Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

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

How product managers can better understand consumer decisions Today we are revisiting one of the best tools for product managers, Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD). Our guest has been applying JTBD to help SaaS companies sell better, retain more, and avoid 6-figure go-to-market mistakes. His name is Aggelos Mouzakitis, and his company is called Growth Sandwich. JTBD will help you regardless of your industry or if you are a SaaS provider or not. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:27] What does Jobs-to-be-Done mean to you? Jobs-to-be-Done is a theory that explains consumer decisions and provides tools to deeply understand consumer actions. My approach to JTBD is very actionable; I care about putting the theory into action. [4:21] What are some examples of how you’ve applied JTBD? I worked for a video conferencing solution, a competitor to the most popular solution. Their value proposition was that they were the simplest video conferencing tool because they were browser-based. During the pandemic, they had explosive churn and explosive growth. They hired me to fix the explosive churn. I did a value gap analysis, which is Jobs-to-be-Done driven. I started with interviewing the power users, churned users, and fresh users. I asked them what job they expected from the product. I then looked at what job the ideal users needed done and what jobs the churned users were trying to do. The churn problem became a positioning problem. Some users used the tool as a temporary solution to do video meetings but later switched to a full-feature solution. They weren’t good users for the product; we needed to discourage use cases that were not right for the product. We also created a Jobs-to-be-Done-driven cancellation survey. Previously, the company had a cancellation survey that asked which competitor users were switching to, but it didn’t tell their perception of each solution. On the new survey, instead of naming competitors, we described the competitors—a more secure solution, a solution with more features for educators, etc. Now the data gave us insight into the job-to-be-done behind the switch. [16:24] Tell us more about the actions you took in your example. First, we audited existing information to know what sort of research to design. Then, we defined our power (ideal) user, in our case with a combination of retention criteria and engagement criteria. Once we had a list of 100-150 people, we started recruitment. We put together an email and provided an Amazon giftcard as a thank-you for their time. Users booked time for an interview on my calendar. During interviews, know what you want to learn in the conversation and have notes, but let the conversation flow. Interviewing people requires fast thinking and talent. We asked for consent before recording the conversation, and then we started the conversation with an icebreaker. After the discussion, we paid the users. Next, we did analysis. I watched the videos and took notes on observations and insights. Then I clustered the feedback from all the interviews, noting themes and categories. Last, I presented to the rest of the team. Action Guide: Put the information Aggelos shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Aggelos’s website, GrowthSandwich.com Connect with Aggelos on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “My only competitor is the person I was yesterday.” – 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

How product managers can focus on creating great products for their customers Today we are talking about the product-led organization. We have seen many organizations in the last few years move the product group and product roles to more prominent positions, putting clearer focus on creating great products for customers. To help us explore this topic is the founder of Pendo and the author of the book, The Product-Led Organization: Drive Growth by Putting Product at the Center of Your Customer Experience. You likely already know his name, which is Todd Olson, who joined us previously in episode 185. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:45] What makes a product-led company? Product-led companies put product at the center of the customer experience. Every department is thinking about how it can use product to better perform its activities, rather than the product management team leading the business. Companies like these are shifting from human-led motion to product- and digital-led motion. The company is the product in many ways. Your business is not just about how the product performs; it’s about the entire customer lifecycle. [3:40] What’s an example of a product-led company? Tesla is a very product-led business. Through the entire customer experience, all the interaction with the product from purchasing to updates is digital. [6:00] What are some tools for understanding customers? Empathy Maps force the product manager to get inside the head of the customer and find out what they’re thinking, hearing, and experiencing. Develop deep empathy for your customer. A great product lies in understanding what your users are going through. Observe customers using your product. Watch videos of customers using your product and thinking out loud. Record yourself using the software. Make sure the development team understands why you’re building the product. The what of how the product functions can change, but you should clearly understand the why. The best teams have collaboration between product management, development, and engineering. They can debate the what because they all have a deep sense of why. [14:30] How can we use data to get closer to our customers? We often have opinions about how our customers are using our product, and we may argue about those and get nowhere. Instead, we need to use data to find out what’s actually happening and find insights. I like to start with outliers. You might find a user who uses one feature more than two times as much as other users. You need to dig in and find out why. Often, outliers are trying to do something with your product that you make very hard for them to do. You don’t always want customers to be using features a lot. See if you can redesign the product to make it easier for them. [20:16] What are your suggestions for structuring and using roadmaps? Especially for B2B software, roadmaps are a critical part of communicating with customers. Even for B2C software, when we buy products, we’re investing in a company and a vision. We’re buying the roadmap. Because of that, it’s really valuable to put out a roadmap, not because you’re necessarily committing to do it, but because you’re signaling your direction. Your roadmap communicates to customers the direction you’re going and helps them know if that direction aligns with their objectives. Communicate that your roadmap is subject to change, and don’t make it too polished and specific. I like to use calendar view or force-ranked lists, which force customers to pick between tradeoffs. The roadmap is all about communication, both internally and with your customer. Action Guide: Put the information Todd shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Todd’s book on Amazon Learn more about Pendo Connect with Todd on Twitter or LinkedIn Listen to TEI 185 with Todd Olson Innovation Quote “Great companies are built on great products.” – Elon Musk 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 to stay relevant in an increasingly digital world – for product managers Today our guest is sharing the steps for successful digital transformation. He is Howard Tiersky, author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance. He founded FROM, a digital transformation agency, which has won over 100 awards for user experience design, including for their work redesigning the Avis app which is now ranked by J.D. Power as #1 in the industry. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:50] What do you mean by digital transformation? There are two spheres of digital transformation. The outer sphere is the digital transformation of the world and the customer. Your customer is living an increasingly digital lifestyle. The mobile phone and other digital touchpoints are central to almost everything we do, and that’s been a big change in the past 15 years. The inner sphere is the digital transformation of the company. That’s your starting point to remaining relevant to a digitally-centric customer. If you’re not caught up to the transformation of the world, you become irrelevant. [4:39] What’s an example of a company’s digital transformation? Some people think only digitally native companies like Facebook or Google do well at digital transformation, but there are many legacy brands, born before the digital world, that have digitally transformed. For example, Starbucks has done a fantastic job integrating the mobile phone, allowing you to order and pay remotely. Taco Bell has remodeled their restaurants to have two separate drive-thru lanes, one for traditional orders and one for picking up food ordered on the app. Meeting the needs of the digital customer is not all about the app; Taco Bell remodeled their brick-and-mortar stores. Legacy companies can catch up and be toe-to-toe with digitally native companies. [10:04] Tell us about customer journey mapping. Customer journey mapping is the foundation of digital transformation, and customer research is the foundation of customer journey mapping. One mistake companies make is being so enthusiastic about mapping the future customer journey they forget about what’s happening right now. Enthusiasm for the future is great, but start with asking, “What’s our customer journey now?” Understand what happens to your customer when they interact with your product—what really happens, not the conceptual idea of what happens. Find the places you’re delighting your customer and the places you’re confusing or frustrating them. Be honest about your current journey, and use it as a starting place to create your future journey. Copy and paste the parts that are great and fix the places where the customer experiences pain and is not in a positive emotional state. You may discover pain points that are solvable with small, easy changes. Of course, you may need to make more complex changes, but look for the low-hanging fruit to get started. Delight customers by saving them time and effort. Uber did a great job with this. They not only make it easier to call a “taxi”; they also save customers the effort of telling the driver where they’re going or paying the driver. In digital transformation, one goal is to remove the things that frustrate or annoy your customer. The other goal is removing something that’s taking their time and effort, even if it’s not your fault; that creates delight. [19:00] Tell us about design thinking. I think of design thinking in three key parts: Prepare to ideate: Empathize with the customer and define the customer’s problem. Ideate: Create ideas. Test your ideas: Prototype and test. In our book, we’ve added some enhancements to design thinking: Pre-Ideation: Business outcomes: Identify your goal, like increasing upsell, reducing call-handling time, or increasing customer satisfaction. Understanding the market: You not only have to solve the problem for your customer but must also do so in a way that’s superior to your competitors’ products. Ideation: The book includes many tools you can use to generate ideas. Post-Ideation: Classic prioritization based on feasibility, desirability, and viability. Other prioritization components like risk factors and confidence level. [24:33] Where do companies run into problems with digital transformation? Sometimes, they don’t understand the customer, so they may be heading off in the wrong direction. Your transformation must be driven by the customer. You should focus on customers because they have the money, and success in business results from driving customers’ desired behavior. You’re going to invest a lot of time and money in digital transformation. For that investment to be worthwhile, it had better be driven by improving customer experience and driving customer behavior. Another problem is not having a clear strateg

How small, focused tests can help product managers create better products Today we are talking about using experimenting and testing to create products customers love. To help us with this topic, Alex Mitchell is our guest. He is Director of Product at Kin Insurance and founder of The Modern Product Manager, which provides resources and courses for aspiring product managers. He also is involved in other organizations, lending his product expertise. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:47] Tell us about experimentation and testing. We need to have a broad definition of experimentation; it’s more than controlled experiments like A/B testing. Experimentation is a foundational and continuous element of product management. Don’t wait until you’ve built a feature to experiment. Test continuously throughout your product development lifecycle. Do small experiments to learn more and continually develop hypotheses you can test to help you make better decisions. [6:19] Product managers often become experts in their industry, and that can lead to assumptions. How do you test assumptions? Assumptions slow down innovation. One way to counter that is to involve more people in experimentation. Including your team and people outside your team will help keep innovation going and prevent you from getting complacent. Second, move around to different domains in your company if you can. This will help keep your ideas fresh and keep you coming up with testing and experimentation ideas. [8:25] What’s an example of using experimentation at Kin Insurance? At Kin Insurance, we sell home insurance to catastrophe regions like Florida and Louisiana. Through research, we observed that many customers were not making changes to their insurance after their initial purchase, like adding additional coverage, even if changes were in their best interest. We hypothesized they didn’t know they could make changes and if we let them know about additional products soon after their initial purchase, a meaningful percentage of people would at least be interested in learning more. If we were not taking an experimental approach to this, we might design a full-blown, intricate add-on system. We wanted the opposite since we were trying to validate whether our customers were interested. We took a simple approach and found a subset of customers eligible for flood insurance. A week after their initial purchase, we sent them an email conveying the benefits of flood insurance and asking if they were interested, and we found that many people were. We tested our hypothesis in a very short period, with a very small amount of effort. With testing like this, you can validate or invalidate your hypothesis, and you’ll learn other things along the way too. We did all this with no development effort and didn’t invest any of our most precious resources until we had validated our hypothesis and understood the customer experience well. You can use lightweight, scrappy tests to get information quickly and inexpensively. However, this may be different from how some of your colleagues are used to working. They might want a fully-developed plan, while you’re trying to do something you’ve never done before. Be prepared for skepticism, questions, and discomfort—that may be an indication you’re on the right track. [17:46] Have you seen an experiment produce unhelpful data? Why was that? One reason an experiment can produce unhelpful data is if it doesn’t line up with the hypothesis you’re trying to test or if you don’t have a way to make changes to prove or disprove your hypothesis. Another reason is if you’re looking at data that’s irrelevant to your experiment or attributing changes to your experiment that were actually caused by something else. Make sure you have someone on your team who understands statistical significance and what is likely to be noise or the result of an unrelated variable. [23:07] What key tip about experimenting would you like to leave us with? Your tests should be small, focused, and easy to explain. If you can’t explain in 15 seconds what you’re trying to learn and how you’re going to accomplish it, your test is probably too big. Staying focused gives you a better opportunity to learn and get others involved. Action Guide: Put the information Alex shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Read Alex’s articles on Medium Visit Alex’s website, TheModernProductManager.com Connect with Alex on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” – Elon Musk 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 s

Four feature prioritization methods product managers should know Today we are talking about methods for prioritizing product features. Joining us is András Juhász, a product manager for Smartly.io, a social media advertising company. He wrote an article on six methods to prioritize product features, and we’ll talk through some of them. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:30] What caused you to explore different ways to prioritize features? I think feature prioritization is an interesting topic on the product level and organization level. We ask, What problems are worth solving? What are the next best features? [3:17] How does the Kano Model work? The Kano Model uses two axes—satisfaction and execution—and shows how customer satisfaction depends on execution for each feature. It divides customer preferences into five different categories: Basic functionality—features customers expect, e.g., voice calling capability on a mobile phone. Poor execution decreases customer satisfaction, but great execution does not amaze customers. Performance—more is better, e.g., an electric car’s range. The more you provide, the more customer satisfaction you get. Excitement—positive surprises, e.g., fireworks appear when you complete a task on a to-do app. Customers don’t expect these features, but they are pleasantly surprised by them. Indifferent—features that don’t affect customers’ satisfaction, e.g., the thickness of a carton of milk. Reverse—more is worse, e.g., longer scripts at a call center. The more you provide, the less customer satisfaction you get. This model helps you prioritize features so you don’t underbuild or overbuild the product. [9:12] Tell us about the RICE Method. The RICE Method scores your product in four categories: Reach—how many users will be affected if you release the feature Impact—the value the feature creates, measured as a subjective score from 1 -5 or 1-10 Confidence—how much data is backing the feature, measured from 1-5 Effort—the time it will take to develop the feature, measured in hours, days, weeks, or months To calculate your total RICE score, multiply reach, impact, and confidence, and then divide by effort. [16:24] What’s the Effort vs. Impact Matrix? The Effort vs. Impact Matrix is a two-by-two matrix of effort and impact, which can each be either low or high. Low-impact, low-effort tasks are fill-ins for when the team is idle, e.g., component improvement. Low-impact, high-effort tasks are thankless tasks that are not providing much customer value but may still be necessary, e.g., security tasks. High-impact, low-effort tasks are the low-hanging fruit that provide immediate value. High-impact, high-effort tasks are major projects and functionalities that provide high customer value. [19:34] How does MoSCoW work? MoSCoW is an abbreviation for Must have, Should haves, Could haves, and Won’t haves. Must haves are the essential features your solution must deliver, the minimum valuable product; they are in your first iteration. Should haves are important but not essential features; they might be part of the first iteration or version 1.2. Could haves are small enhancements, adding color to your product; they might be in version 1.5. Won’t haves are functionalities you plan to exclude. Action Guide: Put the information András shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Read András’ article on 6 methods to prioritize features Connect with András on LinkedIn Read more articles from András on Medium Innovation Quote “I failed my way to success.” — Thomas Edison Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator 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

Strategy, vision, and influence for product managers Today we are talking about the journey from product manager to product officer or product VP. Henry Latham, the founder of Prod MBA, is with us to share his experience and insights. He has been a product manager and managed a variety of product teams in multiple countries. At Product MBA, he helps product managers and owners accelerate their career by teaching them how to build great products. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:49] How do we formulate a product strategy? The four key competencies of product management are execution, product strategy, leadership, and leveraging customer insight. Product managers tend to focus on execution, which is important, but it’s hard to know whether we’re building the right thing—that knowledge comes from product strategy. For many people, this becomes a vicious cycle—you’re not practicing strategy so you’re ill-equipped to fill the gap when an opportunity arises or when you want to apply for a more senior role. A lot of people hit the glass ceiling at this point—they have execution down but they’re not building strategic muscle. Strategy is a messy term. Most people talk about strategy as a list of things to do, but we should think about strategy as making it clear what we’re doing and not doing. That comes with a framework of decision-making. For example, we could be really good at speed, like the fastest email application in the world. We’re not bothered about other stuff, but it’s very clear what is important for our product, customer, position in the market, and how we make money. Strategy isn’t that complicated. You don’t need the complex strategy of Facebook or Google. Start by simply answering, What is it we do and what is it we don’t do? Understand your unique selling point, your target customer, and specifically what they want. Then work out how to build a product that will deliver that specific outcome for them in a unique and valuable way that other people in the market aren’t doing. [11:31] How do you communicate vision to those you work with? Storytelling is a fundamental skill of any leader. When you’re teaching, people aren’t going to remember everything; they might only remember 10%. First, keep it simple. Second, tell a story about a customer. Talk about understanding whom you’re trying to serve and the struggles they’re facing. Get people inspired and focused around that. Communicate the unique thing you’re doing. Third, know how to bring data into that story. Communicate your vision and tie personal stories to that vision. Stories of how your product helps your customers remind people of why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s a rare company that understands vision is not about buzzwords and inspiring sentences; it’s about how our actions and words consistently focus on how we’re creating a specific outcome for our customer, and that leads to a strong culture and a great product. [19:15] How do we influence others? To be an effective product leader, you need three things: Be mindful so you can look at things objectively and zoom out. Be resilient to stick with things when they get difficult. Be able to focus on the essentials so you can say no and stand up for what’s important for your company and team. You need to build your own product to build resilience and come up against your own ego. Take ownership of everything you do. You can read about tactics for influence, but you’re not going to stand up in the face of opposition unless you’re very strong in your convictions, your personal vision, your product vision, and your understanding of the customer. On top of this foundation, you need experience—not perfect experience, but some experience—to understand challenges, have competence, take action, and produce results. You need to be able to define, validate, and communicate a strategy effectively. [25:31] What mindset do product managers need? Many product managers reach a ceiling because they understand the framework and are experienced in managing development teams, but to level up they need soft skills, which are around mindset. Again, be mindful, resilient, and focused. Shift your mindset away from details that don’t matter to instead obsess over vision, strategy, and storytelling. As you get more senior, you need to get very good, very quickly at doing these key things, communicating them, and influencing people to follow you. To cultivate a strong product mindset, you need to have experience and see the value of a specialized offer in the market. As Jeff Bezos says, “Be strict with vision. Be flexible with the details.” You’re not going to stick with your vision if you haven’t built up convictions through experiences that create strong, resilient minds. Action Guide: Put the information H

Advice for product managers on learning, moving into different industries, and becoming problem experts Today we are talking about lessons learned in product management. Lending her insights is Eleanor Hasler, Senior Product Manager at Impala, a travel company making it simple to sell hotel rooms. She has had a variety of product roles and has some tips to share with us. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:39] What was your path to product work? I started at university studying politics but later decided to develop commercial skills and see if I could make the world a better place. I started working in talent in London and loved it because I got to meet so many incredible people but I felt I needed to get closer to the action. A turning point was participating in Techstars Startup Weekend, where I worked on a team to build a business in one weekend. We developed a cycling product, and I spent all day Sunday calling cafes to learn about the problem and find out if they were interested in helping cyclists. I loved the experience. After that, I was hiring for a product leadership role, and I loved every product person I met. I decided to quit my talent job and start from scratch. I worked for a company doing sales in exchange for their help learning product. I was overwhelmed with how much support and time people are willing to give when you’re willing to take a risk. After three months, I started working at a property tech startup helping people find places to rent. A year later, I started at FinTech, a banking company, and built an app that helped people become investors. Last year, I started working at Impala. People told me I was crazy to go into the travel industry at the start of the pandemic, but I believe crisis creates room for creativity and innovation. We’re now working on a platform to help hotel rooms sell quicker. [13:47] What kind of customer interactions get you excited? The biggest moments of joy are when I have a call with someone and talk about a potential solution, and then they email me a few days later and ask to talk again about new thoughts they’ve had. The magic happens when you’ve built a relationship with someone and built enough trust that they can tell you what’s not right. I start discovery calls by telling the customer that the more negative feedback they tell us, the more we can learn—please don’t be too nice. [16:47] What other experiences or decisions have been pivotal to where you are now as a product manager? One decision I’ve been really happy with is choosing building over learning. My intuition was to take courses and read books, but people advised me to build actual products. Books and courses are never going to teach you what product work will. Build earlier than you’re comfortable with. Don’t be afraid to take risks and start from scratch. Moving into a different industry with a fresh set of eyes can be a superpower rather than a hindrance because you’re not thinking about how things have been done, and you look from a customer’s lens. Don’t worry about having deep knowledge of a specific area; trust yourself to start from scratch. [21:19] How did you make the change to different industries and get companies to want you to help them? I think we should be deep subject matter experts, but it doesn’t take years or decades to get to that point. Any product manager is a naturally curious person who won’t back down until they’ve gotten to the bottom of a problem or new area of innovation. Every time I went into a new industry, I spent my evenings and weekends learning everything about that industry and getting excited about it. If you come in with drive and curiosity, companies, particularly startups, find you valuable. In a good startup, you’ll be in a completely different company every six months, so you need drive and excitement. [23:49] What advice do you want to leave product managers with as they develop their careers? Our job as product managers is to be experts of the problem and customer and to present that problem to a team, which then uses the knowledge from many areas to come up with a solution. One mistake I made was thinking I need to have all the answers. Great solutions are created by teams with diverse thinking. Action Guide: Put the information Eleanor shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful link: Visit Impala’s website Innovation Quote “Creativity is coming up with lots of new ideas, and innovation is doing things.” – Theodore Levitt Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator 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 strategic approach product managers can use for choosing product features Today we are talking about prioritizing product features. Helping us is someone who’s been prioritizing customer feedback professionally since 2001. His name is Kareem Mayan, and he is a co-founder at Savio, a company that simplifies collecting, organizing, and acting on customer feedback . He is a serial entrepreneur and previously a product manager and software developer. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers Tell us about your 5-step process for prioritizing product feature requests. Prioritization is as much art as it is science. This framework lets you narrow down a big list of features, but there’s still a lot of art involved in the process. [7:07] Step 1: Get Clear on your business goals I see teams struggle when they’re not clear on what the company is trying to accomplish. If you have a clear business goal—like increasing expansion, reducing churn, or increasing conversion—it becomes a lot easier to narrow down your feature candidates. Often, I see leadership not giving clear direction to the product team about what to build. [9:52] Step 2: Filter the feature requests based on what your most important customers want If your goal is to win more deals, identify the feature-related reasons your sales team lost deals in the past. If your goal is to reduce churn, look at what features your current customers asked for that you didn’t build. Use a tool like Savio or a spreadsheet to process your data; it should take you seconds to find the information you need. [12:54] Step 3: Prioritize further by other attributes that matter Once you’ve identified your business goal and broad set of features, you should sub-segment your features. Look at the features requested by a segment of customers you’re interested in. If we’re trying to reduce churn, we might want to see which features our ideal customer profile (ICP) requested. Or if we want to reduce churn in our enterprise plan segment or our European customer base, we look at features requested by customers in those segments. For example, we’ve had customers in Europe who have churned because they wanted our tool in their language. If we wanted to expand in the European market, we could build a feature to solve this problem and expand our market. [21:12] Step 4: Determine your development budget Decide among the three buckets you could spend your development budget on: new features, strategic features, or tech debt. This isn’t an exact process; decide roughly what percentage of your development budget to spend on each bucket. We like to say, “Spend your devs wisely.” Understand how much you want to spend on each feature. Talk to the development team and figure out where they’re confident and which parts aren’t finished. Use time as an estimate; if a feature is only worth one week to you instead of two, figure out how you can make it cheaper and faster to get it tested sooner. [25:05] Step 5: Choose the features and confirm with other stakeholders Many stakeholders like sales, customer success, development, and the CEO will be interested in your proposed list of features. Instead of sharing the features for the next cycle to all of them at once, share your list with each stakeholder one-on-one and talk about their concerns. Then when you get in the room with everybody to approve the features, all the objections will have been addressed in the less contentious one-on-one environment. Use customer feedback to back up your decisions. Ask questions and have conversations about the data and what customers are asking for to get folks on your side. Use the phrase “not right now” and share data to head off conflict. Action Guide: Put the information Kareem shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Read Kareem’s article about prioritizing product features Learn about Savio Connect with Kareem on LinkedIn Check out Kareem’s consulting work Innovation Quote “Innovation, not invention.” – David Cancel, CEO of Drift Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator 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

The process of creating ideas – for product managers Today we are talking about the 7 habits of creative people. For such a discussion, we need a truly creative person, and that is why Nathan Phillips is with us. He is cofounder of Technology, Humans And Taste (THAT). Nathan leads the development of a proprietary collaborative methodology, which invites diverse and unfamiliar collaborators to co-create innovative concepts, leveraging AI to supercharge ideas. He’s also a best-selling author and Emmy award winner, on top of it all! Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [7:06] You’ve identified seven habits of creative people. Where did those habits come from? I focus on teachable methodologies for collaboration and creativity. People often think creativity is a magic power that only some people have. Everyone is creative, but sometimes we lack the vocabulary to understand how to build an idea. Building ideas is like math—once you figure out how to construct an idea, all you need to do is slot ingredients into that process and watch as innovative original ideas emerge. People think ideas have to be good, but that’s anti-creative; you can’t know if an idea is good until it’s executed. Our process, which inspired the seven rules of creativity, is designed to be understandable by anybody and inclusive of anybody’s participation. It celebrates the fact that you have to have lots of ideas to have a good idea. [8:48] What are the seven rules for creativity? [10:55] #1 Don’t eat with your hands Always have a writing utensil. If you can’t capture your thinking, you’re left without that idea. As my wife Victoria Wellman says, if you have an idea and don’t say it, it doesn’t exist. Don’t write in your phone because word processors and notes are designed to make lists, but beautiful ideas don’t happen in order. A piece of paper and pen allow you to express the creative data point that happened in your head, however it comes out. Writing makes you remember things and think differently. Personally I use pen, not pencil, because when you write with pen you’re locked into it and reminded that what you’re doing has value. [14:11] #2 Art is dead If you want to be a creator, listen to music you don’t love and find out what you could love about it. Don’t go to museums to be inspired; you’ll just see what’s been done before. Instead, go to a place least like a museum and find something that belongs in a museum. Approach the world from the perspective of someone who’s creatively engaged and trying to discover their own way of seeing. [16:32] #3 Keep it Kanye The idea of protecting your creativity is anti-creative. Always show your work. In an office, mandate that people show their work at the end of the day. If you’re sitting in a bar and thinking about a half-baked, great idea, tell someone about it and practice pitching it. If they can steal it, it wasn’t a good idea, but if they respond to it, you’ve got something original that’s yours to run with. It’s risky, but there’s nothing to be afraid of with sharing your work. [20:44] #4 Save your trash Author Stephen King threw away the first chapter of his first novel, but his wife pulled it out of the trash and he finished it, launching an incredibly impactful career. Reimagine your process through the lens of what you throw away. Look at what you’ve thrown away and connect those disparate data points. Your great concept or product is hiding in your trash, because you probably threw it away before you knew what you were doing. [23:30] #5 The Tina Turner Principle: We never do anything nice and easy There are tools that help you have ideas fast, but we need tools that help you have ideas slower. You have an idea by increasing friction, challenge, work, and disruption. You have to make it hard for yourself. If you’re making it easy, you’re skipping the creative part. [25:11] #6 Worship Satan: Religious imagination Use the power of make-believe to solve problems. When you approach a task where no solutions are available, come up with a story with a solution in it. That solution could be magic, from outer space, or something you completely invent. Then ask, How can I make this real? This is how you can get incredibly innovative solutions to problems everyone else is leaving on the floor. [28:34] #7 Create a code One of the most exciting parts of being a writer or creator is seeing people reading or using your stuff. You realize all the weird stuff bouncing around in your head is really useful to people when you bring it to life. They’re treating your crazy ideas like they’re normal. Instead of waiting for that, when you stumble on a new phrase that makes sense to you, codify it. Name a sketch you put on the wall and eventually people will start referring to it by the name you gave

How product managers can make innovation everyone’s job Today we are talking about how we design organizations for innovation. Joining us is Dr. Ben Bensaou. He is Professor of Technology Management and Professor of Asian Business and Comparative Management at INSEAD. He has also served in roles at Harvard, Wharton, and Haas business schools. His research centers on innovation and how organizations innovate. His recent book, Built to Innovate, shares a proven system for building innovation into an organization’s DNA. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:49] What research led to the innovation framework you talk about in your book? The research started with my teaching and consulting about 20 years ago. I saw traditional companies transformed to be very innovative. For example, the CEO of a traditional company making fabrics for tire companies transformed his company into an innovative solution and services provider, not only to the auto industry but also to new markets in construction and aerospace. I wanted to share that experience of seeing an innovative engine built from the ground up in a traditional company. [5:24] What are your thoughts on designing innovation into organizations when many business leaders have spent years learning how to perfect execution? There’s nothing wrong with execution; it’s necessary for every organization. However, an execution engine tends to stop innovative behavior. Organizations often rely on specialists in R&D to innovate, but innovation is the responsibility of everyone. Particularly, we tend to ignore the important role of middle managers. Bayer, the pharmaceutical and life sciences company, recognized this role in the strategy they developed to make innovation the responsibility and job of everyone in the organization. They trained senior managers to train middle managers in innovation, and then the middle managers trained their teams. Bayer also provided coaches to train the teams, making it easy for middle managers to engage their teams in innovation. They also incentivized middle managers and teams to increase their innovative capability and contribution. Bayer also created an innovation information system where employees can send their ideas. To prevent the system from getting overloaded, they have local innovation coordinators who read the suggestions and send feedback. They also use a system called WeSolve where anyone in the company can post questions or problems and anyone else in the company can contribute solutions or ideas. More than 40,000 people participated, and surprisingly the people who provide solutions are usually not from the same division as the person who presented the problem. These systems give people permission to innovate and create a culture where anyone can innovate. [16:50] Where should innovation live in an organization? Should you start with an innovation group or push innovation to all employees? In the end, the CEO and board are responsible for innovation, but everyone has a contribution to make. Organizations need an infrastructure and process to coordinate ideas. As a typical example, a subcommittee of the board is responsible for innovation, and they give permission for innovation to the whole organization and convince and train middle managers. Once the middle managers understand the importance of innovation, the organization creates a separate unit of coaches who train and support people in innovation. At least one innovation coach is assigned to each unit. The organization gives the frontline employees time to spend with customers and use the tools they’ve learned from the coaches. In this infrastructure, innovation lives everywhere in the organization. Local coordinators pick up ideas from frontline innovators and have a network to move those ideas to innovation committees that culminate to the committee on the board. [20:25] What are your three processes for innovating? Because the traditional execution engine gets in the way of innovation, you need to create a separate but parallel innovation engine, which includes three processes: creation, integration, and reframing. Creation is how the organization creates new ideas. Frontline people play a major role because they face customers and can detect their needs, demands and problems. Integration connects the innovative ideas throughout the organization into a social network that builds innovation capability. It’s a system that selects and moves ideas to decision makers faster than going through a hierarchy. This system can include innovation ambassadors, local innovation coordinators, and coaches. Reframing is reimagining the strategy of tomorrow, rethinking the strategy of today, and challenging assumptions the company is making about who they are and the value they are creating. [24:24] How can product managers take action to help their organizations be more innovative? Innovation doesn’t have to start at the t

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 is the second time I’ve shared one publically. Our guest is Ash Maurya. He has been a favorite repeat guest on the podcast and also spoke at our Summit in the Product VP track on the topic of continuous innovation. As this was a Summit presentation, the format of the show notes below are a bit different. BIO: Ash Maurya is the author of two bestselling books, Running Lean and Scaling Lean, and is the creator of the highly popular one-page business modeling tool, “Lean Canvas.” Ash is praised for offering some of the best and most practical advice for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs all over the world. Driven by the search for better and faster ways for building successful products, Ash has developed a systematic methodology for raising the odds of success built upon Lean Startup, Customer Development, and Bootstrapping techniques. Ash is also a leading business blogger and his posts and advice have been featured in Inc. Magazine, Forbes, and Fortune. He regularly hosts sold-out workshops around the world and serves as a mentor to several accelerators including TechStars, MaRS, Capital Factory, and guest lecturers at several universities including MIT, Harvard, and UT Austin. Ash serves on the advisory board of a number of startups and has consulted to new and established companies. INSIGHT: Love the problem, not your solution. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:19] What is continuous innovation and why do organizations need it? In the past, innovation happened apart from the core business. Now, the world is moving a lot faster and going to the end-user is more critical than ever. It’s increasingly important to think of innovation not as something that happens in a lab, but as something that happens continuously all the time.   [3:37] What can you tell us about each of your six rules for continuous innovation? Speed of Learning is the New Unfair Advantage: Companies that can out-learn their competition win. When you learn faster than your competition, you can continuously build a product that customers want and prevent others from taking customers away from you. Speed is relative; not all industries have to innovate at the same rate. The Business Model is the Product: We tend to focus on the product, but we need to consider the business model. The invention of a product is only a small part of innovation. The solution—how it gets to market and how it’s used by customers—is key. The Lean Canvas is a tool for mapping out the business model. Tackle Your Riskiest Assumptions First: Start with your riskiest ideas. We want to prioritize efforts on the right problems and not waste resources on the wrong things. Be Customer/Problem Centric: Start with a deep understanding of your customers and their needs and wants. Identifying their desired outcomes and obstacles helps you find problems worth solving. The solution becomes clear from there. Innovation is Evidence-Based: When we’re moving fast, it’s tempting to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, but it’s much more effective to move ahead based on evidence. Evidence-based decision making is critical because it’s too risky to go down the wrong rabbit hole. Traction is the Goal: Traction is a measure of creating monetization and value or potential in the business model. Traction, not revenue or profit, is the leading indicator of innovation.   [15:01] What can we do to learn faster how our customers are interacting with our product? Running a product without a metrics dashboard is like getting in a car without being able to see where you’re going. There are many online tools that can help with your metrics dashboard. Metrics should generate useful data and be directly related to the ultimate traction, rather than incentivizing employees to create less traction just to meet the metric.   [19:26] How can the Lean Canvas help us collaborate? The Lean Canvas allows you to clearly and concisely communicate your idea to others so you can get buy-in. It helps you deconstruct an idea, share it with others, and look at it from different perspectives. To use the Lean Canvas with teams, have each person create their own version of the Canvas. Then come back together and share ideas.   [22:43] What’s an example of tackling the riskiest assumptions first? If you’re opening a restaurant, the riskiest assumption is that people will buy your food. First, just test that one assumption, perhaps by opening a food truck and experimenting with different menus, locations, and prices. Build something to test your riskiest assumption and start quickly experimenting. Don’t get distracted by the final solution.   [25:44] What are your favorit

Discovery, Detailing, and Deployment for hardware product management Today we are talking about applying Agile and Lean development practices to product projects that are not purely software-based. Our guest is Brian Cohn, who began his career with roles in optical engineering and mathematics. For the last 10 years, he served as the Lean Product Development Specialist at Danfoss and has recently co-founded Aspire Innovation, a group that applies a business acceleration model to help organizations be more innovative. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:11] What are the issues with applying Scrum to projects that don’t involve only software? Hardware development is iterative, while software development is incremental. Think about making a wedding cake: If you make it incrementally, you make the first layer the first year and the second layer the second year, building up a full cake. But if you’re trying to sell 1000 cakes a day, you need an iterative process; you build your first whole cake and then iterate repeatedly to make the whole cake better. Scrum works well for software because it’s designed to be incremental—you build one piece of code and then another, building up your software. Scrum is also built around the idea of product owner, someone who prioritizes the future of the product and translates that future to project work. In hardware, you have to develop everything together, and the features that the product owner is focused on may be dissociated from the project work. More disciplines are involved in hardware, so it’s harder to move the work from person to person on the team. Finally, the pace of hardware development is dependent on the supply change, buying components, and getting parts manufactured, and that can take a long time. Because of all these challenges, Scrum doesn’t fit with hardware development. [9:52] How can we apply Agile principles to hardware products? We need to be agile in hardware development because there’s a lot of uncertainty in solving a problem and time boxes are valuable. We start a project with an idea about a problem and a lot of things we don’t know. We have to go from a wild idea to a product concept for how we’re going to manufacture, market, and sell the product. We have to make many decisions, and the decision-making process can go on interminably because everyone wants more information before making decisions. We need a model for decision-making. We use Rapid Learning Cycles to make decisions at the right time—after we have the information but not too late. We need to know what knowledge we should have before making each decision. Then, we put our decision-making into a cadence. For example, we investigate a decision for two weeks and then make the decision. This allows us to learn from each time box and adjust for the next box, so we’re always learning the most valuable things. [15:53] Tell us about your D3 Model for hardware products. Hardware products go through 3 phases: Discovery, Detailing, and Deployment. In discovery, we start with a core value proposition and turn it into concepts for the product, including manufacturing, assembling, marketing, and launch. In detailing, we use engineering to move from concepts to form and function and design the manufacturing system, assembly system, and plan for selling the product. In deployment, we work on commercialization, scaling production, and sales, with the goal of releasing a product that’s easy and inexpensive to manufacture and that customers are ready to buy. [17:20] Discovery We move from an idea on the back of a napkin to well-formulated concepts for the product, process, and launch. We weigh the decisions we want to make and the gaps in knowledge we need to close to make those decisions. We have a workshop called the Market Requirements Event, where we bring people together to discuss the product requirements. We spend time framing the problem. It’s important to diverge and think about many ideas before converging on the problem definition. In workshops, we find people are often not aligned on what the problem is, and they bring important perspectives so we can all get alignment on the customer and problem. [21:58] Detailing We pull the whole product together, using iterations of increasing maturity. We think about the first prototype, the questions we need to answer, and how many iterations we’ll need before getting a design that meets all the requirements we can reasonably test with prototypes. We iterate the whole product in time-boxed cycles that can take months to a year, while also keeping a shorter time cadence to move forward. Back to the wedding cake example, we’re refining our recipe and also thinking about what machines we could use to make the cake. We improve the product and scale manufacturing. [26:07] Deployment We demonstrate how to replicate the product. At this point, there’s less

Combatting the forces that pull customers away from your product, for product managers Today we are talking about a key challenge with product innovation—the change innovation necessitates. If there is no change, there is no innovation. Helping us understand change and how to properly navigate it in an organization is David Schonthal. He is an award-winning Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management where he teaches courses on new venture creation, design thinking, innovation and creativity. He has also been a practitioner of entrepreneurship and innovation for over 20 years, including a decade working at design firm IDEO. Also, one of his early jobs was product manager at Arthur Andersen. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:39] Out of your many innovation projects, what’s one you’ve found especially interesting? I’m particularly interested in healthcare products because they’re complicated and their positive impact is unambiguous. One program, related to diabetes management, is a great example of design thinking and human-centered design. We recognized people tend to think about chronic diseases at the macro and functional level, e.g., blood sugar levels and HbA1C. When we used design thinking, we realized chronic disease is as much a social and emotional condition as it is a functional condition. The diabetes management programs we designed were about helping the entire person, not just managing the metrics associated with their disease. We aimed to help individuals achieve their goals in life. [5:40] Where did the title for your new book, The Human Element, come from? My co-author, Kellogg psychologist Loran Nordgren, and I wondered why some good ideas fail to get traction in the market. Often, innovators and marketers focus on the product, saying it is designed or priced wrong, but we found the human side of the equation often goes unnoticed. We don’t consider the reaction of individuals whom you are expecting to change to adopt your product. Our book focuses on the human element—the ability for humans to adopt the products we’re creating to benefit them. [8:14] What do you think about the tension in organizations between maximizing operations, which encourages consistency, and innovation, which brings change? In established organizations, there’s always the tension between running the core business efficiently and looking to future horizons for growth. Organizations tend to be optimized for the first part, not the second part. To manage both well, organizations need two speeds or modes, one speed focused on creating efficiency and repeatable, scalable processes, and one speed with an appetite for taking risks and a growth mindset. Organizations often say they want to innovate and take risks, but when the core business needs attention, they lose focus on innovation, leaving it without resources or attention. Managing this tension well has to start at the top of the organization, with leaders recognizing the need for these two modes of function. [13:02] Tell us about your framework for addressing change. We talk about the forces of fuel and friction. Fuel is what draws customers to a product, and it’s where most product managers and developers spend their time. It includes all the features and benefits that make a product desirable, the problem trying to be solved by the new innovation, marketing collateral, and all the tools in product developers and innovators’ toolboxes. Friction is the headwinds that stand in the way of customers’ implementing the change. We identify four headwinds: Inertia—the resistance to move away from the status quo Effort—the energy required to make a change; this can be physical or economic effort or ambiguity about how it will work Emotion—the doubt, anxiety, or concern a change raises in people’s minds Reactance—people’s aversion to being changed, particularly when they feel the change is being imposed upon them [19:12] Can you take us through an example of working through these friction forces? I worked with a customer furniture manufacturer who makes sofas. The two common detractors for people interested in customer furniture are the expense and the long time it takes to get a piece. This company figured out a way to enable people to design custom sofas and get them delivered in 10 weeks or less, and the cost was 70% less than other custom furniture. It was an overwhelming value proposition, and they got a ton of attention from their target market. A lot of people came into their stores or went online and designed the perfect sofa for themselves. Then, just before they were about to purchase it, they walked away. The company wondered what was going on. Clearly, their value proposition attracted people and kept them engaged in the product enough to spend time designing the perfect piece. They learned through interviews that what stood in the

What product managers might not know about insights Today we are talking about markets and customer insights. Great product managers understand their customers and know how to gain insights about their unmet needs. Darshan Mehta is our guest to help us explore this topic. He is the Founder of iResearch.com, an insights platform to quickly and affordably extract insights from consumers worldwide, and ConnectQik.com, an app for instant connections and engaging interactions. In addition he has taught at The George Washington University in Washington D.C., at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and at other universities. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:12] How can we make a human connection between our products and customers? In the past, innovation was more product-focused. Now, people aren’t buying products; they’re buying experiences. The focus of your innovation should be humanizing your product. [4:45] What are customer insights? We often think of insights as facts or observations, but they’re actually a combination of trends in society, emotions, triggers, and motivations. Comedians do an excellent job finding insights. They take an observation and combine it with other elements of human nature and trends to make you say, “That is so funny and so true.” [8:16] How do we get customer insights? The best way to tap into insights is to have conversations. For example, I did a focus group for a clothing retailer in Washington, DC, and a simple insight changed the store’s trajectory completely. They talked to shoppers, most of whom were women, and found these shoppers dropped off their kids in the morning at 9am and would have gone to the store but didn’t want to wait until it opened at 10am. The clothing store started opening at 9:30am, which boosted sales tremendously. [10:31] What’s the importance of an emotional connection? Most successful companies are doing at least one of three things: saving you time, saving you money, or making it easier. If you can do any one of those, your chances of being successful are pretty good. If you can achieve all three, you 3x your chances. If you can achieve all three plus evoke an emotional connection, that 3x is multiplied even more. When people have a positive emotional experience with your product, they’re not only delighted; they also share on social media and promote your product. [14:58] Are there any other ways to get customer insights? With social media, you’re going to get feedback from your customers even if you’re not seeking it. They’ll post reviews and comments. Your choice is to take in that feedback now or later. You’re better off getting it sooner. Keep getting feedback and be prepared that it isn’t all going to be good. You have to listen to the negative feedback because it gives you opportunities for innovation and insights to improve your product or service. Don’t just innovate your product. Also innovate to make your existing product obsolete. You are your own worst competitor. You can’t control your competitors, but you can control your existing product and transition to a new product so you have a sustained future. It can be hard to take feedback when you’re in love with your solution. You want your product to do well, but part of that is tough love. Be open to criticism and set your emotions aside. The people giving negative feedback care enough about your product to want to complain about it. They have the potential to become your raving fans if you listen to what they’re saying. They may be giving you an entry into a great innovation. [22:53] What’s an example of how you’ve found customer insights? We did a project for the State Department, which was looking to hire more minorities in the State Department of Foreign Services. We decided to do a focus group online, which helped people set aside visual bias and give honest feedback. When you have conversations like this, tap into what people are thinking and feeling. You’ve probably been a cocktail party where you’re talking to three or four people and you get on a topic you’re all interested in, and before you know it you’re feeding off each other and getting deeper and deeper into the topic. In conversations like this, you tap into thoughts and emotions you never thought about before and learn a lot about yourself and others. [25:01] How did you set up the focus group for the State Department? First, we invited potential attendees to do a screening survey to see if they fit the right demographics and were in the market for a job. We invited roughly 15 people to participate. This is an ideal number because 8-12 will show up and more than 15 will be too many for a deep discussion. We ran the discussion as an online chat session, so everyone could respond to the questions at the same time and respond to others’ answers. Th

What one product manager learned about understanding customers Today we are talking about the journey from software developer to product manager and some key challenges encountered as a product manager. This journey was made by our guest, Liron Lifshitz-Yadin. She is the VP of Product at Tel Aviv-based Lightrun. She enjoys being a mentor to new product managers and has gained vast product management experience. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:41] Please tell us about your journey from software developer to product manager. I started as a software developer in an intelligence unit in the Israeli army. The army was a very collaborative, connected environment, both empowering and humbling. I did software development for many years but eventually realized I wanted to work more with people and be engaged with customers and the community. I slowly transitioned from development to innovation teams. I saw the beauty of focusing on the problem space and moved to the entrepreneurial space and then to product management. [8:02] What took you from developing code to wanting to understand customers? It was a process as I matured, but one important moment was when I was working at an innovative Israeli startup. I worked there for two and a half years until it closed. We were trying to reinvent the mobile phone, and it didn’t work, but we had amazing people, and it was one of the most hyped-up companies in the country. I was privileged to work there. On the R&D team, we felt like we had a lot of questions about how the product would be validated in the market, where it is going, and why we were doing what we were doing. I wanted to better understand how we did research and how customers would approach our product. I wanted to do innovation, so the next job I took was on an innovation team. [10:57] On the innovation team, where did you get ideas? We tried a lot of products and sent them to conferences. Our customers validated all our concepts, and were in close contact with specific customers. [13:58] How do you get information from customers? The most important way to get ideas is talking to customers. You need to understand their underlying needs, their workflows, and the tools they use. Know how they do things before offering a solution. The specific method of talking with customer varies by company and includes: Phone calls or web meetings Slack channel: At a previous company I worked at, we had a Slack channel with our customers to interact daily, and they felt very free to state observations about our products. Customer interviews Sales calls: In other companies, I’ve gone on sales calls as a product manager, to hear from existing customers and prospects. Design partners: We work with customers as we’re developing products, and they become our design partners. This open relationship gives us tons of ideas. [17:21] Sometimes customers share their own solutions that might not be best way for solving their problems. How do you approach that? Often, you can solve a customer’s pain by doing something very simple. Build in stages—deliver a quick win for the customers, then take time to explore the best solution. You will have to make trade-offs between requests from customers, executives, developers, and other stakeholders. Sometimes you may have to make the tough decision to not pursue a feature customers are asking for because it doesn’t really solve their problems in the best way. [24:23] How do you prioritize ideas and features? We build our strategic roadmap each year and revisit it every six months, making sure it’s aligned with the company’s goals. Then we do a top-down analysis to lay out how we’ll accomplish our goals. Include all your stakeholders—management, executives, sales, and customer feedback. The roadmap will help you make sure every feature aligns with the basic goal of the company. However, you’ll still have customers or management suggesting new features that are off the roadmap. Evaluate them using data, customer feedback, and a transparent conversation throughout your company. You can also use frameworks and models like Value vs. Effort, the Kano Model, the RICE model (reach, impact, confidence, effort), or your own scoring system, which can be validated with surveys, customer interviews, and NPR scores. If an executive makes a request that isn’t on the roadmap, be prepared to discuss their thought process and show your research, data, and validation. Show them if their goals clash with the company goals and what the company will lose by fulfilling their request. If you choose to follow their request, have a clear plan for how you’ll validate it and minimize loss. If you’re saying yes to some features you’re saying no to others. Action Guide: Put the information Liron shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful link: Connect with Liron on LinkedIn Innovation Quote “

What product managers need to know about positioning products to create value Today we are talking about how market segmentation is done and how it impacts product pricing. To help us with the details, a product strategy and pricing expert is joining us, Dan Balcauski. Dan is the founder of Product Tranquility, a consulting firm based in Austin, Texas. He has 15 years of experience in managing multiple products throughout different life cycles, from start-ups to publicly traded multinational enterprises. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:05] What is product strategy? Product strategy is the art and science of understanding customer problems and aligning your organization around creating desirable outcomes for customers and your business. Problem management is more important than product management for product managers. Be obsessed about your customers’ problems. Strategy defines a current situation, an assessment of that situation, and a path forward to overcome the challenges you face. Product strategy is about orienting the company toward the problems you’ll solve and how solving those problems for customers will positively impact the business. [4:07] How does market segmentation influence product strategy? In customer research, we’re trying to understand what problems our customers face and how much they value solutions to those problems. Imagine you’re a general trying to guide your troops. You have a landscape of different hills you could traverse, and you need to understand the possible advantages, disadvantages, and constraints of taking any particular hill. In market segmentation, you’re trying to understand the opportunity, challenges, and advantages of taking any particular position in the market. Once you’ve outlined the market landscape, product strategy is the process of deciding where you can compete and win. [6:34] What’s an example of a company that does market segmentation well? Tesla’s first car was the Tesla Roadster at a price point of $250,000. Eventually, Tesla created the Model S at a slightly more reasonable $80,000, and now they have the Model 3 at $35,000. This is a perfect example of understanding customer segments and aligning product strategy to sequentially attack those different market segments. Elon Musk understood the electric motor has a distinct advantage over combustion engine vehicles: It can deliver power directly to the wheels. The Roadster could easily beat a Porsche or Ferrari in speed. Tesla found a group of people who were willing to pay for that. Their market segment for the Roadster was very high-end people who wanted their 0-60 speed to be the best in the world. These customers didn’t care as much about an established, long-range, national charging network, which was not in place when the Roadster came out. Elon balanced the segment he went after with the value drivers of that segment. He aligned the benefits of the product with the customers who were willing to pay for those benefits and aligned the capabilities of the company to execute his strategy. [10:07] Where do we start with market segmentation? Start at the top leadership of your company and make sure your executives understand segmentation is important; many leaders think they’re going to capture the entire market. Start early. Proper customer segmentation helps every part of the organization. It’s unsuccessful to build a product without a segment in mind and hand it off to marketing and tell them to position it for a particular segment. Understanding whom you are building for makes the prioritization of features much easier as you’re building. When you’re segmenting, you’re creating groups that have homogenous customer needs within a segment but heterogeneous customer needs between segments, while balancing the ability of the company to manage all those diverse interests. [13:34] Tell us about methods for segmentation. There are two methods we use: a priori (before) and post-hoc (after). First, we use a priori because it allows us to have an easy conversation about segmentation and leverages expertise of those on the team. A priori segmentation uses existing research or segmentation schemes like customer geography, company size, and industry vertical. One advantage of this method is it groups customers who are alike. It is fast and cheap because it uses publicly available or easily accessibly data. One drawback is that it doesn’t help you understand why customers buy certain benefits; also, existing segmentation schemes may not fit your exact business context or purpose. This method is useful for surfacing assumptions and areas of disagreement or risk. Next, we do post hoc segmentation. We dig into the underlying customer value drivers. We start with the customers’ view of the world to understand what drives them to make purchasing and usage decisions. We use tools like Jobs-to-be-D

Create change as a storyteller of the future – for product managers Today we are talking about how organizations can better support innovators and improve their innovation capability, taking a systems perspective. The work product managers and leaders do is the life blood of organizations, creating innovations that drive revenue and contribute to a sustainable organization. To help us do this even better, we have an expert guest, Dan McClure. He is a systems strategist and agile product manager who helps organizations envision and create high impact innovations. He has over 30 years of hands-on experience shaping systems-level initiatives that combine business and technology. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:5] You’re an innovation strategist and architect. What do you mean by that? I strategize about a solution in an interconnected system. Instead of improving just one piece of the current system, I think about reinventing the entire system. For example, instead of improving a taxi service by putting charge card capabilities in the cabs, innovation strategists reimagined the entire industry and created Uber and Lyft, changing not just one piece but all the pieces. An innovation strategist sees a big, complex problem and makes all the changes necessary to imagine an entirely new way of working. [6:40] Why do so many organizations struggle to create impactful innovation that matters? The challenge is usually not getting innovation done but making the innovation big enough to matter strategically and over the long-term for the company. It’s difficult to get the entire organization to embrace a big, complex change. Innovators need to imagine how to create big change that works. [9:05] What needs to change in the product leader role to support systems innovation? A lot of people think that product work means identifying a user, selecting a user need, and delighting the customer by creating an effective product that satisfies the need. This model helps you focus on what you’re trying to do and whom you’re trying to do it for, but imagine a more complex real-life situation: You’re planning a holiday party for all your extended family. You have to satisfy every family member, and there’s no single user. You have to design that party not to delight one person but to provide value to satisfy the needs of everyone. We call this “everyone needs to get a pony.” There has to be a solution in which trade-offs are recognized and balanced and all the pieces come together so everyone walks away satisfied. In the business world, similar challenges occur. Imagine you need to integrate a new technology into a hospital’s operation. You need to create value for the administrators, doctors, nurses, vendors, and trainers. The system solution is not about delighting one person. It’s about seeing how all the pieces fit together and how we make a whole, functioning solution that is complete, sustainable, and scalable. People are an integral part of these types of systems, and these types of problems are complex and messy. Systems thinkers have called these “wicked problems,” which sound impossible to solve, but the systems tools are also incredibly powerful, and that’s exciting. [14:40] What kind of work does a leader do to help an organization be successful in system innovation? We call this role of system innovation leader a choreographer. Choreographers see the whole problem, not just one stakeholder or function but the entire interconnected web of challenges and opportunities. Next, they imagine a future system that’s better than the existing system. In the past, many innovators would see the whole problem and start chipping away at individual pieces. That doesn’t necessarily lead to a future system that’s better. A choreographer imagines an entirely different system where all the pieces fit together in a new way. Choreographers are centipede-shaped—they have many legs in lots of different areas of specialty that often don’t relate to one another. Because they can see across many domains, they can work with many different types of users. They tend to be boundary-breakers and are often seen as rebels within traditional companies. Finally, choreographers are great storytellers. They help people imagine a new future. [18:57] Is the choreographer role usually filled by an individual or a team? Choreographers often come in pairs. One is a visionary who imagines the future, and the other is more practical and shows how to get to the future. [21:42] Some product managers see that their industry is headed toward disruption; they’re concerned with what the future might bring; and they have some ideas about what to do. What should they do to get their organization to pay attention to the problem? First, find your natural allies—people who resonate with the story and bring the skills and capabilities yo

Special Episode From the 2020 Summit This is a special podcast episode, sharing an important discussion from The Everyday Innovator 2020 Summit. Two weeks ago Grant Hunter discussed what is product management. I am sharing this episode now because Steve Johnson, who is also a business partner with Grant, did a masterful job at the Summit, describing the real nature of product management. As this was a Summit presentation, the format of the show notes below are a bit different. BIO: Steve Johnson is an author, speaker, and transformation coach on product methods from idea to market. His approach is based on the belief that minimal process and simple templates result in a nimble product team. Steve has been working within the high-technology arena since 1981 with experience in technical, sales, and marketing management positions at companies specializing in enterprise and desktop software. His market and technical savvy allowed him to rise rapidly through the ranks from product manager to the executive suite. A founding instructor at Pragmatic Marketing and product coach with Under10, Steve has been a long-time advocate for product management, serving as an advisor to a number of technical product organizations and industry associations. INSIGHT: As many as 50% of professionals (of any kind) cannot clearly state what is and is not their role and how they contribute to the success of the company. If one team doesn’t do its job, other teams must fill the void. Just as you never want your goalie to be your top scorer, you want each team member focused on their primary job. Use the tool in this presentation to help clarify who does what and how each group will be held accountable. COMPANION ARTICLE: Steve’s graphical framework and article with more details on this topic are available here.   Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [0:55] What is product management? Product managers often spend time putting out other people’s fires rather than putting out products. We wonder if we’ve planned the right products. Our titles are a mess—what one company calls a product manager, another calls a program manager or a product marketing manager. We are involved in too many activities. [3:10] Peter Drucker said, “In a well-run organization each role has a single orientation. They either support customers…or they support the market.” Of the activities that support the market, they focus on either problems or solutions. The activities that support customers focus on delivery. And some of the activities focus on what we’ll offer in the future, while some focus on what we’re offering now. [4:34] Each department has a different goal. Development and engineering focus on building solutions for the future for the market. Marketing focuses on the solutions we have now for the market. Salespeople deliver the solutions we have now to the individual customers. [5:36] Product is responsible for understanding both the market and the market’s problems, both now and in the future. Product management is about identifying problems in the market that we can solve in the future with new products. Product marketing is about identifying problems in the market that current products can solve. [7:56] Win-loss analysis is a useful tool for finding problems in how we sell, market, and deliver. [9:53] There are three roles within product: product strategy, product planning, and product growth. Product strategy is led by the product manager and focuses on products to create in the future. Product planning is led by the product owner and focuses on products to build next. Product growth is led by the product marketer and focuses on products we have now. Many product managers are doing things they should not be doing; they have stopped being product managers and are now development managers. Product management should not be a support role. Product management should focus on strategy, planning, and growth. [13:32] Write down all the activities you currently expect from your product team. Then cross out those related to single customers. Prioritize the ones that are left—those related to market problems. Those activities help us support the products we have now and define the products we should build next and in the future. [14:40] Should we be problem managers? Some people think product managers need to know everything about the product. Maybe we should talk about problem management rather than product management. Bonus Q&A [18:16] How can product managers reduce the time and energy they spend putting out other people’s fires? Product managers spend 47% of their time on unplanned activities. Imagine the increase in productivity if we could focus just 10-20% more time on the actual role rather than firefighting. Years ago, I declared Thursday to be International Productivity Day for product management and product marketing. I encourage every product manager and marketer to work from home on Thursday to get more work d

Prepare for the unexpected as a product manager Today we are talking about change. Innovation itself means making change happen. Changes also come from external sources, with the COVID pandemic being an example of a huge cause of change. Our guest, Jonathan Brill, is here to tell us how to survive through and profit from radical change. He was the futurist at HP, making strategy recommendations, and continues to help organizations prepare for the impacts the future brings. He also has written about the framework he uses in his book Rogue Waves. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers 5:17] What are business schools not teaching about strategy? Business schools teach people to use a formulaic recipe to solve problems, but a recipe only works if the environment stays the same. A lot of business schools teach tools like Six Sigma or Extreme Programming; the founders of those frameworks understood a problem and created a recipe to solve it, but when a disruptive event like COVID, a financial crisis, or a new technology happens, the recipe doesn’t work anymore. I call those disruptive events rogue waves; unmanageable, huge waves that pop up out of nowhere because multiple, individually manageable waves combine in the same time and place. When that happens, your recipe isn’t going to help you unless you know how to cook. To innovate in times of radical change, you need to understand three things: awareness to identify rogues waves coming; behavior change to prepare people to respond to the unexpected; and culture change to design processes and incentives to exploit change. [9:02] Tell us more about Awareness. Awareness means thinking about the social, economic, and technological changes that will overlap to create rogue waves, impacting your organization. Think about what could impact your financial, operational, or strategic performance or your external environment (the four foes). Product managers tend to focus on financial and operational impacts, but strategic and environmental issues are far more likely to occur. [13:50] As an organization, how do we become aware of the trends that are shaping the future? We need a culture shift. We make assumptions about what the future will look like based on the past, but it’s unlikely the low-volatility environment we have now will continue. We can’t assume our cookbooks will still work. To prepare for a changing future, consider having a future unit in your organization, like we have at HP. In the future unit, we look at the social, economic, and technological changes and what they mean across our functions. We report our findings annually to the C-suite and look at risks associated with the four foes (financial, operational, external, and strategic). As a result, we were prepared to respond to the rogue wave of the pandemic and HP’s revenue and earnings were stable over 2020. [17:50] How does recognizing trends create a catalyst for new opportunities? Recognizing trends not only helps us prepare for rogue waves; it also helps us find and exploit new opportunities. As an example, at HP we use microfluidics, moving very small dots of liquid on a page to make inkjet prints, a technology relevant for disease diagnosis. We had identified this application as an opportunity, and we knew a pandemic would be an accelerant. Just before COVID hit, we had funded a business unit that develops technologies for pandemics and medical issues. To find opportunities, you can look internally at threats associated with the four foes, and externally at threats your customers are facing. The more you can alleviate your customers’ pain, the higher the value you’re creating for them. We can apply some rules from Game Theory to innovation. First, make a dynamic threat into a static threat. This is what insurance does. I had two grass fires at the bottom of my hill, so the threat of my house catching fire is incredibly dynamic, but I pay $99 a month to turn that into a static threat. Move a threat from symmetric to asymmetric or vice versa. In 2011, a nuclear power plant meltdown impacted Toyota’s supply chains and production for months. They added a 6-month buffer of semiconductors to their supply chain, and in 2016 during the Taiwan earthquake and again in 2020 during COVID they rolled right through the threats. Move threats from synchronous to asynchronous. The goal is to make the threat hit you asynchronously, so you have more time to respond. Finally, move threats from permanent to temporary. Truly disruptive companies like Amazon, Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb have flipped all four of these switches. [24:12] What are ten major trends that may change the world in the next couple of years? The populations of the top 20 economies around the world, including the U.S., are aging. Although we’re getting richer, we may not have the labor to support increased consumption. The Data Economy has enabled companies like Airbnb and Uber,

The truth about product managers’ common misconceptions Today we are talking about what may sound like fundamentals of product management, but many product managers have misconceptions about these key topics. To help us with this is Grant Hunter, who co-founded with Steve Johnson a peer community and coaching group called Product Growth Leaders. I’ve been a participant in the community for a few months, and recently I noticed Grant posting articles on key topics that will help you as well. Grant is a product coach and strategy advisor who helps companies and product organizations get more market-focused in their products and strategies. Previously, he was a trainer at Pragmatic Marketing. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:40] What is a product? A product is a solution for a person’s problem, including all the components necessary to fully solve that problem for the personas who experience the product. You need to understand the problem of the specific persona you’re marketing to. Customers think of their entire experience, including buying the product and any support they talk to, as part of the product. [9:47] Do you make a distinction between new product work (sometimes called innovation) and current product work? Innovation is about creating value. In the lifecycle curve, if you’re not always adding incremental new value, you’ve plateaued and are not innovating. You can add new value through continuous innovation (adding more value within your current products’ lifecycles) or discontinuous innovation (new products or technology). You use the same processes to make a new product or a new version of a product. It’s all innovation and adding value to a customer. [14:45] How do you think about personas? A persona is someone with the same need and same value profile. Many of us have the same problem, but we don’t have the same value profile. The persona identifies motivation. Think about your customers and what they value and are willing to pay more for. For example, my wife and I will pay more for an electrician who is neat and cleans up afterward. We have a persona for a product that is clean and organized. Our persona is built around our value profile and what’s important to us in our experience with the product. Personas help you understand people’s value profiles and motivations and why they’re making their decisions. Many organizations try to make a product for everyone. They have a product that will help you save and share photos, and they say it’s for everyone who takes pictures, but no one is going to find their product. Instead, they could make it specifically for first-time moms sharing pictures of their new babies, and once they figure that out, they can go on to the next market site. In the bowling pin approach, knock over one pin first, then figure out where to go next. [19:27] How do you determine if a new feature is valuable to your customers? The Kano model helps you determine if a new feature is valuable to customers, ignored by customers, or distracting to customers. You can only understand the customer’s value equation by going out and listening to them. They’re the only ones who understand and know it. You can’t prioritize features based on your own hypotheses or assumptions. You must use data in the market and conversations with customers. [25:35] What is product management? Product management is management of the product. That means increasing value to the company and the market. Product management is the role that makes sure you’re always doing the right thing. Every company has more ideas than resources. Clayton Christensen found that three out of four new product initiatives never make it to market or never turn a profit. Product management needs to make sure you do the right things and aren’t trying to be all things to all people. Understand the persona; their problems, value equations, and motivations; and your differentiation. Align the persona and market with your differentiation and product. Product managers also create value for the team. Everybody wants to work on a winner product, and it can be demoralizing to work on an end-of-life product. Product managers may need to make the decision to sunset the product and start on the next product. Product managers think about value for the customer, the company, and the team. Action Guide: Put the information Grant shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Join Grant Hunter and Steve Johnson’s free community of Product Growth Leaders Read articles from Grant and Steve Innovation Quote “Marketing…is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer’s point of view.” – Peter Drucker Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators,

How product managers can gain influence, solve problems, and propel their organizations to success What would you do if you were the first product hire in a rapidly growing company? Our guest, Kenton Hansen, was in that position at Roll20 three years ago. The company now has more than 9 million users on its platform, providing the best of tabletop gaming in an online environment. Kenton is now the Product Director at Roll20, and over the last three years, he has built the product management and UX processes and teams the company uses. We’ll talk about what that journey was like and what he has learned. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:34] What was going on at Roll20 that caused leadership to hire their first product person? It was a time of targeted growth, and leadership was excited about growing the platform. The business had already grown significantly, and we had just announced our 3 millionth user. There was a product vacuum as one of the co-founders was becoming CEO, and development management was moving out of product into more technical aspects. I was happy to come in and provide support across the organization to make sure growth could happen. [4:08] What were your first few months like, bringing a product management process to the organization? I treated the position as a consultancy role. I talked to a lot of people and wrote down the problems people shared with me. I learned product knowledge and understood the vastness of the company and the various customers you might never think about. We’ve been a virtual company from the beginning, and that virtual environment is challenging and interesting. You have to be more targeted in understanding how other people contribute. After understanding the problems that needed to be solved and the flow of business, revenue, and innovation, I started a punch list of the main problems. I took an approach based on the three horizons model, and focused on accomplishing innovation in horizon one, which is everyday iteration. I focused on how we could deliver features and projects to our users immediately and how we needed to change our process. [7:08] How did you get to know people and problems in a virtual environment? I tried to listen more than I spoke or type less than I read in an online chat. I wanted to internalize the happenings in the organization, and I started to see people’s characters and personalities emerge. Quick coffee chats or volunteering for simple tasks to work alongside others was effective, especially in a small organization. [8:49] What were some of the main problems you discovered, and what did you do about them? I knew our goal was massive growth and scaling, and the punch list to get the product process organized was a small part of the larger goal. I understood that what got us here (the growth we had already seen) was not going to get us there (to more massive growth). I relied on other members of the team to help me create new processes and get some work off my plate. Our strategies and philosophies needed to change to accommodate the stage we were in then and the stages I expected in the future. [10:37] How did your level of real authority compare to your level of gained influence? The authority given to me was not enough to make effective changes, so I knew I needed to show I could handle myself. Volunteering for tasks with others is the best way to build trust. Everyone is going to make mistakes, and showing up for mistakes as much as for successes is key. Great product people understand you share victory and you carry defeat yourself. Influence is gained in small, intimate settings. [13:47] As you were trying to scale dramatically, what was wrong with the processes in place? We needed to understand that pre-optimization is waste. I could have designed a process and slammed it through the organization, but baked into that are assumptions about how the world will change. No one would have been able to pre-optimize a feature roadmap for 2020, because no one knew how the world was going to change. Instead, I focused on solving the problems that were emerging at the time, trying to understand the next problems, and preparing possible solutions. [15:41] How did you avoid constant firefighting (focusing only on what is urgent at the time) rather than putting processes in place for the future? Our leadership team was great at helping us distinguish between an actual fire and a perceived fire using key performance indicators and standard operating objectives. We re-approached how we expect to see change happen within our organization to solve the problems that keep coming up over and over again. Our CEO, Nolan Jones, says, “It’s fine to have 100 problems every quarter. We just want them to be 100 different problems.” [17:21] What were some of the actions you took to solve problems? We needed to change the way we listened to our community. Our community has been crucial to Roll2

Skills for product managers to deeply understand customers’ problems and goals Today we are talking about how to understand what provides value to customers by giving them what they need to solve a problem or complete a task. Clayton Christensen described this as the job to be done. It is a topic our guest, David Duncan, knows well, as he co-wrote the Jobs-to-be-Done book Competing Against Luck with Clayton Christensen and has more recently written The Secret Lives of Customers: A Detective Story About Solving the Mystery of Customer Behavior. Dave is a managing director at Innosight, where he helps leaders of organizations create customer-centric teams and innovation strategies. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:05] How did your experience earning your PhD in physics equip you for your current work in innovation? I studied physics because I was fascinated by the subject and motivated by a desire to understand things deeply. Later, I moved into business and now work at Innosight, where we help companies figure out how to innovate more effectively. My background in physics helped me become a better problem solver and a better and more quantitative thinker. It gave me literacy in technology-related topics that enabled me to understand what different companies do. Science and engineering are at the heart of a lot of great innovation. [4:00] What does your new book The Secret Lives of Customers add to Jobs-to-be-Done knowledge? One of my goals was to create a broadly accessible book. The Secret Lives of Customers teaches anyone in any role in any organization the concepts, tools, and techniques they need to understand customers confidently. I put Jobs-to-be-Done in the broader context of the problem it solves—effectively understanding customers. Another goal was to assert the approach to JTBD I and others at Innosight have learned and developed over the years. The book also includes some new tools and frameworks including how to apply Jobs in strategy, as well as product development and innovation. [7:18] Tell us about your book’s narrative format. The Secret Lives of Customers is a fictional detective story. One of the main characters is a market detective who tries to understand customers in market investigations. The reader learns about the tools and techniques he’s using. This format was much more fun to write, and I hope it’s more fun and engaging to read. It’s best to learn to understand customers by watching someone have a conversation with them, reflecting on what you observe, trying it yourself, and getting feedback. [10:51] Why should product managers think of themselves as market detectives? In the story, I use market detective to describe a person who is aspiring to understand customers. The book emphasizes one-on-one customer conversations, which is the foundation of all other customer research techniques. One-on-one interviews are often the most valuable technique you can use and almost always relevant to every use case. They enable product managers to hear directly from customers, develop products that are more connected with their jobs-to-be-done, and develop features that reflect an understanding of not just their functional jobs but also their emotional and social jobs. You can make better prioritization decisions about which products to work on and minimize the temptation to be product-led rather than customer-led. [13:08] As market detectives, what are the three competencies we need to have to put Jobs-to-be-Done in place? You need to learn a language, a method, and a mindset to confidently understand customers. Almost every discipline has its own vocabulary, but surprisingly there isn’t a standard, widely accessible language that guides interactions with customers. We need a language that guides us to ask the right questions that lead to the right insights at the right level of detail. The right questions are those that help you understand what really matters to customers—their problems, their goals, and the jobs they want to get done. Once you have the language to ask the right questions, you need a method for discovering, organizing, and interpreting that information. The core thought process for understanding customers includes four questions: What are the customers’ circumstances? What are their jobs-to-be-done? What are they doing today to accomplish their jobs? How do they evaluate quality solutions for those jobs? Finally, you need the right mindset to apply the language and method. Be genuinely interested in the person you’re talking with. Be authentic and willing to share some of yourself in the conversation. Go into the conversations with a beginner’s mind—set your assumptions aside and be receptive to being surprised. [18:24] Can you share an example of using the right language to understand the job the customer is trying to accomplish? The Secret Lives of Customers is set in a coffee shop, which peopl

Learn what sets successful product management teams apart Today we are talking about a recent study that gives us insights into what’s going on in product management and product management teams. For several years, our guest has conducted the Study of Product Team Performance. The one for this year was rather different as it reflected on the impact of the COVID Pandemic, which we’ll get into in just a moment. Returning with us is Greg Geracie the CEO of Actuation Consulting, a global provider of product management training, consulting, and advisory services to some of the world’s most well-known organizations. I’ve known Greg for several years, as we both volunteer with PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:08] What is the purpose of the Study of Product Team Performance and how was it different this year? The study researches the factors that differentiate successful product teams from the rest of the pack. This year, we focused on the impact of COVID-19 on the performance of product teams. Our goal was to capture what we’ve learned from the pandemic and help our clients and followers better understand its impact on product team performance, so they can make better-informed decisions in the future. [3:45] What types of companies and industries participated in the study? Companies of all shapes and sizes from around the world participate in our research. For this study: 49% of survey respondents work in the technology industry 22% in the services industry 13% in consumer products 4% in education 1% in government 11% in other industries The revenue of survey respondents varied: 35% of our respondents worked for companies with revenue less than $50 million 37% worked for companies with revenue between $50 million and $2 billion 28% worked for companies with revenue over $2 billion Additionally, over 55% of our respondents were product managers, which was a larger percentage than in the past. [5:54] What highlights would you like to share about the study? [5:54] Remote-first mindset We discovered four key findings. First, survey respondents espoused a remote-first mindset. They believed their organization should be designed with a remote-first mentality and operating structure. Respondents described their organizations as rigid and against remote work, but during the pandemic they saw how working from home could be highly effective. They saw that COVID had changed the mentality of organizations in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, and the lesson many people learned is that organizations need to perpetually experiment with remote technology and collaboration tools before a pandemic or other event forces change. Remote working does not extend equally to all industries. Education, academics, and financial services lead the way in transitioning to remote work, while food service, retail, and construction were the lowest adopters. Respondents shared challenges that come with remote working. Internet connectivity was a problem for many. Process documentation and onboarding of new employees were challenges. Feelings of alienation and perceived lack of empathy from executives contributed to reduced productivity. Nineteen percent of employees struggled with being effective while working remotely, and many dealt with the loss of family members from COVID. Organizations need to keep in mind the impact of the pandemic on their employees at a personal level. [10:03] Importance of strategy Organizations with a clear view of their strategy found it easier to successfully pivot during the pandemic. In every study, we’ve found that strategy correlates with higher performance on product teams. This year, organizations were pivoting their business strategy, not just their product strategy. Surprisingly, respondents were very upbeat and positive. One respondent shared, “Extraordinary situations are extraordinary opportunities.” Many organizations reprioritized their investments, shored up their strategy, and emphasized virtual products and passive income streams. [12:43] Planning for future adverse events There’s a heightened awareness of future disruptive events, and many respondents believe their organizations failed to effectively plan for adverse events, and they want to see this corrected. Respondents anticipate future crises and welcome more planning in advance of the next crisis. Specifically, they would like to see business continuity plans, increased contingency and scenario planning, and the development of special teams to deal with future crises more effectively. [14:21] Flexible culture necessary to thrive Respondents cited a need for a flexible, agile, entrepreneurial mindset. The status quo has been upended, and we need to be flexible in order to thrive in this environment. Respondents pointed out that organizations need to evaluate which organizational activities should cea