Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

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

How product managers can support serial innovators Today we are talking about being a serial innovator and how that can greatly improve the innovation results of an organization. Joining us is Dr. Abbie Griffin, who holds the Royal L. Garff Presidential Chair in Marketing at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. She began her career in chemical engineering at Polaroid, went on to do product commercialization at Corning Glass, and later became a university professor after earning her PhD from MIT. Also with us is Carmel Dibner, who is principal and co-owner at Applied Marketing Science, where she has helped dozens of companies uncover critical customer insights to improve products, services, and customer experiences. Before moving to consulting, she was in brand management at Unilever, working with the Dove brand. And if Applied Marketing Science sounds familiar, it may be because of a very popular interview, back in episode 71, with Gerry Katz, also of Applied Marketing Science, who detailed the steps for conducting Voice of the Customer research, which is based in part on research Abbie did several years ago. Abbie and Carmel, with the help of a few others, have created a public workshop titled Product Innovation Master Class: How to Become a Serial Innovator. If you find the discussion helpful in this episode, check out this masterclass, which is being offered virtually from November 1st to 3rd. They are offering a $400 discount for listeners of this podcast. Register here and use the discount code ProductMasteryNow. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:51] Can you define serial innovator for us? Serial innovators are individuals at large, mature companies who are associated with one after another radical innovation commercial successes. These individuals work in middle management and have to figure out what others want and how to make innovation work in the context of the corporate environment. They have to manage politics, fit into the company’s processes, and do upfront work. [6:21] Do you see innovation getting pushed out in large organizations? In our PDMA best practices research, we’ve found just to stay ahead you have to keep evolving, which is difficult to do. We’ve had trouble getting US companies to even participate in the best practices research. Our hypothesis is they no longer have as much innovation internally because the push toward open innovation has decimated their internal innovation capabilities. We see three different ways large, mature companies can organize and execute radical innovation. Christensen’s innovation theory is a market-driven simplification approach that does innovation in a startup outside a mature company. Gina O’Connor’s research focuses on a technology-driven approach for doing radical innovation in large, mature companies. Our research focuses on a people approach, driven by people who want to solve unbelievable problems. This is a problem-driven approach—they need to understand the problem in order to solve it. [9:41] What impacts have you seen as a result of the Serial Innovators book? It’s wonderful to get emails about how this research has changed people’s lives. Equally important, this research provides managers of serial innovators with the ability to understand how to better manage them. A lot of serial innovators have succeeded because they found a manager who lets them go away at the front end of innovation and be quiet for six or eight months while they do background work to understand a problem in enormous detail. [13:15] Can you talk about serial innovation teams? For radical innovation, there are three major sets of tasks: invent, get projects politically accepted, and implement. In most organizations, those are done very separately. The serial innovator has all those skills. If you have a serial innovator who isn’t quite up to speed in all those areas, you need to supplement him or her with a team. They need some people who are technical and can do some details of inventing. You need a manager who can be the liaison with upper management and other stakeholders. You need a detail-oriented project manager who can execute the implementation. Most serial innovators will have multiple different kinds of technical backgrounds, but if they don’t, they need to work jointly with individuals with other technical experience. Include people on the team with neural diversity. For example, I think spatially, and John Houser, my thesis advisor, thinks in equations. When we were solving problems for voice-of-the-customer research, we would sit together and I would draw a picture and John would write an equation. I’d look at the equation and draw a different picture, and he would write a different equation. Between the two of us, each speaking our own language, we would come up with the right model. I couldn’t have come up with that on my own, and nei

Skills to move from product manager to Chief Product Officer Today we are talking about the role of CPO, Chief Product Officer, and the skills and capabilities that help you move from product roles to a CPO role. Joining us is Rick Kelly, who is the CPO at Fuel Cycle. They’ve developed an insights platform to facilitate collaboration between market researchers, UX professionals, marketing managers, and product leaders. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:11] What technical skills have you found helpful for your CPO role? Product is the most fun role you can have because it sits in the nexus of pretty much everything. You have to understand finance, technology, and customers. On the technical side, for me it’s been learning by hook or by crook. Something comes up at a meeting and I don’t understand the newest database structure, and I have to dig deep and learn. My background was customer-facing, so I had to be self-taught and learn to communicate in a way developers would align with, understand, and respect. Speaking the language of development and being fluent and conversant are requirements for product leadership. It’s like learning another language—you have to be persistent and patient and spend a lot of time on YouTube listening to the latest talks on technology. [8:14] What do you mean by having the respect of the developers? You need to have the collaboration and respect of all kinds of departments. Whether it’s developers or your finance team, they need to know you’re willing to listen and be conversant in their field. My finance team and developers want to know I’m going to listen to them and trust them, and they’ll respect the decisions we make together. Product management is about efficient value delivery. Maintaining collaboration across teams requires that you as a product manager are conversant in other team members’ fields. Have sessions where you ask somebody to explain something is important. I don’t know everything, and I wouldn’t expect myself or any other product manager to be perfectly knowledgeable about all things technical. Asking honest questions is really important. There are junior developers who know a lot more than I do about the latest front-end framework, and and asking them to explain it to me engenders trust. [11:49] How did your customer interaction skills help you along your journey to CPO? The role of a product leader is value delivery. The goal of product management is to build things people will pay for. Understanding what people are willing to pay for is an absolute requirement for building a successful product. Understanding customer needs and knowing how to speak to them and elicit their needs to identify what’s truly valuable to them is an absolute requirement for anyone in a customer success or product management role. I map our platform’s value to customer needs and bridge the gap between the two. [13:10] What kinds of customer interactions were you having as an account manager? In many cases, customer success team members are compensated and evaluated based on their ability to review accounts, and that’s something product leaders should care a lot about. They have to be revenue-focused and find ways to deliver value. Product management is about making the right trade-offs to deliver valuable growth to the business. The biggest rate-limiter to growth is how well you understand customer needs. [17:00] What’s your perspective on emphasizing value to the customer or value to the organization? Solving customer problems is the most important thing. Monetization and the ability to grow follows that. Individual PMs need to be laser-focused on delivering customer value. As people grow in their careers, they have to be increasingly concerned about how the organization grows, monetization, and delivering value to shareholders. Having a strong alignment with the revenue side of the organization and with developers, finance teams, and marketing teams is critical for someone in a senior product role. They need a more holistic view on the business. One of our core values is “Team before self.” Senior leaders have to look at the value to the business, not just to their department or team. [18:49] What management skills have you found most helpful? I love to use the example from the book Ender’s Game. Ender becomes successful by learning that allowing his teams to be autonomous and make decisions independently is what ends up being successful in the long run. I prefer to give people high autonomy so they can independently make decisions that are in alignment with the organization’s goals and mission. If you articulate a clear strategy and roll it down to your team members and have clear alignment on your objectives, your team will be able to make good decisions that lead to positive outcomes without a manager becoming a bottleneck in the organiza

Five must-have skills for product managers Today we are talking about the importance of product management and what makes a product manager great. We have the perfect person for this discussion, JJ Rorie. JJ has spent her professional career in product roles, both leading product in internal roles and advising and coaching companies. She teaches a graduate product management course for the engineering school at Johns Hopkins University and hosts the Product Voices podcast. She is the author of Immutable: 5 Truths of Great Product Managers. She is also the founder of Great Product Management, where she provides training, coaching, and advisory services for product managers, leaders, and teams. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [9:04] What makes great product managers? In your book Immutable, you address 5 truths of great product managers. Can you take us through each one? In the book, I focus on those skills of product managers that are immutable or timeless, regardless of your organization or industry. These 5 skills are not the only things you have to be good at in product management, but if you don’t have them, it’s going to be really hard to navigate the role of product manager. [12:27] Customer intelligence Customer intelligence encompasses the voice of the customer, continuous discovery, and all the mechanisms of understanding customers. It’s an overarching understanding and appreciation of your customers and who they are. Understand your customers on four levels: Characteristics Situations Motivations Unmet needs Great product managers move past levels 1 and 2 to levels 3 and 4. If you understand your customers at those levels, you know what’s truly happening to them and what pain points you could potentially help solve. [17:45] Relationship building Anybody who’s been in product management for a minute and half knows you have to have strong relationships with stakeholders, because we work with people all over the organization and even outside the organization. There’s no one-size-fits-all to relationship building, but the underlying tenet that is bedrock to professional relationships that work is confidence. The product manager has to instill confidence in each of their team members. Do your team members have confidence in you and do they have confidence in the product? Figure out the status of your relationships with the 10 people in your organization who you work with all the time and whose relationships are critical for the success of the product. Ask yourself, How confident are they in me? And how confident are they in the product? You can score them on each question and plot them on a quadrant. Some people are champions who believe in you and the product. Some people are detractors who don’t believe in either one. You can’t process your way through relationships, but you can be very intentional. You can understand where people’s relationships sit, and you can plan to nurture a champion and repair a detractor. [22:03] Effective communication Communication in product management is about connection and clarity. Connect with your audience through stories and empathy. Adapt to your audience. Product managers communicate all the time with different people, and you have to tailor your communication to each person. Understand when someone wants the details and when they want the big picture. Clarity means being concise and repeating yourself consistently. If you focus on connecting with your audience and improving yourself just a little bit in that area, you’re going to be a better communicator. [27:06] Good judgement Good judgement means recognizing we’re all susceptible to cognitive biases and trying to avoid them as much as possible. We’re all going to fall prey to confirmation bias, framing our questions in a way that taints the information we get back. Great product managers also become comfortable with ambiguity. In product management, there are no cut-and-dry absolutes. It’s not absolutely clear which direction is best. We work with incomplete data and have a few different ideas that could all be viable. We’re going to get it wrong quite often, but great product managers become comfortable with knowing they made the decision with the information they had at the time, moved forward, and learned. They put the mechanisms in place to quickly learn and pivot. They don’t fall prey to paralysis by analysis. [31:50] Prioritization Prioritization starts with prioritizing our time. Product managers are often asked to do things that aren’t really in the role. Great product managers are intentional. Understand where your time is spent. Categorize it, e.g., I’m spending X amount of time with customers and Y amount with customers, and I’m putting out fires 50% of the time. We first have to know how we’re spending our time at work, because of a lot of what organizations ask pro

The value of prototyping for product management You’ve heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, and perhaps the Lean version, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings. Prototypes help us convey our product ideas and gain critical feedback from customers. Being able to create prototypes quickly is an important capability for product teams. In this discussion we’re exploring a tool for prototyping digital products, which is Uizard. I enjoy exploring tools that can help us be more productive and understanding the problem they solve, and I expect you’ll find the discussion valuable too. Joining us is the Director of Customer Experience for Uizard, Tarek Slimani. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:27] What problem is Uizard solving? We bridge the gap for non-designers to easily ideate a product design. Typical design tools have very steep learning curves. Our platform is designed for ease-of-use and simplicity. We empower non-designers to ideate based on whatever they have in their minds. They can easily use our platform to construct an interactive prototype they can share with others. [6:13] What are some use cases for your product? Founders who have ideas but don’t really know how to create a prototype use Uizard. A product manager can design a flow test for customer experience and show it to the development team who can then perfect it. Marketers use it for landing pages. Students and teachers use it for courses. [7:47] Can you take us through a story of a customer who used Uizard in creating a product? One guy created an augmented reality mobile application that helps people explore how objects would look in their surroundings. His company’s core product was already built, but he and his team needed a tool they could use to quickly design and iterate the processes that go into a mobile app. They used another tool originally, but it had a very steep learning curve, and they didn’t get too far, so they switched to Uizard. They used our beta product, which uses AI to convert hand-drawn wire frames into editable mockups. They had a quick turnaround in ideating and editing their screens. [9:49] Tell us more about using Uizard to sketch ideas. When you’ve drawn wire frames on a piece of paper, it’s very difficult to edit something. You can take a picture on your phone and upload it to Uizard, which converts your wireframes into high-fidelity mockups that you can edit. The ideation process becomes much more rapid. You can share your mockups with your team and show the interaction in the platform, which is difficult to show on paper. [11:27] How do you add the flow logic of a user experience to your mockups? You can use our Interact options. If you want a button to go to a profile section, you drag a node from the button to the profile section. You can preview the buttons and screens live and have a look at the how the interaction works. [13:28] Are people using Uizard in design thinking workshops? Definitely. Design sprint facilitators and UI/UX designers use the platform. They embed Uizard into their websites to get feedback from users. [17:01] How else can Uizard be used? We’ve created predefined project templates and templates of components you can quickly put in your product. If you have an idea, Uizard is very easy to get into and start using to create a new project. You can start with a template or from scratch. [18:51] Have you encountered a creative use of Uizard you didn’t expect? A cybersecurity teacher used our platform for an interactive course. She created a prototype of a website with different options you could click on that would lead you through a journey to learn about cybersecurity. At the end, she could share the prototype live on stage in front of about 100 participants. I hadn’t thought of that use case and thought it was very cool. Action Guide: Put the information Tarek shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Uizard Connect with Tarek on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Innovations succeed when failure is seen as a learning step to success.” – unknown 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

Three levers to create products customers love I start episodes by saying, “I’m so glad to be part of your journey towards product mastery so you can better develop products customers love.” Today I want to dig into that journey in detail. As a listener of this podcast, your journey in some way involves developing and managing products. The titles vary, but you likely relate to product manager, product leader (such as a Product VP or CPO), or innovator. By diving into the specifics of the journey towards product mastery, you can identify where you are now on the journey and what to do next to further accelerate your career. I’ve talked with hundreds of product managers and leaders about their journey and found three recurring levers present in their journey as well as mine—levers that made a significant difference in our growth as product professionals. I’ll be sharing those levers in this episode (see below, starting at 11:03). For our 400th episode, I also have big news. I’m starting a community, the Product Mastery Now Community. This is something I’ve been asked about many times since starting the podcast in 2015. It is a way for people who already find value in this podcast to get even more from it and add additional fuel to help accelerate your product career. Apply to Join the Product Mastery Now Community Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:06] Milestones that equipped me as a product professional I hope you’ll reflect on the key milestones of your journey as I share mine. Starting my career as an electrical engineer as employee #4 in a small systems engineering office, wearing many different hats, and solving problems. Where did you start your product work?Creating rapid prototypes for potential customers, learning to listen to customer, and finding ways to better understand their needs. When did you gain an appreciation for working with customers?Observing a potential customer by watching them work for a week, creating a prototype that solved their problems, and leading the development team to make the product. What experiences have you had that deepened customer discovery for you?Starting to read innovation and product literature, learning about product management, and studying innovation deeply while earning my PhD. When have you engaged in deep and structured learning?Finding the Product Development and Management Association, earning their professional certification, and sharing with others how to be better product developers and managers. What mentoring and coaching experiences have helped you as well as those you’re working with?Creating a system for product managers, teams, and others in organizations contributing to products to learn a shared foundation, collaborate better, build trust, and get everyone on the same page and working faster—the Rapid Product Mastery Experience. What have been your key milestones in your journey toward product mastery? [11:03] Three levers that make a significant difference in our growth as product professionals I’ve talked with hundreds of product managers and leaders about their journey. You know what they have in common?  Three recurring levers are present in their journey as well as mine — levers that made a significant difference in our growth as product professionals. They aren’t sequential steps in our journeys but levers that reappear during times of growth and acceleration of our careers. Frameworks and tools. Ethnography and other tools helped me to better understand customers and became important to me. Frameworks and tools help us make sense of things so we understand what is important for a situation and what we need to do.Structured learning. You accumulate frameworks and tools by studying and learning. Likely, we have done similar things for this. I read books, attended 1-to-6-day workshops and conferences, and took university courses. While this was all helpful, for my first 10 years in product work, it lacked structure and I didn’t always relate what I learned in one area to what I knew from another area. Later, I learned in a more structured manner, which helped me to quickly connect the many pieces of product work. For me, a crucial part of this was the body of knowledge that PDMA has curated since 1976—the structure they add to their product management body of knowledge revealed important ah-ha moments for me.Peer learning. I’m pretty liberal when I use this phrase as I mean for it to include coaching and mentorship. In a peer-learning community earlier in my career, I learned from Product VPs who had much more experience than me, from other product managers who had more years in their career, as well as when I helped others with problems I had knowledge about. The power of a peer-learning community is the interaction with people at similar levels of knowledge and experience as wells as those with more or less knowledge

Insights for product managers from a Scrum Master Scrum is a frequently used approach for software projects and many other types of projects that would benefit from agility, including physical products. While Scrum is common, there are still many issues organizations encounter using Scrum. To understand how to overcome them, you would want to hear from a real master, and that is Fred Fowler, one of only 50 individuals in the United States who holds the prestigious Professional Scrum Master Level III certification. Fred has been developing software in Silicon Valley for more than 35 years. He tackles many of the issues he has encountered in his book Advanced Scrum Case Studies: Real-World Situations and How to Address Them. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:03] What attracted you to Scrum and becoming a Scrum practitioner? It’s hard to pinpoint the actual moment. I’ve been developing software forever, and for a long time I made my living working with people who didn’t understand technology very well but understood business. By understanding their needs, I was able to craft solutions that fit their needs. Scrum is about identifying needs and organizing people to fill those needs in a way that can be measured. I can’t emphasize enough how important measurement is, because unless you’re measuring, you have no idea whether things are getting better or worse. One of the most powerful aspects of the Scrum framework is its emphasis on measuring things—in product development, measuring the value of the product. In the world of software, many software practitioners don’t focus on measuring the value of their products. They measure the effort users put in but not the value users get out. It’s very important to measure the right stuff. [6:18] What metrics should product teams measure? Measuring the productivity of individual developers is impossible and a waste of time. Almost all the metrics I’ve heard about are just measurements of effort. There’s no point in measuring effort because you’re not finding out whether that effort is producing value. The only thing that makes sense to measure is the value of the product. A product owner or product manager is the person who is the investor in the world of Scrum. The product backlog is a list of needs to be filled. It’s the product owner’s responsibility to figure out which needs are valuable to work on now. There’s a negotiation between the product owner and the developers to reach an agreement about what is going to be produced by the end of a fixed period of time called a sprint. The developers figure out whether the product is possible and the product owner figures out whether it’s valuable. The product owner invests the time of the team to develop valuable results. In software, people get focused on technology and measure effort because it’s easy, but you need to figure out whether you’re developing something that is worth more than the cost you’re putting into it. [9:38] How do you measure value? The product owner needs to use the tools of product management to put a gauge on the value. The customer needs to give feedback. In the Scrum framework, during the sprint review, you look at the state of the product at the end of the sprint and have people who want to buy it in the room reacting. They give guidance to the product owner, who builds the feedback into the Scrum cycle. Ideally, have the customers heavily involved. If you have a single customer, that’s simple. If you have a mass market, you need focus groups or test markets. [11:52] How are customers used to provide feedback and what are some of the decision criteria for how they’re part of the project? There’s only one way to measure the product’s value: Sell it. Measure value by having people put their money where their mouth is. In the world of Lean, you deliver value in bit-sized pieces—minimum viable products. Get something into customers’ hands as soon as possible and find out what they think about its value by asking them to pay for it. There are four ways to increase value: Increase sales and revenue. It’s easy to calculate the value. If you sell 1 million copies of a smartphone game for $1.99 each, the value is $1.99 million. If it cost you half a million to make, that’s a great investment. If it cost you $3 million to make, that’s not a great investment. Decrease cost. If you make a million widgets a year and can save 50¢ on each one by improving it, the value is $500,000. Decrease risk. This is more complicated to measure. When I was a CIO, we had our headquarters at the end of a long fiber optic cable from a major city. About once a year, someone with a backhoe dug up the cable and cut us off for a day. We made $1 million per day, so that was a loss of $1 million per year. For $50,000, I moved the computers to a safe location and

How product managers can understand their customers better than anyone else If you have listened to me before, there is a good chance you’ve heard me say we need to fall in love with the customer’s problem, not our solution. Getting enamored with our solution can distract us from the customer experience. Instead, the customer experience is a component of what creates value for customers. For example, have you ever been asked to enter your address more than once during an onboarding experience? What about at your doctor or dentist? For me, the answer is yes to all three. It’s those simple things that add friction to the customer experience and if we want to make products customers love, we need to improve the experience for customers. To help us explore customer experience, joining us is Natashya Narkiewicz, currently VP of Product Management at Avetta and formerly senior director of product management for Newfold Digital, the company behind several popular webhosting brands, such as Bluehost, Network Solutions, HostGator, and Sitebuilder. She has held product roles for nearly 20 years and enjoys building products that have a clean customer experience. She is also a mentor in the business college at the University of North Florida, sharing her knowledge and experience each year with seniors as well as serving as a business mentor to female entrepreneurs in a 12-week program at the Jacksonville, Florida, Women’s Business Center. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:18] You made a move from being a senior product manager in the medical industry at a company creating surgical implants to being the senior director of product management for an IT services company specializing in web hosting. How did you make the move across industries? I was in the medical device space making surgical implants using the body to heal the body. It was a really exciting space when I first joined, but then the FDA increased regulations, and I realized that was going to stifle my creativity and ability to contribute to innovation. I started looking to switch industries. Strategic planning and connections assisted me in switching industries. Who I knew got me the interview and what I knew got me the job. The onus was on me to show product management is a transferable skill. It’s all about knowing who your end users are, what their goals and pain points are, and how you could effectively solve those pain points. Couple that with the business acumen of knowing sales, costs, and margins, and you can do product management in any industry. I knew I had to apply the framework I had used in understanding my previous users to users in this new industry. In my interview, I came up with lots of examples of how I could use that framework for scenarios that would apply to this company. Having a solid understanding of that framework landed the job. [8:21] Why is customer experience a key part of product management? If you don’t know your customer, you’re just guessing. I’m a naturally curious person. As a product manager, you have to be naturally curious, constantly asking why? It’s your responsibility to know your customer better than anyone else does. Get in their shoes, sometimes quite literally. The Jobs to be Done framework (listen to recent episode with Tony Ulwick) is a great way to think about your end users and what jobs they’re trying to get done. It helps you put yourself in their shoes. You need to know what is important to your users. Otherwise, you run the risk of building something that never gets used. [11:48] How do you keep your customer’s problem at the forefront? You need to humanize the customer. It’s easy to use the term “customer” in the abstract and lose sight of who your customer actually is. Often you may have different variances of your customer. It’s important to know who they are and humanize them. We develop personas with names and pictures so when we’re talking through solutions we can picture those people and ask how our solution applies to them and whether they care about the features we’re building. [15:16] Can you take us through a project with the objective of improving the customer experience? At Newfold Digital, we acquire a lot of companies that specialize in a product or service. Each of these companies comes with its own platform. We want to offer their services to our customer base. However, if our users have to move through different platforms, that’s a jarring experience. There are friction points, like if they have enter their address several times. We had the opportunity to unify all the platforms to provide a single customer experience and make the user feel as it were a single interface. First, we needed to understand who the users of these platforms are. We used behavioral analytics tools embedded in the platforms to see what areas users are going to. We talked to customer

Insights on product strategy and customer research for product managers Today we are looking at product management work through the eyes of a CEO, exploring several topics together. The CEO joining us is Matt Young, CEO of UserVoice, the first product feedback and research tool for software companies. UserVoice is the tool I see most frequently used for collecting customer feedback and prioritizing customer needs to help product managers create more valuable products. Matt started his professional career as a software developer, and throughout his career he has been pushing for better ways to build software products. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:41] As a CEO, what do you expect from your product VPs? I need product VPs to develop a product strategy and measure its effectiveness. They must formulate a product strategy that will help deliver on the company’s overall strategy. They need to have a way to demonstrate whether their hypotheses are meeting the mark. If the product strategy is intended to drive an increased NPS, how are they going to tie their activity to that result? [6:48] How do you communicate strategy to your organization? We do it often in actionable ways. When we get together as an executive team to update our strategy every six months, we role play every department and title to make sure those people know how to support the strategy and be confident what they’re doing contributes. We make sure the strategy is simple and understandable to everyone. On the executive team, it’s easy to throw around acronyms your industry uses, but someone who just came out of school with a design degree may not know all those things, and a brief explanation isn’t going to make them an expert. Every two weeks, we do a company all-hands and make sure all our slides re-emphasize strategy and metrics we’re using to track it. We celebrate when an individual team meaningfully contributes to our goal. It not only re-emphasizes understanding of what the mission is but also gets people on board with how to achieve the end result. CEOs sometimes falsely feel we bear the entire burden of the company, but it’s really all the people who work at the company who are accomplishing everything, and I want them to feel they’re the ones who did it. There are a lot of people who view the product team as sitting in an ivory tower. They seem to be making decisions without a lot of information and are perceived as ignoring some of the feedback they’re getting and running around with their own agenda that isn’t well researched. The misalignment may come from a communications problems or a failure to see eye-to-eye on the difficulty of other people’s jobs. There are a lot of examples of misalignment between product teams and the rest of the organization. [11:00] How do you improve communication about strategy with product teams? Every time we propose a project for our product management team, we list a couple of bullets at the top explaining how this initiative will support the company’s strategy. Whoever’s leading the product team keeps re-emphasizing those points to the product team. People pay attention to their immediate managers. When all the conversations in the organization are oriented around the same goals and using the same language, it starts to stick. Strategy has to be ever-present in people’s day to day. [12:36] As a CEO, how do you interact with the product functions in the organization? It’s challenging for me and for most CEOs to hand off control and trust the people leading engineering and product. Every Monday the heads of each department produce a report I ask them to spend no more than 20 minutes on. If they’re spending a lot of time assembling that information, they might be too disconnected from the people doing the work. Producing a terse summary is a good opportunity for them to reflect on what they have a good handle on and what they should dig into more. I sit in on some brainstorming discussions, and I try to be as much of a peer in the organization as possible. If you have good interconnectedness from team to team, I don’t need to be the one making connections. We dissuade people from communicating through their managers and going up and down the tree until the right people get connected. We’ve shifted to an all-remote workforce, and it’s much more efficient to go on Slack or Zoom with the person whom you need information from. We have a brief product and marketing meeting and product and success meeting every week where everyone can talk about what they’re learning and the struggles they’re having. More than any report or oversight structure, these meetings create the self-healing network that creates the greatest value in our organization. In product management, we talk about adding value to a customer, and that’s not precise enough for everyone. There

Misconceptions about Jobs to be Done – for product managers Today we are talking about a popular and often misunderstood product management tool—Jobs to be Done (JTBD). Joining us is the originator of Jobs to be Done, Tony Ulwick. I first discovered Tony through his book What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services. It was published while I was working on my PhD in Innovation and resonated with my research on why products fail. It is the innovation book I have most often gifted to others. He is also the author of the more recent book Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice. Both are valuable books to add to your library if you don’t already have them. This discussion will examine misconceptions about JTBD and approaches for using it better. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:43] Can you help us understand the different perspectives on Jobs to be Done? Let’s start with the perspective popularized by Bob Moesta. One of the first products I worked on was the IBM PCjr, which headlined in The Wall Street Journal as a flop the day after we introduced it. I got interested in innovation because I wondered how they knew so quickly it was going to be a flop. Clearly they were using some criteria to judge the value of the product. If we could only know in advance what criteria people are using to judge our products, we could design the products to meet the criteria, and we would know we’re working on a winning product before it even goes into development. That’s the dream of every product manager. It became clear to me that people buy products to get a job done, and you study that job and make it the unit of analysis. Break down the job into steps in a process and understand how people measure success in each step. By understanding their needs in advance, we can figure out which needs are unmet and come up with solutions that address the unmet needs. Different people have applied the Jobs to be Done theory in different ways. I’m coming at it from the angle of figuring out how we create products people want—product innovation. JTBD is also useful in helping make people want products—demand generation, which is the perspective Bob Moesta takes. You can ask why people are hiring a Snickers bar or a Milky Way bar, from Bob’s example, and then you can tell other people who are also trying to get that job done to buy your product. JTBD serves a purpose for innovation and marketing. Using JTBD for demand generation doesn’t make the job the unit of analysis. Instead, you’re studying the buyer’s journey to buy the product, which is useful in coming up with better marketing and sales strategy. The JTBD approach works for both innovation and demand generation, but don’t assume people want the product you have. You can’t make people want products. If the product is not getting the job done, it’s not going to last very long. [11:09] Alan Klement wrote, “A Job to be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to change her existing life-situation into a preferred one, but cannot because there are constraints that stop her.” What do you think about that definition? That definition comes at Jobs to be Done from the demand-generation angle. It’s talking about understanding the progress the customer is trying to make and the journey of making that progress. But it misses out on making the customer’s job to be done the unit of analysis. [12:25] Theodore Levitt said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” How is this statement related to Jobs to be Done? I view it as the origin of the line of theory that has led to Jobs to be Done. Because of that quote, it finally clicked in my head that people have measurable outcomes they’re trying to achieve. It gives you the option to see the world through two different lenses. You can see the world through the lens of the drill maker and go talk to customers about how to make better drills, because you think you’re in the drill market and all your competitors are drill makers. Or you can look at the market through the lens of the home builder and realize there are people trying to create a quarter inch hole and they use many different products to do it, so there are different types of competitors. You realize you’re in a different market, and you’re able to compete much more effectively. [13:55] Tell us about Clayton Christensen’s milkshake story. The story starts with a milkshake. Clay talks about people buying products to get a job done, but the milkshake story doesn’t make the job the unit of analysis. People are buying milkshakes early in the morning. If we’re using Jobs to be Done for product innovation, we would ask, What job are they trying to get done as they commute to work? They’re trying to ge

Lessons learned on a journey from schoolteacher to Head of Product Most of the people that listen to this podcast have been in product management for several years. Many of them are in leadership roles, such as Product VPs, CPOs, and Heads of Innovation. But many others listen as well. Some are new in their product management careers, and others listen to this podcast because they are considering a career in product. All of us have different paths to our roles, and I love hearing about people’s paths and what attracted them to product management, especially when the path is uncommon. In this episode, we are going to hear about Bella Renney’s path and what she learned along the way that helped her become Head of Product at Tray.io, her current role. Bella is a former secondary schoolteacher with a bachelor’s degree in geography. After teaching she moved to product roles. Now at Tray.io, she believes embedded integrations may be the relief product teams sorely need. She is leading product and engineering teams to develop a platform for embedded integrations that quickly connect various software applications. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:02] When did your interest in product work begin? I was always interested in people, how they use tools, and the problems being solved by businesses. When I was in education, I thought about how we could educate better. How can we empower students, teachers, and parents? It was scary how little we were utilizing great technology to solve challenges in education. I wondered what we could do to use technology better to share resources among teachers and bring students into the 21st century with skills like innovative thinking. That’s where my interest in product and technology and solving problems came from. I wanted to use technology to solve the problems I saw every day in teaching, but I couldn’t do that in the role I was in as a secondary school teacher. I moved away from the classroom into product technology. I want to empower others to make things better. Rather than just using technology for technology’s sake, how could the right tools in the hands of the right people empower them? The right software in the hands of someone in an organization can add transformative change to their own role, their team, and their business. [7:53] How did your desire to make things better turn into your first product role? As lots of product people do, I thought I could do it all myself. I wanted to start my own business. I tried a few different avenues, and it lasted for a bit of time and taught me grit and resilience. That was exciting, but I decided I wanted a bit more skin in the game. That led me to take a job as a contractor with a few folks I knew who were launching a product software company called TableCrowd. They were pivoting from being a services company to a platform for running events. We had a bunch of tools people used to run events, and we wanted those tools to talk to each other to provide a seamless experience for people running and attending the events. I did market and competitor research and figured out the basic requirements for the product. I moved to financial software company Bloomberg for a while, helping them with product for philanthropic endeavors. Then I landed firmly in the European car tech industry at a car buying marketplace where I stayed for three years. After that I went to Tray.io, where I am now. [12:38] What skills help you be successful in product work in a variety of domains? It’s important to have a blend of frameworks in your toolkit. Ask good questions of the folks you’re working with, who are more expert than you in their domain. Ask curious, open questions to get insightful qualitative data from customers, potential customers, and stakeholders. From teaching 11-18-year-olds, I had developed the muscle of how to talk to people, how to get things out of them they don’t want to say. That coaching habit helped me across the board to move swiftly, hit the ground running, and know everything I needed to add value to whatever group I was working with. You need the ability to influence others. Leadership characteristics will serve you incredibly well. First, ask the right questions of the right people and build relationships. Second, know what to do with that information to move everybody forward. Know when to make decisions based on collective agreement and when to have a more dictatorial stance. Ask yourself, do I have those leadership skills? If not, what do I need to do to grow them? Be confident you can use these skills in other places, in other domains or industries. Moving to a new domain, I don’t bring the same assumptions everyone else in the industry has, which is really valuable as we’re trying to create new value for customers. However, it’s not easy to move to a new industry. It’s scary. I love the knowledge I have about the industr

How product managers can empower teams to create a winning product strategy We hear a lot about strategy and that product managers need to create a product strategy. In practice, what does that mean and how does a product strategy help you be more successful? Helping us explore that topic is Sean Kim. He is the President and Chief Product Officer at Kajabi, a web platform that helps creators and entrepreneurs turn their knowledge into income. Previously, Sean was head of product at TikTok, where he set the strategic direction and led product teams. Prior to TikTok, he was the global head of product at Amazon Prime. You can see from his intersection of product and business leadership experiences that he is the perfect person to help us better understand creating product strategy. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:31] What is strategy? I always start with the customer problem. Once I’ve identified the biggest problem I can solve for them, I think about the potential solution to solve the problem and reduce friction. Then I think about how we can offer the solution. We create a step-by-step approach to validate the solution through a minimum viable product and then start building the customer experience. Strategy includes thinking about what your competitors are doing and the risks involved in your solution. Product strategy is 100% focused on the customer. [7:23] Is there a link between product strategy and organizational strategy? It’s critical to know what your North Star metric is—where you point all your product teams. Then look downstream to identify the core metrics that are helping you drive to the North Star metric. Then find the input actions that drive the core metrics. Align your teams around these actions. [10:57] What’s an example of creating a product strategy? When I was at Amazon, our North Star metric was paid Prime members. We needed to ensure our customers realized the value of membership. We focused on the Prime membership cancellation experience. We launched a new cancellation experience that helped customers realize the benefits they would lose if they cancelled. Even though Prime is a well-known brand, most customers didn’t realize there are over 30 benefits beyond two-day shipping and videos. After our successful tests, we had to scale globally. We enabled machine learning to test everything—the cancellation experience, copy, call to action, colors, etc. The machine learning tested all combinations of the content in the cancellation experience and determined the best one to show people globally. We had to debate whether we would offer discounts for the membership. That’s a slippery slope. We’re trying to empower PMs or marketers globally to make decisions. We established tenets for how to make decisions to help scale the business and improve the product globally. [17:27] What’s something that’s gone wrong for you related to product strategy? I tell my teams not everything is going to work, but you have to swing big. You have to take risks, and some will fail. Failure is just one step closer to success. It’s an amazing learning opportunity to know what’s not working. From there we can potentially build even better products. When I was at TikTok, I worked on the Learn tab. TikTok has two tabs on the homepage—Following and For You. We launched a third tab called Learn because a lot of people who had stopped using TikTok said the content was not useful. We set out to onboard more useful content and create a dedicated place where people could find it. We thought we could potentially launch other tabs that offer dedicated content. It seems like a simple enough concept, but it’s actually a ton of work across a lot of different teams. There was a lot we had to think through. Once we launched, we saw only a small percentage of people visited the Learn tab. Most people stayed on the For You feed. Users say they want specific categories, but their actions say otherwise. We saw the more time people spend outside the For You feed, the worse the core metrics are. Watching Learn content isn’t very fun. Users want a variety of content. Determining what should be classified as learning content was incredibly hard. The Learn tab wasn’t a successful product, but we learned a lot from that experience. Learning videos are much longer than entertaining videos on average, which means users watched fewer total videos on the platform, but the longer videos didn’t negatively impact certain metrics we care about. This opened the door to testing longer videos on TikTok, which now has 10-minute videos. We learned users do want useful content, so we continued to invest in educational content, but we included it in the For You feed. [23:50] What’s the value of empowering teams, and how have you drawn the best out of teams? Make sure you’re focused on the customer 100%. Understand what motivates th

Ask the right questions to uncover your customers’ problems Today we are talking about one important skill that separates great product managers and innovators from the rest. It is the same skill that separates great leaders from the rest. It is also seen in great friends. What is that skill? I’m going to leave you in suspense for a moment and first introduce our guest. Tony Poon is the Chief Product Officer for R-Zero, a biosafety technology company creating products for disinfecting shared spaces. He has a long history in technology products that includes Texas instruments, Logitech, AMD (where his customer was Apple), and many others. Tony is going to help us get better at this important skill for product managers, which is asking the right questions. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:42] You’ve said, “To find the right answers, you must first ask the right questions.” When did you start realizing the power of questions? I come from a computer engineering and hardware background, where the stakes are high because mistakes take a long time to fix. When I was an architect designing systems and working with product managers, I would ask for a list of features and come up with the best architecture I could, but there was a chance I was solving the incorrect use case. I realized we can unintentionally end up solutioning things we like based on assumptions of what the problems are rather than based on the actual customer pain points. Failures led me to understand that if I don’t really understand what the problems are, it’s really hard to come up with the right solutions. The best way to uncover the right answers is to ask the right questions. [4:36] What are the characteristics of the right questions? It’s about asking the right questions and asking them in the right sequence. Ask questions focused on the context of the problem rather than the symptoms. Often we’re presented with a list of attributes of a problem or the solutions someone is describing, and we have an urge to go into the solution right away because we assume we understand the problem. The person presenting the problem or you yourself may be so excited about trying to resolve the problem that you don’t get enough coverage on the different facets of the root causes of the problem. You’ll end up solving only a portion of the problem or missing the mark completely. Acknowledging the symptoms is really important, but redirect your team to focus their firepower on the root problem that’s causing the symptoms. Asking three why questions is a good place to start. [8:06] How do you think about framing a problem? First understand whom you’re solving the problem for. Often, especially in enterprise, the person who’s describing a problem to you may not be the person experiencing it. I’ve often realized too late that I’m talking to a third person who may not truly understand the motivations and drivers of the person experiencing the problem. Don’t start until you have framed the person whom the problem impacts. Second, understand what outcome the customer is trying to achieve. Solving for people’s preferences often doesn’t yield the ultimate outcome. Explicitly uncover the outcome of the stakeholders and the success criteria to be able to say whether you can solve the problems efficiently. [11:51] What other insights do you have about the right questions? I sometimes catch myself asking leading questions with a solution in mind. There’s a time and place for that, but getting into the solution space too soon often leaves a lot on the table so you can’t fully uncover what the problems are. Resist the urge to jump to questioning around solutioning. Be cognizant of whether you’re asking questions based on facts or assumptions. Are you asking a question as a reaction to something a customer said, or because you have an assumption? Knowing the source of the question helps you uncover how much weight to put on the answers you get. Use your customer’s name more and use “I” less. This helps you fact-check whether the customer said something or you assumed they said it. Tools like journey mapping are helpful for writing down what’s being done and your goals. This helps you fact-check when you come up with a solution to see if there’s going to be an impact on the actual problem rather than on what you think customers need. [17:14] What are some wrong or less powerful questions? “What if” questions are potent but dangerous. Customers may react positively, but they may be reacting to your great idea rather than the fact that it connected to their outcomes. If I ask my son, “Would you like candy?” I know what the answer will be. It’s very different if I ask him, “What snack do you want?” You get extremely different perspectives. Product people s

Insights for product managers from a case study with an electric vehicle gamechanger Today we are exploring technology-driven vs. market-driven innovation. I want to set up the topic for us a bit. There are times that a technology comes first and later a problem associated with a market need is found that the technology addresses. Examples include the glue that made 3M’s Post-it-Notes possible 7 years after the glue was invented, an electric actuator Caterpillar invented that went unused until they later created a digger that couldn’t use their standard hydraulics platform, or the magnetic research my daughter is doing as a physics student, studying spin wave properties, for applications that are yet to be discovered. However, I find market-driven innovation is more common—the wants and unmet needs of customers are first discovered and then solutions are considered. This is the innovation process seen in the Jobs-to-be-Done methodology and described in many books including The Innovator’s Method. To help us compare and contrast these approaches, Dr. John Cooley is with us. John has five technology degrees from MIT, starting with dual bachelors in electrical engineering (EE) and physics and including a PhD in EE. He founded Nanoramic in 2009 and now serves as the Chief of Products and Innovation. Nanoramic is a nanocarbon composites engineering company, currently working on electric vehicle batteries by reducing their costs while increasing their energy density (more energy in smaller and lighter batteries) and at the same time providing rapid charging. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:21] How do you view the value of pure research and market-driven research? At Nanoramic, we have developed a product development business model. Some of our products are market-driven and some are technology-driven. We recognize there always needs to be a market-driven aspect for a successful product. Even if we start with a cool technology, we link that development to the market. Our product development has a large surface area in contact with the outside world. We create ways for our product development teams to interact with customers and get feedback that they formalize into the product development process. We look for sensors to sense the market need. The most effective sensor is customer interaction with an existing product. In a conversation about an existing product, what does the customer say they would want instead? A lot of products come from market need, but we have developed products starting with technology. Our original energy storage technology was a technology-driven innovation. It was a highly efficient electrode technology for a niche energy storage device called a supercapacitor. We had a way of making electrodes with a uniform array of nanotubes, which had advantages for ion transport and overall efficiency. We connect innovations like this to clean tech. Another example is our business line Thermexit focused on polymer composites and products. Our key product line is a thermal interface for electronics systems. It helps dissipate heat from electronic components, which is crucial for performance because the efficiency with which you can remove heat is directly related to performance. This technology began while we were studying carbon nanotubes and other nanocarbons. Some of the composites we created had very interesting properties like high thermal connectivity. At an investor meeting at MIT, we talked about how we would use our technology for thermal interface materials, and everybody got excited. We eventually developed a product and found the market in high-performance consumer electronics. That’s an example of a product that started from a bunch of nerds in the lab working on something we thought was cool. Later we found the application as the technology developed, and we turned it into a product that is a successful business line today. On the other hand, our electric vehicle lithium ion battery is a market-driven product. We adapt our core innovations, driven by the requirements and needs in the market. It’s always a mix. Successful products can be market-driven or technology-driven. Be opportunistic but also disciplined. We do a feasibility analysis to create discipline in identifying product concepts and how they fit the market. If we start with a market, do we have technology that addresses that need? If we start with technology, is there a market that will buy the product? [10:32] How did you get on the path that led to creating the thermal pad? In our company we encourage engineers to experiment in the lab. Some engineers had already played around in the lab with polymer composites and had seen some neat properties. If you establish a mesh of carbon nanotubes or other nanomaterials with a high aspect ratio, you get a low percolation threshold, meaning you don’t need much material to establish the mesh. We also noticed that carbon nan

How this product manager created a successful product for an underserved market Today we are taking a product journey, exploring how an insight about an underserved market turned into a valuable product and a rapidly growing company. I love hearing stories of a product’s journey and enjoy sharing one occasionally on this podcast because, regardless of you role in product management, leadership, or innovation, there are important lessons to be learned. Joining us is Matt Danna, who graduated Magna Cum Laude from Rochester Institute of Technology, where he focused on web development and human computer interactions. His professional career has entirely involved product roles, most often as Product VP or Head of Product. During his experience he became aware of an opportunity to better serve small businesses that needed to frequently make and manage client appointments. He is now the co-founder and CEO of Boulevard, which provides a SaaS platform for spas and salons to increase sales, in part by increasing client bookings and decreasing no-shows. I’m eager to hear how Matt has made this happen. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:35] What early experiences caused you to be interested in creating products? I grew up building with Lego, K’NEX, and Lincoln Logs, doing finger painting, and exploring my creative and artistic side. Growing up I didn’t know if I wanted to go into computer science or graphic design. I decided on information technology because of the salary and kept graphic design as a hobby. Product has been a way to join the artistic and technical worlds. [4:42] How did your interest in design and user experience evolve? I noticed the most successful companies’ products feel delightful and magical. They surprise you with their elegance and how easy they are to use. I love creating those moments with technology, particularly straddling the worlds of software engineering and design. I’ve always been drawn to building technology for creative individuals, and that’s been the theme throughout my whole career. [8:40] Where did the idea to create a product for spas and salons come from? At my last company, I was the VP of Product and the co-founder of Boulevard, Sean, was the VP of Engineering. One day Sean’s hair was a complete disaster, and I told him he was looking way too much like an engineer and needed to get a haircut. He kept forgetting to call the salon during the day to make an appointment, and at night when he remembered they were closed. I had the same problem. We hypothesized that if salons were more convenient to call, they would make more money, and we didn’t understand why they were seemingly so far behind on technology. One weekend Sean and I walked into a bunch of different salons in LA and asked them how they handled appointments. We were surprised that 100% of the businesses were using technology that was capable of online booking, but none of them had it embedded in their website. They wanted people to call to make appointments. We learned these businesses are really low margin—a healthy salon or spa operates on a 5% profit margin. The front desk controls the profitability of the business based on how they schedule appointments. If you’re a new guest, they’ll add 15 minutes consultation time. If you’re returning, they want to know what service you got, who your stylist was, and exactly how long it took. If you no-showed in the past, they’ll put you at the end of the day so if you no-show again, they can cut the staff early. Most importantly, they’re double-booking so a professional can be with multiple clients at once, and they’re making sure there are no gaps between appointments on the schedule. The front desk staff is doing yield optimization on the fly, and no scheduling system had any business logic. It was a no-win situation for business owners. Either they had had to hire an army of front desk staff and have friction in the client experience, or they had to use online booking and be less profitable. We thought technology could solve this. We built our MVP, found a couple of customers at first, and built lots of functionality to figure out how to optimize the schedule in real time. We built a constraint solver that takes all the inputs and figures out the most ideal time for the appointment. When customers book an appointment, the calendar only shows the times that are best for the business. We learned that the start time of the appointment doesn’t matter much to customers, but it matters a great deal to the business. We knew if we could turn this opportunity into a win-win for the consumer and business owner, it would also be a win for our company. Automating scheduling allows stylists and salon owners to be more productive on the things that truly matter. We try to automate as much of the mundane as possible. We’ve evolved from just a scheduling app to an e

How product managers can get customer insights from a community to create a competitive advantage Three years ago I was looking for a wifi camera I could put in our RV so I could check on our dog when we needed to leave her in the motorhome. The leading brand cost about $150. I tried a brand that was new to me offering a wifi camera for $29. It worked great with the cloud features I expected. This year I was looking for a robotic vacuum cleaner for our house. The highly rated and recognized brand was about $800. I went back to the company I got the camera from and learned they also had a robotic vacuum, complete with LIDAR, which I got on a Cyber Monday sale for $200. I wanted to learn how this company creates competitive products, differentiating on cost while offering comparative capabilities that equate to much higher value for customers. Today, we get to find out together as the VP of Product for Wyze joins us. His name is Steve McIrvin and we met a few years as we both had kids competing in Science Olympiad. Before joining Wyze, Steve was last at Amazon. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:15] How does Wyze compete? Wyze is a home automation company that is community-driven. A group of passionate users in our social media and forum communities drives our roadmap and and helps us understand the problems we need to solve. From there, if we’re getting into a brand new category, we follow a fast-follower strategy. We help external engineers understand the product requirements and user needs and rely on their expertise. For our core business like cameras, plugs, and bulbs, we’re investing in internal innovation, especially artificial intelligence. We’re pushing the boundaries of computer vision and machine learning. For example, the Wyze Cam, a security camera, detects people, pets, and packages, and we’re beta testing face recognition. When our customers want a new solution, we try to find that solution, invent something, or enhance the features of an existing product. For example, people who had the Wyze Cam were looking for a way to power it, because they didn’t have an outdoor outlet near the camera. We came up with the solution of putting an adapter with a USB port in a light bulb socket. The light bulb still screws in the socket, and the USB port power the camera. We were extending an adjacent capability. This is the most fun kind of innovation—when you can quickly see a problem and immediately come up with a novel solution. [8:00] Tell us more about how you’re developing your core capabilities, especially AI visual recognition. One of our new service features is Wyze Anything Recognition. Training a computer vision model is very hard and usually requires an AI research team, but we wanted to make that problem accessible to anyone. Wyze’s tagline is to make great technology accessible. If you have a use case where you want your camera to recognize something, you can train it to do that. For example, my kids are always leaving their laundry in the washing machine, so I can put a camera there and train it to recognize the closed and open washing machine and trigger an alert when it sees an undesirable state. There are probably a hundred different problems like that around your home that you could use this feature to solve. We’ve done limited beta testing on the Wyze Anything Recognition so far, but the results have been good. We get suggestions that we can put in our main model, like people want it to recognize a dog barking or baby crying. When someone in our community takes a video, the app asks if they would like to submit the video to improve Wyze’s AI. A lot of people submit those, so we get the training data we need to make the program better for the community. [12:08] How did the community become a core aspect of Wyze’s strategy? Our CEO calls our community the crown jewels. We protect them and are amazed at how much they contribute. When we started in 2017, a lot of people didn’t want to spend $150 on a camera. When we came out with the $19.99 Wyze Cam, we inadvertently developed an amazing, passionate community of early adopters who told all their friends about it, and it went word-of-mouth viral. We asked them what other products they would use. The reception to all these products has been very strong. Every launch of a new generation of camera has been stronger and stronger, driven by huge spikes in interest when we tell our community members about them. [14:2] How do you use the community and keep people engaged? People engage with us on multiple different levels. We have several different Facebook groups, and several of them include people who volunteer to help shepherd others. I meet with those volunteers at least monthly to listen to their opinions and make them feel like Wyze employees. They do a ton of work on Wyze’s behalf, so they’re like superstar employees. We always include them on

Lessons learned from a product manager’s experiences at Google and YouTube Most of us have become product managers and then moved on (or will move on) to product leadership based on our experiences and knowledge. We encounter tools along the way—some that are helpful and some that are not. I want to explore experiences that help you be a better product professional. Joining us is a Tom Leung, Director of Product Management at Google Health and previously at YouTube. He also hosts the Fireside Product Management podcast. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:59] What was your path to product management? I started my career in management consulting because I wanted to be a business leader. Later I founded a startup and then worked in business development at Microsoft. I realized I was most excited about the solution and customer experience. I switched to product management and never left. In product management, you can connect the dots and be as close as you can to running things. It gives you control, accountability, and a wide breadth of problems to solve. The PM role gives you the opportunity to have influence in all areas of the company and a lot of flexibility. You can stay in the role for a long time and still have diverse experiences. [8:10] What experience provided growth for you early in your career? The failures are punctuated in my memory. The startup I founded in 1999 with my brother was a good example. I was enrolled at Harvard Business School and I thought I was hot stuff. I learned the hard way how hard businesses are to create. One of the many reasons we failed is our product didn’t really solve a big enough problem for customers, and we weren’t solving it sufficiently well. Many of us constantly relearn that lesson. We get distracted by technology, business opportunity, or the desire to focus entirely on internal execution, and we forget that to stand out we need to solve a big problem for customers in a way that is 10 times better than current solutions. [11:35] Can you tell us more about the problem you were trying to solve and what mistakes you made? The idea was to provide a free video streaming service and fund it with video ads inserted in the middle of the videos. The problem we were trying to solve was to provide consumers with a wider range of content choices beyond movie theaters, DVDs, or cable TV. Ironically, I later worked at YouTube, so I think this was a very real problem, but the way we solved it was very transactional. We licensed video content from film makers and rolled it into a single portal. It was decent, but we had poor bandwidth and the content was not great. Some users sent us content they wanted us to put up, but we said no because we thought it was user-generated trash and advertisers wouldn’t want to spend money showing ads next to content that wasn’t professionally developed. In hindsight, they were giving us free content we could just benefit from. [14:38] What is a more recent experience that helped you become a product leader? I spent four years at YouTube rebuilding the creator platform. I was a high performer but not one of the top three or four product managers. I wondered what I could learn from that, so I reached out to my peers, manager, and skip level and asked for feedback. People will give great feedback if you ask for it. My skip level was so glad I was asking because many people don’t ask for feedback. It’s great to have these conversations even when you’re no longer in the reporting chain, because your managers can be as unvarnished as possible. The theme I heard from the people I talked with was that people loved working with me, but I could have done a better job forcing them to have harder conversations and make harder choices earlier. I was very agreeable and tried to get everyone together, but when a hard call was made, I could have made it in a third of the time. That’s one of the things that separates amazing product directors from strongly exceeding ones. [18:19] How did you implement this feedback? It’s hard to make hard calls because even if you are personally ready often decisions are consensus-driven and cross-functional, and some hard decisions have an impact on different people. The trick is to make sure you’re not the victim of your own blind spots. Bring people along to make the call. Help the organization officially make it together and stick to it. Do it in a way that minimizes disruption. Someone will be impacted in a negative way, and that’s delicate. You can’t just go kick the door and say a project should be killed. On the other hand, you don’t want to be in a situation where two years later the project gets deprecated and everybody knows it should have been deprecated before. There’s always tensions between those two extremes. [21:17] What are the characteristics of product managers who excel? Ability to build trust

Innovate for the future – for product managers Is your organization innovative? Is innovation part of the culture and an aspect of the organization’s reputation? Or is innovation something that is just talked about, but you know real action isn’t taking place—what’s been called Innovation Theater. If so, today we are talking about changing that—how organizations can be more innovative and the action leaders need to take to make it happen. To help us is Tendayi Viki. He is a returning guest, having joined us in episode 308. Tendayi is an author and innovation consultant. He holds a PhD in Psychology and an MBA. He is also an Associate Partner at Strategyzer, where he helps large organizations innovate for the future while managing their core business. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:03] How do you help companies innovate for the future? Organizational leadership is stewardship. Half the job is helping the company succeed right now, and the other half is setting up the company to survive and thrive into the future. Surviving into the future requires coming up with new things that are future-facing. [4:05] How do you transform the organization to be able to do both of those jobs? The first step is philosophical alignment with the belief that human life is a mixture of daily bread and planting for the next season. For example, if you get drawn into tasks and forget to take a walk, it’s not good for your future capability. Make hay while the sun shines. It’s hard to make hay while the sun is shining, because you want to go to the beach and surf. People need a philosophical buy-in; otherwise they’re being dragged to a trough they don’t want to drink from. [7:00] What do we need to put in place so we can innovate for the future? Embrace the idea that first we shape the tools and then the tools shape us. Every organization has tools it uses, but often we take those for granted and nobody challenges the underlying philosophy. Large organizations tend to struggle with innovation because they apply their core business processes to innovation since those are the tools they have on hand. They’re picking up harvesting tools for planting. The worlds of innovation and core business need different management tools, processes, and philosophy. Core business uses execution tools. Innovation uses design tools. Buckminster Fuller said, “Rather than argue with people about their behavior, just give them a tool that is an expression of the behaviors you want them to show, and by using the tool, they get to embody the process.” If you try to change someone’s mindset, but they don’t have the tools to do anything differently, their mind may be changed, but they can’t manifest that in any way. It’s better to give people tools that allow them to manifest the right behaviors, and you’ll see the mindset shifts happen over time. [12:22] Can you tell us a story about providing the right tools? I was helping an organization make investment decisions on new products, and I sat in on their process. Their R&D scientists were coming up with great inventions, but then the scientists had to fill in a long business case. After that, they came to a session where the questioning was brutal. Leadership asked customer-based questions like “Have you sold anything yet? How do you know what customers want?” The organization was convinced the brutality of the questioning extracted the truth. I had to convince them there was no truth to be found. They could be as brutal as they wanted, but the R&D scientists didn’t know the answers to the questions. They needed to create a preceding process where the scientists could gather data about customers to answer the questions. After that, the questioning would produce truth. The question in innovation is how much are you willing to pay for that initial process? Typically, your organization will give you money if you promise a return, but in this context they’re giving money because you’re promising answers to questions, but you’re not promising what the answers are going to be. You might or might not find that there is value to be created. [15:41] How can we decide how much to invest to get information on what will create value for customers? It depends on the industry, but there are a few overarching principles. Don’t build anything tangible before you know exactly what the customer needs and wants. Don’t build the expensive product before you build prototypes and see whether the value proposition resonates. Don’t start manufacturing before you get the price point that customers are willing to pay. Consider how much money a team would need to get answers to these questions in your industry. Answer the first question (what does your customer need?) first. If you get a positive answer, invest more and go to the next level of question

How to tap into the valuable resources your legal counsel can provide – for product managers Today we are talking about product leaders using legal resources. When and why should product VPs, CPOs, and other senior product roles involve legal resources? While that question is directed to executive team roles, I expect product managers will also discover how legal resources can be wisely leveraged. Joining us is Ryan Lewendon, partner at the Giannuzzi Lewendon Law Firm, helping founders navigate growth and reach their full potential. He has helped several brands grow and overcome obstacles, especially consumer product companies. This has included successful exits with acquisitions by companies that include Coke, General Mills, Boulder Brands, Bacardi, and more. I’m looking forward to learning from his experience. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:29] What kind of law do you practice? We focus on fast-growing, disruptive consumer products companies—anything you put in or on your body. My partner and I were the first lawyers for Vitamin Water from when it was just an idea until we sold it to Coke for $4.7 billion. We did every corporate legal thing they needed. After that we realized there weren’t a lot of lawyers interested in helping disruptive brands, and we had a great playbook for how to build a disruptive business and an aptitude for working with the underdogs in consumer packaged goods (CPG). Now we work with over a thousand companies, from huge companies to startups, over their whole lifecycles. We work in several verticals. We help companies with financing. We have experience and downstream vision to help companies know what they should and shouldn’t do when they’re raising capital at different stages and negotiating with investors to set up for longterm success. We help companies spend money to implement their plan. We help them solve the problems directly in front of them and the problems down the line to help the company grow all the way through an exit. [10:48] How can products leaders and managers do a better job engaging legal resources to help create a new product? Lawyers get a bad rap for being people who say no and stifle innovation, but they can provide valuable resources. A good in-house legal counsel is a translator between the C-suite executives and the external legal counsel. They’re going to communicate whatever you put forth to the external counsel, and how it’s presented will have a big impact on whether you get a rubber stamp. If you can get the in-house counsel on board with what you’re trying to do, you’ll have a much higher chance of success. Establish trust with your in-house counsel. Don’t hide parts of the story from them. Tell them all the issues, the reason you’re creating this product, and what you’re hoping to achieve. Talk through the negatives first. Tell them the issues that might be problematic and explain how you’re going to deal with them. Business people focus on the upsides and winning scenarios. Lawyers look at the downsides and worst cases. If you provide a proposal that looks at the upsides, acknowledges the downsides, and describes mitigators for those downsides, you’ve done a lot of the in-house counsel’s job. All they have to do is translate it to the external counsel. [17:02] When does the external counsel get involved? A good in-house counsel does almost no legal work. They’re just a conduit between the company and the external counsel. There are lots of legal issues at a company, and the in-house counsel can’t address them all themselves. Also, using external counsel provides a professional coverage against liability. You can’t choose your in-house counsel , but you can choose your external counsel. When you’re trying to get a disruptive innovation passed, picking the external counsel is extremely important. Choose an external counsel that has contextual experience in your field. Lawyers are typically risk-averse, so if you’re working with someone who does not have a great grasp on the industry or your idea, they’ll probably say no pretty quickly. It’s easy to say there’s risk, but it’s harder to understand the dynamics and nuances of a situation to identify where risks can be lessened. Lawyers will only have that ability through a contextual understanding of the industry you’re in. Look for lawyers who are interested in your project. Choose a firm that typically operates in the industry you’re in and with the matters and clients you work with. [22:48] If a company is thinking about creating a disruptive product and deciding between building the product themselves vs. buying a company that might help them, what should they consider? Consider whether a company or brand is situated such that paying for it outweighs the benefits of internally developing it. Distill down what you wo

What product managers need to know about entering a crowded product category Today we are discussing crowded product categories and the challenges when trying to enter them with a new product. For context, we’ll use the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) category, which is indeed crowded. Joining us is Jeroen Corthout, co-founder of Salesflare, the simple yet powerful CRM. This is a topic I’m close to as I have been evaluating CRMs to keep track of the guests I have on this podcast as well as the companies I have the pleasure of helping to improve their product management and innovation. In full disclosure, Salesflare gave me a license to use their CRM at no cost. For this episode, what I’m interested in is what Jeroen learned entering such a crowded market. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:20] Why does the world need another CRM solution? Eight years ago I had a software company, and we were looking for a CRM tool to help us follow up our sales leads better. I had used Salesforce in the past and knew it wasn’t a great practical tool for the end user. We found some small business CRMs that still fell short for us because they only worked if we did an enormous amount of work—constantly typing in information. We wondered if we could build our own CRM that collects information automatically. We created a CRM system that collects information on your contacts from your emails, calendar, and phone. That became the basis for Salesflare, a tool with which you can follow up leads, prospects, and customers in a much easier way because the system provides you all the information about them, which you can then build on and organize. [8:19] Tell us more about your product journey that led to creating a CRM company. As we tried several existing solutions, we noticed what worked well about them and what problems we still had. We did a lot of experimentation. We built a prototype and got excepted in an incubator and accelerator. After that we started building the CRM tool and did customer interviews, because we knew what we wanted, but we didn’t know what other people wanted. [17:30] How did you find people to interview and what did you ask them? We had an idea of the types of companies we wanted to go after—companies that sell through email and phone calls. We decided to interview VPs of sales and salespeople. I reached out to people I knew, and at the end of each interview I asked them if they knew three other people who would be interested in being interviewed. We showed people the product and got feedback. We discovered we needed to make the software a bit more clear and simple. Our software can be used like a normal CRM, even though it works differently, but sometimes people try the software and don’t see it’s different. When you’re entering a crowded category, you want to differentiate yourself sharply, but if you differentiate too much people won’t get it. [21:28] What good decisions did you make and what did you get wrong along the way? A lot of SaaS companies put up a webpage and let people try their software, but this doesn’t allow you to get much information about people’s experience. Instead, I got in contact with all the customers who wanted a trial version. I gave them a demo, understood their needs and context, showed them the software, and took notes about their experience. We set up the software together and saw the moments when it didn’t work like we expected. Staying close to the customer saved us in the early days, because if we hadn’t done that I don’t think we would have been able to evolve the product as well as we have. In the beginning we were very bad at structuring and prioritizing feedback. If we had done it earlier, it would have saved us a lot of time. We were just scribbling feedback in a Google doc, and it was very badly organized and prioritized. Now we have a clear system We know what to tackle first and why customers asked about an issue. Action Guide: Put the information Jeroen shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Salesflare Check out the Salesflare YouTube channel Connect with Jeroen on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” – Forrest Gump 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

When to use Agile and when to consider other options – for product managers charset=Ascii Today we are talking about when to use or not to use Agile for your product projects. Products need to get released quickly and correctly, creating more value for customers. Is Agile the answer? Maybe, but the details matter. To explore the topic with us, Mark Madsen is here to share his experience. He has built and led project organizations in a variety of companies, including Lego, Saab, and Danfoss. He has seen the conditions needed for Agile to work well and when it doesn’t. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:48] What does Agile mean in the context of developing products? Agile means a lot of different things to different companies and individuals. To me, Agile is related to flexibility and is an umbrella term for practices like Scrum and Safe. [5:29] What are the characteristics of projects that benefit from Agile? Agile works well when there’s uncertainty. I started out using Agile in the software and electronics world, which was very uncertain, and I saw Scrum was really beneficial there. I thought Scrum was the silver bullet for everything until I came to a company that was not as complex and was doing production, which needs to be stable. For the first time, I saw that Scrum did not work. When I came upon Dave Snowden’s work, I realized it’s all about complexity. When you have complex, unpredictable tasks, Agile makes sense. When you have less uncertainty and can plan everything upfront, then use the waterfall methods. [7:21] Tell us more about Snowden’s framework. Snowden divides projects into four habitats. First is the clear world which includes tasks you just go do. For example, tying your shoes is easy and you can easily teach it. This category also includes team-based tasks; for example, if I need to dig trenches I can tell my team to dig the trenches, they can come back when they’re done, and we don’t need to discuss that. Second is the complicated world where we can predict problems but might not understand them. For example, if my car breaks down I might not know how to fix it, so I would take it to a mechanic. If I take it to someone who is not an expert, they won’t fix my car. You need great teams and knowledgeable people who have done it before. Involve experts from different area of the company, analyze the problem or project, and create and execute a plan. Third is the complex world where things stop being predictable. For example, no matter how much you analyze the stock market, you cannot fully predict how it is going to go up and down. If I plant ten seeds and treat them exactly the same, I will not get ten trees that are 100% alike. People aren’t predictable. You can crack a joke in one room and have everyone laugh then tell the joke to another room and no one laughs, and you don’t understand why. Last is the chaotic world where a crisis is happening and we react. If the house is on fire, we do not sit down and think; we run for the door. We need to treat these different worlds differently. What works in one world does not necessarily work effectively in the other worlds. In the clear world, you have one step and the job gets done great every time. In the complicated world, you need processes, best practices, and tools. In the complex world, you should be ready to create processes. An important part of Agile is learning—starting with something and modifying and adapting it to the reality that you’re only just finding out. [17:27] If Agile isn’t a good fit, what other options should companies consider? In the complex world, Scrum can be a great place to start, but it must not be implemented too rigidly. If it is, the benefits will be hit-or-miss, and you might end up with something that does not work. You need to train people to use Scrum and other frameworks like Kanban, Extreme Programming, or SAFE, and empower your team to choose the right tools to solve problems. [22:56] How can we deal with friction between the Agile team and the rest of the organization? For example, marketing might say there is a nine-month deadline, and the Agile team says it’s going to do sprints every two weeks and see what’s done in nine months, creating conflict between marketing and the Agile team. When you have a problem like this, you need to have a discussion. Make it clear you’re facing a complex problem that isn’t predictable. In the past, you’ve made plans that didn’t hold, so you need to investigate the problem more. You’re facing reality when you say you’re not sure what you’ll be able to deliver at the nine-month deadline. Communicate what you’ll be doing. Explain that Agile gives you flexibility. It works well when you communicate with each other and get on the same page. [26:50] Can you share a story about when Agile worked well? When I was at

How to load up your brain with your customers’ mindset How do you figure out what your customers want? Stop and think about it for a few seconds. Is your product work based on what Sales wants, what an Executive or other HiPPO wants, what your competitor is doing, some insights gained about your customers, or something else? While we all have constraints, insights about the people using our products and the needs they have help us develop better products. To explore getting customer insights, Mike Mace is with us. He leads market strategy for UserTesting, which is a firm that helps you experience what your customers experience, getting human insights within just a few hours to help you design and deliver exceptional products. Mike has a long history in product work, spending a decade at Apple, helping Silicon Graphics, then contributing to growth at Palm, as well as assisting other organizations to be more successful with their products. He is going to help us learn how to quickly get customer insights for our product work. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:44] How do we get better insights about our customers? It’s not about asking your customers what they want; it’s about figuring out what they need and what you would they would like you to do for them. On the other hand, don’t be arrogant—there are a lot of companies that say they know what the customer needs, but it doesn’t work at all. If you’re not getting inside your customers’ heads, you won’t be able to produce market traction on anything new. My favorite example comes from my time at Apple. We did enormous quantitative surveys and asked customers which features they wanted. Consistently, a bigger hard drive and more memory were ranked highest, and multimedia features were ranked lowest. We executed on those findings, but the company was gradually dying. In the late 1990s, Steve Jobs came back and said we were going to work on multimedia features. He understood we didn’t need something of mediocre interest to 90% of customers; we needed something 10% of people will absolutely adore. Intelligently parsing customer feedback to solve a problem that is compelling to a certain segment of the audience as opposed to blindly following customers’ requests turned the company around. Following an overall average inevitably makes you mediocre. It’s not that you shouldn’t take any customer feedback. It’s what you do with it that matters. [10:05] What should we avoid when we’re trying to understand customers’ needs? Don’t over-rely on proxies. A lot of people need to do discovery but don’t have time to talk to their regular customers, so they use people they’ve talked with in the past, friends and family, or only customers in their city. That’s better than nothing, but when you go to the same people repeatedly they turn into insiders. During COVID, many people used social media to get customer feedback, but the voices on social media are self-selected and systematically biased because those most active on social media are not average people—they’re fanatics. When you use these proxies, you end up designing the product for the 5% who are fanatics rather than the core of the market. [13:01] How do we get actionable feedback? I grew up in the old world of market research, which relied on slow, expensive focus groups. Now through technology it’s possible to get video feedback from people for just about anything you want within a couple of hours. They can record themselves interacting with anything you can show on a computer screen or completing any task you ask them to do. User testing is a way to get regular people to respond to any prompt—a marketing message, a product question, a discovery point. You get more candor when someone is talking to their computer than when they’re talking to a live interviewer. You can get this feedback within a few hours or a couple of days at most. There are huge areas where we all guess regularly because we’re not used to having feedback available. Now getting feedback has sped up so there’s no excuse for making an important decision blindly. Think about how many guesses you make each week and how much risk that introduces into your product. Why are you doing that when you have the option to get really fast feedback? We don’t have to guess anymore. [18:22] How can we use user testing to better test hypotheses? Many companies assume the best way to test hypotheses is to fail fast. But it’s better to not fail in the first place. If you can use user testing to get it 90% right the first time, you’ll have more credibility as a PM, you’ll save money because you’re doing fewer sprints, and your engineers will be more motivated because you’re not asking them to do as much rework. You’ll still occasionally fail and learn from it, but

How product managers and leaders break through challenges Tom Leung is the Director of Product Management at Google Health and was previously at YouTube. He also hosts the Fireside Product Management podcast. This is a special episode of the Product Mastery Now podcast as Tom is interviewing me. He invited me as a guest on his Fireside podcast. We had a great discussion and I wanted to share it here as well. We covered several topics, with a focus on recommendations for overcoming challenges organizations and product leaders encounter developing products customers love. They are: Lead with the Problem, Not the Solution Start with Strategy Engage Customers Share High-Value Resources Clarify the Customers Portfolio Management Project Selection Do More With Less Manage the Product Lifecycle Maximize the Benefit of a Product Process Click here to get a PDF with more information about each recommendation. Useful links: Tom’s FiresidePM podcast 10 Changes Product Teams Should Make Now to Consistently Launch Products Customers Love   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

How product managers can achieve transformational listening Today we are talking about listening. How would you rate yourself as a listener? I consider it a superpower for product managers and innovators, because proper listening is a key way to learn what customers need. It is also a behavior of those gaining influence in their organizations. To help all of us better develop this superpower, Christine Miles joins us. She is the author of What Is It Costing You Not to Listen: The Power of Understanding to Connect, Influence, Solve & Sell. For three decades, Christine has been helping organizations improve by applying human skills to drive results and build cultures of empathy. Teaching people to listen differently has been a big part her work. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:55] Through working with CEOs, what have you learned about the importance of listening? CEOs know listening is important, but they often haven’t taught people how to do it. Performance is accelerated by emotional acuity, not just intelligence. Superstars have both emotional intelligence and technical skills. [5:34] What’s a story of a failure that happened because people weren’t listening well? We tend to overestimate our listening skills, and none of our education systems teach listening skills. We’re all failing to listen, because we’re not equipped to know how to do it. I was on a very technical call with engineers who had delivered an energy-saving product and were validating the results. The engineers and the customer thought they were talking about the same thing, but they weren’t on the same page at all. The engineers weren’t hearing what the customer was asking for. Fortunately, the head of sales had been trained in how to listen differently, and he intervened and got them aligned so the engineers could solve the right problem. The main failure that results from not listening is we end up solving the wrong problems. [9:36] What is the foundation of listening differently? Listening differently or transformational listening goes beyond attentive listening. Just paying attention is a low bar to achieve. To listen differently, we need to understand and uncover insight. When you do that, you’ve earned the right to solve the problem. [12:56] How can product managers avoid falling in love with their solution and thinking they’re listening when they’re actually filtering information through the framework of what they believe the customer needs? The brain is the enemy of listening. We’re all telling ourselves a story, which can contaminate what the customer may really need. You can’t white-knuckle your way to listening differently. You wouldn’t go into the woods to get over the mountains without tools in your backpack, but we go into important conversations without being prepared, thinking we can white-knuckle our way to the other side of the woods. [15:44] What tools do we need to listen differently? The most powerful story you can tell someone is their own. We influence people by understanding their stories. Understanding and saying we understand have nothing to do with each other. If I reflect, confirm, and validate what you said, then we truly have understanding. Every time you’re in a conversation, a story is happening, and you need to understand the story to discover the insight. Some of the most important tools are the Six Most Powerful Questions: Take me back to the beginning. People tend to start in the middle of their story and go forward, but we need to go backward so we’re on the path together. Asking why questions can cause people to shut down rather than open up. Asking where the story starts causes them to relax and open up. Tell me more. Then what happened? How does that make you feel? The first three questions are factual, but asking an emotional questions is incredibly important. It might seem uncomfortable, but people will answer it, and the results are very powerful. Hmm. This is similar to Tell me more but avoids interrupting the speaker. It sounds like you feel _____. You can ask these questions in any order you want, as often as you want, and they will get you the majority of the story. You can also use the affirmation tool of asking Do I get you? to see if you’re getting alignment and connection. For every three to five technical questions, ask one emotional question, which will open up both emotions and facts of the story. Action Guide: Put the information Christine shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Christine’s book What Is It Costing You Not to Listen? Learn more about EQuipt Innovation Quote “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” – Albert Einstein “Understand first.” – Christine Miles Thanks! Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and

How CTOs contribute to innovation and product management superiority Today we are talking about senior roles that contribute to innovation, specifically the role of CTO (Chief Technology Officer). Product managers and leaders interact with many people in their organizations, and knowing how to leverage professional relationships is important to success. Joining us is Steve Orrin, CTO at Intel. Steve orchestrates and executes customer engagements in the federal space, overseeing the development of products to address challenges in government enterprise, national security, and other federal areas of focus. He has a reputation as an industry leader, leveraging a history of delivering results in Innovation, Intrapreneurship, and Entrepreneurship. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:52] What’s your role like as Federal Chief Technology Officer (CTO)? My role is to be the interface between federal customers, the ecosystem that services them, our product line, and the product managers, engineering teams, and executives. I help translate and architect our technologies to match government’s missions and unique challenges. I lead our innovation teams, which are working directly with government customers on technical challenges. This comes in two forms: federalized commercial technology, which is modifying technology that works in other industries for the federal problem set, and pathfinding on new capabilities. [5:43] How have you seen the CTO role differ in different organizations? I’ve seen four types of CTO roles: The startup CTO is the Jack of all trades. Their role is to get their hands dirty and initiate the innovation that leads to the first prototype. The CTO typically comes up with the first novel idea upon which everything gets built. Next, it’s important to collaborate early with product management and engineering to get a product from the prototype into the market and continue innovation to introduce future capabilities and evangelize what the product does. As a startup CTO, one of my first hires is a product manager, a key role in finding the requirements that meet the minimum viable product. After that, I bring in a VP of engineering who oversees the architects and developers. The CTO in a more established, larger company drives innovation and the incubation team. Once you have your product established, the CTO looks for the next big opportunity. The product-line CTO in large organizations owns a particular technology or product category. This is an evolution of the second type above to a larger scale. The field CTO is closely aligned with the sales and business development teams. They do technical evangelism, speak to customers, and become the voice of the customer to the organization. The fourth type is a blending of the other three roles, and is most closely aligned to my role. It involves product evangelism, being the voice of the customer, and driving innovation. [11:56] Can you compare and contrast your role as CTO with the roles of product VPs or product officers? At Intel, I work with product managers, engineering managers, and engineering directors. I think about now, next, and after. The VP of engineering is focused on now—building the product with the current requirements to get it out the door with the maximum amount of bug fixes in a particular timeframe with particular resources. The product manager is focused on the next—the key customer requirements we need to solve to continue to be viable and the bug fixes critical for customers. The next phase of innovation or after comes from the CTO. The CTO must manage the balance between product management, innovation, and engineering. The CTO is thinking about the next big non-organic growth opportunity, while the product manager is focused on solving the current customer’s problems, and the VP of engineering is managing resources. I negotiate among these roles. I need to understand the key things I want to get into the product today that help build out the capabilities for what’s next and after. Some of the best successes I’ve seen come from not solving the big problem today but putting key features into the road map so we have the building blocks for an innovation team to later build a novel capability on top of a core feature. You show that to a customer and get validation; then the product manager gets involved to build the big innovation. The most successful organizations have product management, engineering, and the CTO working together in tandem as peers. [17:14] How do CTOs contribute to innovation? The role of the CTO is to be the focal point for innovation. Successful CTOs drive and lead innovation but also recognize innovation can come from many places—engineering, product managers, the help desk, finance, etc. The CTO collects and fosters innovation and helps drive the transition to make products a reality. We navigate products out of the lab into the real world. The CTO

How product managers can become change leaders Today we are talking about change. The very nature of our work as product managers and leaders creates change—we change existing products to make them more valuable to customers and our organization, and we create completely new products, which causes change to occur at many levels. Your work demands that you are competent leading change. To help us learn how to better manage the change our product projects create, Brendon Baker is with us. He has helped organizations across several industries navigate change created by large transformation projects. He is also the managing director of the firm Valuable Change Co and author of the book Valuable Change: What You Need to Know to Ensure Your Change Pays Off. I appreciate his personal mission statement, which is “Help Change Leaders Drive Real Value.” Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:58] How did you become the guy who helps organizations with change? As a child, I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I didn’t want to do Business as Usual—doing the same thing every day scared me. I got into project management then consulting. Throughout my career, I saw a pattern: Change leadership made the difference in whether change was successful or not, yet those change leaders were essentially abandoned by the industry. There are not textbooks or certifications for change leadership. It’s assumed everyone can do it. I’ve found people can’t always do it—not from a lack of skills or capability but from a lack of support and knowledge. Change leaders default to running change based on time and cost, which doesn’t ultimately achieve the value they’re looking for. I founded Valuable Change Co to provide support without adding unnecessary complexity. My mission is to help change leaders drive real value, and my secondary mission is to fight unnecessary complexity. I’m providing knowledge about the key essence of change leadership and simple metrics or questions to maximize the value of what change can achieve. [9:51] Talk us through applying your framework to a real problem product managers encounter—when we develop a new product that disrupts an existing part of the organization’s business, causing many people to try to kill the new product. How do we deal with this change and help the people in our organization become our supporters? Resistance comes from self-protective fear and is an indication the value equation is imbalanced for these people. As leaders catalyzing change, we tend to underestimate the impact and pain caused by the change for everyone else. As humans, we avoid pain unless there’s a good reason to endure it. As change leaders, we’re inflicting pain on others. The value equation is reward – pain = decision. We need to think about how to rebalance the value equation by increasing the reward and minimizing the pain. As a mental metric, list the pain and rewards the change will create, then double the pain and halve the rewards. Then ask yourself, would I still be on board with this? If not, keep increasing the reward and decreasing the pain. You’re asking a group of people to take on personal pain so the organization won’t collapse. We need to balance that by creating opportunities for personal reward, reducing personal pain, involving employees earlier in the discussion, or having a value equation discussion with them upfront. As a change leader, you know that if we don’t change, the organization will be gone in five years and everyone will lose their jobs. However, pain in five years is less impactful than pain in six months. When you ask for change, you’re asking employees to invest in pain now so they don’t have pain later. You may need to make the pain in five years seem scarier and more evident. Decrease the immediate pain. Pain is coming from a place of fear, which you need to address directly. You can do this through peer support, openness, transparency, involving employees in the successes and failures, and building empathy. [21:52] What are tactics for addressing fear? Avoid building a black box—making all the decisions without the employees then dumping the change on them. On the flip side, don’t overburden people who have existing jobs by asking them to attend 400 workshops in 6 months. The biggest risk is people will believe you should just wait it out. They may have heard talks about change over and over and seen it blow over every time. There are several factors and risks related to addressing fear and getting people onboard with change, and there’s no silver bullet. Don’t aim for perfection. Instead, keep several key principles in mind: First, keep the value equation in front of you. You are inflicting pain, so how can you help others through that? Be empathetic. Second, be clear on your change core. A change works through three ripples, and the first is

Integrating the advantages of large organizations and startups – for product managers Today we are talking about how your organization can more effectively innovate, using precious resources wisely to create new value. We may not talk about your organization by name, but what we will learn together will certainly apply and help you. Joining us is Kapil Kane, the Director of Innovation for Intel China. He is also the founder of GrowthX, a corporate startup accelerator. His experiences have helped him integrate the advantages of large organizations, like Intel, with the scrappiness and agility of startups, and we get to benefit from the insights he’ll share with us. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:38] What does your role involve as the Director of Innovation for Intel China? I have three main goals: create and orchestrate one innovation strategy for Intel China, grow and transform our talent and get them skilled in the methodologies of innovation, and bring bottom-up innovation ideas from our employees into the pipeline. Ultimately we want to deliver business growth and people growth. [4:18] How does GrowthX fit into your work? Intel lets our employees have free time to work on their ideas. In the past, we saw many amazing innovations created across China, but we couldn’t get those innovations to land in the market and get commercialized. We wanted to close this gap. We came across startup accelerators that help startups by providing business coaching, lean startup methodologies, and mentors. We decided to create such an accelerator inside Intel, which became GrowthX. We start with a technical proof-of-concept and build and validate a business case through a cohort approach, in which we pick five to six teams and twice a year do 16 weeks of acceleration with eight different sprints, each focusing on different aspect of business. [8:29] What are some practical ways existing organizations can more effectively embrace innovation? What have you seen work, and what should we avoid? Initially we tried to create a centralized innovation center in charge of all innovation initiatives. It didn’t work because the people who created the initiatives didn’t want to lose control of their ideas. Now, different groups do their own ideation activities like hackathons, but we also have some activities for everyone. This year, we’re organizing a giant hackathon for all employees. You need to provide avenues to carry on ideas. Don’t just give someone a certificate after a hackathon and then not let their idea go anywhere. We have programs that give seed funding to ideas from hackathons and self-ideation. We tried accelerating innovation by simply funding ideas that have been incubated and having biweekly checkups to see the progress and guide our employees. We soon realized we needed to bring in more business coaching and methodologies. We brought in external coaches who taught our employees frameworks. We wanted our employees to feel they’re the founders of their ideas. We brought GrowthX outside of Intel and started operating our accelerator out of a coworking space to get innovators to think and act like real entrepreneurs and be completely responsible for moving their ideas forward. For the last four years, once a week all our innovators meet at the accelerator, and the rest of the week they have their day jobs. This year we’re creating the GrowthX Academy, an online platform where any employee can study innovation tools at their own pace, anytime, anywhere. They end up with a business case they can bring to the next level of the program. [16:51] How do employees balance working on their new ideas and working their day jobs? An idea can get an initial seed fund of $5-10 thousand. We allow employees to spend 10-15% of their time developing their idea. They can use the money to hire interns or buy software or anything else they need. They also get technical mentorship from senior tech leaders during incubation. After that, larger projects can get $100-200 thousand, which they can use to hire interns and contract workers who will build their idea. During incubation, employees still work their day jobs. During acceleration, we require employees to spend one full day per week in the accelerator. Again, they can spend funding on interns, contractors, software, etc. Four years ago when we started GrowthX, managers questioned letting their employees spend one day a week on ideas they initiated. Now, managers encourage their employees to join GrowthX. The ideas employees are coming up with must be related to their business unit, and many are customer-inspired, so managers are seeing the value in developing ideas that have strategic alignment with Intel’s goals. [20:23] How do you run GrowthX like a startup? We are very much part of Intel, but we run our accelerator activities at a location physically outside of Intel to force our innovators to spen

What product managers need to know about having an ecosystem strategy Today we are talking about strategy. It’s an important topic because our work as product managers and innovators should be in alignment with our organization’s strategy, but strategy may not be what you think it is. To help us better understand strategy and the large changes taking place in many businesses, Dr. Ron Adner joins us. He is a Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Previously he was the Akzo-Nobel Fellow of Strategic Management at INSEAD. His research examines value creation and competition when industry boundaries are changing. His latest book is Winning the Right Game: How to Disrupt, Defend, and Deliver in a Changing World. He has received high praise from his contemporaries, including Clayton Christensen who described his work as “Path-breaking,” and Jim Collins (author of Good to Great) who called him “one of our most important strategic thinkers for the 21st century.” Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:59] Make this simple—what is strategy? Strategy is an indication of what you want to do. A classic test for strategy is, “Do you know what you need to do and what you need to not do?” Strategy is how you allocate your resources and choose which opportunities to forgo while pursuing the ones you’ve chosen. Mainstream strategy includes Porter’s five forces, low cost differentiation, and Clay Christensen’s work on being more sensitive to substitute threats. These tools are based on the problems we had in the 1950’s-1990’s, but the world has changed. It’s getting harder to stretch those frameworks that were built for a world well-defined by industry into the world we face today. Examples of classic disruption like Southwest Airlines relied on new technology, but the industry was the same. Today, the industry is no longer the industry. For example, what is Fintech—insurance, investment, gambling, personal identity? The boundaries around industries are shifting, and that’s why we need a new approach to strategy. [7:35] What are some examples of changes in the business environment that influence strategy development? Take the automotive industry. We used to think of it as Ford vs. GM, and then Toyota started delivering higher quality cars at a lower price, but they were all selling cars. Tesla is different. They’re making electric vehicles, but they’re also making an electric charging infrastructure and servicing vehicles with over-the-air updates. They’re the dealer, fuel provider, and service station. Now the buzzword isn’t industry; it’s ecosystem. The clean boundaries of knowing who is doing what have broken down. A hundred and twenty years ago, autos were an ecosystem. People were trying to figure out who would make cars, pave the roads, and provide fuel. As those relationships became stable and accepted, we conceptualized the auto world as industries. Now we’re moving back into an ecosystem mode—rewiring and reconfiguring. The challenge for strategy today is we’re transitioning from the stable configuration of industry into a new reconfiguration of ecosystem. All the old tools in our toolbox were built for a world of industries and break down in this world of ecosystems. [10:55] How has the perspective of business model innovation impacted the ecosystem perspective? An ecosystem is the structure through which partners interact to deliver their value proposition. It’s anchored in value proposition, and you have a multiplicity of partners that need to be aligned relative to one another in a certain structure. An ecosystem strategy looks at that configuration and how you get partners into that alignment. The business model is a company-centric view of how to make money. The challenge with business models is you can overlook what it takes to get partners in place and willing to participate in your vision. If you don’t have a business model that makes sense for your partners too, you’ll be disappointed with the lack of alignment and inability to deliver. [13:24] Have you seen dependencies on partners changing over time? Today we see partners taking different roles. In the automotive supply chain, there’s a huge amount of interdependence, but the structure of the interdependence has been stable. We knew who’s making the car seat, and they ship it to the assembler then to the dealer. Today we’re seeing reconfiguration. The people making the car seat might want to gather data about the customer. We’ve always had interdependence, but today technology makes it easier to pull things together in new ways. Even small organizations are participating in reconfiguration. As a product manager making one block, you should be thinking about what happens outside that block. A company with an ecosystem strategy has a

Reflecting on your passion and purpose – for product managers Today I’m inviting you on a reflective journey of discovery—a journey to consider your why—which I call your purpose. I revisited this myself a few years ago and found more deeply understanding my why was personally inspiring and provided clarity to me for how I should spend my time. To help us, we have the why expert with us, Frankie Russo. Through his Russo Capital firm, he has developed a portfolio of companies across multiple industries, including technology, advertising, marketing, automotive, music, agriculture, publishing, and finance. He believes your why is important to your success and how you think about success. He has written about these concepts in two books, first The Art of WHY (2016), and just recently, his second book Breaking WHY: Hacking and Rebuilding Strategic Emotions for Authentic Success. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [02:02] What does our why mean? Why is our purpose in what we do and how we do it. It taps into our passion. Passion and purpose coming together create profits, which can go beyond money to include a changed life, more time available for yourself, or an experience. It’s a challenge to hack and rebuild your current life while you’re in the middle of it. You can apply the principles I’m about to share to start something great or get unstuck as a product manager or in your personal life. [5:00] What are the benefits of having a clear why? The greatest benefit is getting to a place where you’re at peace with yourself—being happier and more joyful and having a sense of freedom. These benefits inspire me to continue to work on why. You’ll have some early wins, but for your work to pay off, you have to be willing to continue. [7:52] What are the steps to uncovering our true why? [8:10] Step One: Break your Why Figure out what your why is now and how it’s different today from what it used to be. Ask, why am I here in this moment and in this section of my life, and why am I here on this earth? What’s my mission? What am I doing to fulfill that mission? Sometimes we do our passion and look for profits but lose our purpose; or we do our purpose and get profits but aren’t passionate about it. You need to put together the fire from the passion and the meaningfulness from the purpose to create profits that are worth it and have deeper fulfillment. [19:38] Step Two: Count the Cost Figure out what your why is going to cost. Make a plan. I’ve learned to count the cost the hard way—I tried doing my passion and purpose many times and failed because I didn’t plan. If the cost is greater than the why, go back to step one. Go through the process until your why is strong enough and motivating enough that you’re committed to go to the next step. [20:18] Step Three: Commit and Believe Sign a contract with yourself. Make sure you’re fully committed and believe the why is greater than the cost. For the rest of the 10 steps, check out the resources below. [21:56] What do you mean by breaking your why? I had a personal journey with breaking why. In between writing my two books, I got a divorce and hit my emotional bottom. It made me a person who’s willing to be honest to himself and everyone around. Sometimes I have to break free from what I have been doing to appease others. Helping and loving others is not the same thing as pleasing and appeasing others, but I thought they were the same thing for a long time. I use the words hacking, rebuilding, and breaking because those are the focal points in my journey and my book. Sometimes you have to break a relationship to become your authentic self. Unless something dies, it can’t be reborn. What I do today is what I am. Action Guide: Put the information Frankie shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Frankie’s website Learn about the School of Why Get a free copy of the School of Why Workbook Check out Frankie’s books Breaking WHY and The Art of Why Innovation Quote “Don’t flinch.” – Frankie Russo 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

Special Episode From the 2020 Summit   This is a special podcast episode, sharing an important discussion from The Everyday Innovator 2020 Summit. The Summit brought together 24 experts who spoke on topics for product managers and product VPs. Many of the topics are truly timeless and this speaker, Keith Hawk, impressed the Product VPs who attended with his sales and organizational leadership experience. As this was a Summit presentation, the format of the show notes below are a bit different.   BIO: Keith Hawk is a lifelong sales professional who has spent most of his career in senior sales leadership roles, most notably his 10+ years as the Senior VP of Sales for a 1,000+ sales force in a major information company, LexisNexis. He is a frequent speaker on topics including consultative selling, leadership, principled negotiations, incentive compensation plans, and performance metrics. He is the co-author of the popular business book, GET-REAL SELLING. Keith and his son AJ Hawk, 11-year NFL linebacker and Super Bowl champion, do frequent corporate speaking engagements together on “The Athletic Organization”, where they mix Keith’s career as a Fortune 500 senior leader with AJ’s experiences in the wild world of NFL football. Keith and his son Ryan Hawk, host of the internationally popular podcast “The Learning Leader”, do presentations together on the importance of principled leadership and building a culture of thriving in organizations. INSIGHT: The most important attribute for a professional salesperson is confidence. One of the keys to being able to confidently advocate for our business, or our product, is to be inspired by what an amazing job our product can do for our customer.   Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:08] To what do you attribute your success mentoring others? People look at who you are before they look at what you’ve done, so first I try to be a good teammate. Integrity and confidence in our shared mission are important. I make sure everybody understands their role, and I stay involved at the front of the operation. If you’re a leader, don’t forget what the other people in your organization do.   [3:56] How does emotional intelligence help you be a great leader? Emotional intelligence means self-awareness and understanding how you’re perceived. Every leader should work on building their emotional intelligence. You can do that by listening to mentors whom you trust and watching the reactions of people around you.   [9:11] To help us improve the relationship between product and sales, what do we need to know about what motivates a sales VP? VP of sales is the most measurable job in a company. We are measured on our numbers, and our sales force is paid based on their performance. As VPs of sales, we want to be successful. Sales is very misunderstood. Consumers tend to perceive salespersons negatively. Professional selling in a business-to-business setting is not what it is in the consumer world. My mission is to help my sales professionals become supremely confident that they work for a great company that delivers great products that solve customers’ problems. Our job is to provide confidence to customers and increase their success. Sales also can give valuable information to product management, because we talk with customers every day. Some of the greatest learning happens when we bring customers and product people together.   [14:57] Do you think the mission of providing confidence to customers is a common perspective among salespeople? Unfortunately, too many salespeople bag-dive—figuratively dive into a bag of products and throw them at the customer. Salespeople easily forget that they can only be successful after making their customer successful through the use of their product. When salespeople believe that success comes through mass-manufacturing proposals and hoping some customers say yes, they propagate the stereotype that salespeople don’t care about their customers. I propagate the perspective that it is our life’s mission, not just our job, to make other people more successful.   [20:19] What are the responsibilities of a sales VP? It’s a pretty broad role. I care most about who’s on my team–recruiting, hiring, training, developing great professionals. Another part is sales operations, the infrastructure, which concerns how people get paid. Organizing the many different people on the team is important. I’m constantly planning sales campaigns and sales territories. A big part of the job is having your mission clear, and then executing the details to accomplish that mission. A sales VP is not just the sales leader to the salespeople; they’re also the representative of the sales organization to the rest of the company and outside the company.   [26:01] How can product and sales get on the same page? Sometimes product management offers the sales team a SPIF—a one-time payment to incentivize sales to get attention fo

What product managers need to know about launching products Today we are talking about go-to-market planning and what is involved in planning the launch of products. Helping us learn about this is Karthik Suresh. He is a technology product leader who has led teams as founder, early hire, and executive at companies including Facebook, Craft.co, and KCG holdings. He studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon and business at the London Business School. Now, he is the co-founder of Ignition, which has helped organizations launch more than 200 products. Ignition is the world’s first go-to-market platform for managing all stages of the product life cycle. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:50] Can you share a story about getting a product to market? My last role at Facebook was as a product manager in the Facebook Reality Labs, which is now Meta. The go-to-market (GTM) process involves many different teams, including engineering, product, marketing, and management. We worked with teams across Facebook to launch the product. It was a huge, highly cross-collaborative process with many stakeholders. We managed it out of one giant spreadsheet about target persona, messaging, positioning, etc. A bunch of people from different teams collaborated by getting together and talking about what we had gotten done. We had a huge launch checklist with all the things we had to do before launch, like promotion, design, copywriting, budget for campaigns, approval from leaders, and legal. It was one of the hugest, most cross-functional processes I’ve been through, and it was surprising that everything was managed through one spreadsheet. Six months later, we had another launch with a new product marketing manager who did it differently. We had to learn everything again. It was a highly fragmented process, with assets and copies delivered in various different ways. Eighty percent of the time, product marketing managers are managing stakeholders rather than planning the launch. [9:48] What factors contribute to failures in launching products? One of the biggest issues is not having a strategic planning process for go-to-market. Companies dedicate most of their resources to engineering and product development and very little to messaging about their value propositions. Sending an email to customers is not a launch. You need a multichannel approach to reach your target users. Another reason is lack of experience. Company founders tend to be product managers or engineers who value product and engineering over marketing. Many product marketing managers don’t have previous experience doing launches at a large scale. Your go-to-market process should be tiered. Spend the first tier planning as a team, setting objectives, thinking about the target audience, talking to users, and figuring out messaging and positioning channels. You need to communicate your value proposition to your customers. Product managers talk a lot to users, but marketing doesn’t have that experience, so they often copy everything from the product specs and make that the launch. That doesn’t work because it needs to be a completely different process. You also need to know what marketing objective you’re going after and have a game plan for each objective. If you’re trying to get customers to switch to your product from a competitor or you’re trying to grow your category, you could invest in SEO. But if you’re creating a new category, don’t invest in SEO because people aren’t searching for it yet—instead, invest in content generation. Another problem is being rushed. Marketing teams and engineering teams rarely communicate about delays. There’s a problem with coordinating timing. [15:54] What elements should be part of go-to-market planning? At the macro level, go-to-market includes the company-level GTM strategy set by the executives. The micro level is a plan for the specific product and features. First, you need a tiered process in place to put your launch in the correct tier depending on whether you’re launching an entirely new product or enhancing an existing product with a small feature. Then follow these steps: Have clear business and marketing objectives and KPIs. Figure out who your target audience is. Have a clear idea of your ideal customer profile. Determine how to position your products to differentiate from competitors. Create copy to communicate your value proposition to your target audience. Have a 40-character message that pitches the value proposition and top three features. Clearly define the messaging strategy. Choose which channels to use to get your messaging to your users. Put together campaigns for each channel. Check everything on your launch checklist. Communicate with engineers and other stakeholders to make sure everything is ready. Align all your stakeholders before launch day. Get approval from leadership and resolve conflicts. Post-launch,

What product managers need to know about value-based pricing Today we are talking about product pricing, specifically the best practices for pricing B2B software products. Joining us is Chris Mele, who has spent his 25+ year career in software products, with much of that time as a pricing specialist. He is the Managing Partner at Software Pricing Partners, which focuses on helping software companies develop better pricing strategies. The company has helped IBM, Dell, Cisco, HP, McAfee, Microsoft, and others. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:11] Who owns pricing? Pricing has suffered from the idea that it’s an attribute that can be decided two weeks before launch. That’s a dangerous proposition that causes a lot of great products to fail to meet their revenue objectives. Who owns pricing is one of the most important discussions you’ll ever have. With software, you can get a new version tomorrow with groundbreaking features and capabilities that deliver enormous value. Product managers are at the heart of the product’s new capabilities, so they have perspective on the value of the product. They have the thumbprint of the customer and know what value customers get out of the product. Your pricing strategy needs to address the broad array of customers you serve. Pricing is rapidly becoming a discipline and a science, and people are using pretty sophisticated tools to approach perspectives on pricing. [11:18] Can you give us some examples of products you’ve helped price? Everything Software Pricing Partners has done is B2B software. I want to tell the story of Black Monday, the recession prior to the Reagan years. Back then, there was no Cloud, so you shipped software on-premise. Software Pricing Partners invented financial overlays, which is selling software as a subscription. There was no way for two people to use a single software license at a time, so companies were sure to be paid fairly for the licenses. However, some companies realized they could pass a license out on a network. Out of that came the Concurrent User Model, a monetization approach to sell network licenses and charge based on the number in use at one time. Value pricing is often confused with charging what each customer will pay, so if you and I bought the same thing we’re paying wildly different prices. That’s the opposite of transparency and creates a lot of problems in defending your value. Value-based pricing requires market fairness and transparency, keeping the net price calculation the same for all your customers. Many of the techniques from B2C don’t work in B2B at all. [18:41] What are the factors involved in pricing? There are three pillars of intellectual property: Licensing—the licensing metric describes the range of deals the sales team might be making. Choosing the correct units to sell is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make—for example, you don’t want your smallest product to be a $1 million list, while your competitor has a $20,000 list, but you also don’t want to charge a flat fee so your customers can do anything with just one site license, because then they won’t upgrade. Offering Model—When you’re monetizing intellectual property, you’re monetizing capabilities. The Offering Model is describing your ideal B2B customers and usage patterns, how they use your product and extract value, and how they pass on value to their customers. Understanding the value chain and the similarities between different types of customers helps you keep your packaging and sales dialogue simple. Pricing—Be able to take in a wide variety of data and get it cleaned and structured to make pricing decisions. Willingness to pay requires a context, and you must have a dialogue with your customers to understand their context and do a deep dive to determine if you left money on the table. You need to be able to pass your business on to a new owner someday and say confidently, “When I make these kinds of changes, I have these kinds of responses.” Make a reliable forecast, exercise market fairness, and validate your hypotheses constantly. Action Guide: Put the information Chris shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Software Pricing Partners Connect with Chris on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “You have to have a perspective on your value.” – Chris Mele 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

Trends influencing the future of leadership – for product managers Today we are talking about what product managers should know about the future of leadership. By the nature of the role, product managers are leaders, as they must influence others, and many product managers will be in senior leadership roles in the future. Consequently, we should be looking at what it takes to be an effective leader now and in the future. Joining us is an expert who tracks the trends influencing the future of leadership—Anne Loehr. She is a leadership speaker, trainer, and coach, and frequently writes on leadership topics. Her journey into leadership began as she owned and managed hotels and safari companies in Kenya, dealing with many crisis management situations, including facing down lions, severe weather and floods that carried away equipment, and transforming employees from different tribes to succeed together. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:01] What are the big trends that are driving leadership change? There are four big trends: Longevity–our workforce is aging. The chances my sixteen-year-old daughter will live to 100 are very good, and the chances of her being healthy at 100 are even better. The idea of retiring at 65 is going to be thrown out the window, because we’ll have employees who are 70 or 75 who are vital and want to contribute. As leaders, we’re thinking through what it’s like to manage an aging workforce. People, especially women, are leaving businesses in droves to start their own businesses. There are 1900 small businesses started every day in the US. How do we support or retain people who want to start their own businesses? Diversity—our leaders are becoming more diverse and younger. Freelancers—by 2027, 50% of the workforce will be freelancers. [9:48] What does current leadership look like? Every organization and industry looks different. Some organizations have the culture of startups while others are based on command and control. Our whole society is asking, how do we respond to change? We need emotional intelligence, which means using our emotions to ground ourselves, show up fully, and influence those around us. Some people respond to change by holding even tighter to command and control, while others are disengaging, as we’ve seen in the Great Resignation. [12:47] As leaders, how do we encourage employees to be engaged and move into the future? Employee engagement means employees are psychologically committed to making a positive contribution at work. Globally, 20% of employees are engaged, and the US rate is around 40%. There are four elements of emotional intelligence: Self-awareness Self-management Social awareness Influence We need leaders who: have purpose engage others inspire others Culture is made of behavior, mindset, and values. If we have a sense of mission and values, and we know what behaviors are expected, we can be inspired to show up better tomorrow. [16:30] How can leaders communicate what’s expected of the team? The leaders of the future must have a strong handle on non-technical competencies, such as coaching, conflict management, and emotional intelligence. Practice these competencies in your organization and use them to influence the organization culture. [20:28] What can product managers take action on to become better leaders in this new leadership environment? Let’s break down coaching. It’s made of two skills—active listening and asking questions. Product managers make good coaches because they’re used to asking questions. Ask open-ended questions that start with how or what and are short (8 words or less). Use forward-focused, chronological language—avoid getting stuck in the drama; focus on what you’re doing in the future. Accountability partners help us change. You can have an external, formal accountability partner whom you talk about goals with. You can have an internal, formal accountability partner—a peer or colleague. Tell them you’re working on not interrupting, being more concise, etc., and ask them to let you know how you’re doing. Or you can have an internal, informal accountability partner. Action Guide: Put the information Anne shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about the Center for Human Capital Innovation Check out Anne’s website Innovation Quote “We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.” – Arianna Huffington 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

How product managers can move their customers to action using the StoryBrand Framework Today we are talking about how to clearly communicate the value of a product to customers. Specifically, we will learn about a 7-part framework for marketing communications. Joining us is Dr. J.J. Peterson, whose PhD is specifically about the validity and effectiveness of this framework, which has been used by tens of thousands of organizations. He is also the Chief of Teaching and Facilitation at StoryBrand, a Nashville-based company that helps organizations across the globe clarify their messages so their organizations will grow. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:51] On the StoryBrand website, you say “Even if you have the best product in the marketplace, you will lose to a competitor’s inferior product if they communicate more clearly.” How does the StoryBrand Framework help with this and why does it work so well? It makes me really angry when people put time and energy into creating great products that never get to people. We’re under this myth that if we build it they will come. In reality, a competitor with an inferior product who communicates more clearly will beat you. Period. That’s not an excuse to not have great products—when you have a great product that solves a customer problem and makes people’s lives better, you need to communicate quickly and clearly in a way that invites people into a beautiful story to do business. Our brains are designed to keep us alive by looking for information that helps us survive and thrive and conserving thinking calories. If you’re communicating anything that doesn’t contribute to survival and thriving, or if it’s confusing or overwhelming, people’s bodies are designed to tune you out. Most of us daydream about 30% of our day, as a survival mechanism, but when we watch a movie or read a book, it does the daydreaming for us and helps us make sense of the story and of life. Stories help us focus on important information and give us a formulaic way of thinking. The people selling inferior products are able to do it because they communicate in such a way that customers know how the product will help them survive and thrive and can immediately make a decision. [10:44] Take us through the StoryBrand Framework. Every good story has seven elements or plot points. These rules go back to Aristotle and Plato, who argued that if you want to move society to action, the best way to do it is through story. Studies have shown that the better the story (meaning the better it follows the rules), the more likely someone will see themselves in the story—that’s called narrative transportation. When an audience experiences narrative transportation, they are more likely to be moved to action. Here are the seven elements: Character want—we need to clearly know early in the story what the hero wants Problem—something gets in the way of what the character wants Guide—someone with empathy and authority who helps the hero solve the problem Plan—the guide gives the hero a clear, simple path to win Call to action—a moment when the hero must be in or out; often there’s a timer that limits how much time they have to act Failure—we know how this story can end in tragedy Success—we know what success would look like We summarize this as: A Character has a Problem and meets a Guide who gives them a Plan and calls them to Action that helps them avoid Failure and ends in Success. [17:48] How do we apply these story elements to marketing? Position your customer as the hero of the story and your product or business as the guide. If you make your product the hero, and the customer is also positioning themselves as the hero, you’re in competing stories. This communication framework works for marketing and internal communication, like motivating people around a new project. Even if you don’t do marketing, you’re always communicating with people and trying to move them to action. Understanding that everybody you talk to views themselves as a hero in their own story will radically change the way you communicate to them, allow you to approach things differently, and get better results. [21:47] Take us through an example of using the StoryBrand Framework. Suppose we’re creating a podcast microphone. Character want: Identify what your customer wants—Our customers want a microphone that will give them high quality recordings. Problem: Most high quality microphones are not portable and don’t easily plug in to laptops. If you just list your features, you won’t win in the market. If you state what problem you solve, you will win. Identify how the problem makes people feel—People feel frustrated and ripped off because they can’t get what they want out of their microphone. Guide: As a podcaster I have been frustrated by the microphones I’ve been given, so I created a microphone that will work a

Using an Innovation Stage-Gate – for product managers Today we are talking about how Lean Startup can be used at large organizations. To tackle this topic, Jim Euchner is joining us. He has helped many large companies implement innovation practices including Lean Startup and has written the book on the topic, titled Lean Startup in Large Organizations. He has served in executive positions, responsible for innovation, at several large organizations and is the co-founder of the MIT Innovation Laboratory. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:13] What are the key principles of Lean Startup? Principles related to how you innovate: Lean Learning Loop—a business experiment to test a hypothesis Pivot or Persist Decision—using the experiment to validate or invalidate a hypothesis Minimum Viable Product—minimum prototype used in the experiment or as an early product Principles related to what you’re trying to learn: Innovation Accounting—keeping track of your learning agenda Value Hypothesis—how you create value for customers Business Model Hypothesis—how you capture value for yourself Growth Hypothesis—how you scale [8:22] Why do large organizations struggle with adopting Lean Startup? It’s hard because large organizations are innovating inside a context. There’s an impedance mismatch between the startup principles and what needs to happen in the core business. I use the phrase “Yes, and…” Yes, you need to use Lean Startup principles and do things to make them work in the corporate environment. For example, the lean learning loop, business experiment, and pivot decision can seem very chaotic for an organization that’s used to a traditional stage-gate process. They’re not used to going wherever the customer tells them to go. To contain the chaos, use an innovation stage-gate. Use Lean Startup practices and be as Agile as you need to be in each learning phase—the customer value preposition, the business model, and the model to scale. At the end of each stage, have a deliverable that’s reviewable so people can decide to proceed or not. While a traditional stage-gate is successive refinement, an innovation stage-gate is successive elaboration. Similarly, a minimum viable product gets a negative reaction in IT and engineering departments, because they’re afraid you’re going to take a product to market that’s not sustainable. In this case, use graduated engagement. You have free rein to build prototypes until you get to incubation, but during incubation you’ll take care of all the issues engineering raised. Practices like these make existing functions work constructively with the innovation team. Some large companies have a separate innovation lab, but the challenge with separating innovation is you’re throwing away your advantage of being a big company. [13:08] What other antibodies against innovation have you seen in large organizations, and how can we deal with them? Other hypotheses core to Lean Startup like the value hypothesis, the business hypothesis, and the growth hypothesis trigger reactions at an even deeper level. Following the customer can take you places the company is not sure it wants to go. Be very clear about the opportunity space you want to operate in and the assets you want to leverage. People may worry you’ll cannibalize the core business. Develop a business model with a keen awareness of measuring its impact on the core business. Often, this will help both your new business and your core business. When your new business is growing, separate incubation from the core business and explicitly negotiate arrangements with the core business, so you’re both independent and connected. When you’re making decisions, be open—people are sometimes so afraid they’re going to get squashed they hoard information. Be flexible. Be empathetic—people resist innovation because they have good reasons, and if you can understand their reasons and have good relationships, you can find ways to move forward. [17:53] What steps can large companies take to get started with Lean Startup? Apply the whole system, not just a single piece. Sometimes people pull out the minimum viable product and use that but don’t do any experiments—that’s just prototype, not a minimum viable product. Adhere to the underlying principles—learn and learn fast. Often, product managers are creating new products, not entire business models. In this case, use Lean Startup principles like the Lean learning loop and minimum viable prototype, and try to shift your conversation toward learning from customers. People are often worried to use Lean Startup, because they think their product will never meet safety requirements, but they’re worrying about this before they even have a fully formed value proposition. Engineers are good at solving those problems, and customers are good at raising them. Defer decisions

A bicycle company and innovation excellence – for product managers Today we are talking about transforming a struggling company to excellence by applying product management disciplines, including R&D principles, innovation process, and more. We’re discussing a business novel that shares these topics in an engaging and practical way, titled Winning Innovation: How innovation excellence propels an industry icon toward sustained prosperity. Joining us to discuss the transformation to excellence is Norbert Majerus, co-author of the novel and returning guest on this podcast. He joined us previously in episode 212, discussing Lean-driven innovation for product managers. Norbert spent 40 years at Goodyear, driving R&D and innovation excellence. Now he is a keynote speaker, teacher, and consultant, sharing his expertise with others. I appreciate him sharing some of it with us. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:50] Why did you write a novel about innovation? When I give workshops, people love my stories. I wondered how I could get a message about innovation across just by telling stories. It dawned on me it had to be a novel. [5:36] Tell us about the bicycle company in your novel. The company is the best at what they do. They have the best product on the market, their bikes win races, and they’re very expensive. However, the technology is old and competition has caught up to them. The owner talks to a friend who brings in innovation excellence and transforms the company. He tells the owner, “You are the best at what you do, but it’s not sustainable on its own. I will teach you to use your innovative thinking and continue being the best at what you do and how you do it.” The company struggles with innovating and changing, but if they wait another year or two, it will be too late. They need to look at what they’re doing well and engage all the people in the company to use their creativity and reinvent the company. Of course the book has a happy ending, and I don’t believe that’s fiction. This is such a simple process that everyone can be successful. [10:50] What’s the first step to becoming more innovative? Constantly thinking about how you can do better should be in your DNA. Most companies do product innovation well, but you also need to be innovative in how you work. I used to think innovation was all about following a process, but now I know you have to engage people in transformation. If you don’t, the transformation won’t be sustainable. It’s also a lot easier to teach innovation excellence to experts already in your company, rather than bringing in innovation experts and teaching them about your company. Change the culture while you engage the people, and engage them while you change the process. Don’t just tell people what the new process is. Educate them in new thinking, and then develop the process together. Doing this takes upfront effort, but it’s much more sustainable and gives better results. [15:50] What do you do if people in your company don’t recognize the importance of changing? In the book, one of the characters is me as a young engineer. I come into the company with all these great ideas, and the leaders tell me they don’t need that stuff. They think they know what they’re doing. If you know you’re on a burning platform and are going to go out of business if you don’t do something drastic, it’s easy to engage people, but if they don’t recognize that, it’s harder. People need motivation to change. When I was at Goodyear, it bothered me and other engineers that many manufacturing and engineering jobs had moved out of the U.S. We started an initiative to keep jobs here. To keep jobs here, we had to get so good at what we did that we could compete with anyone in the world. That was a big motivator people understood, and we succeeded in not outsourcing jobs. When they felt like we could do this together, they were motivated to change. [20:33] What is your innovation process? People say innovation can’t be a process, but that’s rubbish. At every company, a large part of what they do is routine product design. That work can be done exactly like a factory. I call it mass design. When I came to Goodyear, no one had time for creativity because they were all working on routine work. Then we started doing front-end innovation, and it was extremely cumbersome. Every idea turned into a project that went on for years, and people quit because they didn’t want to work for years on a project only to have it killed. I knew we couldn’t keep working like that. Around this time, Lean Startup came out, and we tried that and found we could evaluate 100 times more ideas. I challenge people to give me the one assumption or question that makes or breaks the project. Then I ask them to answer that question in one week with the minimu

The value of patents and trademarks for product managers Today we are talking about what product managers and leaders should know about intellectual property (IP) protection. Some organizations have a robust IP protection system that is part of their product management and development process while IP is an afterthought for others. What do you need to know about IP? Let’s find out. Helping us is Rich Goldstein—a patent attorney, entrepreneur, author, and speaker who helps people protect and capitalize on their valuable ideas. He also authored the American Bar Association’s book on IP titled The ABA Consumer Guide to Obtaining a Patent. He originally studied electrical engineering at Stony Brook in New York, a highly rated engineering school. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:48] What IP protection mechanisms should product professionals know about? Patents protect products Copyright protects content Trademarks protect branding [7:13] When are trade secrets useful? A trade secret isn’t something you file for. You just have to keep it secret. Trade secrets are appropriate for products that cannot be reverse-engineered, like Coca-Cola’s secret formula or data used within an artificial intelligence system. Patents are useful for products that are out in the open, like the components of a physical product. [12:51] What is the value of protecting IP? IP protection is valuable when your company would be hurt economically or offended if your competition were to copy your IP. In general, there are two reasons for patenting or trademarking something. First, IP protection can help you while your company is operating. You can slow down your competition and hold on to market share. Second, IP is valuable when your company is acquired. The entity acquiring your company can’t do what you’re doing without your IP, so they’re willing to pay much more. During operation, you determine whether IP is worth it based on how much revenue you’ll gain vs. how much the IP costs, but if you get all the way to exit, you will always get a huge ROI on whatever you spend on IP. You can also leverage IP for licensing. [16:56] How much do trademarks and patents cost? Trademarks cost a lot less than patents. Generally, U.S. domestic trademarks are a few thousand dollars, while domestic patents are tens of thousands. International trademarks and patents cost more. [19:00] What can product managers do to help with IP protection for new products? Look for product differentiation that you can keep exclusive. If you can differentiate your product in a way your competition cannot because you own the IP, you have an advantage. It’s gold if you can find features in the overlap between what’s patentable and what’s marketable. If your customers want it and your competitors can’t make it, they won’t even want to compete. [22:03] At what point in time should product managers be thinking about IP? In much of the world, it’s too late to apply for a patent after you’ve made the product public. In the U.S., you can file for a patent up to one year after you make the product public. You don’t lose the rights to file a trademark after you’ve used the name publicly, but if someone else files a trademark on the same name earlier than you do, you have a complicated and expensive situation. You should apply for a patent at the earliest point you have something valuable. Then follow-up as improvements are made. For example, if you have an idea to create a non-toxic cleaning product, that’s an aspiration, not something valuable. But if you find a plant extract that can break down grease that no one has ever talked about before, that’s unique and valuable. Even if you don’t know the exact formula for your product, you should file a preliminary patent application. Six months later when you’ve found the ideal formula, you can file a follow-up patent application. If someone else filed a patent about the same extract in between, you have priority because of your preliminary patent. [26:26] How can product managers put a spotlight on the value of IP in organizations with immature IP protection systems? If your company has not been pursuing IP protection, your first job is to get everyone onboard with the potential value of IP, including the people who make the budgets. In an environment that hasn’t valued IP, it’s hard to convince others to allocate budget to protect an idea. Get everyone to say yes to pursuing and protecting ideas. You should have a program to look for things developed by R&D that might be valuable in the marketplace so you pursue them at the right time. [27:57] Is there any value for you in your career to have your name on a patent? Yes, when a company puts their resources behind something you created, it looks good on your resume or CV. People will see you do valuable work and are valued

How product managers can get people talking Today we are talking about being a better facilitator. The ability to get a group of people to work together, exploring a problem, coming up with ideas, making a decision, and more, is a valuable capability for an organization. It is also a great capability for product managers and leaders. If you are not good at this yet, this discussion is perfect for you. If you are already an accomplished facilitator, I’m sure you’ll find some insights as well, to be even more effective. Our guest to help us with this topic has prepared many senior leaders, VPs, and CEOs to be more effective facilitators. He is an executive coach and started his coaching business, Essential Communications, in 1990, and also hosts the podcast “The Look & Sound of Leadership.” The list of companies with names we would all recognize where he has helped to improve leaders is too long to go into, but know he is the person behind many senior executives. His name is Tom Henschel. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:33] In your recent interview with Don Miller, you did an excellent job actively listening. How can we get better at active listening? Active listening is really hard. I’ve been working on it for years, and it’s a race with no finish line. You have to make an agreement with yourself that everything else can wait—you have nothing to do but listen. You have to let go of your ego. When I was talking with Don Miller, who is a big celebrity, I could have totally gotten into my head, thinking, “I have to do well!” I’ve learned none of that stuff matters. You have to get over it and do your work. I didn’t know how the conversation with Don would go, and I didn’t really care. Whatever was going to happen was going to be just fine. [10:54] What makes you a likeable person? I’ve worked really hard to be willing to focus on the other person. I’m happy if I listen to you for 30 minutes and you never know anything about me. As a coach, I turn the focus on my clients, but it’s not just for my job—if we met at a party, I would listen to you. My mother taught us how to chat with people by asking about them, so I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. [15:31] What are the benefits of being a good group facilitator? You get better results if you can facilitate the group. Otherwise it’s like a bunch of people driving in a bus where no one has the steering wheel. A good facilitator gets people talking. You can facilitate something you don’t know anything about. As a professional facilitator, I never know the content or jargon of the meeting, but I don’t need to. I’m only there to drive the bus; I don’t pick the road. [18:13] What are the characteristics of a good facilitator? Be fearless of rooms full of people. Stop being a participant and separate yourself from the team. Be able to track the content and emotion happening in the room by answering questions like, What are we supposed to be talking about? What are we actually talking about? What is the emotional content in the room? Be non-judgmental. Your job is not to scold, approve, or correct. Your job is to get to the goal. [21:00] What is a good outcome for a facilitator? Have a clear goal. As a facilitator, I have the wheel of the bus. I don’t own the outcome, and I’m not contributing, but my job is to get the group to the goal. I’m always paying attention to whether we’re moving toward the goal. [22:35] How can product managers be effective facilitators when they have a vested interest in the decision? Be transparent. When you’re a participant and not a neutral facilitator, don’t lead the conversation and then at the end state your opinion. Instead, start by sharing where you’re coming from and saying you would like to hear what everyone has to say. Then stop talking so everyone else can talk about it. [24:04] How can we make sure everyone’s voice is heard? This is always a challenge. It’s our job as facilitators to ensure everyone is heard, including those who are reticent and don’t seem to have the tools to share information. You need to give these people tools. One simple tool is breaking people into groups or breakout rooms of about three people each. Most people who won’t talk in a large group will talk in a small group. Before you split into breakout rooms, pose the question you’ll be discussing. Then put everyone on mute for 60 seconds to give them a chance to put their thoughts together before going into the discussion. Once they’ve had time to think and are in small groups, reluctant people often are more willing to talk. Be willing to manage people who talk too much and go off topic. Don’t get caught up in your emotion and don’t judge, but be courageous in managing the conversation. If someone is talking to much or goin

Lessons from a medical device company bringing oxygen to kids who need it – for product managers Today we are dissecting how a product came into being, examining it from initial insight through product development and to launch. Joining us is Mark Adkins, co-founder and CEO of LeanMed, a medical device company for the medically underserved regions of the world. He is also an adjunct professor teaching product innovation for the University of Pittsburgh and has served in many product management roles. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:09] What problem did you uncover and what is your current product? Pediatric pneumonia is the #1 killer of children in the world. Eight hundred thousand children will die this year from pneumonia, and 99% of those deaths are in low-income nations. One of the primary causes is lack of access to medical oxygen. Our solution is a solar-powered oxygen production system called the O2 Cube, a device that fills oxygen cylinders. Clinical studies have shown if we can make medical oxygen available to these children, we can cut the mortality rate by a third. [4:49] Take us back to the beginning, before the O2 Cube was even a concept. What was the genesis of the idea? I teach a course called Managing Medical Product Innovation at the University of Pittsburgh. A medical student in my class, James Newton, traveled to Malawi in Africa and saw firsthand that kids were dying from pneumonia. When he came back, he formed Team Oxygen with some of his classmates and me as their mentor. We won first place in an entrepreneurial competition at the University of Pittsburgh and earned $10,000, which we used to start LeanMed in 2018. [6:58] What happened next? How did you develop the product? We were in a race to get to market. We’re an innovation company, not a research company. There’s a long regulatory pathway for brand-new medical devices, but we look for proven technology that exists today in high-income countries, and through innovation and strategic licensing agreements, we bring that healthcare to the developing world. Philips Healthcare donated us an oxygen concentrator and an oxygen compressor. With the donation and money from the competition, we built the first operational prototype in my garage with solar panels on my roof. We did some early design work with a local design firm and got our website going. We got quite of bit of flak for not having IP. We integrated off-the-shelf technologies in a clever way. We modified the device for use in sub-Saharan Africa and entered a global licensing agreement with Philips Healthcare to manufacture and sell their oxygen compressor, which they had discontinued. Strategic licensing agreements can be lower risk, lower cost, and faster to market than inventing something new. Our missions align, as Philips also has a mission to save lives and bring healthcare to the developing world. [16:29] How did you know you were on the right track to creating technology that could work for people in developing areas? We got involved in the Every Breath Counts Coalition, a community fighting pediatric pneumonia that runs Zoom calls every week. There are over a hundred people on the calls, including NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like the Gates Foundation and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) like Philips. We learned from others’ experiences and met people in Africa. Through customer discovery with these people, we learned that solar would be effective. We learned the local clinics can’t keep children overnight, so they refer them to a hospital. We developed the O2 Cube to fill small oxygen cylinders that can be used while the child is transported on a motor scooter or bicycle to the hospital. We also visited clinics and went to conferences about pediatric pneumonia. [20:12] What did you do next? In 2019 we entered an incubator called the Idea Foundry and received another $10,000, which we used to fund a project to provide pulse oximeters to seven health centers in Malawi. We continued to talk to people at the clinics and validate the O2 Cube. [23:48] Did you feel pressure to get your product out faster to save lives? Yes, it was frustrating. I wanted things to move faster. In 2020, COVID threw gasoline on the fire. People were dying of COVID around the world because they couldn’t get supplemental oxygen. We partnered with a student team from the University of Duquesne and built a freestanding prototype. [25:44] What’s the state of the product now? 2021 has been our breakout year. In March, the WHO recognized the O2 Cube as an innovative health technology for low-resource nations, a prestigious recognition. We’ve created a completely new product category—solar-powered micro oxygen production. In May, we signed the agreement with Philips to manufacture and sell the technology. This fall, we were finalists in a University of Pittsburgh competition and earned $50,000, which we are using to

Lessons from disrupting the insurance industry – for product managers Today we are talking about creating disruptive products that challenge existing industries. A classic example of this is the digital camera that disrupted the film industry and contributed to the collapse of Kodak. Disruption occurs when we think of how a problem can be solved in a completely different way. It is typically accompanied by new technology or the application of technology in a novel manner. Our guest is creating disruption in a very old industry—insurance. His name is Konrad Heimpel and he is the VP of Product for GetSafe, based in Heidelberg, Germany. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:01] How did you become interested in disrupting the insurance industry? I was born with a walking disability, and without the very good health insurance we have in Germany, my parents would not have been able to afford treatment for me. I’ve experienced the difference insurance can make in people’s lives. Insurance is a great achievement and a relevant challenge. It still has a bad reputation, and I want to help it have a good reputation and be accessible for everyone. [5:15] What are you doing to disrupt the insurance industry? At GetSafe, we’re making use of the megatrend we’ve seen over the last few decades: people using their smartphones to steer their lives. Insurance has not been fully digitized, but there is no reason it can’t be, because there are no physical goods being exchanged. We’ve built an app where people can buy and manage their coverage and make claims. We’re digitizing and simplifying insurance, making it more transparent, easier, and faster for customers. We sell B2C and currently offer the app for a range of property and casualty (P&C) insurance. [7:33] What makes your approach to insurance disruptive? The app sounds simple but is quite complex. The insurance industry is highly regulated. Any transaction must be 100% traceable, unlike in most ecommerce industries. When someone buys insurance, we’re obliged to provide coverage, so we can’t lose any information. No matter how we iterate our platform, everything must be 100% backward-compatible. The regulations and need for backward compatibility make the coding behind the app very complex. Collecting data at every touchpoint and simplifying the user experience would be a huge effort for old insurance companies. That gives us an advantage. [12:41] How are you using data? We collect behavior data and customer feedback to improve the user experience. For example, on the app we explain what an insurance contract covers. We collect data as users read explanations and use that to optimize how we present information. We also use data to recommend the right coverage, make better risk predictions, and provide better coverage. [21:09] How do you discover how to make a better user experience? The key is talking to users a lot and listening to their feedback. Many users are happy to give feedback, and we collect and analyze it and try to see patterns. If we see something we want to know more about, we jump on a call and talk to the user. You can get valuable insights from talking to just five or six people. It’s crucial to talk to customer service. Insurance is complicated, and we still receive calls and emails every day from people asking questions about specific situations. We listen carefully to hear what they’re really asking. That’s our greatest source of information. [25:34] As you scale, how do you decide which product features to implement and which ones to say no to? I’m a huge fan of iterating fast and listening to feedback and data—put out a first version very quickly that solves at least part of the problem and then learn from it. It’s not a good practice to have 10 developers working for six months to build something big that doesn’t have any impact. On a daily basis, listening to customer feedback is the most important part of making feature decisions. For our long-term strategy, we find indicators of good business outcome. For example, we predicted the customer lifetime value and tried to see correlations with important product metrics, like how does the processing speed of the claim correlate with the customer’s happiness and business outcome? We need data like these to make decisions that will provide value to the customer and to the business. [29:16] What advice do you have for product managers who haven’t started working with data science yet? As a product manager, you need to be good at balancing gut feeling and data. It’s your job to minimize uncertainty in your outcome and decide when you have enough data to make a decision. Be strict about using data, doing proper experiments, and measuring success. You need to be able to tell people how you moved the metrics. Have a plan for carefully measuring metrics before you start. Act

Steps for creating world-changing products Today we are talking about radical product thinking, which is a mindset and process for innovating smarter. Our guest, Radhika Dutt, will help us understand radical product thinking. She is an entrepreneur and product leader who has participated in four acquisitions, two of which were companies she founded. She has built products in industries including broadcasting, media, advertising, technology, government, consumer, robotics, and wine. She also teaches entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern University. She cofounded the Radical Product Thinking movement of leaders creating vision-driven change, along with authoring the book Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:56] What put you on the path to being a product leader? My path to product leadership has been through entrepreneurship and product diseases. Regardless of which industry I was in, I kept seeing the same patterns of diseases. For example, hero syndrome is when you get so focused on being big and scaling you forget about the problem you set out to solve. Other diseases are pivot-itis and obsessive sales disorder. I learned from these product diseases and developed an intuition after really hard lessons. I wondered, are we all doomed to learn these hard lessons or can we share intuition to build better product and avoid product diseases? That burning question started Radical Product Thinking. Two colleagues and I built a framework that translated our intuition into steps for building world-changing products systematically. I’ve realized that product is a way of thinking. Building products is how you create change. Your title is irrelevant—if you’re building products and thinking about how to engineer change, you’re applying product thinking. [9:05] Why did you write Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter? I realized we need to change how we build products. We’ve been taught to keep iterating until you find product market fit—just keep trying different things. We need to become more vision-driven and think of our product as a mechanism for creating change in the world. That starts with having a clear picture of the change you want to bring about and being able to translate that to actions. Whenever your vision becomes disconnected from your actions, product diseases set in. The key to building better products while avoiding product diseases is avoiding breaks in the chain from vision to action. [11:23] Tell us about the five elements of Radical Product Thinking, starting with Vision. We need to unlearn the myths that a good vision is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), broad slogan, or short tagline. For example, “contributing to human progress while empowering people to express themselves” could be the vision of a piano teacher, a post-it note company, or anything else. A good vision should be a detailed North Star for decision-making. A BHAG vision like this is not useful because you can’t use it to evaluate features and figure out what to do and not do. A good vision answers: Whose world are you trying to change? What does the world look like for them today? Why does that world need changing? When will we know we’ve accomplished our mission? How are we going to bring about the change? A vision with this level of detail gives teams enough direction to make decisions. For example, a good vision is: “Today when amateur wine drinkers want to find wines that they’re likely to like, they have to find attractive-looking wine bottles or pick wines that are on sale. This is unacceptable because it leads to so many disappointments, and it’s hard to learn about wine this way. We envision a world where finding wines you like is as easy as finding movies you like on Netflix. We’re bringing about this world through a recommendations algorithm that matches wines to your taste and an operational setup that delivers these wines to your door.” A radical vision gives you an exact sense of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. [18:40] Strategy Strategy is converting your mission into steps. Strategy requires answering the four RDCL (“radical”) questions: Real Pain Points: Why does someone come to your product? Design: What is our solution to those pain points? Capabilities: What is our special sauce that powers the solution (technology, IP, infrastructure, partnerships)? Logistics: How does the solution get to customers (support, sales, training customers, professional services)? Derive your strategy directly from your vision to avoid breaking the chain and avoid product disease. [22:13] Prioritization Use your vision in everyday decision-making. When you’re prioritizing, you’re trading the long-term against the short-term. Think about your vision on the y-axis and your short-term surviva

How product managers can use the Modified Agile for Hardware Development Framework Today we are talking about using a modified version of Scrum for hardware projects. Many teams have tried adopting Scrum for developing hardware products, not always successfully. This is such as big topic, we have not one but two guests to help us with it—Dorian Simpson and Gary Hinkle. They think they have the answer for applying Agile principles to hardware projects, and they call it the Modified Agile for Hardware Development (MAHD) Framework. Dorian has a deep background in product development, starting in engineering and then moving to business leadership roles. These include roles at Motorola and AT&T along with dozens of companies as an innovation and product development consultant. He’s also the author of The Savvy Corporate Innovator, which is about applying Agile principles to idea development in organizations. Gary also has an extensive background in product development with senior roles at SAIC and Tektronix. He has held R&D leadership roles and founded Auxilium in 2002 to help companies improve their R&D and leadership practices and transform their new product development using Agile practices. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:56] Can you summarize Scrum for us and share what aspects of it aren’t suited for hardware projects? Scrum is one of the most widely-used flavors of Agile, mostly applied to software development projects. It starts with describing the customer experience through user stories. Teams work on high-priority user stories in rapid cycles called sprints, deliver working software that is validated by users, and incorporate feedback quickly into the next cycle. This mechanism is great for evolving a product and figuring things out as you go, and those challenges apply to hardware products, but the basic mechanics of Scrum, optimized for software development, are missing some pieces for hardware development. The first missing piece is big-picture planning. Hardware projects almost always have a schedule—the project has to end and the product as to go into production. This end goal and transition to manufacturing requires a big-picture plan, which Scrum doesn’t account for. Scrum also doesn’t account for the dependencies involved in physical products, mostly associated with physical materials’ lead times, which need to be factored into the project plan. Software and hardware have to come together from multiple disciplines, and typically all the pieces can’t come together in a traditional two-week sprint. When companies try to implement Scrum or Agile for hardware, they get hung-up on the mechanics. We focus on four key Agile principles, which give us the benefits of Agile without worrying about the dogmatic, detailed tactics: Autonomous teams Timeboxed learning cycles Rapid prototyping Engaging with customers In hardware development, user stories have to be looked at differently. The user still needs to benefit from the product, but you can’t directly translate user stories to features of a physical product. User stories are still a valuable starting point to understand the customer, but hardware teams have to shift gears quickly to the physical attributes of the product, the complexities of designing hardware, and regulatory concerns. Some Agile purists tell hardware teams to write a user story for every requirement, feature, and specification, but we don’t know anyone who’s done that successfully. [15:01] How does your MAHD (Modified Agile for Hardware Development) Framework work? One of the big differences between MAHD and Scrum is the onramp, which is a set of five interactive, collaborative activities between marketing and R&D. To get the project started, use an Agile project brief, which is a one-to-three-page document that describes the customer, market targets, timing, price points, decision factors for customers, positioning in the market, etc. This kickoff gives you a clear understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish. Next, look at user stories and physical attributes of the product. We use a tool called a focus matrix, which allows us to see how user stories relate to product attributes. Using the focus matrix is a collaborative team exercise. Identify the areas of focus and where to remove risk. Next, create an iteration plan, which is the pig picture of the project that replaces a detailed Gantt chart. Look at the areas of risk, major strategic questions and where you want to answer them, rapid prototyping, and customer engagement. Identify the right place to bring those components together to create a prototype you can put in front of customers to get the feedback loop going. After this, the tactics are similar to Scrum. You work in timeboxed execution cycles, working through tasks as a team. However, with hardware projects, you have multiple sprints working toward a higher-level iterat

Innovation accounting for teams, managers, and strategy – for product managers Today we are talking about measuring innovation effectiveness in organizations. To help us is the person who has written the book on the topic, Innovation Accounting, Esther Gons. Esther is the CEO of GroundControl, an Innovation Accounting software platform to help corporate ventures with the development of new business models. She has been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and mentored several hundred startups. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:59] Why did you write Innovation Accounting? There’s not much information about measuring innovation effectiveness. Eric Ries coined the term innovation accounting in his book Lean Startup. My background is in startups, where innovation accounting is the metrics and accountability of the team to make data-driven decisions. Later, I worked with corporates and realized there is a huge need to report on and measure innovation progress. My coauthor and I decided that to help corporates do disruptive innovation, we needed to write this book. [3:58] Who needs an innovation accounting system? People use innovation as a catch-all word for everything, but if you want to do disruptive innovation—new markets, new business models, high-risk, high-return—you need a structured approach. You need to de-risk the innovation, and you need indicators you’re going in the right direction. Your financial accounting system can’t provide these. You need an innovation accounting system for disruptive innovation to take off. [7:44] In your book, you address innovation accounting on several levels. In the first level, tactical innovation, what metrics should teams use to measure innovation? The tactical or team level is the most important level. In this level, we find out what the teams need to move forward and make decisions. Teams use venture-based and team-specific indicators to make decisions. Metrics should also help the company see how fast the team is learning. You can measure the number of experiments done over time or per sprint, but these metrics are easy to game; you don’t want to do experiments just for the sake of doing experiments. Measure the insights and learnings from each experiment and the amount of time and money spent on each experiment. Any metric should be something you can improve or make decisions upon. [14:34] What specific metrics should we be using? The most important one is the learning ratio, which is the experiments you found insights from divided by all the experiments you conducted. Learning is what you should be doing; if your team is doing other things, it’s not going well. Once you’re more mature, you can measure the value/cost ratio. [18:37] How is innovation measured at the managerial level? The managerial level focuses on having a venture board or decision board that can help the teams move forward. The board makes small bets in the beginning and funds the projects that are promising and have a higher confidence level. The venture board wants to see the confidence level with evidence. The metrics are about managing the funnel of investment decisions. [24:04] How does innovation accounting influence strategy? It’s a loop—strategy influences innovation accounting and innovation accounting influences strategy. The strategy level has two pillars of indicators. The first pillar is understanding why you’re looking at a particular area, finding out if your core portfolio is under threat, and looking at new business models, new markets, and diversification. The second pillar is understanding your ROI. Even if you just started and have no revenue, look for progress toward the vision of where you want to go. See if your innovation thesis is validated. Action Guide: Put the information Esther shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Esther’s book, Innovation Accounting Learn about Ground Control Visit Esther’s website Innovation Quote “If there is one thing we can learn from the past, it is that we are very bad at predicting the future.” -Esther Gons 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