it was hard to define the meaning of some measurements. The industry has become more sophisticated around measuring the ultimate business success, answering, “Did an advertisement drive an ultimate business transaction for a brand?” A good portion of those technologies relied on cookies, which are going away. Now we’re seeing the rise of first-party data. Collecting phone numbers or having loyalty cards allows marketing to be tracked back to the purchases. [21:53] How are marketing and product innovation interrelated? Advertising, social

Lessons for product managers from PDMA’s Outstanding Corporate Innovators Award Every year the Product Management and Development Association (PDMA) recognizes an organization with the Outstanding Corporate Innovators Award (OCI). Hershey, the chocolate maker, was the last winner, in 2022. The winners of the award can teach us valuable lessons about innovation. To help us learn some of those lessons, Sally Kay is with us. She has served on PDMA’s OCI Committee for several years. Sally spent 36 years with The Dow Chemical Company and GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare. After working in R&D, Finance, Sales, and Marketing she focused her career on various areas of innovation and new product development. Since retiring, Sally has started her own consulting business, Strategic Product Development, which focuses on the front end of the innovation process. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:04] Why was the OCI award created? OCI was created as a learning vehicle for PDMA. When a company achieves a sustained and quantifiable innovation success, PDMA will give them an award if the company will present their lessons learned at the annual conference. The OCI committee uses a rigorous process to evaluate candidates, focusing on identifying unique practices that will provide valuable learning opportunities for others trying to improve their innovation practices. We look under the hood of these companies to learn how they are sustaining innovation success. [5:05] What is required to compete for the OCI award? There are three primary criteria: Sustained success launching significant new products or services Significant quantifiable business results delivered by those new products or services Consistent use of disciplined product development practices that the company is willing to share with others We provide detailed feedback to companies that don’t win the award. Many companies find this valuable, and some later win the award after adapting their practices to reflect what they learned from us. [9:40] What are key innovation practices that winners have in common? The award started in 1988, and in 2004 the OCI committee was asked to write a chapter for the PDMA Handbook of New Product Development about the OCI award. We found consistency in the winners’ practices that others competing did not have. Even though these companies were diverse in industry, size, and geography, their practices were consistent. How they executed those practices depended on their industry and culture. We conducted two more retrospective analyses covering 2004-2013 and 2014-2021. We saw an evolution of the practices that separated the winners, but we still saw that consistency of practices across the winners. We learned that achieving innovation success has not gotten easier over the 35 years of the OCI award. From 1988-2004, winners were early adopters of Stage-Gate, cross-functional teams, and voice-of-the-customer. Today, the practices that differentiate OCI winners are much more complex and involve: innovation strategy that defines where the company is going to play and how they are going to win intense focus on the front end of the innovation process portfolio optimization external collaboration and open innovation culture that supports bold thinking, risk-taking, and failure Lean and Agile practices metrics to measure effectiveness of the innovation process strong corporate commitment to innovation [18:07] Do you have any favorite innovation practices you’d like to talk more about? Innovation strategy is critical. The company Corning was once very dependent on the telecom industry. In the early 2000’s, that industry started to decline, and Corning almost shut its doors. Instead, their management decided to totally change their approach to innovation and make sure they were never dependent on just one industry again. One of their key tactics was to develop an innovation strategy. They call it their innovation recipe. It clearly defines the key elements of achieving successful innovation. One of those elements is solving a significant customer problem. When I visited Corning, it didn’t matter whether we were visiting engineering, marketing, or sales—everybody could quote the innovation strategy. They all knew that was critical to their success. Intense front-end focus is also important. We look for companies that are really digging deep at the front end of the innovation process and getting as many inputs as they can to make a decision on where they’re going to innovate. The company Church & Dwight showed us a funnel where they determine their “drill sites”—where to focus their innovation efforts. The funnel has 25 different inputs to determine where the big opportunities are. That’s intense front-end focus, and it tends to be skipped sometimes. [21:48] How do winners resource front-end innovation? Corning has a discovery process called Magellan.

How product managers can give their products momentum to get across the finish line Identifying the strategies that accelerate innovation starts with the question: “What do the world’s best innovation teams do differently?” To find the answer, we are talking with Matt Phillips, who interviewed over 100 new product innovation leaders, identifying six key strategies they use to cut through bureaucracy, find winning ideas sooner, and improve their success rate at launch. Matt is the founder of Phillips & Co., a Chicago-based innovation strategy firm. The company’s team of researchers, strategists, and inventors helps organizations reimagine their future and invent new products, services, and brands. Matt has an interesting educational background, with an MBA in Marketing from The Kellogg School of Management. He also graduated from the Conservatory Program in Improvisation at The Second City in Chicago. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:08] After interviewing 100 product and innovation leaders, you identified six key strategies that improve innovation. Can you take us through those? As a consultant, I’ve seen that the biggest challenge has been projects that grind to a halt or fade away. If you could speed things up, that momentum would get more projects to the finish line. The six strategies: [4:46] Question the question. A company called A. Y. McDonald, which makes plumbing parts for city waterworks, wanted us to help them invent new products. At the kickoff, we asked what their last breakthrough product was. They told us about a valve that came out in the late sixties. If you run a public water system, the last thing you want is a newfangled product—you want the same reliable product over and over. At our first meeting, we suggested we reframe what A. Y. McDonald had hired us to do. Instead of answering, “What new products can we create?” we could answer the basic question, “How do we make more money?” We worked on answering both questions at the same time. Most of the successes were non-product successes around marketing, distribution, and user experience. Eventually we got to products, but knowing there was an extreme uphill battle, we decided to question the question. If you’re handed a challenge by the product team, CEO, or customer, first step back and ask, “Is that even the right question to work on?” That accelerates things because often teams spend months or years on a question that many people on the team know isn’t even the right question. [8:10] Build dream teams. Walt Mossberg asked Steve Jobs, “How do you turn out such amazing products at Apple?” He said, “Walt, do you know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero.” Apple was organized like a startup. Every product had a team built and dedicated to work on it. After a class I taught at Kellogg, one of the students who had worked at Apple told me an interesting story about the team that ran the software Garage Band, which allows you to record different musical instruments and piece them together into a finished song. The team in charge of Garage Band was four people who happened to play four different instruments, so not only were they great software engineers and leaders, but they were also musicians—a drummer, keyboardist, guitarist, and singer. When one of those four people left Apple, instead of finding a replacement who was just really great at the role they needed filled, they found someone who was great at the role and played the instrument that was missing. There was a synergy in having the four of them not only be software engineers but also be musicians. Companies that accelerate innovation have thought hard about their teams. They haven’t just cobbled them together. They’ve spent time finding the exact right people. [12:11] Consistently query customers. Many organizations rev up for innovation, do a giant market study for six months, go off and work with those insights for the next three years, and never talk to customers again. This sounds insane, but it’s very common. The company Radio Flyer was in financial straits. They realized they hadn’t done any work around insights or understanding their customer. They were making the metal red wagon, and competitors were coming in with plastic wagons that looked a whole lot like theirs. They went on a listening tour and found out that people had this huge emotional sense of nostalgia for the Radio Flyer wagon and for the Radio Flyer tricycle. What was fascinating about that was that they had never made a tricycle in their history, but people had this huge nostalgia for these non-existent tricycles. Customers had apparently merged their childhood memories. The first thing Radio Flyer did was make a tricycle, and it became a smash. After that they built a constant listening mechanism. They could go back on a regular basis and talk to customers, show t

How product managers can prepare for a product leadership role Today we are talking about how you can prepare for and find a senior product leadership role, and we’ll be addressing this both for current senior leaders as well as for product managers. To help us, we are joined by the co-founder of an executive search firm that specializes in placing Product VPs and CPOs. Our guest is Chris Mason, who started Intelligent People in 2002 as a specialized recruitment agency. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:20] What do you love about your role helping people land senior product leadership roles and helping organizations find the talent they need? Organizations approach us and give us insight into their strategies and what they’re looking to achieve. It’s really exciting to see what their strategies are and help them figure out the profiles of people who will solve their problems. We also get close to candidates and understand where they are in their careers and what challenges they’re looking for next. We change their lives when there’s a strong match—the candidate gets the opportunity they want and we solve the business’s problems. [3:56] What are organizations looking for in a Product VP or Chief Product Officer (CPO)? There are lot of variables, and it depends on the challenges the organization has. Usually organizations are looking for some relevant domain knowledge or experience relevant to the problem. Product leaders need skills like using data, prioritizing, managing a team, strategic thinking, and influencing. It’s critical for Product VPs and CPOs to be able to articulate the value behind a business case and get people on board. They should think about the full product lifecycle, asking, “What is the purpose of this? What value are we creating? What problem are we solving?” There’s an ongoing debate about the importance of domain knowledge and how transferrable product skills are. I think skills can be really transferable with some exceptions. No one piece of work is the same, but there are common themes that start to rise to the front for product leaders. [7:41] Do you have any more thoughts about domain knowledge? We try to shift the conversation with the company to discussing what impact they’re looking for. What problem are they solving with this hire? Then we look at the candidate pool. How realistic is it we’re going to find this person? We try to focus more on competencies and experience rather than domain knowledge, because domain knowledge can be learned relatively quickly. We try to increase the size of the candidate pool by getting the client to look more broadly at other domains. Often product leaders want a different challenge by moving to a new sector. Often a person coming from outside the domain has an advantage because they don’t make the same assumptions everyone in the industry makes. [11:14] How can a person looking for a Product VP or CPO role best position themselves? There’s some hygiene stuff at the beginning: Get your CV and LinkedIn profile ready and make sure they’re well aligned. You can apply through an agency, but you can also use your network. Continually keep your LinkedIn updated, so you’re not raising any red flags if your current boss sees you suddenly update your LinkedIn profile, and so you’re discoverable based on your content. Change your profile to “open to work” when the time is right to make yourself even more discoverable. Write your resume to highlight your impacts. Write about what you’ve achieved. Attach data and metrics. Reflect on what’s going to make you happy. Make sure you’re targeting the sort of challenge you’re looking for. Some times people get promoted to the point where they’re no longer happy. It takes a lot of self-awareness to answer, “What will make me happy? What sort of challenge am I looking for?” At the start of your search, reflect on that. Think about the things you enjoy the most and the things you don’t enjoy and what sort of opportunity will tick the boxes of the things you enjoy the most. Try getting a mentor because that person can uncover things that aren’t obvious to you. [18:06] What kind of experience should product managers be looking for to prepare themselves for a future Product VP role? Be continually learning. Do training, read books, and join a community. There are a lot of product management communities, like Chad’s Product Mastery Now Community, that you can get involved in. It’s really valuable for product managers and leaders to be able to share stories and bounce ideas off other people. Take opportunities to learn. Be willing to take on more responsibility, even if it’s for a small initiative and you can’t see the rewards right away, because the rewards will follow when you build experience. [21:42] Wha

How product managers can get involved in inspiring the next generation’s workforce Today we are talking about preparing the next generation of innovators. If you are a parent, have a nephew or niece, or want to help influence future innovators, this will be a very helpful discussion for you, especially if the kids you can influence are in grades 6-12 or will be in the future. Joining us is Jennifer Kopach, the CEO of Science Olympiad and President of the Science Olympiad USA Foundation Board. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:06] What is Science Olympiad? We’re one of the largest STEM competitions in the United States. We have school teams in all 50 states and have been around for almost 40 years. Science Olympiad is creating the next generation’s workforce. Right before the pandemic, we had about 8,000 teams of kids in grades 6-12 and almost a quarter of a million students competing. The way Science Olympiad works is there are 23 events for each division. Kids form a team of 15 in their school. They practice just like an athletic team, and they advance through levels of competition from Regionals to State to Nationals. Every year we have alumni who graduate, go on to college, and go into STEM careers or other careers, and from Science Olympiad they take the soft skills of collaboration, teamwork, and intellectual curiosity that are the hallmarks of Science Olympiad. We hear from our workforce partners that when the alumni show up at work, they have those teamwork skills already embedded in their processes. They’re problem solvers, creative, not afraid to take risks, and not afraid to fail. In Science Olympiad, students work with people they might not necessarily know. They learn from them and learn different skill sets. Science Olympiad includes a lot of cross-column learning. Some people are more interested in engineering, others in study skills or lab skills, and they come together and learn from each other. [5:54] What do you tell parents about why their kids should be in Science Olympiad? I like to share the participants’ comments. The thing I hear the most is that Science Olympiad was that “one thing” in the student’s life. It was the thing that really brought them to school. It’s what kept them going to school. It’s what kept them interested in the subject matter that connected the real world to what they were learning in the classroom. Sure, there are lots of great students, and they’re obviously going to excel, but Science Olympiad allows them to choose the topic they want to excel in. They can apply their learning in ways the classroom doesn’t offer. Parents who are looking to give their kids a nudge in the direction of certain activities should know Science Olympiad will definitely create a skillset in a student that they can take throughout their time in college and entire career. [6:16] Tell us more about how Science Olympiad is structured and what students learn in Science Olympiad. Science Olympiad was founded by a group of people who were super committed to science education. They wanted to share the love of all sciences. Science Olympiad is not just robotics olympiad or biology olympiad or chemistry olympiad. They wanted something for everyone, so they created this great system of 23 events across different columns: life science, earth and space science, physics and chemistry, tech and engineering, and inquiry of science. There are 15 kids on a team and 23 events, and students work in pairs on each event, so they’re never working alone and they each have do more than one event. If a student is really into studying, they can do a bio event, but they could also try a building event and a chemistry event. We really encourage students to branch out and try different things and we make sure we also help the teachers by making the events aligned to the curriculum. Science Olympiad is everything the kids are learning in school, just on steroids. Part of the fun of a Science Olympiad tournament is students usually get to go to a big high school, community college, or university. They not only get to be doing what they love, which is science, but also get to be part of the team with a bunch of people who are their friends. Then they’re with a professor who is at the front of the room running the event, and that’s really exciting and inspiring because they have immediate access to these mentors and a vision of what it’s going to be like when they go to college. [11:15] How does Science Olympiad choose the events? We rotate about a quarter of the events every year. There are some signature events that we cannot get rid of. If we didn’t have Write It Do It, I think we would have a mass mutiny. Other events like Disease Detectives, which is an epidemiological event, stay in the rotation every year, but we change up the subtopics. We like to freshen things up and follow the scien

How product managers can get market-driven data to make product decisions quickly This episode is sponsored by PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. PDMA is a global community of professional members whose skills, expertise and experience power the most recognized and respected innovative companies in the world. PDMA is also the longest-running professional association for product managers, leaders, and innovators, having started in 1976. I have enjoyed being a member of PDMA for more than a decade, finding their resources and network very valuable. Learn more about them at PDMA.org. PDMA invited me to their conference, which was in Orlando, Florida, to interview some of their speakers. This speaker spoke on the Three ways to escape gut-feeling and boost innovation rapidly to markets. The topic is about techniques to increase the innovation success rate. For example, by applying Lean innovation, you can speed up development by up to 60% and increase profitability by 31%. Ulrike Laubner-Kelleher is a sought-after mentor, educator, and presenter on the topics of product management, innovation and teams efficiency. She helps product teams get ahead of their competitors by finding innovations quickly and developing and launching complex hardware and software products on time. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:04] You shared a method during your talk called CuCoCo for getting market-driven data to make product decisions quickly. Can you walk us through the method? CuCoCo is an abbreviation for Customer, Context, and Company. It’s a method for market-driven analysis. In many companies, data to make market-driven decisions is missing for several reasons—people don’t have time, they don’t know how to do it correctly, or nobody tells them what to do. CuCoCo is a method to empower product managers to find the right data. First, we need to talk to the customer. We should have innovation that fulfills a purpose for the customer. The customer tells us about their problems, and it’s our job to find the right solutions. We need the right questions to ask customers. The product manager needs to get the answers that are used for setting up the product strategy and for marketing and development, so we have clarity. Start with the customer and find out what the problem is. The questions we equip product managers with help them find clarity on the buyer persona (used for marketing) and the user persona (used for development). The more interviews you do, you see the priority of problems and requirements. You also get information to help with promotion, pricing, sales, and marketing. [6:53] What are some of your favorite questions to ask customers? My favorite question to start with is “What does your typical day look like?” This serves as a bridge to make the customer start talking because they know their day very well. They say what is good and what is not very good about their day, and then you dive deeper and follow with other questions. [7:43] Tell us about Context. The context surrounds the company and products. First, what is the competition doing? Where are they positioning their product? What marketing and sales are they doing? Where are they selling it? What are they not doing? The things they’re not doing make good entry points for us. For instance, if there is a market segment they are not serving, we can grow our company in that direction. The next part of context analysis is a PESTLE analysis, which looks at external factors—political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental—that is, all the trends impacting the business environment. There are so many new laws and environmental factors impacting our businesses that weren’t there 50 years ago. If recycling is important to customers or there’s a new law coming up, and we forgot about those things, we’re going to need to make a lot of changes. Those changes are very expensive and take your development people away because they don’t want to amend the product, work on it again, test it again, and launch it again. Then you won’t have the resources to work on the next product, so it’s very important to look at PESTLE factors upfront. As a product manager, know what your company is doing. Half of the product managers in my masterclasses say they don’t have clarity on the strategy of the company. They’re very frustrated because they put in a lot of work and present their concept, but if it doesn’t follow the direction of the company’s strategy, they can’t execute it. It’s better to understand the company’s vision, strategy, and competence upfront and align those with the product strategy. Many product managers spend too much time firefighting and being distracted from spending time with customers. Say no to many things that distract you from focusing on customer interviews. [20:11] Can you give

How to achieve product-market fit – for product managers This episode is sponsored by PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. PDMA is a global community of professional members whose skills, expertise and experience power the most recognized and respected innovative companies in the world. PDMA is also the longest-running professional association for product managers, leaders, and innovators, having started in 1976. I have enjoyed being a member of PDMA for more than a decade, finding their resources and network very valuable. Learn more about them at PDMA.org. PDMA invited me to their conference, which was in Orlando, Florida, to interview some of their speakers. This speaker emceed the conference and presented on Lean Product Management: How to Achieve Product-Market Fit. Our guest will teach us a simple but effective process for creating successful products. Dan Olsen is a returning guest to the podcast. He is a well-known product management trainer, consultant, and speaker. He is also the author of the bestselling product management book, The Lean Product Playbook. Through his talks and interactive training workshops, Dan helps companies build great products and strong product teams. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:38] What are the steps of the Lean Product Process? The Product-Market Fit Pyramid is the key framework, and it has five layers that build on each other. Start at the bottom and work your way up: Market: 1. Target customer 2. Underserved needs Product: 3. Value proposition 4. Feature set 5. User experience (UX) Write down your hypotheses in each layer then test the product with customers to see where you’re at with product-market fit. Iterate those assumptions and hypotheses until you get to the level of product-market fit you want or decide to pivot. [8:38] How do we identify our target customer? It’s important to start in the problem space. Get really clear on who has the problem, because those details will change how you solve it. Segment the market by: Demographics (or firmographics for B2B). Usually demographics show correlation, not causality, but they’re a good starting point. Attitudes: What do customers believe? What’s important to them? For example, how much do different segments care about the environment? Behaviors: What are customers doing? For example, power users vs. lightweight users. Needs: What are the different needs of different segments? This is the closest to causality. Use all four ways of segmenting. To find out if your segments are clear enough, interview ten customers. If five of them love your prototype and five don’t, that’s a hint you haven’t segmented your market enough. What is the salient attribute you missed? Adding that attribute adds predictive power to your model. The Lean Product Process helps teams get aligned. If we’re not aligned on the customer, of course we’re going to have disagreements about features and prioritization. Create a simple persona to get everybody on the same page. [13:45] How do we discover underserved needs? Find out why the problem is important to your customer. How is it going to create value for them? Don’t go rushing into the solution space without being clear on who your customer is and what problem you’re going to solve for them. People don’t want a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole. A product manager’s main job is to define who our customer is and what their needs are. Map out a problem space definition. Brainstorm all the benefits you could address and organize them. Look for an unmet or underserved need. I use an importance vs. satisfaction framework to define how well-served or underserved each need is. How important is this need to the target market segment? And how satisfied are they with the current solution? If they have an important need and have not yet found a satisfactory solution, that’s where the opportunities are. [18:18] How do we define our value proposition? Out of all the benefits we brainstormed, what are we going to actually promise to customers? And what’s our plan for how to do it in a way that’s better than the competition? How are we going to deliver higher levels of satisfaction? I apply the Kano model, which is a categorization scheme for problems using three relevant categories: Performance benefits or features: You can plot this on a graph. The x-axis is how fully the products meets the need (from 0% to 100%), and the y-axis is how much customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction results. Usually you can quantify performance. For example, if we’re in the microprocessor chip business and everybody else’s chips are 2 GHz and ours is 3 GHz, we’re outperforming by 1 GHz. Must-haves: If your product fully meets the must-have needs, it doesn’t make customers happy. If you don’t have a must-have, customers won’t bu

Injecting the theme park industry’s experience model into product development This episode is sponsored by PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. PDMA is a global community of professional members whose skills, expertise, and experience power the most recognized and respected innovative companies in the world. PDMA is also the longest-running professional association for product managers, leaders, and innovators, having started in 1976. I have enjoyed being a member of PDMA for more than a decade, finding their resources and network very valuable. Learn more about them at PDMA.org. PDMA invited me to their conference, which was in Orlando, Florida, to interview some of their speakers. This speaker gave a keynote on transforming products into experiences: injecting the theme park industry’s experience model into product development. In other words, what can we learn from theme parks to help us do a better job creating products our customers love? Geoff Thatcher is the Founder & Chief Creative Officer at Creative Principals. As an experienced creative director, he excels at leading projects from concept to reality. These projects are most often about creating world-class experiences in corporate visitor centers, museums, theme parks, and live events. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:13] Tell us about your work creating customer experiences. I started in the experience industry as a 14-year-old cleanup boy at a swimming pool. My job was to make sure the customers experienced a clean pool. I went on to be a lifeguard, a train engineer, and a manager in a rides department. One of the most memorable experiences was working on the Mack Wild Mouse coaster, a classic coaster that was very fun to operate. I worked ten years at Laguna amusement park in Farmington, Utah, and then had a brief flirtation with journalism for about two years. I really missed the parks, and as a journalism major in college I realized our job creating experiences was really about telling stories. I was able to combine the education I got writing and telling stories with telling stories at theme parks, museums, and brand experiences around the world. I love a good story. Amusement parks have their place, but I love the evolution from amusement parks to theme parks—where the rides tell a story. [8:58] How can we use this perspective focused on the customer experience to improve products? To summarize the customer experience framework: Attract attention Build trust Give the information customers need to move forward Create an experience for customers to internalize the product Be purposeful about the action you want customers to take The customer experience means the customer is on a journey. The experience model is similar to the hero’s journey and other models that are deeply embedded in the human psyche. I don’t claim to have invented the experience model. I recently wrote a piece talking about the tabernacle in the wilderness as a product experience. The way the priest went through the tabernacle in the wilderness very much aligns with the experience model and the hero’s journey, so these things are just part of who we are as human beings. Any product should be an experience. The first thing you have to do is attract people’s attention. Often, that’s through product design. If it’s a theme park ride, it’s through an icon. If it’s a museum experience, it might be through signage. If it’s a brand experience, it might be something as simple as a logo. Once you attract someone’s attention, you have to build their trust. At a trade show, that could be as simple as a handshake. It could be as complicated as an immersive queue through the Hogwarts castle that looks exactly like it did in the movies, so if you’re a fan of the movies, you think, “This is legit,” and that trust is established. When you’re developing a product, what are you going to embed in that product that will build trust with customers? Next you have to give them the information they need to move forward in their journey. We’ve seen products fail because people do not know how to use them. We’ve seen experiences fail because people don’t know what’s happening next. Often in a theme park, that information is delivered in the pre-show. Now people are ready to internalize the story. In a theme park, internalizing might be hopping on a coaster. We’re working on a project right now called the Ozark Mill at Finley Farms in Ozark, MO. The Ozark Mill is a historic grain mill. It’s been there for almost 200 years and it’s beautiful. The internalized moment isn’t anything we manufactured. It’s when you step out of the mill onto a platform and you see the waterfall coming over the mill pond and the tree and birds chirping and sun shining. That’s the moment when the story hits home, and you realize the

What product managers can learn about innovation from the U.S. government’s innovation efforts Today we are talking about building more innovative organizations. To help us with that, we have the author of Creating Innovation Navigators: Achieving Mission Through Innovation joining us. That is Sabra Horne, who is Entrepreneur in Residence at BMNT, where she supports the development and deployment of government innovation efforts. Before joining BMNT, she was Chief of the Innovation Hub, responsible for envisioning, establishing, and developing innovation efforts in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Previously, she served the National Security Agency (NSA) as Deputy Chief for Information Sharing and Collaboration, facilitating sharing of NSA’s most highly classified intelligence. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:59] What is the state of innovation in government organizations? We probably think of the government as a bureaucratic mechanism that is slow and lumbering, but there are many innovative organizations within the government, such as NASA and DARPA. In many cases, the government can be somewhat slow, and we intentionally bring people to the government who are not experts in innovation—people who are great at following processes and strategies so we have repeatable efforts consistently focused on making the best use of taxpayer dollars. The challenge is balancing the responsibility of being methodical and precise with having innovative tactics. Every individual within the government has the ability to be more innovative, if we think about what that might look like, how we could achieve that, and how we’re going to achieve mission impact even more effectively. [5:38] Are we competitive in innovation across the U.S., and are we able to make the best use of innovation across entire organizations? We are able to do some amazing things that people could never imagine. We realize there’s a great nation race, and we must keep on top of that. It’s important for us to figure out how we can bring emerging technologies to bear as quickly as possible for mission impact. Using commercial and emerging technologies as effectively and quickly as possible is critical. But there are a lot of different ways we can bring about innovation within the government, and by focusing only on emerging or commercial technologies, we’re missing a lot of what we can make happen. We can also look at strategies, processes, policies, or ways of communicating, and rethink how we do those things so we are being more effective and delivering mission impact. Innovation is not just about technology. It’s important for everyone to see their own role and how they can rethink what they’re doing and make it easier and more effective. [9:42] How can we do a better job innovating? One way to achieve innovation is by using innovation methodologies and tools. For example, the U.S. Navy’s Tactical Advancements for the Next Generation (TANG) program uses a human-centered design approach to thinking about mission problems and being able to connect with end users so they understand the problem and are able to create solutions that are more effective in bringing mission impact. It’s also important to look at innovation strategically. For example, when I was at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), I was charged with standing up the innovation hub. First, I asked myself, Why do we need innovation within CISA and what are our challenges and strengths? CISA is challenged with a mammoth mission of informing the 4.7 million owners and operators of critical infrastructure about cyber threats and keeping the .gov domain safe from cyber threats. We only have 2200 people to achieve that mission. The last thing we needed to do was load more work onto these incredibly overworked people. If I was going to bring in innovation, it was critical I found partnerships outside of CISA. One of the programs I stood up was called Hacking for Homeland Security, which makes use of university students who are working to solve innovation problems in an entrepreneurship course. We worked with students from Carnegie Mellon who spent time thinking about how we might assist small and medium-sized businesses who have few resources to better keep themselves safe from cyber threats. [13:32] What is the innovation pipeline? The innovation pipeline is a process in which we find new opportunities where we might bring in innovation. We want to look at the problems the workforce or our end users are having and how we might create a solution. The innovation pipeline is a five-step process to understand from the end users what their problems are: Sourcing problems in the widest manner possible and understanding the wide range of problems we have to work on Curating, prioritizing, refining, and ranking the problems so w

Insights from an innovative Design-Thinking program Today we are talking about Design Thinking through the lens of a unique new program at the University of Wisconsin that is teaching product design from a multiple-discipline perspective. For example, product design grad students learn UI/UX principles while learning about electronic circuits and product packaging. The cross-discipline experience is unique and provides a valuable perspective. Joining us to discuss Design Thinking is a recent graduate of this program, Emily Phelan. Emily is now a customer experience strategist for Landor & Fitch, the New York-based brand and design group. Previously she was a marketing specialist for Accenture. She also had her own design company and pursued other entrepreneurial interests. And Emily is an amazing illustrator—check out her LinkedIn profile for some of the superheroes she has designed. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:49] Can you take us through the Design Thinking framework as you applied it through the University of Wisconsin’s program? The framework we used was from the Stanford d.school. There are four phases: Empathizing Defining the problem Ideating Prototyping and testing [10:05] How did you use this framework in your project? I led a team through a redesign of a diabetes self-management program website. Our client was the Wisconsin Institute for Healthy Aging, and they had a diabetes-self-management program called Healthy Living with Diabetes. We were tasked with redesigning the program to be more inclusive of the black community in Wisconsin. We started with identifying one anothers’ strengths. We needed to figure out what hats we all needed to wear and how we could best work together. Then we dove right into the empathy phase. We spoke with program coordinators, facilitators of the program, participants, doctors, health educators, and nurse educators. We needed to learn what the program currently looked like from the perspectives of all the stakeholders. Doctors and health educators were two critical stakeholders who had been completely overlooked. We found that in order to serve the participants and facilitators, we needed to engage doctors and health educators, who can make recommendations to patients and kickstart the self-management journey. [15:56] How did you engage each of these stakeholders? We did in-depth interviews. They were typically 45 minutes to one and a half hours. We had an interviewer asking questions and a scribe capturing information. It’s important to lay the groundwork with a comprehensive interview guide to achieve your goals, but it’s also important to go off script. If an interviewee is telling an important story, lean into that conversation. [18:07] What other steps did you take? We identified the problem by looking at patterns in our research. After conducting the interviews, we put ideas on post-it notes so we could move them around and identify patterns. We identified several key themes and barriers to the program. We found seven key insights that led us to three opportunity areas that we needed to build out to figure out the best solution to the problem. For each opportunity we had four to five ideas for solutions. We crafted a “how might we…” question for each opportunity: How might we inform and empower facilitators to facilitate a better workshop? How might we help participants sustain their healthy habits beyond the program? And how might we inform and engage health educators to be ambassadors of the program? [20:48] How did prototyping work? Before we prototyped, we analyzed the resources these opportunities would require and their potential impact. We built several prototypes of solutions: a healthy-living-with-diabetes conference marketed to health educators, a newsletter that program coordinators could use to market to health educators, and a website that included health educators in the ecosystem and provided resources they could use with patients. After prototyping, iterating, and testing, we ended up going with the website and accompanying resources. We got feedback from all the stakeholders and used it to iterate the website. [23:34] Was there anything in the design thinking process that you found you needed to apply differently? Since we were so heavy on our empathy phase, we could have spent more time on prototyping and testing near the end of the project in order to get a few more features on the website. We built a marketing plan for the client, and I would have loved to help them build the solution out. They took our work and are using it to conduct their redesign, but staying involved in that work would have been excellent. Action Guide: Put the information Emily shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Emily on LinkedIn Check out EmilyPhelan.com Check out Design is Storytelling and Speculative Everything Learn more about Stanford

How to get out of your organization’s routine and create real value – for product managers This episode is sponsored by PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. PDMA is a global community of professional members whose skills, expertise, and experience power the most recognized and respected innovative companies in the world. PDMA is the longest-running professional association for product managers, leaders, and innovators, having started in 1976. I have enjoyed being a member of PDMA for more than a decade, finding their resources and network very valuable. Learn more about them at PDMA.org. PDMA invited me to their conference, which was in Orlando, Florida, to interview some of their speakers. This speaker presented on the topic Get into the Discovery Zone. With Lean and Agile methods, it is too easy for teams to fall into the trap of pursuing speed and a sense of progress, while failing to provide value on the most important aspects that customers need. The Discovery Zone changes that. We’ll find out how from David Matheson. He’s a Practitioner & Thought Leader in Portfolio & Innovation Management and cofounder of SmartOrg, a Silicon Valley based company that connects innovation and finance. With decades of experience, David has helped senior management of firms around the world improve their results from portfolio management, product development, innovation, R&D, capital investment and strategy. He earned a Ph.D. at Stanford University where he has also taught strategic portfolio management. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:10] What is the problem that led to the Discovery Zone? The Discovery Zone grew out of my work with HP. Around the time the Apple Watch came out, HP had the best smartwatch. The innovation team was charged with figuring out if they could pull off a digital watch. They made a really cool watch and sold enough to show it’s real. Everyone got super excited. The management review board’s next questions was “How do we make a business out of this for HP?” The team ran ahead and made more watches. They proliferated about 10 different watches, and they all sold and made more money. The team came back and said, “Look at our great success,” but management said, “You did not answer our question. In fact you’ve demonstrated this cannot be a business for HP.” And they killed the program. It was probably the right call because the innovators charged ahead with making the product and didn’t think about answering the questions that would really make this work for HP. HP made a few SKUs of laptops and sold millions. Watches run in ten thousands. The innovation team demonstrated unintentionally they couldn’t make it scalable. There’s an innovation blind spot that Lean and Agile methods invite us to walk into. We come up with hypotheses and do the ones that make the most traction. “Learn quick” is the mantra. That’s good as far as it goes, but most teams often don’t do critical thinking. They don’t take a broad enough view and work on the wrong hypotheses is. Like the team at HP, they’re not asking the right questions. [8:33] What is the Discovery Zone? The Discovery Zone is customer discovery when the customer is internal to the organization or is the organization itself. It’s outside your comfort zone. As an innovator, you hear what your stakeholders want from the perspective of the routine of the organization. Routine is a giant distraction machine, but there’s a lot of political force around that. You want to make progress, so you listen to your key stakeholders. You pick something small to work on in your comfort zone. That’s not the job of the innovator. That’s what HP was doing. They knew how to make things, so they made watches. The Discovery Zone takes a different perspective. First, get multiple perspectives on what the issues are—what’s between you and the big dream. Look for issues that are both speculative and impactful. Speculative means they’re outside the company’s wheelhouse. Surprise is likely and we’re making it up has we go. There’s uncertainty and ignorance is high. Impact means how much resolving the uncertainty will change the confidence in the business case. In the HP example, the question of whether they could make more watches had an impact of +/-10% on the business case. People knew you could do that. The questions of whether HP could do it in a modular, scalable way would change the business case 10-20x. The Discovery Zone is where you pursue high-impact, high-ignorance opportunities. It’s the place where you’re making it up, you’re going to be surprised, and what you learn will dramatically change the business case. This is where the innovation blind spots are. People don’t talk about them because they’re scary. If you g

Tools for building a more collaborative product team – for product managers This episode is sponsored by PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. PDMA is a global community of professional members whose skills, expertise, and experience power the most recognized and respected innovative companies in the world. PDMA is the longest-running professional association for product managers, leaders, and innovators, having started in 1976. I have enjoyed being a member of PDMA for more than a decade, finding their resources and network very valuable. Learn more about them at PDMA.org. PDMA invited me to their conference, which was in Orlando, Florida, to interview some of their speakers. This speaker presented on the topic Improv to Improve Your Team’s Creativity. How do you think improv can improve your product work and your group? We are about to find out. Our guest is Seth Greenwald, aka Sherpa Seth. He’s a best-selling author, keynote speaker and popular communication coach for creative professionals and technical leaders. He founded Creative Warrior Secrets to help professionals be excellent communicators and increase their success. He holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering and has served as design lead and senior project manager for many of the nation’s largest engineering and construction organizations. Among other publications on communication, he hosts an online course called Improv to Improve Your A-Game Mindset. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:13] What do you mean by improv to help teams improve? The improv TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway? was my inspiration. I saw how they did everything on the spot, and I always liked laughing, so I wanted that for my team. In many large organizations, people are working in silos and never really collaborate. I wanted to help them figure out how to break out of their silos and improvise. I was always the guy hiding behind my laptop. I wanted everyone to go away and just leave me alone and let me focus. That’s not good when I wanted to be in the world with other people. I needed to learn how to speak to and collaborate with people. I joined an organization called Toastmasters, and they taught me how to present, but I also wanted to learn how to speak with and collaborate with people when I’m not presenting. Whose Line Is It Anyway? was a revelation for me because they were so in-the-moment, focused, and working together. I didn’t want to be a comedian, but I did want to have fun with my team. I want to help you learn how to have fun with your team. That’s what I mean by improv communication. Instead of going back to your laptop and solving a problem by yourself, learn to solve problems together in real time. Each team member is coming to the problem from their own point of view, and you have to force yourself to organically solve the problem with others in the same space and timeframe. It’s hard for a lot of people to do that. You have to trust what comes out of your mouth and be in the moment. You need to listen fully and have a yes, and mindset. Go from a me go mindset—one person wins—to a we go mindset—we win together. [17:38] How do we be in the moment and appreciate what others bring to the table? You have to create before your critique. It feels good to judge, but before you critique you need to offer your creativity. There are stages of creative problem solving. The first stage is defining the problem. Make sure you’re solving the right problem. The second stage is divergent thinking where we come up with alternative options to solve the problem. At this point, we’re not judging each option yet. The third stage is convergent thinking where we choose a solution. You can’t mix up the creation stage with critique stage. [25:39] What’s an exercise we could introduce at our next team meeting to help people have fun and be creative together? Keep the words yes, and in mind. Yes means you’re listening. And is responding to and building on what you’ve heard. Saying yes, and prompts your brain to think in a more collaborative way. Do a yes, and exercise with your team. My favorite acronym is Together Everyone Achieves More (TEAM). That’s product management. Action Guide: Put the information Seth shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Seth’s website Join Seth’s Improv2Improve Course and tell Seth you heard about it on the Product Mastery Now podcast to receive a discount Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

Insights on brand storytelling for product managers Today we are talking about the problem you solve, the value you create, and the difference you make—and not just you specifically but also your organization. Just like you, I have encountered organizations that confuse me—I’m uncertain what they are really about. This is a branding and messaging issue. As product professionals, we need to help position our products in ways that make sense for customers and the organization. We have to tell the product and brand story effectively. To help us do that, Sarah Panus is with us. She is a brand storytelling strategist and coach, host of the Marketing With Empathy podcast, and founder of Kindred Speak, which provides editorial brand storytelling services and coaching. Sarah also speaks on topics for humanizing your brand. Before starting Kindred Speak, she contributed to brand and marketing strategy for the Sleep Number Corporation and other companies. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:14] What is brand storytelling? Brand storytelling is when a brand shares editorial stories with their audience. Editorial stories are not promotional stories. They’re narrative stories designed to engage your audience, attract new people to your brand, and keep them engaged. They’re something your customer base wants more of, versus promotional content that they’re not really excited to read. Brand storytelling educates, entertains, and inspires your audience. A brand story isn’t solely about the product. Your webpage can talk all about the product features and benefits. Create a story around the problem the product solves . Bring in real people who can talk about their experience. The product isn’t the hero of the story. Your customer or the problem is, and the product gets mentioned as a secondary element that can help solve the problem. These are the types of stories you read in a magazine or on a digital site. You need both marketing storytelling and brand storytelling, but brand storytelling is better designed and what I’ve seen drive leading ROI of attracting the audience and keeping them engaged. [6:14] What do you do as a brand storytelling strategist? Think of me like a rental editor-in-chief. I develop editorial strategies. What are the storytelling pillars that you should focus on? I go through all the data to figure out what the brand cares about and wants to talk about and more importantly what the audience cares about. The sweet spot of those things is the low-hanging fruit . I use the FED method—focus, empathy, data. One element is figuring out how to get alignment throughout the organization. One big complaint from a marketing perspective is that content can live in silos and there’s no sharing. That can happen between marketing and product. I help with creating the culture of innovation among teams so you’re all working toward the same goal to drive the best results for the organization and have fun doing your job. I help manage blogs, podcast strategy, editorial calendars, and large content partnerships. I help be the extra voice, asking is this good editorial storytelling content? Does it feel humanized? Is it going to connect? [14:39] How can we use brand storytelling to have more influence with stakeholders? Brand storytelling can help give you insights into what your audience is most interested in. As a content investigator, I go through tons of data internally and externally, so there might be other pieces of insights that people who are drafting content have that you as a product team don’t. If you’re launching a product, storytelling helps generate awareness of the product through those stories. Storytelling is like a marathon not a sprint. Anything that’s upper-funnel or mid-funnel takes a while, but it’s feeding that pipeline. Storytelling can help you understand what is and isn’t working—what messaging or features customers want to know more about. When you collaborate with the editorial team, you can marry both teams’ goals and share more of what the product team wants to get across. Storytelling amplifies that message and gets it across to more people. Your company will have a consistent voice, and your customers will repetitively see the key messages you care about. There’s a myth in marketing that if you build it, they will come. Obviously that’s not true. I wonder if in product there’s a myth that if you create it, they will buy it. Marketing and product need each other. It’s so important that storytelling go hand-in-hand with product. [19:02] How do you manage a shared, consistent voice between the product and editorial teams? For ultimate success there needs to be open communication between leaders at the C-suite level. Everyone needs to be talking cohesively and be unified on goals. It works best if there is dedicated product person who is the liaison to the m

A process for improving product roadmapping using Objectives and Key Results – for product managers Today we are talking about roadmaps. Some product people love roadmaps, while a lot hate them. What can make them better? Our guest has had good experience creating roadmaps from objectives and key results (OKRs), and he is going to tell us how. That guest is Michael Harrison. He is the Head of Product Management for Fleetio, a SaaS company that automates fleet operations to keep vehicles and equipment running smoothly. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:11] What are approaches to product roadmaps have you used? As Fleetio has scaled, the needs of our roadmap have changed a lot. When we were small—seven employees—we operated on a project-based roadmap, a series of features with goals and timelines for when we hope to deliver those. That worked pretty well. When we were small, it kept us focused and we could afford major changes in direction. Now, as we’ve evolved, we need more of an outcome-based roadmap because it naturally keeps us more aligned as we get bigger. [3:58] What led you to incorporate OKRs into your roadmaps? The first change we made was switching to more theme-based roadmaps. Having narratives for product strategy is inspiring and allows the go-to-market side of the organization align with product more easily. We found if you just select roadmap themes and put them on a yearly cadence, it’s hard to judge relative priority among themes and choose a cap for how many themes you should have. If you’re a customer-led organization, almost every idea is a pretty good idea. The question is, what are the best ideas? For the last two quarters, we’ve been doing OKR roadmaps, and it forces us to make sure everything we’re building ties up directly to our company’s objective. It forces us to think about relative priority because we can only choose a couple of things to ladder up to the top company objectives. You need narratives, but you also need some cap on how those narratives tie to your strategy and how to measure which ones are making a difference. [6:46] Have you found times when the strategic objective wasn’t the most helpful thing to guide OKRs? Yes, how you are going to pick the right things is the principal challenge of roadmaps. Not all your ideas are going to work. Think of the product team more like the marketing half of your organization—half of your ad dollars will be wasted; you just don’t know which half yet. The question is which things will have the most impact and can you reduce the impact of the things you’re going to get wrong? The OKR structure has given us a way to measure the impact of things. We don’t just have a flurry of activity each quarter. We have a flurry of activity in specific categories that are measurable. [8:16] What is your process for roadmapping with OKRs? I think of our process as a four-layer ladder. We tie everything the company is doing up to five unchanging OKRs at the top level, for example our annually recurring revenue (ARR) is our North Star metric. We also have metrics for retention and expansion. That’s level one—company strategy. Underneath that in level two, we think about what the product needs to do over the next year. What do we need to get better at? What kind of mission do we need to be on for the product to drive revenue, retention, and expansion? Level three is what can we do this quarter? That’s where time bounds are very important because we’re planning where we want to be by the end of the quarter. That’s our outcome-based roadmap. What does the product need to achieve for users? What leading indicators can we measure that would tell us we’re driving the level-two product mission. Level four is our roadmap. Those are the ideas, experiments, and features. These are loosely held ideas, hypotheses that can drive our convictions that ladder up to the top. [16:05] What other benefits have you seen with creating the OKR project? A lot of product leaders listening can probably empathize with the idea that we lose sleep over the opportunity cost of our decisions. When we get bigger and have bigger teams, it is such a frustrating feeling if you don’t feel in control or don’t know the main direction the organization is rowing in. Having this OKR structure gives me a way to feel like our activity is rowing in a direction I believe in and can trust. It’s not a series of disconnected teams I have to check in with to make sure they’re on course. It helps me sleep better at night knowing our activity is going in a consistent direction. It helps me coach product managers, designers, and engineers on the autonomy of what they’re building. It gives us a way to know we’re only a couple of weeks away at most from measuring what we’re doing, and we can’t dig a hole too deep before we realize we were

A framework for digital transformation – for product managers Today we are talking about digital transformation and why it matters to product managers and leaders. Tim Bottke is an Associate Professor of Practice in Digital Transformation at SDA Bocconi School of Management in Milan, Italy. He is also a Senior Partner at Deloitte Germany, specializing in digital transformation. Tim has more than 22 years of top management consulting and digital transformation experience, working with clients in more than 20 countries. He is also author of the new book, Digital Transformation Payday: Navigate the Hype, Lower the Risks, Increase Return on Investments. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:54] What is digital transformation and why does it matter? It’s a good question with a not-so-easy answer. There’s not much of a common definition of what digital transformation is all about. It’s a transformation process toward digital. It’s just one tool that can help companies transform. It needs a good product to succeed. Just to say something is digital doesn’t make it any better. You need to find something that is better than the competition and is fulfilling customer needs. Digital can be a great help in making this happen but it’s not the solution in itself. Digital transformation is about the strategy you follow, because if you don’t know where you’re going, you spend a lot of money for digital hype buzzword technology that is not making any customer more happy or any product more profitable. Digital transformation is not an objective by itself. It’s a means to an end, and if no one has thought about what the end should be, it’s probably not a good idea. [5:59] What is an example of a successful digital transformation? Let’s take the example of a telecom company. In a traditional business model, if a customer had an issue with the product they had to call the call center or walk into a shop. Sometimes the people can help, but sometimes the customer has a terrible experience. If this experience is transformed to digital-first, the customer opens an app on the smartphone and does everything themselves—no human intervention and no possibility for anyone messing up in the process. As product specialists, you should think about the segments you want to serve. In many markets, you have segments that are not digitally savvy, and for them some of these transformations can lead to a worse experience, because there would be fewer people in the call center or the people in the shop would no longer be trained to help. If you want to serve your larger customer base, every product needs to accommodate not just the digitally savvy people. Many other industries are following the telecom industry. Take the car industry. Car companies never had any end-customer connection. They produced cars and gave them to retail networks, and only the retail networks had direct customer interaction. That’s now changing. More manufacturers are doing direct sales, and all the new companies like Tesla are thinking about their product end-to-end, including the sales journey, and taking full control of everything. As more and more subscription-based models come into place for more and more products, the companies really need to know their end customers. By selling directly, they suddenly have data, When I started working in the telecom industry, we walked into stores and watched people buying things to see how they behave. The more digital everything becomes, people think data can replace that customer interaction, but data never show emotions. If you don’t know how it feels to buy this product, you shouldn’t do a strategy for the product, because probably you’ll be terribly wrong, and no data on this planet will help you if you don’t do customer research in parallel. [15:45] Can you share your framework for how to do a digital transformation project? I know every consultant just loves having frameworks, but that’s not the reason I put a framework in the book. You can use any framework as long as it shows an end-to-end journey. For my framework, I use the analogy of a chemical experiment. Digital transformation is a big experiment with an unclear outcome, but many of these experiments fail—some say 70% or 80%. Strategy: Before you set out, design what you want to achieve with the experiment. You need a strategy. That sounds obvious, but you wouldn’t believe how many experiments are started without anyone thinking even for 10 minutes how they will use this to win in the marketplace. The strategy tells you how to win together. Often people wrongly think they don’t need strategy because the work is digital. Or they just play to play, not to win. That’s not what business is all about. Catalysts: Catalysts make the experiment run. Are there new technologies that can make your experiment run at the speed you want?

How product leaders can drive purpose and belonging This episode is sponsored by PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. PDMA is a global community of professional members whose skills, expertise, and experience power the most recognized and respected innovative companies in the world. PDMA is the longest-running professional association for product managers, leaders, and innovators, having started in 1976. I have enjoyed being a member of PDMA for more than a decade, finding their resources and network very valuable. Learn more about them at PDMA.org. PDMA invited me to their conference, which was in Orlando, Florida, to interview some of their speakers. This speaker gave a keynote on “Reimagining Engagement in Product Development and Management: A Masterclass on the Employee Experience in the Future of Work.” Employee engagement remains very low, and everyone wants more of it. What seems to be missing from the conversation is an understanding of the science behind engagement. I want to learn how engagement is so connected to creativity and innovation, and I bet you do to. Dr. Brad Shuck is an internationally recognized and sought-after thought-leader in the areas of employee engagement, leadership, and organizational culture. He is the author of Employee Engagement: A Research Overview (Routledge, 2020). He routinely works with leaders throughout the public and private sectors, and his insights are widely applied in the world’s largest Fortune 500 and Fortune 50 companies, as well as small- and medium-sized organizations seeking to grow and empower employees at all levels. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:19] What is employee engagement? We define engagement as maintenance, intensity, and direction of effort given to something. Employee engagement is what one gives at work, in a job or to a project. We can apply those ideas to spaces like creativity, innovation, and development and look at engagement from a variety of perspectives. Maintenance is the ability to maintain putting energy into something. How willing am I to stick this out? Intensity is how much one is willing to give. Am I willing to do things differently to be part of this? When people are really engaged in something their level of energy is intense. Directionality separates employee engagement from other job attitudes like commitment or satisfaction, which have a sense of status quo. Engagement has a driving force that pulls us forward. Belief is a really powerful force in engagement. Belief has an emotional connection. Our beliefs drive our behaviors. When we believe in a product or an innovation, when we’re sold out to an idea, engagement happens naturally because there’s some sense of belief and purpose in what we’re doing. [9:13] You take an evidence-based approach to improving employee engagement. What does that mean? We use science to drive decision-making. My job as a research faculty member at the University of Louisville is to do primary research, running field surveys ad talking to people. We do mixed methods research—blending qualitative and quantitative research. From that we derive insights that help us understand what steps leaders should be taking today. Using an evidence-based strategy helps leaders make evidence-based decisions. [12:04] What can product leaders do to improve employee engagement? Build a community around you. Be intentional. Culture and engagement don’t happen by accident. There’s a narrative you can use to drive engagement. There are two areas of currency right now around culture and engagement: purpose and belonging. Having a direct line of sight to work that is meaningful and knowing how my work impacts the end product are important. Belonging has everything to do with how I see myself here. Do I fit here? Is this a place I can be myself? Am I part of the team? There are messages we get that build over time and tell us whether we really belong here or not. Is this a place I can raise my hands in meetings and give my best ideas? Or maybe I’ll just keep those to myself. As a leader, you’ll see disengagement. Sometimes it looks like physically pushing back from the table in a meeting or someone who is normally vocal staying quiet. Investigate those things. Driving that sense of purpose and belonging is absolutely critical to driving engagement. [15:31] What suggestions do you have to drive belonging? I love the idea of pizza parties, but it’s not the pizza; it is the intentionality behind it. We’re gathering together to just get to know one another. We just happen to be having pizza. Helping people know they belong is often rooted in things that are easy to do but easy to not do. It’s a simple recognition that says, “Hey, I see you and I value you.” That can come in the form of an email: “You did a really great job in this meeting. Thanks for speaking up.” Somebody

How product managers can align stakeholders on product projects Today we are talking about the need for product leaders to manage stakeholders and the associated challenges this creates. Aligning the perspectives of stakeholders on a product project is desirable as well as difficult. Helping us with this difficult task is Bruce McCarthy. Previously, Bruce joined us for a three-part series on creating and using product roadmaps. He is the co-author of the book Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction While Embracing Uncertainty. He is currently working on a new book project, co-authoring Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders. He is also the co-founder of Product Culture—one of his customers said about Bruce, “Coach, trusted advisor, organizational therapist—like me, you’ll probably hire Bruce because of his experience in product management or his skills as an Agile coach.” What a great quote. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [7:13] How did you move from focusing on roadmaps to focusing on stakeholder management? When we wrote Product Roadmaps Relaunched, we knew just producing a roadmap is not the goal for product management teams. The goal is alignment of the team. As part of a workshop on roadmaps, I was briefly covering tips for gaining alignment, and someone told me, “I really enjoyed the workshop on roadmaps, but we need a workshop on alignment. This is the stuff nobody teaches. This is the stuff that allows you to take any framework, any bunch of data, any existing team, and glue it together.” I came to the realization this person was right. It’s the hidden skill of being able to influence without having authority that is the difference between a product manager who would seem on paper to tick all the boxes and one who’s really going to be successful. If you’re a product manager, you cannot issue orders, so you have to influence people. You can’t say, “This is where we’re going,” so you have to convince people where you should be going. [10:49] What are the challenges that leaders face in getting other senior leadership in the organization aligned around feature prioritization? Making good decisions is not the challenge; the challenge is getting people aligned with those decisions so you’re not constantly second-guessing or shifting priorities. If there’s a lot of disagreement on which features come first, that reveals there is not good alignment on goals—not the what but the why. Everyone has their point of view, and it’s up to you as the product manager to articulate not the ordered list of features but your vision for the future of the product, why it’s so great for the customer and the company, and how you will measure success with dollars and cents for the company. Given those assumptions, the priority list becomes much easier to agree on. You can still argue a little bit, but now you’re debating the best solution to the problem because you’ve agreed on the problem. [17:51] What can product leaders do to create stakeholder alignment? It’s easy to think you agree because you’re using the same words when you don’t actually agree, or to think you’re not agreeing when you’re using different words to mean the same thing. It’s helpful to think about stakeholders as a type of customer. For decades, product managers have been told they need to understand the customer, and they’ve been taught a lot of skills in customer discovery, but they forget all about that when they’re talking to people inside the company. That’s a mistake. We segment customers. We can also segment stakeholders. In the company, we have different departments, functions, and levels of authority. I’ve developed the TIPS Framework to classify stakeholders into four categories: Team—people who are working on the product day-to-day Impacted—people who are impacted by the decisions you make, e.g., customer support people Power players—people who are not in the direct line of authority for anybody on your team but whose judgement is considered by the executive team Subject experts—people who have knowledge you need even if they’re not interested in your product, e.g., legal team Make a canvas, just like a business canvas, to figure out whom you should be talking to. Go to them and do a customer discovery interview. Instead of just showing your roadmap and asking them to sign off, ask about their business and job. Ask what success looks like to them and where they’re struggling. Goals specific to a person’s role are obvious and easy to talk about, e.g., they need to generate a certain number of leads. What’s harder to talk about are people’s personal needs, yet we talk about those with customers too. It’s the same with stakeholders. If you know someone wants a promotion, you can position your product as someth

How product managers can go beyond the obvious in VOC PDMA invited me to their conference, which was in Orlando, Florida, to interview some of their speakers. This speaker spoke on The Key to Successful Voice of the Customer (VOC) in Agile Teams. This episode is sponsored by PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. PDMA is a global community of professional members whose skills, expertise and experience power the most recognized and respected innovative companies in the world. PDMA is also the longest-running professional association for product managers, leaders, and innovators, having started in 1976. I have enjoyed being a member of PDMA for more than a decade, finding their resources and network very valuable. Learn more about them at PDMA.org. Agile teams need to know what they are developing, and VOC is a tool for understanding what customers need. However, traditional VOC doesn’t meld well with development accomplished in a series of sprints. We’ll discuss how to get more benefits from VOC in Agile teams. We are with Kristyn Corrigan. Kristyn is a principal and co-owner of Applied Marketing Science, a Boston-based market research consultancy that helps companies develop better products and services through harnessing the power of customer insights. She specializes in helping companies understand stated and latent customer needs through in-depth interviewing and ethnographic observation. She also trains companies to create and implement their own in-house Voice of the Customer programs. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:38] What is Voice of the Customer (VOC)? There’s a temptation to think of VOC as any type of customer data, but when we think about VOC in a more systematic sense and fueling product development and innovation, we’re thinking about an in-depth understanding of customer needs. What is the customer trying to accomplish? What is the job to be done? What problems are our customers looking to solve? What things are important to them that the market isn’t currently delivering on? Effective VOC is understanding your customers in an in-depth way and getting beyond the obvious. [5:50] Can you talk about the friction that happens with VOC and time-box sprints? Systematic voice of the customer is uncovering a complete set of customer needs that are prioritized by customers. Ideally, this process happens as early as possible in the stage-gate process, but it takes months and months to accomplish. That is in direct conflict with Agile teams’ working on tight timeframes and constantly iterating. These Agile teams might already have a product concept or prototype and still need customer insights. How can we infuse VOC into those moments and get meaningful customer insights? The aim is to be able to fail quickly. To do this, we need three pillars. [7:34] Tell us about the three pillars of using VOC with Agile. The first pillar is planning. The first part of planning is answering the question, “Who are the types of customers we really need to get feedback from?” The second part is figuring out what you’re going to have customers react to, which is the minimum viable stimulus. You want to show customers something that’s really easy to change. Don’t be too attached to a prototype. The second pillar is asking the right questions to get beyond the obvious and get the information we need. Showing the customer a minimum viable stimulus and asking, “Would you purchase this product?” gets us a yes or no answer and does nothing for the development or optimization of the product. Instead, we want to understand why or why not the concept or prototype is appealing. We want to dig deeper to understand the individual features of the concept or prototype, what’s most appealing, what’s least appealing, and what jobs it accomplishes for our customers. We want to map back to customer needs. Ask, “Is the prototype accomplishing what you need it to do? What else could it potentially do? Did we miss anything big?” [12:14] Are there some general questions you like to ask customers? I love to ask customer to tell me stories. It’s a great way to organically get at the needs that may not be top-of-mind for them. I have them tell me about the last time they used a product or experienced a service. For example, I was consulting with a company that manufactures accessories for enteral feeding pumps. They were developing a new bag and set of lines for these pumps. We started an open-ended exploration of how patients and caregivers interact with the pumps. One of the biggest insights we gained was the prototype had a bag the food was stored in that was extremely crunchy. When people described the experience of using one of these devices in public, they talked about how self-conscious they were and how they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. That was not something the company

How product managers can build authentic confidence Today we are talking about how to unleash confidence. As product professionals, we need authentic confidence. Joining us is Dr. Joan Rosenberg, a cutting-edge psychologist known for her work in communication, confidence, resilience, authenticity, and grief. She is frequently sought by media and companies to speak and train on these topics. She is a clinical professor of psychology at Pepperdine University and author of several books including her most recent book, 90 Seconds to a Life You Love: How to Master Your Difficult Feelings to Cultivate Lasting Confidence, Resilience, and Authenticity. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:17] How does self-talk impact us? Negative self-talk comes under the category of harsh self-criticism, which is considerably more damaging than people believe. Most people think harsh self-criticism is equivalent to unpleasant feelings, but it’s not. Unpleasant feelings do nothing to sabotage ourselves, but harsh self-criticism is like dropping 10 or 20 stories in an elevator—it takes you down. Harsh self-criticism is a distraction from unpleasant feelings. We don’t control what we feel, but we do have a lot of control over how we think. When somebody gets upset, they quickly shift to harsh self-criticism, ostensibly to take control of the unpleasant feelings they were feeling. Harsh self-criticism is damaging and very severe. I think it promotes depression and plays a big role in people’s becoming suicidal. It’s one of the most damaging things people can do. The recommendation I make is to speak and act in the direction you want your results to be—positive not negative. [6:47] How can we build more authentic confidence? Building confidence for me came out of two important questions: How does somebody develop confidence? And what makes it difficult for people to deal with unpleasant feelings? Confidence is the deep sense that you can handle the emotional outcome of whatever you face or want to pursue. It’s not about positive feelings. It’s our ability to tolerate the challenges we face and the feelings that come with that. My focus is on eight unpleasant feelings: sadness shame helplessness anger vulnerability embarrassment disappointment frustration The foundational element to building confidence is to be able to experience and move through unpleasant feelings. The steps to confidence are: Experience and handle unpleasant feelings Speak up with ease Take action End harsh self-criticism Absorb compliments [9:52] How do we move through those unpleasant feelings? Most of us come to know what emotions we’re feeling through bodily sensation—tightness, heat, heaviness, etc. People find it so hard to deal with unpleasant feelings because we don’t want to deal with the bodily sensations. We distract ourselves. Instead, you want to ride the bodily sensation “waves.” When a feeling gets triggered, there is a rush of biochemicals into the bloodstream that activate the bodily sensations, and they flush out of the bloodstream in 90 seconds. If you can just breathe into the process as you’re experiencing a feeling, you can stay present in the feeling and link up your feeling with your thinking to help you make decisions and take action or express yourself so you can make use of the feelings. When you stub your toe, you’re in pain for a moment. You take a deep breath and hold on to that toe till the pain subsides. Similarly, when you have a quick emotional reaction, if you take some deep breaths, you stay present in the experience, and it’s always going to subside. [15:46] How do we speak up and express ourselves with ease? People don’t experience unwavering confidence until they’re able to speak with ease. That means you can say what you to say with whom you need to say it when, where, and how you need to say it. It has to come out in a kind and well-intentioned manner. Difficulty speaking up is not a speaking problem; it’s a difficulty with unpleasant feelings. When you first start speaking, you’re trying to deal with your own emotional discomfort. Then, you have to be willing to experience the other person’s discomfort. If you don’t handle unpleasant feelings, you’ll have a reluctance to speak up. It’s super important that you understand that your growth and greater ability to speak with ease is going to come the more you develop your capacity to handle unpleasant feelings. [22:01] How do we take action? Both in speaking up and in taking action, you’re not confident, and then you do it and become confident. If I want to learn how to play tennis, and other people will be watching, I go play tennis and then develop the confidence. Repeatedly taking action and handling the emotional outcome build confidence. [23:57] How do we end harsh self-criticism? Harsh self-criticism is unbelievably damag

Apply to join the Product Mastery Now Community — Application deadline is November 28th. Product managers, take note—the value of adding a community to your product Today we are talking about the value of community. Some products are started as a community while other products add a community aspect later. Of course, many products exist without a community, but that may be missing opportunities. Let’s find out together how community can benefit products. Joining us is Patrick Woods. He is co-founder and CEO of Orbit, the leading community growth platform. He’s worked with business leaders from some of the world’s fastest growing businesses to leverage the power of community. He’s the co-creator of the Orbit Model, host of the Developer Love podcast, and author of the Brand Strategy Canvas. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:38] What does community mean? I like to define communities based on the expectations of community members. In this framework, there are three types of communities: product, practice, and play. In a community of play, members come together to have a good time. This could be folks who get together to play basketball on Saturday afternoons. The sole purpose is to have fun, meet each other, and have a good time. In a community of practice, members learn about a skill or discipline. This could be a Discord community for CTOs. The goal is to get better at something, to network, and to skill up. In a community of product, folks come together to get better at and talk about a specific product. The Orbit community has users who come together to talk about how to more effectively use the tool. Communities are often a blend of practice and product. [9:26] What is the value of communities for companies? An active and healthy community de-risks and accelerates almost every part of the business. What better way to drive awareness for your product than to have an army of thousands or tens of thousands of people eagerly talking about your product? An active community drives adoption and onboarding because you have customers willing to answer other customers’ questions, which increases retention. A community helps with product discovery, since you can get feedback easily. You can recruit new employees from a community. [12:24] What are your insider secrets for starting a community successfully? Part of my answer will sound philosophical and part will sound tactical. When you start a community, you can think of the process like a customer discovery process. Ask questions like, What’s the market like? Who are my potential customers? What is the overlap between the things the community needs and the things I can provide? Get specific with that. Having a community because everyone has one is not a strong case for a community. Before launching your own community, spend time in other adjacent communities. Learn what the conversation are like, what challenges and themes come up again and again, and how people talk in that space. Find gaps in the market and build credibility. By that point, you’ll have a positioning map of how your community is going to be different and why it matters to your prospective audience. To gain interest, produce a series of event around your market need. Now you’re creating value for your potential community members. Invite people in those adjacent communities to the events. Then, you can onboard them to your community. To create a successful community, first ask yourself, what value can I create for these people? Some people treat their community as nothing more than a source of data. That’s a very short-term view on what a community can be. Create value for your community members and you will capture value too. [19:20] How do you craft trust in your community, especially if you’re disclosing things you would not want to fall into the hands of a competitor? We lead with trust. We don’t really do NDAs when we’re talking about features or roadmaps. Most of these folks are people we’ve met over the years and had dinner with at conferences. They feel almost like part of the family. [22:15] What resources do we need in place so the community doesn’t fall apart? You can think of this as a hierarchy of needs. At the bottom is the fundamental question of who is out there and what are they doing. This is the first problem we had to solve with Orbit, which is a platform for community growth. Our customers have huge communities online spread across a ton of platforms—a support forum, Discord for live chat, GitHub for code, social media. etc. Many community leaders found it hard to asses the health of the community because the data is siloed across so many platforms. It’s hard to understand the individual customer’s journey without Orbit. With Orbit, you can see that Patrick followed you on Twitter a month ago, created a trial of the product the next day, came to your forum that same day and ask

Lessons from launching a #2 Product of the Year on Product Hunt – for product managers Today we are talking about getting attention for your product launch. Joining us is a co-founder who got his product to #1 Product of the Day, #1 Product of the Week, and a finalist for Product of the Year on Product Hunt. That’s a lot of attention. His name is Ken Babcock, and he is the Co-founder and CEO of Tango. Tango allows you to simply create step-by-step tutorials of anything you do in a web browser or on your computer desktop—it simplifies creating instructions or workflows. Prior to Tango, Ken spent most of his career in the Bay Area at Uber, where he held roles in Launch Operations, Data Science, and Product Strategy. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:12] What insight or problem led you to create Tango? I met my co-founders, Brian and Dan, at Harvard Business School. When we met, we kept talking about team performance. One of the barriers to high performance is creating documentation. It gets outdated quickly, and when it is outdated, people tend to ping you and ask you to update it. The emotions associated with teams creating documentation, which is a conduit to sharing knowledge, were very negative. We thought about how we could shift that to a more positive experience and cut down on pain points. It takes a long time to create documentation. How could we make this passive? Could we make it something people do in the flow of their work? You go through your process and we create the documentation for you. I reflected on my Uber experience, where I was on a launch operations team. We took what we learned from cities we had already launched in and applied it to cities we were about to launch in. It was a constant recalibration of our best practices. [7:48] How do you think about the strategy for getting attention for a new product launch? Your strategy has to be within the context of what your product is. It all comes back to the product you’re offering and the value proposition to the end user. We were a product-led company, meaning people would download the Chrome extension we’ve built and use it to solve their day-to-day tasks. We were speaking directly to those end users. The call to action was, “You need to go download this because you’re spending too much time creating documentation.” Make sure all those pieces are tight—you understand what you’re selling, the typical emotion, who your customers are, and how they find your product. Product Hunt is not one-size-fits-all. Product Hunt is a great way for early product adopters and end users of technology to find tools. Our strategy informed our decision to launch on Product Hunt because that’s where we were going to meet a lot of customers. To start the conversation, you have to know who the people you’re communicating with on launch are. [10:54] Take us through the specifics of launching on Product Hunt and getting a product to the top of the charts. On Product Hunt, every day a new batch of products launches, and those products get upvoted as people interact with them. There’s a #1 product of the day, week, month, and year. We got our product to the #2 Product of the Year, which was pretty cool. Product Hunt is a great way for new products to get visibility; it’s free marketing. To launch on Product Hunt, you upload a quick blurb on what it is and a few screenshots that walk through what the product does. Someone hunts your product. It’s a good signal if a strong hunter hunts your product. This is all geared toward getting attention and upvotes, because if you get upvotes, more people will see your product. Those blurbs and screenshots are not a lot to get people to understand the product. We had to be really tight on that messaging. We had to be very clear on what our product does, what it’s solving, and the impact it will have on the end user. Product Hunt is an all-day affair. We launched at midnight Pacific time, which gives time for Europe to interact with it. Our team was up around the clock pinging people they know and asking friends and beta users for upvotes. Product Hunt is a unique platform, but it’s phenomenal free marketing to a community that’s going to readily try your product and give great feedback. [15:03] What help did you have with creating messaging? When we launched, we had been in development for about a year, and we had brave, generous beta testers who were willing to try the product in exchange for giving us feedback. We listened to the vocabulary customers were using to see how the product was resonating with customers and used similar language in our messaging. [17:27] Tell us more about the hunters on Product Hunt. Product Hunt has tried to remove a little bit of the impact a hunter can have. It used to be there were super hunters, and if they gave you their stamp of approval, you were pretty much guaranteed to

Answering the questions that lead to optimal product pricing Today we are talking about how to price B2B SaaS products, learning from pricing examples. Joining us is Marcos Rivera, the author of the new book Street Pricing: A Pricing Playlist for Hip Leaders in B2B SaaS. Marcos is a pricing specialist with deep roots in product management, having served in roles from product manager to executive senior director for product management. He has leveraged his experience to specialize in pricing for the last several years and founded Pricing I/O to train and coach high-growth B2B SaaS companies on how to accelerate Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:18] How did you find yourself moving from product management into SaaS product pricing and packaging? I started building products way back in the nineties and cut my teeth on creating and crafting products starting with basic integrations. Everything I built I had to price. It wasn’t easy. I had to dig deep and learn how to do it because the success of my product depended on it. I realized it’s not as formulaic as I thought it was. There’s not a spreadsheet that cranks out the optimal price. I realized there is a pattern and a way to understand value and capture it with pricing. [4:20] Can you take us through a story about product pricing? I worked closely with the company Mindbody, a fitness SaaS company. They raised prices without data or a good value story, and their customers reacted negatively. We had to step back and take a look at how we think about capturing value in cases where it’s warranted and whether we’re raising prices in cases where it’s not warranted. Most companies want to increase the number of customers and extract more value from the existing base, which is not easy to balance. For pricing and engagement, we go through the 5Q Framework. 5Q stands for five questions. The big question in your mind—how much should I charge?—is one of the last things to figure out. First, you have to understand what experience you’re pricing for, who’s buying your product, what their motivations are, and your purpose in pricing. Mindbody, which sells fitness plans and software for gyms, sold a few fitness plans, and you didn’t see a lot of differentiation between them. They had grown so much, they never thought how to layer value in their plans. I started pressing them on whom they really wanted to win. The yoga instructor who has a couple of clients? The massive chains like Orange Theory? And I asked why they wanted them. What’s the big play here? If you’re expanding your software, how are you expanding it? Where’s your value? They said they needed to grow market share and gain clients but at the same time lift the amount of dollars per client. They found some customers were paying very little for the value they were getting, others were paying the right amount, and the rest were overpaying. We needed to calibrate that. Step one was a neutral strategy, which is balancing the amount of pricing tactics used to get customers with the amount of money you’re getting. Step two was figuring out what customers they wanted. We wanted to make it easy for new yoga instructors who don’t have a lot of courses to come into the platform. We needed a leaner version to compete and give them something they needed, but not too lean, like a free offer, because we wanted commitment. We wanted another price point for growing gyms, and another one for mature gyms. Once we had nailed in the who, we worked on the what. They had new functionality and innovation and didn’t know what to do with them. We had to create different packages. Then, we extracted price points from three inputs. First, we did analysis on happy, inactive, and churned customers to see patterns in what they were paying. Second, we ran a survey to find out what aspects of the product people loved and were willing to pay a premium for. Third, we did a competitive deep dive, looking at competitors’ pricing. There’s not a single optimal number or a magic spreadsheet for pricing. You have to strategic with what you want, whom you want, the experience you want to give them, and how you want to capture that. [13:08] Were there different ways of attracting customers in this case? Absolutely, the go-to-market piece is very important. You can have self-serve all the way to very guided sales-led motions. A yoga instructor is looking at the website and price and expecting understand whether it’s worth it for them. You have to be transparent in that sector, but also give them the ability to see what type of value framing they can get. They’re investing $49, but that’s less than the cost a full hour of training for a high-end instructor. Frame it the right way to lead them to click on buy now or start the free trial. If you frame it the right way, it doesn’

Apply to join the Product Mastery Now Community — Application deadline is soon. The journey to product mastery – for product managers I expect you, as a product person, love shaping the direction of a product, especially a product that provides you value. That is why I’m inviting you to be a founding member of a brand new product I’m launching—the Product Mastery Now Community. Too many of us have very little interaction with product professionals—in your own organization and at other companies. We need to be developing our professional network and learning with and from other product managers and leaders. If you neglect your learning, you are jeopardizing your ability to move toward product mastery and not getting better at developing products customers love. Instead, become a founding member of the Community. Not only will you influence its direction while getting value from the community; you’ll join for the lowest price that will ever be offered. Applications to join the Community will close soon. I’d like for you to get the benefits of being a founding member—learn about the community and apply at www.ProductMasteryNow.com/community. Today we are talking about the journey to product mastery. While everyone’s journey is different, I created a roadmap to cover the major stages. I first created the product mastery roadmap in 2013, and I updated it this year to reflect some changes in my experience and knowledge, as I’ve encountered hundreds if not thousands of product professionals since 2013. I expect you’ll find it helpful to talk through the four main stages of the roadmap so you can make better use of the resources you have to help you get to the next stage as well as to help those you can mentor and encourage at a previous stage. Download the product mastery roadmap at ProductMasteryNow.com/roadmap. . . Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below. Source

A digital customer experience coupled with rapid physical product creation – insights for product managers Today we are talking about what Andrew Wolgemuth has learned creating a unique product business called Wove. Andrew and his co-founder and team have created a way for their customers to design engagement rings, experience their design in their home with a mock-up ring, tweak what they want, and then receive their one-of-a-kind custom ring. This is a digital business coupled with rapid physical product creation. Regardless of your industry, there are lessons you can learn from Andrew’s mistakes and successes. Before founding Wove, Andrew served as the Deputy Commander of a Special Operations unit in the United States Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:16] What was the insight that led to Wove? Both my co-founder Brian and I experienced pain points when we were buying engagement rings. My childhood was centered around growing the family business, a small brick-and-mortar jewelry company. I worked with my parents to design an engagement ring for my now-wife, Sarah. I was stationed in Washington, and my parents were in Pennsylvania. They sent me numerous photos and videos of the ring, but when I saw it in person, I sent it back to my parents and asked them to rebuild it. I felt very bad doing this, but it was amazing to me that seeing photos and videos of a product doesn’t always translate into real life. We’re creating a user experience for engagement rings similar to Warby Parker, the home-try-on eyeglass company. [7:12] What challenges did you experience trying to implement your solution? When I talk with my team, we laugh because we feel like we’re building three different start-ups at the same time. We’re doing the in-house manufacturing focused on systems and logistics to create custom jewelry from scratch in a highly expedited timeline. We’re building a new digital product that’s the first of its kind for custom jewelry design online. And we’re doing the marketing and branding that’s so important for any ecommerce business. Sometimes we feel like we’ve bitten off more than we can chew, but it is coming together nicely, and we’re excited about the progress we’ve made. There are a few consumer pain points with buying an engagement ring, and a lot of them are tied closely to different cultural tailwinds. If you’re buying a ring online, you’re buying without certainty. You’ll put thousands of dollars down, and you don’t know what’s going to show up exactly. We send customers a replica ring first. We started the replica idea when I was in the Army, and I had many friends who were overseas in Afghanistan and wanted to buy an engagement ring but didn’t want to ship a $10,000 engagement ring to an Afghani address on some base so they could propose to the love of their life. Our replicas are shockingly realistic. They use imitation diamonds and non-precious metals. Our first replica rings were set to Army Rangers overseas who wanted to design a custom ring while deployed and be able to step off the plane back in the United States and drop to a knee. [11:13] How do you create the rings so quickly? The industry average for custom ring design is six to eight weeks. Advanced 3D-printing technology allows us to significantly cut down our timelines. Rings used to be hand-carved from a wax block then cast and polished. Hand-carving from wax takes a tremendous amount of time. We use new technology mixed with old-world craftsmanship. We design the engagement rings with jewelry designers. They send our clients a beautiful hand sketch of the design, and if the clients approve the sketch, it goes to our CAD designer who brings the sketch into a computer-aided design in about a day. We 3D print it overnight. Our 3D printer can print 300 rings in about three hours. We cast the rings in precious or non-precious metals, and our goldsmiths polish the rings and set them with real or fake diamonds, depending on if it’s real or the replica. We are generally building rings in seven days and getting them to clients in nine days. My co-founder and I love building systems. It was a lot of what we did in the military and in college, so we invested heavily in building a CRM and a digital product that can support building custom jewelry in a rapid timeline. The systems have allowed us to do it quickly and in a way that is scalable. [13:35] Tell us more about your customer experience. Clients come to our website and fill out a short design quiz, which allows us to match them with a designer. We do a 30-minute video design consultation and then send them a technical sketch of the ring. We design it in CAD and print and cast it. [16:45] What systems have you found critical to make this work? The big one is the digital product we’ve built—an online design p

What product managers need to know about the Product Development and Management Association The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) has been curating the body of knowledge for product managers, leaders, and innovators and helping them improve since 1976—the longest-running product management professional group. Most of us haven’t known about product management for more than 10 or 20 years, yet PDMA has been improving the discipline of product management for nearly five decades. Are you involved in a professional group for your career? If we were project managers, we would be involved with the Project Management Institute because they are the go-to association for project managers. Well, what about us product managers? PDMA is the professional group for us. What value does it provide? Is it staying up with current practice? Is it worth looking into? To help answer these questions, Susan Penta joins us. She is the current Vice Chair of PDMA and serves on PDMA’s group responsible for certification as well as the group that helps local PDMA chapters across the world. She is the co-founder and managing partner at MIDIOR, which has been providing professional services for 25 years to product organizations in a number of areas from product insights, product development and management, and technology platforms. It’s worth noting that PDMA is a volunteer-led organization and, like Susan, most of the people involved in its leadership have fulltime jobs in product roles yet find time to contribute to the professional association. On and off, I’ve been one of those contributors as well because I have found PDMA very helpful in my career development. This will no doubt be an interesting discussion. Attend the PDMA Inspire Innovation Conference in Orlando, FL, November 13-15, 2022: pdma.org/page/conference-central. Use code PMNPodcast10 for 10% off registration. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [7:17] How did you first discover PDMA? I started as a product manager in the eighties. When I founded MIDIOR in 1997, I was looking for training for the individuals we were hiring because all my product knowledge was based on experience, not formal training. I had some colleagues in New England who were involved with PDMA, and the PDMA New England chapter had disintegrated. We started talking, and I decided to use PDMA’s huge knowledge base as training and restart the New England chapter. I’ve stayed involved with PDMA for the basis of professional development that is provided through the knowledge base, formal certification, and anything in between. [10:36] What value has PDMA personally provided you? When I first got on the board in the early 2000s, my interest in PDMA was for both my firm and me personally, but it was more for the big vision. PDMA has always been special because we bring together practitioners, service providers, and academics. At that point the NPDP certification was just getting started, and I was part of that conversation, asking what that would look like and whether it would be applicable across industries. For me, a big industry is financial. At this time, financial services firms were recognizing they were technology companies, and the discipline of product development and management really didn’t exist. PDMA was instrumental for me in helping my clients get exposed to product management and its value. In PDMA we get to talk about product—the challenges and opportunities around product as a discipline. There weren’t other places to have those conversations. That part was a pleasure. I am all about the discipline of product management, nurturing the discipline, the importance of the discipline, and being supportive of all of the different roles across career journeys and industries. For me, that is why PDMA matters. [15:21] What does PDMA provide to product professionals? PDMA can be many things depending on where you are on your career journey. It can be a place you go to learn. It can be a community of individuals you connect with and learn from. You can do it in a fairly light and easy way by interacting with our digital content through our Knowledge Hub (K Hub), body of knowledge, or presentations. PDMA has chapters globally. It’s a nice way to engage with a community of peers and get exposed to companies and how they’re approaching product development and management. As you move through your career, what PDMA offers shifts. If you get interested in the more abstract parts of product development and management, you have access to our Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM) and individuals who teach at higher institutions and do research around product management. For most of us, PDMA is not a place you go but a place you belong as a product professional. PDMA is the place where anyone, regardless of how they intersect with the product discipline, can belong, converse, and advance the discipline