Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators

Tips for product managers to communicate so people remember We are about to have an important discussion on how to communicate in a way that makes people remember what is important. That is communicating to influence others and build networks to help you accomplish your product objectives. Helping us do that is our guest, Tina Frey Clements. She believes that a company’s success is directly related to the engagement of its people. She excels at moving businesses forward and motivating and growing talent. Her experience has been in many areas but has emphasized the automotive industry, with treks at BMW, Volkswagen, and Mini. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:41] You help people become better communicators and facilitators. What do you mean by facilitation? When you’re facilitating a message, it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with your recipient, the learner. The job of a facilitator is to present the information and get out of the way of the learner and let them learn. [3:49] What should we try to accomplish as facilitators? First you have to define your specific goal. Usually, a product manager’s goal is to communicate knowledge. A specific goal might be communicating with a retail store so you can sell something or communicating with marketing so they can promote your product. Second, remember that whomever you’re communicating with doesn’t necessarily communicate like you. We typically communicate in the way we like to be communicated to, but that rarely works. Figure out how your audience needs to hear your information and communicate so that they are hearing it and retaining it. [9:21] How do we help our audience remember, retain, and apply? That’s not easy. Once you’ve acknowledged that not everyone learns like you do, the next step is identifying the learning style of the person you’re communicating with. Some examples of learning styles are visual, auditory, reading/writing, intellectual, and kinesthetic. Tailor your communication to your audience’s learning style. For a visual learner, use visual aids. For an auditory learner, ask them to repeat back what they understood. If you’re communicating to a big group, script your message to reach all of them. Always leave your audience with an action item. [15:18] How else can we better communicate? If possible, be interactive. Use the 80:20 rule—20% of your communication should be teaching the information and 80% should be your audience figuring it out on their own. For people to act, they have to create their own thought about the topic. Interaction is the critical element to engage the audience. Even if you’re in a formal setting behind a podium, you can encourage interaction by asking people to answer questions or raise their hands. Always invite people to ask you questions afterward. [24:29] How can product managers focus on solving the customer problem? We often focus on our solution instead of listening to customers. We need to prioritize learning about the customer problem. Without knowing your customers’ real problems, you’ll never be successful. [28:07] How can we partner with others to be successful in our communication? Focus on what you’re really good at and partner with others who complement your strengths. If you know everything about your product, but you’re not good at selling it, partner with someone who is. If you don’t want to partner with someone, change your behavior to communicate better. Don’t fake it so much that you lose who you really are, but take action to build relationships. [31:42] How do you use story to make your communication more effective? Be transparent, vulnerable, and relatable. This will make your audience want to hear you and trust you. When you can, use story. Everyone loves and can relate to a story. You could share a personal story about your journey with the product. You can use stories to engage all types of leaners. Action Guide: Put the information Tina shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Tina’s book, The Art of Facilitation: Communicate So They Remember Visit Tina’s website, RPCAmerica.com Look out for Tina’s new book, Fantastic Facilitation Fails Innovation Quote “If you can predict it, you can prepare for it.” – Unknown 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 tool to help product managers understand what features customers value Today we are talking about conjoint analysis, which is a tool you can use to make informed decisions about what customers value and what they will pay for. If you have to make decisions about what features to include in a new product or the next version of a product, what price to charge for a product, or what the impact on market share will be by introducing a new product, then this discussion is for you. To learn about Conjoint Analysis, we are talking with Patty Yanes, a market researcher who has led numerous research projects that resulted in new insights about customers and a deeper understanding of their needs. Patty is with Applied Marketing Science (AMS), a firm dedicated to helping product managers with market research. AMS was founded by an MIT professor and is well respected for the work it does. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:49] What kind of problems does Conjoint Analysis solve? Conjoint Analysis is the industry standard for understanding the features to include in a product. It helps you find out how much people are willing to pay and is the best way to figure out pricing. [2:56] What are some other tools similar to Conjoint Analysis? Van Westendorp: a quicker and easier but less reliable method of pricing Gabor Granger: another pricing test Max/Diff (maximum difference scaling): a method of ranking features without considering price Turf Analysis: a method to understand which bundle of features will allow you to reach the most customers [5:29] Take us through an example of Conjoint. Let’s take the example of a pair of headphones. First, we must make sure we have the right inputs. Inputs that affect the customers’ decision to purchase the headphones are: brand, how it fits on the ear, whether it’s wireless or noise-cancelling, and the microphone. You’ll also need to determine your price, which could vary from $20 to $500. [7:54] How does segmentation fit in? Segmentation can be part of the process of designing your study or it can be part of cutting the data on the back-end to see how the results vary. For instance, you might create two separate studies for two different headphones, one for gamers and one for audiophiles. Or if you want to develop just one product that you will market differently to different segments, you would design one study with all the attributes and then cut on the back-end to see what’s more important to a gamer vs. an audiophile. [9:27] What’s the next step in Conjoint Analysis? Make sure you’re talking to the right people. You need a significant sample size including all the people who are part of the decision to purchase your product. We recommend 300 people, with a minimum of 100 per segment. Once we’ve designed our Conjoint study, we pre-test our survey. We talk to people in the field to make sure they’re understanding our survey and we’re understanding their answers. [12:23] How do you recruit and incentivize study participants? We use research panels that are already in existence. The incentives may have to be quite high since people’s time is valuable. Scrappy solutions include talking to customers in a store or reaching out to friends and family. [15:29] Tell us more about the pre-test. We recruit a small sample of the same type of people who would be taking our general survey and run through the survey with them. We ask them questions to discover what assumptions they’re making about the survey and whether they understand the survey in the way we expect. [17:35] How do we field the study? We go into the field with a panel, send the survey out, and get the data back. Then, before analysis, we clean the data, making sure everyone paid attention appropriately and that we have the right people who will give relevant answers. [19:36] What do we do with the data? There are many different ways you can analyze the data, and today almost all of them can be done with software. The industry standard for Conjoint software is Sawtooth Software. First, perform a regression to see what’s most important to people. We use the hierarchical Bayes regression, but there are many different options. The regression equation tells you what’s driving the overall purchase decision for the product. This allows you to look at which features are more and less important. Next calculate willingness-to-pay for each feature. For example, we could look at willingness-to-pay for two different types of noise cancellation. [24:20] What kind of questions would we ask in the survey to determine which features are more important? Conjoint is all about simulating choices and tradeoffs people are making. You present survey participants with three to five option of different headphones that all have different attributes and different prices, and you ask them to select the one they prefer. You repeat this about 12 times

How product managers can use data to understand customers and create value Today we are talking about making better product decisions that create customer value using the data you already have. A PR person contacted me about a company that received the 2021 Products That Count award in the Operate category. The award recognizes products that help product managers and are pushing for better ways to accomplish work now and in the future. The company is Indicative and they help product managers leverage insights based on data already in their data warehouse, build their product roadmap, optimize user engagement, and reduce churn. I’m interested in learning more about this area in general because it brings together several important aspects of product management—the customer journey, data science, data-driven decision making, and reduced time to market. Our guest is Jeremy Levy, the CEO of Indicative. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:00] What problem in product management drew you toward your work with Indicative? Our mission at Indicative is to help businesses build better products through data. The first company I founded provided location-based dating for iPhone and Android, and my second company was the first mobile-based CRM for enterprise. In these companies, we struggled with leveraging the data we collected from our customers in a cohesive way for our product teams to make informed product decisions. We created Indicative, the only product analytics platform build specifically for modern data infrastructure. Indicative allows product teams to easily synthesize and use information and ask thousands of questions about their product, roadmap, or day-to-day decisions. [5:36] What is a data warehouse? A data warehouse is a repository of a company’s business data. It’s separate from a traditional transactional database that runs your application. The data warehouse keeps your data in one place and allows the rest of the company to easily interface with the data. Data warehouses have become available easily and inexpensively; now a startup has access to the same hardware as a Fortune 500 company. [9:02] How can we do a better job creating products for customers using data? Can you take us through an example? One example is Prezi, which makes virtual presentation software. Customers don’t use their products in a linear flow; there’s an infinite number of journeys the customer could take when they use the product. Any manual analysis of those journeys is impossible, so Prezi built a data warehouse to collect and store all their data. Using our platform, they isolated the individual journeys customers take as they create presentations. They found friction, the most effective paths, and the features that people were and were not using. Understanding the nuances of how people use their products allowed Prezi to better understand their users and inform their roadmap to reduce friction and help people create better presentations faster. [12:24] When you brought Prezi onboard, did you instrument their product to collect data, or was there already data available for you to leverage? Prezi already had their own data. This is often the case. Companies retain ownership of their data and use a variety of available tools to collect and analyze data, storing it in a single data warehouse. Storing data in a single warehouse makes data collection and analysis safer, more reliable, and less expensive. [17:25] How do customer journeys help us make better products? Customer journeys include all the paths that customers take when they interact with your product and all the touchpoints like email, registration, and phone calls. We created a product called Journeys that visualizes many possible journeys and allows you to filter the ones that are most effective and visualize them with a Sankey diagram, which is a diagram that branches out like a tree showing the possible paths on a customer journey. Analyzing customer journeys helps us reduce friction in the product experience and allow customers to interact with the product as effectively, pleasantly, and delightfully as possible. [23:36] What are other benefits of making better use of data? Once you start thinking about product management using data, you start looking for opportunities to leverage data in your roadmap. That leads you to use the scientific method. You come up with a hypothesis about your product and use data to prove it. [26:41] Who helps get the data into a data warehouse? When data warehouses were technical and expensive, engineering teams or data teams put data into data warehouses, but now as data warehouses are becoming easier to use, product teams are doing this. It makes so much sense because product teams are the ones who use the data. More and more, data is being thought of as part of product. Action Guide: Put the information Jeremy shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Usef

Pipeline, Process, and Practice for Product Managers This is the Product Mastery Now podcast. For seven years it was called The Everyday Innovator, but I recently changed the name to better reflect our mission, which is to help you become a Product Master, creating products customers love. A common question I am asked is, How can an organization speed up its product development? One way is what our guest is sharing with us today, the 3 Ps of Lean Product Development—Pipeline, Practice, and Process. His name is Steve Stucky, and he has over 25 years of experience applying lean product development. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:20] What is Lean Product Development? Lean Product Development is about putting in place the best processes to make better products faster. It’s about eliminating waste in processes, making teams more effective, and aligning the organization. [2:56] Why are organizations incorporating Lean Product Development? Lean Product Development gets products that meet all the customer needs out the door quicker, without having to work harder. Lean Product Development helps developers spend more time on value-added work instead of wasteful work. [5:18] How can an organization use Lean Product Development? Lean Product Development is a holistic approach to improving product development, looking at: Pipeline—communicating priorities and aligning the organization so it isn’t overloaded Process—the lean product development process itself Practice—how the team works together [6:50] Pipeline The Pipeline allows leadership to communicate a ranked list of priorities. The top projects are the focus, and when we run out of resources, the lower priority projects are placed on hold. Top projects get the maximum effort and get done sooner. The Pipeline includes the optimal number of projects for people to be most effective and spend more time doing value-added work—usually two or three projects. [11:28] Process Process focuses on improving two main areas of the new product development process itself. First, find the waste, wait time, and bottlenecks in the process. Second, make sure development teams have the flexibility to reduce the number of deliverables on their plate to manage the work that’s important for the teams. A Kaizen approach finds bottlenecks and looks at the wait time versus the actual work time. Identify and remove bottlenecks and speed everything up. [13:40] Practice Several best practices can help improve the speed and effectiveness of project teams. One is using Agile with Scrum, taking the best of both practices. Teams meet frequently and communicate, and the vision and work are visualized using Scrum. Facilitated acceleration events are also impactful. A Market Requirements Event prioritizes product requirements in one to three days, rather than the months this process usually takes. The Market Requirements Event involves customer-facing people like sales and marketing, and it’s led by product management with developers and engineers present. You discuss customer needs and competitive threats and identify the key features customers will value in a product. You categorize and prioritize to develop products with maximum differentiation and value, and you align the group around the important requirements. Another event is PARM (Project And Risk Mitigation). This is an 8-hour event in which the team builds a project schedule, compresses it, comes back with a date they feel they can meet confidently, and then identifies risks and prioritizes the highest risks for mitigation. Rapid Learning Cycles are another great risk reduction opportunity. The team identifies unknowns and focuses on key decisions the team should make and the knowledge gaps they need to close to make those decisions. Rapid Learning Cycles can also be used for putting together a project. In a two- to four-week cycle, you start with a hypothesis and learn more to expose assumptions and help you make the right decisions. Action Guide: Put the information Steve shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Steve on LinkedIn Learn more about Steve’s Lean Program Consulting Ron Mascitelli’s Mastering Lean Product Development Norbert Majerus’s Lean-Driven Innovation Katherine Radika’s High Velocity Innovation Eric Reis’ Lean Startup Innovation Quote “You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” - Anonymous 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

How product managers can succeed in innovation leadership Welcome to the Product Mastery Now podcast. You may know it as The Everyday Innovator, but after seven years of interviews, I have changed the name to better reflect our mission, which is to help you become a Product Master, creating products customers love. Our guest today is a 30+ year innovation and technology journalist. He has authored several books on innovation and is the CEO and co-founder of Innovation Leader, which helps changemakers at large organizations deliver real impact. He’ll share the challenges innovation leaders are facing and how to overcome them. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:37] What are the biggest obstacles to innovation in organizations? Big companies are designed to be like aircraft carriers—everything is supposed be perfect, safe, and reliable. If you, as a product manager, are trying to make something new that’s not yet perfect, safe, and reliable, you face obstacles like: Politics and turf wars: people don’t want you getting in their way Cultural issues: changing the culture is challenging Inability to act: people know what signals are crucial to the future of your company but can’t act on them [6:52] How can organizations overcome those obstacles? One option is skunkworks—innovating in secret. There are successful examples of this, like the Apple Macintosh and Lockheed’s skunkworks that developed some of the fastest planes of the 20th century, but often skunkworks don’t get enough support from headquarters and are not attuned to the overall strategy. Innovation networks are more successful. People from organizations all over the world work together to build innovation capability. These networks are much harder to switch off than skunkworks. [10:19] What is the role of an innovation leader? Innovation leader is an incredibly challenging role. Innovation leaders work in established companies and are responsible for thinking about the future, talking to customers about the future, and understanding how technology is going to change. It’s a hard role because of the obstacles I already mentioned—people know how to do their jobs and they have numbers to hit, and innovators feel like agitators because they’re disturbing the status quo. [19:24] What actions do successful innovation leaders take, and how do you see innovation leadership changing in the future? First, innovation leaders need to find out what kind of innovation the organization wants them to be doing. There are three categories: Product/service innovation: innovating what you’re offering to customers Cultural innovation: changing the way it feels to work here and potentially attracting new talent Process innovation: internally-focused Successful innovation leaders know you can’t work on all three of those categories at once. Choose one or two and don’t spread yourself too thin. Successful innovation leaders create value for the organization in the near-term, mid-term, and long-term. Today, they might be hiring new talent, testing new technology, or finding new solutions for customer research in a remote world. Meanwhile, they’re balancing those activities with a mid-term and long-term approach to innovation. Innovation leadership is a job about people—understanding organizational politics and influencing people. [24:00] What are the biggest enablers of success for innovation? The top three are: Leadership support Ability to test, learn, and iterate Right strategy and vision Do you have a vision that is thinking about today, next year, and the next five years? Successful founders have a vision for the next five or ten years and know what they need to get there. Too often, companies collect ideas from their employees but don’t have a plan for doing anything with them, so people stop giving ideas. These companies are doing innovation theater, not true innovation. You need to think through the unintended consequences ahead of time and making sure you have a plan for managing any innovation processes you put in place. Action Guide: Put the information Scott shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out Innovation Leader Listen to the Innovation Answered podcast Connect with Scott and Innovation Leader on LinkedIn Connect with Scott on Twitter Innovation Quote “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” – John Cage 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 tool to help product managers accomplish more Product improvements and product innovation too frequently suffer from accomplishing less than we want. The urgent is often in the way of the important. If you want to get the important work done more of the time, you’ll find OKRs (objectives and key results) helpful. Also, if you’ve tried OKRs and didn’t like them, this discussion will help you too. We need an OKR expert to learn more about this, and joining us is the woman who wrote the bestselling book, Radical Focus, that tackles the use of OKRs and startup culture with an eye to getting the right things done. Her name is Christina Wodtke, and she is a lecturer at Stanford, sharing insight into human innovation and high-performing teams. She has designed products with LinkedIn, Zynga, Yahoo! and many others, as well as founding three startups, and the online design magazine Boxes and Arrows. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:13] Why are OKRs (objectives and key results) important? OKRs are powerful for accomplishing important things that aren’t otherwise getting done. If a task is important and urgent, it always gets done, but sometimes the things that are unimportant but urgent get in the way of the things that are important but not urgent. OKRs give those important strategic projects a sense of urgency, scheduling them and helping you get them done. OKRs’ cadence causes you to touch them every Monday, when you commit activities toward your OKRs, and every Friday, when you celebrate progress. OKRs allow people to meet their goals. [13:27] What are the steps for putting OKRs into practice in a product team? Start using OKRs with a high-performing product team. Your objective should be inspiring. The key results can be hard to choose. Think about results that suggest you’re keeping your customers satisfied and committed to staying with you. For example, measure leads converted, renewals, or word-of-mouth referrals. Choose good, strong, honest signals of success. Don’t choose key results that you can make happen by doing them. Choose results that are in response to the activities you’re doing. At first you won’t know how many results to use; make a guess. Every Monday, everyone commits to doing something toward the OKR. In a healthy company with psychological safety, team members can ask each other, “Why are you doing that?” or “Do you really think that’s going to work?” On Fridays, celebrate progress. This is critical. Everyone shares what they’ve done during the week and how they’re progressing toward the OKRs. [19:59] What is an example of using OKRs? Suppose we have a small B2B company, and we want to grow, but we’re getting distracted from the real problems. We think we need a CRM, but before getting a CRM, the CEO says the OKRs for the next quarter should be around retaining current customer and turning leads into customers. Out of those, which is most important? Turning leads into customers is great, but if we can’t keep them, let’s focus on retention first. The CEO states the objective, using language of optimism and aspiration, “Our current customers feel so supported by our services and software that they eagerly sign up.” Next we figure out the key results, e.g., emails from customers saying thank you for the software. Next quarter we will choose new key results. Before trying something big and expensive like a CRM, we could start with a simpler solution like a single spreadsheet. Keep in mind that OKRs don’t do everything. They’re just a piece of the larger system of modern product management. [27:59] What’s the cadence of OKRs? The cadence depends on the needs of the company. If you’ve found product market fit and are looking to accelerate growth, you’ll have a different pace than if you’re looking to move into a new market. If you’re moving into a new market, run lots of experiments to test hypotheses. Choose key results that are strong, early indicators that you might have hit product market fit, then keep running lots of tests. At the end of the quarter, we have a formal closing of the quarter. Focus on learning. Have a retrospective, see patterns, and note the hypotheses that moved your numbers. Talk about what kept you from meeting your goals. Then you can repeat or adjust your OKRs for the next quarter. [32:34] What is the timeframe for OKRs? I think that at large companies all missions are five-year objectives. For these companies, have annual OKRs, supported by quarterly objectives. For startups or intrepreneurs who want to move faster, use quarters (three months) for your OKRs. Six weeks is the smallest timeframe I would run an OKR in. [35:33] Would you like to share any other tips for implementing OKRs? A common mistake is setting up the OKRs and not following up with the weekly meetings. A bad o

How to align your organization and product management team with the voice of your customer In this discussion we address what it means to properly incorporate UX (user experience) into your product work. This is not merely making things look right. This is deeply understanding the user experience that creates greater value, beating competitors and delighting customers. Joining us is Mark Baldino, UX product design expert and co-founder of Fuzzy Math, which designs software products for companies. Mark has 20+ years experience implementing human-centered design to solve difficult problems. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:37] Why should UX (user experience) be part of product strategy? There’s no better way to provide customer value than aligning your organization and product team with the voice of your customer. Often, UX gets bolted on at the beginning and end of the product cycle. Many organizations only contact their customers during sales and support, often because they’re scared to listen to their customer and make product decisions based on knowledge of their customers. Sales and support are important, but you’re missing out if you don’t also talk to customers while they’re using your product. Listen to customers and rely on a customer-centered design process. [5:43] How do we make UX more effective in our product strategy? Often, underperforming UX teams are stuck in a cycle responding to developers’ requests and fixing features without aligning the overall product with the customer. To get out of the cycle, you have to level-up and understand the entire process. Product managers are our best partners in this because they value listening to customers. You need to invest time and energy talking to current and potential customers and watching them use your products so you can make research-backed decisions. The power of user-centered design is that it allows us to tell stories about customers and the future of the product, getting product and engineering in full alignment. Pull cross-functional teams into the research and synthesis of concepts. [10:15] What tools are helpful in UX? Quantitative Tools: Super Q: a standardized set of questions asking the user to gauge the product’s features and functions Net Promoter Score: would you refer someone to this product? Qualitative Tools: Interviews with customers: open-ended questions and discussion Observation of customers using the product Think Aloud method: customers says exactly what they’re doing while using the tool Story-telling Tools: Personas: archetypes of the users Journey Maps: tell stories of how customers use the product Through customer observation, you’ll learn that how people use tools is not how you think they use tools. Have stakeholders join you in observing customers; it’s illuminating for them to see how their customers are using the products. [19:59] Wouldn’t adding UX to product strategy slow us down? Adding UX will introduce new parts to the process, but you have to ask, What is the cost of not adding UX? What is the business suffering from because you’re not spending time with customers and not making informed decisions? It might be a decrease in efficiency of your team, a lot of rework, high customer support numbers, low customer satisfaction, or missing sales. One study showed that UX give a 10x ROI. It may be closer to 3 or 4 times, which is still really good. When you begin to use UX, you will slow down for a period of time, but the cost of not doing anything is much greater. If you’re going to embrace UX, start running parallel paths. Choose a pilot project you can run with user-centered design while still doing incremental updates on the current product. This gives you an internal case study that will demonstrate the benefits of UX. [25:14] Tell us more about how to incorporate UX. UX adds a Voice of the Customer program. You’re installing listening devices to find out how your customers are using your product, such as: in-app analytics quantitative longitudinal studies user interviews At the beginning, you need to do a batch of discovery. We use scorecards based on our experience in the industry to pair SaaS and UX criteria with customer research. The goal is to bring together all the data so the team can make decisions on it. Take bite-sized pieces. You could start with incorporating UX into one feature. If you do a complete redesign, know that it will take more discovery. During your pilot project, work on creating alignment in three areas: people, process, and purpose. You need the right people in the right seats doing the right things. The new people are doing a new process—research. You need UX to be aligned with the bigger vision. Many people equate UX with UI (user interface), but it’s not about making your product look pretty. Begin with low-fidelity design, moving to high-fidelity design. Action Guide: Put th

How product managers can solve positioning, packaging, and pricing for their products Today we are discussing how to price products, helping you avoid common mistakes and sharing steps to make your pricing smarter. Our guest is Ajit Ghuman. He is the Head of Product Marketing at Narvar, an enterprise-grade customer engagement platform for retailers. Ajit is an expert in software pricing and his book, Price to Scale, covers an end-to-end approach to packaging & pricing for high-growth technology companies. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:49] What mistakes do companies make when pricing their products? When a company is having trouble in the market, price point is never really the problem. Upstream issues cause price difficulties. Follow the PPP hierarchy: First solve positioning, then packaging, then pricing. Start with product strategy, determining why the product exists in the market. Then come up with positioning, which is how customers see the product. Next discuss packaging, which is a way to maximize value for different segments. Finally, choose the price point. [4:52] What’s involved in packaging? Packaging means including the right set of features the customer values. A large enterprise has different needs from a small business, and they want different features. The point of packaging is to maximize revenue from the market by creating an offer tailored to the customer. Large enterprises want a bundle of features, and higher pricing can increase their perception of value. Small businesses may value a cheaper, lightweight package. [8:57] Suppose we created a SaaS-based platform for product managers. How do we price this product? We’ll go through the PPP hierarchy. To determine our positioning, we identify our target segment and how we’re differentiating. Suppose we’re creating product management roadmap software for big enterprise teams. We’re differentiating by allowing a lot of PMs to collaborate. Next, we move to packaging. A common approach to packaging is “good, better, best,” where a company creates different levels of packages like Pro, Elite, and Platinum. Another option, which works better for enterprise products like our example, is value-based packaging. We make a list of all the features of the product and map them to the use cases the product solves. Then we decide whether our market is homogeneous, needing a single package, or heterogeneous, needing multiple packages. We present our packages to customers and ask them to rate how well the packages perform each capability to meet their needs. Let’s assume we create two packages for our product. Finally, we think about pricing. Before choosing the price point, we need to make two decisions: our pricing metric and our pricing structure. We have two options for pricing metric: Capability-based pricing sells the product for a flat fee. Consumption-based pricing, which is most common for SaaS products, charges a price per user (most common), API call, SMS sent, etc. For our product, we would choose consumption-based pricing and charge per user per month. We have two options for pricing structure: A linear scale charges the same amount per user. A three-part tariff provides a volume discount for more users. Finally, we choose the price point. There are many ways to measure this, including willingness-to-buy surveys, conjoint analysis, or Van Westendorp surveys. Conjoint analysis is best for simpler products. For our software, I would use Van Westendorp. We’ll get a range of options and choose the price point based on competition, positioning, and strategy. The three important decisions of packaging, pricing metrics, and pricing structure contribute more to revenue than the actual price. [17:39] What is the role of product managers in the PPP process? Product managers play a key role in positioning because they understand the customers’ problem and needs. Their insights from customers are also important in packaging. PMs play less of a role in pricing, which is mostly done by revenue teams. Too many organizations miss the opportunity to use product managers’ insights in marketing and positioning. In my career, every time we have a clear understanding of what the buyer and user want, everything—pricing, marketing, selling, sales—goes much better. I encourage product managers to take on a complete business role rather than being just product owners. Often product managers don’t understand or agree with the price attached to a product. The price should be based on the value the customer perceives. Everything is about value. [22:20] What can product managers do to help Sales present pricing information? For subscription products, customers want to be able to predict the impact on pricing as their usage grows. Product managers can communicate with other teams to create the best pricing structure based on what makes most sense from the customers’

Dive deep into a valuable tool for product managers In this discussion we are learning more about the power and use of Jobs-to-be-Done with Bob Moesta. Bob is an innovator, entrepreneur, and the co-creator of the Jobs-to-be-Done Theory to investigate consumers’ motivations and decision-making processes. He also co-founded the Re-Wired Group, which helps companies repeatedly innovate and reliably predict success. He is also a Research Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute. Bob has had amazing mentors and many accomplishments. I’m sure you’ll find this discussion valuable. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:54] How did you get involved in Jobs-to-be-Done? I’ve been breaking things for a long time and building things for the past 35 years. As I was building products, I would get marketing reports that told me who the customers were but wouldn’t tell me why they were doing what they were doing. One of my mentors, Dr. Deming, told me nothing is random; everything is caused; we need to understand why people buy what they buy. From that perspective, I started to understand the underlying causality behind why people buy something or do something new. I worked with Rick Pedi to make Jobs-to-be-Done a method and then another of my mentors, Clay Christensen, who made it a theory. Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) is a methodology based on the premise that people don’t buy products; they hire them to do jobs. It helps us understand the struggling moments that cause people to do something different. To solve problems, you need to see the big picture. [7:22] What’s an example of a time you used JTBD? When I was a VP of sales and marketing in the house building industry, I realized that our features looked like everyone else’s features and we could apply the JTBD methods to understand this business differently. We built homes for first-time home buyers, divorced families with kids, and downsizers. I asked, What causes someone to decide today’s the day they’re going to sell their house and move into one of my condos? The product is irrelevant. The important thing is to know what the customer wants, regardless of how we solve it. Understand people’s context, desired outcome, and the struggling moment that causes them to want to change something. JTBD helps us understand the forces of progress, anxieties, friction, and habit that are pushing and pulling people, and the phases they go through of having a first thought, passively looking for something new, actively looking, and deciding. When I was interviewing home buyers, I learned that a big friction point was getting rid of stuff to downsize. To decrease friction, we added two years of storage and a place to sort the stuff at the clubhouse, and increased sales 22%. We also provided crews that would fix people’s houses so they could sell. I realized I wasn’t really a builder; I was a mover. By making these changes, we went from 4% market share to 14% market share. One of my mentors, Dr. Taguchi, said, There is way more that we don’t know than what we know, and don’t ever forget it. He taught me to always talk to consumers and understand their underlying causal mechanisms. [14:01] What are the jobs of Snickers and Milky Way? Snickers and Milky Way are both chocolate candy bars with almost all the same ingredients, except Snickers has peanuts. You would think they compete, but we found the candy bars get hired in very different contexts for very different outcomes. When people eat Snickers, it’s typically because they have work to do and are running out of energy, and they want something small and quick to eat. People almost always eat Milky Way alone and very slowly after something emotional happens. Snickers satisfies physically. Milky Way helps people feel better emotionally. [18:53] How do we apply JTBD? Start with framing the fundamental question of what you’re trying to answer. We start with 15-20 questions, then boil them down to one core question. For example, “What causes people to move from the house they’ve lived in for 20+ years to a new condo?” The question can be about a product, a group of consumers, or a struggling moment. Next, we recruit people who have tried and successfully and unsuccessfully solved the problem. We conduct hour-long interviews with these people, asking questions that help us really get at what people mean and understand their actions. After each interview, we debrief and codify the causal mechanisms—pushes and pulls—that made them try to solve the problem. We start to see patterns of the different outcomes people want in different contexts. We use nearest neighbor analysis to understand how many unique stories we have. Now that we understand the jobs people are hiring a product to do, we decide what we want to do. [24:31] In your interview, how do you identify why people do what they do? Have an empathe

How product managers can excel in both supportive and challenging organizational environments In this discussion we share ideas and experiences for getting more benefits from product management and how you can help with that, regardless of whether your organization supports product management or not. To help us with that is someone who has made it happen, increasing the visibility and effectiveness of product management, in different types of organizations. Her name is Monika Murugesan and she is Vice President of Product Management at Sentient Energy. She focuses on portfolio roadmaps, innovation, strategy, and customer success. . Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:26] What’s it like to be a product manager in a product-centered organization where product management is valued? In an organization like this where the product manager’s function and value are understood, product management is usually a separate function. The product managers report to a chief product officer or CEO and have a big-picture understanding of the company strategy, which they can relate to the product portfolio strategy. [6:24] How can product managers excel in that environment? As a product manager, you build the right product and release it at the right time, so you need to know what the right product is and make sure you can build it with your resources and get it to market on time. PdMs interact with every division in the company—finance, marketing, sales, customers, quality, manufacturing. You have to be on top of everything and excel at time management and communication, because you are responsible for solving problems related to every division. [10:37] What’s it like to be in an organization where product management isn’t honored or recognized? Product management isn’t an easy job, because PdMs are the CEOs of the product without any positional authority. It’s a challenging role because it requires influential capacity, and it’s even tougher when no one understands product management. In organizations where product management is not well-understood, the PdM role blurs between project management and outbound marketing, and PdMs are usually under engineering teams or marketing teams. It’s a tougher position when your peers don’t recognize what you do. [12:02] How can product managers excel in that challenging environment? Build credibility and trust by influencing with the 3 H’s: Head: logical reasoning, e.g., using data to show the engineering team why it’s best for the company to pursue a project Hands: mutual benefits, e.g., showing a sales team why a strategy will benefit both of you Heart: emotional connection, e.g., showing developers how the product they’re building will help people; telling engineers what customers say about how your products are helping Consider organizing a brown bag lunch to share customer stories with your engineering or sales teams. [17:00] How can we build strong connections with customers? It’s important to build a good relationship with sales so they will introduce you to customers and take you along on sales calls. You can’t build the next product sitting at your desk all day. Innovative ideas come from seeing customers in action. [18:53] What are the benefits to having product management as a separate function? There are some pros to having product management aligned with another function. For example, if product management is under engineering, product managers are more technical and understand the engineer’s challenges and their innovative ideas that can become part of the product. However, the ideal output from product management is achieved when product management is a separate function. When product management is a separate function, product managers see the big picture and can set up product strategy that aligns with the long-term company strategy, so product managers have a direct connection with the leaders of the organization, and engineering and sales are their peers. Action Guide: Put the information Monika shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Monika on LinkedIn Find out more about Monika’s product manager coaching, Apex Specialist Innovation Quote “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” -Michael Porter 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

How product managers can build great products by focusing on their customers’ unmet needs Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) is a valuable tool for product managers and innovators, and there are different thoughts on how to actually put it into optimal practice. Our guest, Jay Haynes, is helping that problem by creating the first and only JTBD software for product, marketing, and sales teams. He founded THRV (pronounced Thrive) to make that happen. Also, Jay has three decades of innovation experience and has helped Microsoft, Dropbox, eBay, Twitter, American Express, Oracle, Target, and others. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:54] What is Jobs-to-be-Done? Jobs-to-be-Done is a method to build great products that customers love. The core idea is that customers are not buying a product; they’re hiring a product to get a job done. A job to be done is a goal a customer needs to achieve, and it’s independent of any product. For example, we don’t want iPods, cassettes, or CDs; we want to create a mood with music using whichever product best helps us accomplish that job. [4:16] What problem does Jobs-to-be-Done help product managers with? It helps us fail less. If you start with a brand-new idea, you have no way to judge whether the idea is useful. JTBD lets you start with your customers’ unmet needs instead. Then you can more quickly and efficiently come up with ideas, which will be much more valuable once you understand their problems. [6:04] How do we get started with Jobs-to-be-Done? Everything starts with the customer. You need to know who your customers are. It’s amazing how many teams disagree on whom their customer is. Many companies define their customers using personas, which can lead us away from the core customer who benefits from getting the job done. Instead of limiting yourself to personas, group your customers into job beneficiaries, who are the people who benefit from getting the job done. For example, Nest the thermostat company focuses on the job beneficiaries. Traditionally, thermostat manufacturers sold to contractors, not homeowners. Nest redefined their customer and decided to sell directly to homeowners. This was smart, because homeowners are the job beneficiaries, benefiting from the thermostat, which performs the job of creating a comfortable home. Often, especially for B2B products, we have multiple different groups with different needs interacting with our product. In addition to job beneficiaries, there are job executors, who help the beneficiary get the job done, and purchasers, who purchase the product. Job executors perform consumption jobs like installing the thermostat, while job beneficiaries perform function jobs like using the thermostat. Both are important, but increasingly consumption jobs can be done by the job beneficiary. Focusing on the job executor isn’t good for your long-term growth, because someone is going to figure out how to get rid of the job executor, like Nest did. Focus on the job beneficiaries, because they’re your true market. [15:07] What’s the next step? Next we go to the market. The market you’re in is the most important decision you can make as a product team. If you have to choose between being a great entrepreneur in a terrible market or a mediocre entrepreneur in an awesome market, choose the awesome market. If you haven’t thought about what your market is and what your customer’s job is, you’ve made a critical mistake. There are no product-based markets. There are only markets for getting jobs done. For example, when Apple created the iPod, they defined their market based on the product. They sold $30 billion of iPods, but today the iPod market is zero. The market isn’t for iPods; it’s for creating a mood with music. Pandora experienced enormous success by finding a different way to create a mood with music. Speed and accuracy are the measures of success for Jobs-to-be-Done. The Kodak Brownie camera was one of the most successful products in history because it made photography fast and easy. All you had to do was point the camera and push a button. [21:47] Once we know our customer and market, what’s next? Next you need to identify your customer’s unmet needs. Jobs-to-be-Done theory breaks down your customer’s goal into very specific customer needs. We all know innovative products should satisfy unmet customer needs, but companies and product teams often disagree on what a customer need is. Let’s look at an example of how Jobs-to-be-Done can help define customer needs. Suppose the job to be done is getting a customer to a destination on time. First, break down the steps the customer has to take to get the job done. There are six categories of steps based on George Pólya’s problem-solving technique: Understand the problem: estimate the departure time Plan to solve the problem: plan the stops along the route Execute the so

How product managers can benefit from Scrum for joyful, prosperous, and sustainable work The name of this podcast is changing to Product Mastery Now, to better reflect our purpose of helping product managers becoming product masters, gaining practical knowledge, influence and confidence so you’ll create products customers love. The 2020 State of Agile Report found that only 5% of organizations have never used Agile practices. Scrum is the most popular Agile methodology and there is a good chance you are using it. The move to remote work last year impacted how teams work, including their use of Scrum. To learn about these impacts and other tips for improving the use of Scrum, Howard Sublett, the CEO of the Scrum Alliance, joins us. The Scrum Alliance is a member-driven nonprofit trade association that supports the Agile movement. They have trained and certified over a million people and provide a vast community for Agile practitioners to interact. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:55] What is the Scrum Alliance and what does your role as Chief Product Owner involve? The Scrum Alliance is a non-profit organization, or as I like to think about it, a “for-impact” organization. We’re a certifying body and training organization with trainers in every country and about 1.38 million certifications. We have a mission to empower our members and guide individuals and organizations into Agile practices, principles, and values in order to make the world of work more joyful, prosperous, and sustainable. Scrum gives teams the context, autonomy, mastery, and purpose to be able to solve complex problems and delight customers. Scrum teams have joy in their work because they understand the work they’re doing, the problems they’re solving, and their impact. [5:56] At the Scrum Alliance, how do you “eat your own dogfood”—how do you use the practices you promote? Our staff is organized as cross-departmental Scrum teams. Each team includes people from marketing, education, customer support, and software development, as well as a product owner and Scrum master. In the past, we had a separate team from each department, but we found that there were deep dependencies between departments, so we began to work in cross-departmental teams. Unlike many Scrum teams, our teams work in two-week cadences, and every two weeks they do a sprint review to an advisory team of real customers. Interaction with customers is huge for creating joyful work. It’s important for product managers to see the people who are going to use the products they’re creating. [12:05] How is Scrum being applied in a remote work environment? Many organizational leaders were afraid Scrum wouldn’t work in a remote environment, but they found out it does. Individual remote work can be lonely, but Scrum team members don’t do individual work; they work together. When a Scrum team works on a problem, the need to work together helps them collaborate. Many teams now have open Zoom calls that they use to see each other on video while they’re working on problems. Because it’s based on collaboration, Scrum makes remote work a little easier on people. New technology and tools are also helping make remote work easier and more connected. [18:27] The most common struggle I’ve seen when organizations adopt Scrum is that leaders feel helpless since the natural rhythm of information flow is disrupted. What can leaders and organizations do about this struggle? I think the key word is feel. Leaders feel helpless. In a traditional environment, leaders feel like they know exactly when a project is going to be done and what it’s going to be like, but in reality it never happens exactly like they expected. Leaders need to acknowledge what they don’t know. Distributing some decision-making to people closer to the customer may feel uncomfortable, but the leaders were already uncomfortable—they just pretended they weren’t. It made them feel comfortable to have a chart that said a project was going to be done on October 3rd, but the product wasn’t finished then, and their expectations still weren’t fulfilled. Some organization are building Agile-enablement teams, which include leaders of different areas in the organization and function as information centers of how teams are progressing. Most importantly, leaders need to acknowledge they don’t have all the answers. In Agile work, the bets are short and the risks are small. Each sprint is only a week or two, and you can make a new bet next week. The pace of change is fast, and you get customer feedback frequently. By working in small increments, we reduce risk and can deliver a better product to the customer. [25:31] What is the role of the product owner? Some organizations try to change the role of product owner to make Scrum fit with their current organizational design rather than changing the orga

Principles product managers can use to guide creativity and innovation The name of this podcast is changing to Product Mastery Now, to better reflect our purpose of helping product managers becoming product masters, gaining practical knowledge, influence and confidence so you’ll create products customers love. In this episode we discuss the obsessions of everyday innovators, as that is the language our guest uses to describe mindsets and actions that make us better innovators. You already know why this is important—because better innovators and product managers are more likely to create products customers love. Our guest knows a lot about this as he is the founder and CEO of five tech companies and a frequent keynote speaker. Interestingly, he started his career as a jazz guitarist. His name is Josh Linkner. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:59] What was it like to transition from a professional jazz guitarist to a founder of five tech companies? Surprisingly, there are many similarities between jazz and business. Both are about improvising and course-correcting when you inevitably screw up; they’re both messy, fluid, and creative. Jazz requires skills like passing the baton of leadership, taking responsible risks, and tinkering. Both jazz and innovation are about collaboration and co-creation. [5:48] From your book, what are the “obsessions of everyday innovators”? In my research for the book, interviewing amazing creators of all types, I found several common mindsets or obsessions of innovators. We can all apply these principles toward the outcomes that matter most to us, whether in business, our families, or our communities. Let’s dive into some of the obsessions of everyday innovators. [7:06] Fall in love with the problem. Fall in love with the problem more than a specific solution. Be willing to adapt, and study the problem from all different angles so you can solve it in the best possible way. [8:38] Don’t forget the dinner mint. Find a way to add delight with no more than 5% extra creative juice. Think about when you go to a nice restaurant and they give you a special treat compliments of the chef. That small surprise totally transforms your experience. When you’re creating a product, add a little extra something to take it to a whole different level. For example, a restaurant in New York City called Eleven Madison Park has a team of employees called Dream Weavers whose job is to add extra delight. A family with young children was visiting, and a server overheard that it was their first time to see snow. The Dream Weavers arranged for the family to be escorted out to a limousine, presented with brand new sleds, and whisked off to Central Park for an evening of sledding. It might sound crazy, but that family will never forget that night. Eleven Madison Park follows the 95/5 Doctrine; they spend 95% of their resources, time, money, and energy being super efficient and disciplined so they can spend 5% of their time “foolishly,” but it’s not really foolish at all because providing those extra special “dinner mints” is part of their strategy and a key driver of their incredible success in a crowded space. [13:27] Start before you’re ready. Too often, opportunities are out there, but we wait too long. When we wait for certainty, we can lose the opportunity altogether. Don’t wait for a bulletproof game plane. Just get going. It will be messy, and your first iterations will be sloppy and ineffective, but you’re going to learn quickly and course-correct. Suppose you and I both have an idea, and you test it for six months in the lab until it’s perfect, while I get going today. My first version is going to stink, but I have six months to catch up, pivot, adapt, learn, and grow. By the time you take your first shot, I’m way ahead of you. Meanwhile, the opportunity might shift and you might miss it altogether. It’s better to start quick and sloppy than to wait for perfection. [17:17] Open a test kitchen. Embrace rapid experimentation. Some people think innovation is about creating a once-in-a-lifetime perfect idea, but that’s not how it works. It’s much more effective, efficient, and less costly to use constant rapid experimentation. Shake Shack, a restaurant in New York City, has an innovation kitchen underneath one of their stores where they test new recipes, get feedback from their customers, and experiment with shaving time off their processes. They constantly experiment not only with their product but also with their processes, marketing and technology. Even if you don’t have a physical test kitchen or innovation lab, you can still be testing. The test kitchen principle is about a mindset of constant experimentation. There are a couple of ways to test: First, is the farmer’s market model—you look around at all your options and start experimenting, just l

How product managers can prepare for success in a rapidly shifting work environment This podcast will soon be known as Product Mastery Now. The name is changing, but the purpose is the same—helping product leaders and managers become product masters, gaining practical knowledge, influence, and confidence so you’ll create products customers love. The future of work is changing for many people. We saw some changes accelerate as a result of the pandemic, and others have already been in motion. The changes will impact product managers and innovators. Our guest, Matt Coatney, has studied the future of work as it is also related to his interests in the future of AI, automation, and other applications of technology. Matt has 25 years of experience bringing advanced technology products to market in a variety of industries and for some of the largest global organizations, including Microsoft, IBM, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Pfizer, Deloitte, and HP. Use this discussion to help you consider how your work will change in the near future. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:56] What is broken about work? As technology has evolved, it has made work easier, decreasing friction, but there’s a disconnect between changing technology and traditional corporations. Changes in technology are disrupting industries and, more importantly, changing the way we work, but large corporations are not set up to accommodate a world where technology is changing quickly. There’s a growing rift between management and employees. Engagement is at an all-time low, and job loyalty is not what it used to be. All these are symptoms that the underlying culture and systems need to be modernized for the world of the 21st century. Many people love their job but despise the environment. We see a lot of people loving project work, but the rest of their organization isn’t in a project-based mindset. [8:21] Your new book is titled The Human Cloud. What is the human cloud? The Human Cloud encapsulates the new world of work. In the book, we discuss two main themes and how they impact the way we work: the freelance economy and shift to project-based work artificial intelligence and how technology is creeping into every part of our life The Human Cloud is a visualization of a global cloud of people and devices that are all connected to accomplish an end. The cloud includes human and digital resources that you can tap into to do outsourced work. In the past, freelance work and AI were low-value, but now top-notch professionals are choosing careers of freelance work, and there are new capabilities that didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago. People are becoming more comfortable with using outside experts, and technology is making it more convenient and inexpensive to outsource work. [14:00] What is a Changemaker, and how will Changemakers drive the future of work? A Changemaker is an entrepreneur or intrapreneur who is leveraging their resources to create value. They’re growing themselves, their business, or their role in their company. They’re taking charge of their work, and their focus is to drive value. Taking ownership of your work is empowering and provides accountability. People aren’t born Changemakers; you can develop the Changemaker attitude and approach to work. While writing the book, we interviewed freelancers and found that they operate as a business of one. They constantly think about how they can add value and stop doing things that aren’t adding value. We see tensions and dissatisfied employees when employees want to take ownership of their work but are in an organizational structure that doesn’t know how to let them do that. The 20th century corporate environment was very structured and hierarchical, which produced results but did not empower individuals or provide accountability. Many companies are still using those structures, but some companies are finding ways to work better. For example, one model assigns everyone to a pod that is working on a project. Once the project is finished, they’re reassigned. Each pod is given a mission, constraints, and a budget and then works independently to create value. The corporate structure is like a portfolio, managing projects, putting more bets on the projects that show value. Reid Hoffman talks about the two types of roles in an organization. People in traditional management roles needs structure, rules, guidance, and certainty, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, when an entrepreneur is put in that environment, they rankle at it. Entrepreneurs work better in an environment where they are given freedom to complete a mission and add value, with a mindset of project-based work. We’re shifting toward project-based work, and the traditional infrastructure is still vital but becoming smaller. [23:54] What should product managers do to prepare for this paradigm shift in work? How can they be Ch

How product managers can avoid false beliefs and revive their careers In this episode, instead of me interviewing a guest, I’m being interviewed. Mike Belsito, co-organizer of the INDUSTRY conference for software product managers, interviewed me a few weeks ago for an INDUSTRY webinar. We both found the discussion very valuable and I’m sharing it with you on this podcast as well. The topic is: Are your misconceptions about product management holding your career back? Product management has a longer history than many people realize, dating formally back to the 1930s. The first professional association for product managers that is still in existence, PDMA, began in 1976. While the discipline is not new, several misconceptions exist about what product management is and what product managers do. In this discussion, I’ll help you find the best place for you to contribute to creating products and services customers love so your career will take off. Check out the Virtual INDUSTRY conference coming up on April 20 and 21 by going to industryconference.com. I’m not receiving any commission from INDUSTRY, just recommending it because it is good. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:45] Tell us about the misconception that product management is a brand-new discipline. Recently, product management has grown in popularity and visibility, but the discipline has been around for a long time. People have been building products for a very, very long time, and product management as a discipline originated around the 1930s at P&G, where product managers were originally called brand managers and were responsible for developing a product, growing a brand, and getting customers to adopt the new product. The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), the first professional organization for product managers, began in 1976. I found out about product management through PDMA and found their resources and body of knowledge really helpful. As product managers, we have access to a solid foundation of knowledge. [8:00] What are some other common product management misconceptions? Many people think that because they don’t have the job title of product manager, they’re not doing product management. Actually, many people involved in product innovation, product development, or product marketing are doing product management. I use the IDEA framework to describe the full spectrum of product work: Ideate—coming up with ideas and putting together a concept to pursue Develop—making the concept real, e.g., writing software or manufacturing Evolve—continuing to make the product better after launch Accelerate—practices that improve product work At some organizations, product managers are all about Ideate; at others they focus on Develop or Evolve. Understanding the full breadth of product work helps us find the aspects that are a good fit for us and bring us joy. [13:15] What’s an example of someone reframing their work as product management? A listener of my podcast was a product marketer responsible for growing the product’s position in the marketplace. He reached out and said he really wanted to get into product management, which he believed was all about coming up with new ideas. After talking, he realized that he could easily call his work product management. He was learning what customers want and improving existing products. He ended up continuing to work in product marketing and loved it. All he had to do was think about his work differently and it became a good fit for him. I hear many people say they love the work they’re doing but despise the environment they’re in. If they reframe their work, look for the aspects they really enjoy, and try to find work that aligns with that, they may be happier. [15:53] What misconceptions about product management are holding people back in their careers? One thing holding people back is not having good alignment between their role in product and where they find joy. This might be because they don’t have a broad enough picture of what product work entails. Someone might think product management is all about customers but find that their organization thinks it’s all about data. With a broad perspective on product work, they may be able to help their organization think differently, because their organization is limiting itself if it doesn’t let product managers gain customer insights. One listener emailed me and said he had had his first interview for a product manager position, but he was disappointed because the organization didn’t talk about product management in at all the same way as I do on my podcast. It’s important to remember there are different perspectives on product management, and understanding the full breadth of product management can help us recognize we might be focused on different areas but we’re all working together on product. [19:01] What can we do if we

A framework for product managers to dig deep into their customers’ needs I am changing the name of the podcast to Product Mastery Now. The new name is coming soon. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but it will show in your podcast player not as The Everyday Innovator but as Product Mastery Now. The logo will look the same—just the name is changing. This episode has two of my favorite things. First, our guest is discussing how he got started with Jobs-to-be-Done and how you can use this valuable tool yourself. Second, he is also the co-founder of Product Collective and the co-organizer of INDUSTRY, the conference for software product managers. INDUSTRY has a virtual conference coming up on April 20 and 21 and it is worth checking out by going to IndustryConference.com. Our guest is Mike Belsito. Before his current work, he had a number of product roles and experiences, giving him insights that can help us. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [10:08] What’s an example of Jobs-to-be-Done? Jobs-to-be-Done is a framework for understanding how and why people choose products. For example, in my hometown of Lakewood, we have a restaurant called Angelo’s, which is a neighborhood pizzeria, and a Little Caesar’s, which is fast food pizza. If I’m rushing home from my son’s soccer practice and need to be home and eating dinner in ten minutes, I grab a pizza from Little Caesar’s. If friends are visiting, I take them to Angelo’s because I want to show them Lakewood’s personality. I’m not choosing a pizza based on the toppings or ingredients. It’s all about the context and the circumstances. In the language of Jobs-to-be-Done, I’m not “hiring” the pizza to complete the job of feeding me. I’m choosing convenience or entertaining my friends. [18:39] What are the elements of Jobs-to-be-Done? Struggling moment—a moment of pain or need, when we wish there were a better way. As Bob Moesta, a pioneer of JTBD, says, the struggling moment is the basis of innovation. Push—realizing there has to be a better way and deciding we’re not going to live with the current solution anymore. We’re pushed to find a new solution. Pull—when we become aware of the better way or new solution. Anxieties—excuses for why we shouldn’t switch to the new solution. Inertia—we stop exploring the new solution because it seems easier to stick with the old solution than to go through all the changes to switch. [23:59] How do we conduct a Jobs-to-be-Done interview? A Jobs-to-be-Done interview uncovers all the elements listed above. First, identify whom you’re going to interview. Avoid interviewing outliers; interview average customers or people who aren’t customers yet but have similar problems. Block off two hours for each interview. Spend the first 30 minutes doing a pre-interview; don’t plan out an exact script, but list the important areas you want to explore. Spend a full hour with the customer. Then spend 30 minutes in a post-session, reviewing while the interview is still fresh in your mind. When you’re interviewing, dig deep. I learned this from Bob Moesta, who helped us interview INDUSTRY customers. One time we were interviewing a customer named Matt and asked, “Why did you buy a ticket to INDUSTRY?” Matt said he wanted to learn from the best. I would have moved on to the next question, but Bob asked, “What do mean by that? Who is the best? What do you mean by ‘learn’?” Bob kept asking questions and digging deeper, and we uncovered valuable insights we otherwise would not have found. Bob told us to act like documentary filmmakers—we’re trying to uncover the story, and sometimes what people initially say is not the whole story. We need to dig deep to capture the whole story. Action Guide: Put the information Mike shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Learn more about Jobs-to-be-Done from TEI 106 with Tony Ulwick Check out ProductCollective.com Register for the INDUSTRY 2021 Virtual Conference Connect with Mike on Twitter or LinkedIn Listen to Clayton Christensen discuss the job of a milkshake Innovation Quote “No one can stop you from doing exactly what you want to do. If you can accept that the cavalry won’t come, and if you can be the cavalry, it gives you a chance to be happy.” – Mark Duplass, filmmaker 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

Pillars and practices for product managers to deeply understand their customers’ problems I am changing the name of the podcast to Product Mastery Now. The new name is coming soon. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but it will show in your podcast player not as The Everyday Innovator but as Product Mastery Now. The logo will look the same—just the name is changing. I expect you’ll find this episode very value because it is focused on how you can get better at making products, which is a topic important to all product managers and leaders. I am joined by Heather Samarin and Vidya Dinamani, the co-founders of Product Rebels, a product management leadership training company. They have enormous experience in product management and delighting customers through product-market fit. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:09] How did your time at Intuit help you as product professionals? We learned how to stand in our customer’s shoes. We performed observational research that allowed us to have customer empathy and understand our customers’ pain and problems. Clayton Christensen introduced a program called Design for Delight, which helped us innovate by observing, experimenting quickly, and getting feedback from customers. Customer learning was infused into all the product decisions we made. [9:05] What led to your book Groundwork: Get Better at Making Better Products? We see product teams and leaders hitting the same pitfalls we have hit. Product leaders struggle with an overwhelming set of priorities and struggle to figure out where to put their effort, and investors shy away when they can’t see how you’re going to spend your money. Product teams struggle with making decisions. They argue about features, letting the loudest or highest paid person get their way instead of listening to what the customer wants. These problems lead to unclear value propositions, lack of clarity, and unhappy customers. We kept seeing problems like these over and over again, across all industries and in all sizes of teams. We wanted to get to the root cause of the problems and create tools and tactics to solve them. [14:53] Your book Groundwork covers two areas—the Pillars and the Practices. What can you tell us about them? The three pillars are the foundation for good decision making and focus: Convergent Problem Statement—defining a problem in a way that drives focus Actionable Persona—knowing your ideal customer to allow you to make trade-offs confidently Individualized Needs—intimately understanding your customers’ needs The three practices are daily actions that allow us to consistently get to the pillars: Developing a Hypothesis—clearly defining what you want to learn when you talk with customers Scrappy Research—researching continually without a ton of money and resources Getting Commitment—framing information to lead to an actionable decision [19:16] Tell us more about the Convergent Problem Statement. We naturally want to create solutions, but we need to first focus on the customers’ problems. When we observe and really understand the customer, we define multiple different problems. Think broadly about customers’ different problems, then converge on one. A convergent problem statement expresses the difficulty or pain the customer has with no attempt to address a solution. Often, we work on solutions when we think we’re working on problems. Take a look at your work and see if you’re just working on a feature or actually describing the problem. [21:32] Tell us more about the Actionable Persona. Once you have a clear problem, you want to know intimately whom you’re solving it for so you can make good decisions about how to design the product and prioritize features. Many teams don’t find personas valuable, but we’re redefining personas and making them actionable, simple, and something everyone can use. We define personas using character trait spectrums that help you understand different aspects of your ideal customer and take action to design the product for them. The more focused you are in targeting your ideal customer, the better you’ll be able to delight them. [24:49] Tell us more about Individualized Needs. In an ideal world, you’d solve one problem for one customer, but in reality you’re solving many problems for many customer segments. To create delight, you need to group together a persona and a problem statement. Think in silos. Understand the needs of each segment so you can make decisions about tradeoffs for each persona. Action Guide: Put the information Heather and Vidya shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit Heather and Vidya’s website, Product Rebels Check out Groundwork: Get Better at Making Better Products on Amazon Innovation Quote “Innovation comes from saying no to a thousand things.” – Steve Jobs &#82

The skills product managers need in a changing environment This podcast will soon be changing its name to Product Mastery Now. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but it will show in your podcast player not as The Everyday Innovator but as Product Mastery Now. The logo will look the same—just the name is changing. The role of product manager is shifting, and you can position yourself for future success if you know how it is shifting. Our guest has some unique insights about this as he is the founder of Product School, a large community of product managers. His name is Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, and he’s here to share the shifts that are emerging and how you can prepare. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:22] What are some of the shifts in product management you’ve seen in the last year or two? When I started seven years ago, product management wasn’t well-understood. Now, there’s more understanding about what product management is. Many companies have a chief product officer who reports directly to the CEO. More and more companies are hiring product managers, even though many companies are downsizing because of COVID. They still need product managers to make their products and sell online, and with remote working, they need more efficient collaboration. Product management isn’t just for high-tech companies anymore; all industries need product managers. [5:05] What changes have you seen in product managers’ influence? The power dynamic is definitely changing. Product managers now have more influence because they’re in the middle of the organization, connecting the dots between engineering, design, and marketing. They create the roadmaps and vision. Product managers feel empowered because many CEOS are coming from a product background, setting up a product culture in their organizations. [6:22] Why is the cross-functionality of product management important? Product managers are generalists. They understand the company’s different functions and the customer. Product managers connect everyone under a common vision, similar to what CEOs do, which is why many product managers become CEOs and many startup founders and CEOs later become product leaders. [7:26] How can product managers be more effective at relating to different functions? Learn about functions you don’t have a background in. If you are trying to move toward a product manager role, and you have experience in marketing, take a year to learn about design and engineering. Become more complete by picking up skills outside of what you’re really good at. [9:04] What are the key capabilities a well-rounded product manager has? Technical acumen: You don’t have to be an engineer, but you will be working with engineers, so you need to speak tech and be able to earn engineers’ respect. Industry domain or business acumen: You don’t need an MBA, but you need to understand your customer, market, competition, and product, so you can be passionate about the problem you’re solving. Communication skills: Be comfortable communicating with different stakeholders, not only in big presentations but also over email, in-person, and online. You need to be there for your team and have time to support and coach others. [11:54] Tell us about your journey to become an effective communicator. It wasn’t easy. I immigrated from Spain, so I’m a non-native English speaker, and I still make a lot of mistakes when speaking. I had nothing to lose and no experience at all, so I pushed myself to practice, practice, practice. It’s okay to be uncomfortable; learning is a process. I encourage people to go for it and start practicing communication, even if they’re not native speakers or professional communicators. Non-verbal communication is important too; smiling while you talk goes a long way. Curiosity is also very powerful in making us more approachable and effective. [15:51] How is the role of product management changing going into the future? We recently released a report called “The Future of Product Management,” and identified several trends in how the industry is moving. Product management is becoming more data-driven. It’s becoming more of a science than an art. You can’t get away with just having a strong vision and being a great communicator; you need to also look at the numbers and listen to your users. There’s much more technology available specifically for product managers. These tools are becoming more and more visual, meaning you don’t need technical expertise to use them. Product management is becoming more collaborative. Product teams now include engineers, designers, and marketers, in addition to product managers, and they all work together to generate ideas and create successful products. Product managers need to learn about others’ work so they can connect with their teams.

How product managers can get their teams on the same page This podcast is getting a new name—Product Masters Now. The name officially changes in a few weeks, but I want you to know it is coming. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but it will show in your podcast player not as The Everyday Innovator but as Product Masters Now. The logo will look the same—just the name is changing. Effective product managers are good communicators and can get team members aligned to meet the objectives of a product. However, that is easier said than done. Knowing a few simple tools to create team alignment, getting everyone on the same page, makes a big difference in your success and the success of your products. To help us with those tools, Dr. Stefano Mastrogiacomo, a project management professor, consultant and author fascinated by human coordination, joins us. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:30] Why do some teams underperform? Teams underperform when members work around each other and not with each other. This is caused by two factors: The team climate is unsafe psychologically—trust is lacking; there may be conflict. When the team activities are poorly aligned—when teams do not understand and trust each other, they experience confusion. [4:17] How can we recognize an unsafe team climate, and what are its effects? Visible symptoms of an unsafe climate include lack of recognition, disengagement, and team members losing the joy of working together. As Amy Edmondson said, psychological safety is the belief that the team is safe enough for interpersonal risk-taking. When the team is not psychologically safe, we’re afraid to speak up and share new ideas, and that undermines innovation. Because of fear, we won’t wake up the collective genius. Trust and psychological safety are cousins. Trust is the perception that I can be vulnerable with you, and psychological safety describes a climate of trust. We all can tell very rapidly whether we’re in a place that’s psychologically safe. When we are, we have joy and motivation. We want to wake up and go work with people we enjoy working with. During my academic research, we followed several teams to measure the impact of mutual clarity on task performance. We also included a question on motivation in our survey. We did nothing to encourage motivation, but surprisingly we found that the teams with greater mutual clarity had greater motivation. We concluded that motivation is a consequence of mutual clarity and mutual trust. [10:07] What are your tools to help teams improve? The high impact tools for teams improve the quality of everyday interactions, especially related to clarity on team processes and psychological safety. The five tools are: Team Alignment Map—structured discussion to help every team member clarify their individual contribution to the team Team Contract—clarifies the rules of the team before problems occur Respect Card—checklist of ways to show respect and recognition Fact Finder—helps team members ask good questions to decrease perception gaps and improve mutual understanding and trust Non-Violent Requests Guide—manages conflict and allows team members to express discontent or disagreement in a non-judgmental way leading to a constructive dialogue I divide the tools into blue pill tools and red pill tools. The Team Alignment Map is a Blue bill tool that clarifies team processes, mission, and goal. Red pill tools improve trust, and include the Team Contract, Respect Card, and Non-Violent Requests Guide. The Fact Finder is a hybrid of a blue pill tool and a red pill tool. [16:08] How does the Team Alignment Map help teams? The Team Alignment Map is most powerful when used for a new team, new project, or new collaboration. The map is a poster divided into four columns. Teams put the poster on a whiteboard, discuss each area, and fill in the columns. The four areas are: Joint Objectives: What do we want to achieve together? Write down the team’s objectives categorized under the team’s joint missions. Joint Commitments: Discuss everyone’s contribution to make the joint objectives happen. Joint Resources: What resources do we need to keep the commitments? Do we have what we need? Joint Risks: What might prevent us from achieving our objectives? Once you’ve filled in all four columns, you’ve completed the forward pass. Now everyone has a big picture of the collaboration ahead. Next, you must perform a backward pass to address missing resources and risks. Each missing resource or risk must be connected to a new objective and a new commitment. For example, suppose your objective is to run interviews with clients, and a risk is that the clients might not be available for interviews. In the backward pass, your new objective is to schedule all interviews. You assign a team member to do it and identify resources needed. The backward pass increases the resilience of the team by trans

Powerful actions and mindsets to take product managers to the next level This podcast is getting a new name to better reflect our objective here—helping product managers become product masters. That new name is Product Masters Now. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but I want you to know the name change is coming in a few weeks, and it will show in your podcast player not as The Everyday Innovator but as Product Masters Now. Product managers are in a perfect role to become senior leaders and part of the C-suite. Your role is in the middle of the work the organization does, giving you insights that few executives have, which is why you should become one. To prepare for that, you need to adjust your mindset, stop doing certain things, and start doing other things. Our guest, Evan Roth, is an expert on this as he has coached many product executives. We first met way back in episode 102 after a product VP and coaching client introduced me to him. Today, he’ll help you prepare a path to leadership roles. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:28] How can product managers change their mindset to prepare for a senior leadership role? Stretch out your thinking about the future—think longer term, wider breadth Embrace the gray—recognize that there won’t be perfect answers Focus on the big picture— when you’re a senior leader, someone else will focus on the details Stop thinking about urgent products and start thinking about important products—focus on solutions, opportunities, and possibilities Stop thinking about the details and start thinking about themes and trends Anticipate the future (future proofing) [10:38] How do we think bigger? Examine your mental models. Ask yourself, What is my framework? How far out am I thinking? Is my thinking unlimited or limited? Spend time with other people who think big. Change your mental models by being influenced by mentors. [13:53] Tell us more about how can mindset help product managers. I coach people on four aspects of mindset, using the acronym GAIL: Gremlin (inner critic) Assumption Interpretation Limiting Belief Our brains don’t distinguish between limiting beliefs and positive beliefs. A thought leads to a feeling, which leads to a behavior, which lead to an action. If we want to change our behavior and achieve a goal, we have to change our feelings and thoughts. We need to reframe the messages we tell ourselves. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine. If you want to create a new neural synapse, you have to practice mentally. Your mindset is not in your DNA. You can choose to change. The brain is seeking certainty and will continue to stay the same unless you actively change yourself. Awareness is big. If you want to change your mental models, you have to become aware of them. [20:21] What actions should product managers take as they’re moving toward senior leadership? First, list the things you’ll need to stop doing. When you advance to the next level, you can’t keep doing all the things you’re already doing or you’ll burn out. Identify the most valuable activity (MVA) you’ll be doing at the next level. Find out how senior leaders spend their time in ways that lead to economic or product success. Think differently by reading differently; read about what your next position may be like and read about things you don’t understand yet. At the executive level, you’ll be faced with things you don’t know all the time, so prepare yourself now. [22:28] What books can leaders read to expand their thinking? All great leadership starts with self leadership. Read about you can become better, self-actualize, and become aware of blindspots. Leadership and Self-Deception is a great book on how we’re deceiving ourselves all the time and how becoming aware of that can help us. Read about emotional intelligence and change methodologies. [23:44] What is a 360 review? The 360 review is a process I use when I’m coaching clients. I call it the “human pincushion experiment.” You get feedback from people above you, beside, and below you in the organization, and sometimes from customers too. You end up with a list of actions to start, stop, and continue based on everyone else’s input. The 360 review can be done quantitatively with a survey, but I do qualitative interviews. I talk to each person for a few minutes about the client I’m coaching. The conversation is confidential, but I use what people share to create buckets of actions to start, stop, and continue. These actions can be related to behavior, leadership, conflict, or collaboration. You get a rich set of feedback to help identify blindspots. The bigger the gap between other people’s view and your view, the better the coaching opportunity, because you can grow in self-awareness. [26:03] How can product managers ask for feedback to prepare them for a senior leadership role? Some people are hes

How product managers can work backwards to amazing products In a few weeks, the name of this podcast will be changing to Product Masters Now. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but I want you to know the name change is coming. If your player is like mine that lists podcasts alphabetically, it will be displayed further in your list of subscribed podcasts as the first letter of the name is changing from “E” to “P.” The logo will look the same—just the name is changing. To be a better product manager, it is worthwhile to examine organizations known for their product management capabilities. Amazon is such a company. In this episode we are joined by not one but two product professionals who built much of their career at Amazon—13 and 15 years. They are Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. They document the process Amazon uses to create successful products in a book titled Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. And, they are here to share their insights with us. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:42] What makes Amazon so innovative? Innovation is a necessary part of everyone’s job. Our 14 leadership principles are woven into the DNA of everyone who works there and every process in the company, and six of them are directly related to innovation: Customer obsession—people wake up every day trying to figure out how to delight their customers. Invent and simplify—leaders expect invention and innovation from their teams, and they’re always finding ways to get better. Leaders are right, a lot—they seek diverse perspectives and try to prove themselves wrong to make sure they have the right thought. Insist on the highest standards—we’re continually finding ways to get better. Frugality—constraints breed innovation. Necessity also drives Amazon to innovate. Amazon operates at a scale that often can’t be supported by any commercial solutions, so they have to create solutions themselves. Amazon accepts failure as part of invention. If you’re not failing enough, you’re not inventing enough. When we started working at Amazon in 1998 and 1999, Amazon was an ecommerce business when ecommerce was completely new. We were inventing a whole new form of commerce from the beginning. The people who found it fun and exciting to invent something new thrived. As the company progressed, that mindset pervaded the company and drove them to move outside ecommerce. Also, some of Amazon’s raw materials like computing power, storage, and bandwidth, get cheaper over time. We use those advancements to invent new things, like scanning and storing every book in the world. [7:47] How did you see customer obsession encouraged at Amazon? Remarkably, Jeff Bezos and Amazon figured out how to create reinforcing processes to make customer obsession part of people’s jobs. Weekly business review meetings included a section called Voice of the Customer. At these meetings, a leader of the customer service group brought forward a customer problem that Amazon didn’t have a good solution for. The senior leadership assigned people to tackle the problem and create a solution so it never happens again. Another process, the COE (Correction of Error) process, tasked teams with diving deeply into the details of a defect, figuring out why the customer had the problem, and creating a detailed plan to fix the problem. Unlike most companies, Amazon created methods for leaders to programmatically seek out problems and solutions. [11:40] Who is responsible for innovation at Amazon? Everyone. Innovation is the lifeblood of the company. We don’t have a chief innovation officer, because that would be like having a chief breathing officer—everyone has to innovate, so you don’t assign that task to one person. We have found the best innovations come from people who are closest to working with the problems at hand, rather than having a management team several levels removed from the problem dictating how to innovate. Many of our innovations are small, and customers never see them, but they make Amazon work more efficiently and allow us to provide lower prices for our customers. In a lot of companies, people think of innovation as a product function. At Amazon, it’s a job for everyone, not just the product organization. Amazon celebrates innovation. Employees receive awards for finding ways to cut costs, going above and beyond to serve a customer, and filing patents. The awards have no monetary value, but they’re some of the most prized possessions of people at Amazon. Everyone is expected to innovate, and everyone celebrates and recognizes innovation. [17:37] What is Amazon’s Working Backwards methodology? Working Backwards is Amazon’s method for developing new products and services. We start with the customer needs and work backwards from there. Most companies take a skills-forward approach, meaning the

Four steps for product managers to make an awesome First Time User Experience This podcast is where product leaders and managers become product masters. That has been our purpose from the beginning, and it is why I’m changing the name of the podcast to Product Masters Now. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but I want you to know the name change is coming in a few weeks and it will show in your podcast player not as The Everyday Innovator but as Product Masters Now. If your player is like mine and lists podcasts alphabetically, it will be displayed further in your list of subscribed podcasts, as the first letter of the name is changing from “E” to “P.” The logo will look the same—just the name is changing to Product Master Now. How much do you think about the user experience of your products? The entire user experience? I know I have put my focus in one area and neglected other aspects of the user experience—for example, the functional experience with the product, while perhaps ignoring the onboarding aspect or the customer support aspect. Even if you argue that such areas are someone else’s responsibility, I believe you, as the product manager, have important insights for improving these areas. Our guest, Elizabeth Ferrao, has a practical framework for quickly evaluating UX called First Time UX, or FTUX, which is an acronym for a 4-step process. She’ll take us through the steps and an example so we can understand how to apply the framework. Elizabeth is the founder of Product Mindset, a product consultancy focused on FTUX and onboarding. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:01] What is your focus as a UX product person? I’ve worked as a product manager for many companies, repeatedly working on onboarding—getting customers into the funnel. I started thinking about the first time user experience. I learned that 77% of mobile users download an app, then never use it after 72 hours. That means the money spent on getting those customers to download the app is wasted. The funnel is leaky. How do we make sure that the first time user experience is fantastic and offers immediate value that keeps users coming back? [6:38] What is First Time UX? First Time User Experience (FTUX) is the experience a person has the first time they encounter a product. FTUX is important for physical products and digital products. For digital products, it’s very measurable because we can measure our bounce rate, why people are dropping off, and what they’re looking at. [9:45] What are the steps of your First Time UX evaluation? I have a set of four steps that I walk through in any product experience, physical or digital. [9:54] Step 1: Landing Page On the landing page, I look for… Really strong message strength. Are they speaking directly to my pain point? The customer persona. The landing page tells whether the team understands whom they’re building the product for. I should be able to identify the key customer persona from the landing page. Are there any barriers to entry? I don’t want to have to enter a credit card number or talk to a salesperson. [11:09] Step 2: One Minute Magic Moment This is what the customer sees in their first minute with the product. For example, if an orange juice bottle tells me it has no sugar, and that’s my pain point, I’ll keep reading the bottle and might purchase it. As another example, when you first start using Spotify, it asks what music you like to listen to and automatically recommends songs you might like. It’s important to note that as a product manager you can’t satisfy your super fans and first-time users at the same time. You have to focus on one. Often product managers are focused on creating more value for current users, and they might not think about first time user experience. It’s important to have someone focused on getting users into the funnel. [15:06] Step 3: Five Minute Magic Moment In five minutes, you can give your customer a lot of information about your product. Within five minutes, you should be able to give them something fantastic, beautiful, or magical. For example, on a photo sharing app, in five minutes you can create an awesome photo album you can share. [15:45] Step 4: Grit Score The grit score measures how gritty your customer has to be to understand the product, keep using it, and convert from a free user to a paid user. I measure the grit score from 1 to 10. A low grit score is good, meaning customers don’t need to be very gritty to understand the product. [19:27] Let’s talk about an example of great FTUX—from Lemonade Insurance. I loved the Lemonade Insurance landing page and the entire experience. The landing page made it obvious that they were talking to me, a millennial who is purchasing home insurance for the first time and has heard things that scared me off before. Other insurance companies ask you to sp

Secrets for working with customers to create products they will love This podcast is getting a new name to better reflect our objective here—helping product managers become product masters. That new name is Product Masters Now. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but I want you to know the name change is coming in a few weeks, and it will show in your podcast player not as The Everyday Innovator but as Product Masters Now. You are in store for an enriching discussion with someone who has more experience delighting customers than most of us will ever see. You’ll learn a few important tools along with deepening your understanding of what it means to create products customers love. Helping us with this is Chip R. Bell, who has been ranked for six years in a row as one of the top three keynote speakers in the world on customer service. Bell has appeared on multiple TV networks, and his work has been featured in several prominent publications. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:18] What is co-creation? Co-creation is a partnership of creating collaboratively. I’ll be discussing the application of co-creation between a customer and an organization. The customer and the organization work together with equal license to make contributions to the product. Many organizations make products for the customer, but in co-creation, you’re making products with the customer. It’s a win-win partnership. [3:47] How do you find co-creation partners? Good co-creation partners have a need and the knowledge to contribute effectively. For example, a contributor to an electronic device needs to have knowledge about electronics. Choose a partner who can make a contribution in a way that’s unique and different from how you would normally approach the problem. Another group of contributors are catalysts. For instance, I might bring in third graders who will ask questions that stimulate product development. They don’t have the expertise to create a product, but they will help us break out of our normal way of thinking. Talk to people like drivers or security guards in your company; they have a different viewpoint and can often bring intelligence you might otherwise miss. A friend of mine who manages a hotel got valuable insights from taxi drivers about what customers liked and disliked about the hotel. [10:44] What are the five secrets for creating co-creation partnerships? For many years I’ve worked in customer service innovation. In contrast to value-added innovation, customer service innovation is value-unique—it’s all about creating new experiences that your customers will want to tell someone about. I wanted to write another book about this topic, and I decided to focus on including the customer in the innovative process. I found five secrets that the cultures of the most innovative companies share. My book Inside Your Customer’s Imagination is about applying those secrets to a relationship with the customer. The customer’s imagination is a door that can only be opened from the inside. The question is what to do to get the customer to open the door and share their crazy, unique, or unusual insights. Customer service innovation is about looking for opportunities to add something that delights the customer in an unexpected way. If you involve the customer in this, you get their cool ideas mixed in with your creation, and your customer will be loyal to a product they helped create. [15:55] Curiosity that uncovers insight Curiosity is approaching an inquiry without having any clue where it’s going. Normally, when people do customer interviews or focus groups, they are looking for confirmation of something they already expect. Product managers know better than to ask leading questions, but the expected answers are in their heads. Instead, what if you took a treasure-hunting approach? Invite the customer to be part of the treasure-hunting process, and be curious, not knowing where the process will take you. For example, I worked with a pizza delivery company, and we were getting the same comments from customers again and again because we were focused on their needs and expectations. We switched to focusing on their hopes and aspirations. We asked dreamer questions, like “What’s something that no pizza company does that would be really cool?” Customers imagined having something useful or fun to do with the box—the inside of the lid could be a puzzle or coloring book. Several years later, the company added fun activities to their boxes. That insight only came from demonstrating real curiosity about the customer’s desires. Make your customers feel valued by demonstrating that you are truly curious about their needs. If you can “be the customer,” you will see their world from a different angle. Experience what your customer experiences and demonstrate understanding in your relationship with them, and

How product managers can use visual storytelling to make their ideas stand out As we move into 2021, the name of this podcast is changing to better reflect our objective here—product managers become product masters. That new name is Product Masters Now. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but I want you to know the name change is coming in a few weeks and it will show in your podcast player not as The Everyday Innovator but as Product Masters Now. Product managers must communicate their ideas to others in ways that are clear and solicit feedback. Using visuals to help communicate information can be very helpful. Visual tools can make information easy to understand and also place it in context. When it comes to visual information, Amy Balliett is a leader. Her visual communication agency has created thousands of successful information campaigns for Fortune 1000 clients. She speaks on and teaches visual information concepts whenever she can. Today, she joins us so we can understand how simple visual tools can make us better communicators. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:44] How did you end up on the path to becoming the “Queen of Visualizing Information”? In film school I fell in love with visual storytelling. Later I pivoted my career and started my own business, Killer Infographics, creating infographics for online marketing. We evolved from infographics to motion graphics, interactive eBooks, and other visual media. We merged marketing and visual storytelling and drove success by applying what we had learned with infographics—the best practices of visual storytelling—to all these other types of creative content. Visual storytelling makes a huge difference for businesses because audiences want to get to know the brands they’re buying from, but they often don’t want to take the time to read content that delivers authenticity and transparency. We visualize those messages so that audiences will consume them far more often and voraciously. [8:13] You’ve been compared to Edward Tufte, the “King of Visualizing Information.” What are your thoughts on that comparison? To be compared to Tufte is a huge compliment. I’ve followed him from the beginning, and one time I went to one of his workshops and saw that some people were overwhelmed by the pace at which he was sharing information. I wondered how I could share the same content in a way that’s easier to digest. Tufte focuses on visualizing scientific or historical information for an analytical audience. At Killer, I focus on visualizing content to advertise to an audience. We want to make content edgy and exciting while delivering a clear, succinct message. We focus on catching attention very quickly, because today’s audiences have super short attention spans. What would you like to share about your eight rules for visual communication? [11:04] Always think about con-text. It’s a con when there’s too much text. The definition of visual communication is the act of graphically representing information to efficiently and effectively create meaning. A key word is graphically, but 99% of infographics have paragraphs of text next to images. That’s not visual communication. According to brain science, humans take in visual information in one-tenth of a second, but they take over five seconds to take in text-based information. If you have only five seconds to get your viewer to come to a conclusion, use visual content. If they have to read the text to understand the visuals, you’re not visually communicating. A recent study found that articles with images every 75-100 words had two times the engagement of articles that had one image or less. [14:53] Avoid the stigma of stock. It’s not enough to stick unrelated images into your content. Quality visual content is what succeeds online. Ninety-four percent of first impressions are based entirely on design. Lead with quality design, not stock imagery or clip art. Custom illustrations convert seven times better than stock imagery. In today’s world, we all have the tools at our disposal to quickly edit video and photos and create original content. If brands are leading with stock imagery, they’re not even doing what any of us can do. Lead with 100% custom illustration or photography and ensure that all your images have a matching style. Content is king. Visual content is the new king. But quality visual content reigns supreme. Consider using a designer to design quality content for you. [22:19] There’s no gold at the end of the rainbow. Color theory has been debunked. We’re a global society, and colors have different meanings in different cultures. Colors don’t invoke emotions. However, when used wisely colors convey meaning as your viewers start to recognize patterns in the colors you choose. Don’t use an overwhelming rainbow of colors; be minimal with your co

How product managers can innovate throughout the entire product lifecycle As we move into 2021, the name of this podcast is changing to better reflect our objective here—product managers becoming product masters. That new name is Product Masters Now. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but I want you to know the name change is coming in a few weeks, and it will show in your podcast player not as The Everyday Innovator but as Product Masters Now. This is the final episode in the series on a product management body of knowledge. Every-other-week starting in episode 307, we have explored the Product Development and Management Association’s (PDMA) guide to the body of knowledge for product managers and innovators. PDMA is the longest running professional association for product managers, existing since 1976. We end the series by discussing product innovation management, which is the knowledge area for maximizing the return from product innovation through application of sound management practices throughout the product life cycle. Our guest is Jerry Fix, a global Product Management professional who has successfully launched numerous products. He has significant experience managing global organizations to develop and support products and guide the commercialization of products and technologies. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:35] What are the key topics addressed in the chapter you wrote, Product Innovation Management? Innovation is a theme woven throughout the Body of Knowledge. We don’t treat innovation as a static event but as a process that winds through the entire new product development lifecycle. This final chapter wraps up the theme of innovation and highlights the idea that innovation should be managed throughout the process. [4:29] What responsibilities and skills do product managers have? I like how Marty Cagan describes the job of a product manager—to discover something valuable, useful, and feasible. Product managers’ main responsibilities are… Understanding the customer experience well. Internalizing a vision and communicating it to others. Assessing and prioritizing processes and activities. Managing pricing and roadmaps. Building business cases. Working with stakeholders. Effective product managers’ key skills are… Understanding the market. Understanding what innovation is. Switching easily between thinking strategically (big picture) and tactically (immediate actions). Being able to explain technical requirements to users and stakeholders. [11:58] What is the product life cycle? The product lifecycle is a curve that describes the stages of a product from the time it’s introduced to the time it’s retired. It includes the areas shown in the graphic. Historically, the introduction, growth, or maturity phases could last years or decades, but today we’re seeing the whole process getting shorter. As technology develops, consumers become more demanding, leading to more new technology, causing consumers to become more demanding, etc. Some product managers aren’t aware that retiring the product is part of the product lifecycle. They say their products never go away, and they have to continue managing them. They’re overextending the maturity phase. During the maturity phase, the product doesn’t change much. You’re generating as much revenue as possible while holding off decline as long as possible. If you extend that phase too far, your competitors will develop alternatives to your mature product, and you’ll miss opportunities for revenue and innovation. [18:08] What should product managers be thinking about as they’re taking a product through its lifecycle? During introduction, product managers are subject experts; during growth, they’re growth hackers; during maturity, they’re retention strategists; and during decline they’re solution seekers. In the growth period, product managers are looking to expand the reach of the product; they’re making sure it’s competitive and ready to scale. Their focus is on supporting as many users as possible while optimizing for the fastest growth possible. During maturity, product managers focus on retaining customers and sustaining their market share. They stay aligned with how the value to the user is evolving. Their goal is to deliver customer satisfaction and customer delight. Reframing a product is a very smart, low-cost way to stay in maturity. For example, Wisk detergent extended their maturity by 30 years simply by reframing their product as a solution to the ring around the collar. [23:09] What metrics should we use for managing product innovation? What gets measured gets managed. If you want to improve something, you have to measure it. If you think of innovation as a singular “ah-ha” moment, you can’t manage it. But if you think of innovation the way PDMA does, as a process woven t

How product managers can understand and solve their customers’ problems This podcast is getting a new name to better align with its purpose of helping product managers become product masters. That new name is Product Masters Now. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but I want you to know the name change is coming in a few weeks, and it will show in your podcast player not as The Everyday Innovator but as Product Masters Now. Today is a discussion with a listener who contacted me after hearing episode 304. I sent an email to listeners who are subscribed to receive the show notes in their email box that said, “If you thought your job as a product manager was building products right, think again. In this discussion, Ken Sandy shares why the job of a product manager is not building products right but building the right products.” I admit, I did phrase that to be intentionally thought-provoking. A Chief Product Officer of a global company responded to that message and we began discussing the responsibilities of building the right product and building it right. It’s such an important topic, which is why I invited the CPO to this episode. His name is Narasimha Krishnakumar, and he is the Global CPO for Wind River, a cloud-based IoT company, and he is also an advisor and a product consultant to startups and new ventures. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:16] What are your responsibilities as a Global CPO? At Wind River, we focus on software and tech for edge devices. I oversee product planning, product roadmap, vision, and strategy for our products. We look at the landscape of devices in the market and create innovative solutions for our customers. [4:42] Where do your ideas come from? We look at technology that has already been developed to know what our capabilities are. Ideas come from looking at our customers’ problems and finding ways to solve problems that we aren’t already solving. We consider how market dynamics and changing technology are relevant to our products and the problems we’re solving. We look at what our competitors are doing and understand what our value is and why customers like or don’t like us. It’s also important to think about how solving a problem will affect the business—how will we scale and grow through the products we’ve introduced? [6:56] In the many product management roles you’ve had, what is one of the most important lessons you’ve learned about product management? Product management is all about reducing the number of variables when you’re building a product. Product management begins with the customer problem—Who is the customer? What are you trying to accomplish for them? Why will it benefit them? After you’ve answered these questions, you must figure out how you will build the products. As you make decisions about building the product, make sure that your variables are easy to manage so you can meet the time to market requirements for the product. I was in a situation where we picked brand-new technologies for building a product, and we ended up facing an extreme delay because the technology was not mature. When we drive a product idea through execution, we have to make the right bets about technology choices. Product leaders must assess the risk and make the number of variables manageable. [10:20] What should our focus be—building the right product and/or building products right? We need both—building the right product and building products right. Building the right product starts with looking at your customer problem, market opportunity, and competitive dynamics, and using that information to create a product definition that has a fair chance of successfully solving the customers’ problem. Building the product right means making decisions to solve the customers’ problem. It also includes building a high quality product. While building the product, you will have to make tradeoff decisions. Work collaboratively with engineering teams, quality teams, your DevOps organization, etc., to make sure your product is meeting your customers’ requirements and is high quality. Product managers tend to focus on the market problems and customer problems—the who, the what, and the why. But product managers can also influence the how—determining the best way to build the product. Building the product tends to be an engineering activity, but product managers still have an important role to play. They should get active in the execution process and understand how the product is built. Product managers can also influence how the product is built by setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and quality standards. Effective product managers focus on the who, the what, the why, and the how. They’re curious and have a customer-first attitude. [19:48] Sometimes engineering creates a long-term architecture well beyond what the product is ready for now.

The secret sauce product managers need for success This podcast is getting a new name to better align with its purpose of helping product managers become product masters. That new name is Product Masters Now. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but I want you to know the name change is coming in a few weeks, and it will show up in your podcast player not as The Everyday Innovator but as Product Masters Now. This is another episode in the series on a product management body of knowledge curated by the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA). If you are unfamiliar with PDMA, it is the longest running volunteer-led professional association for product managers, existing since 1976. I’ve been publishing this series every-other-week, starting with episode 307, which was an introduction to the body of knowledge. Today we cover topics related to culture, teams, and leadership, which are essential to forming and maintaining an innovative environment that enables, encourages, and rewards product management and innovation processes and practices. Our guest is Dr. Teresa Jurgens-Kowal, founder of Global NP Solutions, which helps individuals and organizations learn, adopt, transform, and sustain innovation. Previously, she worked in R&D, process technology development, and as an internal innovation expert at ExxonMobil Chemical Company. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:12] How are Culture, Teams, and Leadership important to product innovation? It’s easy to implement systems, templates, and checklists, but culture, teams, and leadership really make for success. Teams need collaboration, expertise, and autonomy. You need trust among your teams and effective leadership that bridges the gap between strategy and execution. [4:45] What is culture and how does it impact organizations and product teams? You can feel the culture when you enter an organization—an innovative culture or a hindering, bureaucratic culture. The culture teaches how we do things in an organization. It’s how people behave and accomplish the mission. Culture allows a company to understand important qualities such as their risk tolerance, how much they can trust their teams, how much they interact with customers, how they work together, the pace of work, and how they bring an idea to commercialization when there’s risk involved. Culture is the “secret sauce” to unlocking success. [9:20] How does culture relate to strategy? Strategy consists of vision, mission, and values. Vision is who we are as an organization and includes our long-term goals for interactions with our community, employees, and environment. Mission is how we accomplish the vision. Values are the driving behaviors. Culture is closely tied to values because culture includes behaviors that allow an organization to have a reasonable approach to risk, fulfill their mission, and meet their vision. [13:19] What is the importance of teams to innovation? Lone geniuses don’t create spectacular innovations. For innovation, we need teams, particularly cross-functional teams that start together, work together, and launch the product together. Cross-functional teams can take many forms: Functional work groups for depth of innovation Lightweight teams for minor tweaks Heavyweight teams for large innovations Autonomous teams for something brand new Important elements of a successful innovation team include: Trust Autonomy Ability to learn from mistakes and not be punished for them Being close to customers [19:31] How do work styles impacts teammates and team performance? The Z model identifies four categories of preferred work styles: Creators like to come up with ideas. Advancers are good at communicating ideas, interacting with customers, and getting feedback. Refiners are good at making plans. Executors want to get their hands dirty, jump in, and do the work. Teams find that understanding each others’ work styles helps them communicate more effectively, and communication is what makes an innovation team successful. [23:35] What assessments do you use to identify people’s work styles? The Z model from PDMA has a very short assessment that teams can take together. Additionally, I use the DiSC assessment, which has four categories of work styles: dominant, influential, steady, and conscientious. These work styles relate to how people think, their preferred pace of work, and whether they rely on people or data to make decisions. [25:29] What are the characteristics of an effective leader of an innovation team? The DiSC assessment and Z model profiles help leaders build their teams and encourage their team members to understand each others’ work styles. Equally important for leaders is emotional intelligence, which includes: Self-awareness—can come from a DiSC Assessment or Z model profile Self-regulation—being proactive but not reactive, especially when addressing uncertainties Unders

Insights on roadmaps, metrics, OKRs, and more for product managers It is a new year and this podcast is getting a new name. In a few weeks, the name will change to Product Masters Now. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but I want you to know the name change is coming—The Everyday Innovator will be renamed to Product Masters Now. Chief Product Officers (CPOs) have many responsibilities, such as mentoring product managers, defining product strategy, leveraging cross-functional resources, developing products to meet an expected schedule, and more. They use tools to help them with these responsibilities. Joining us for this episode is a CPO who shares some of the tools he uses, including roadmaps, metrics, and OKRs. He knows a lot about tools as he is the CPO for Betterworks, a provider of enterprise OKR and performance management software. His name is Anup Yanamandra. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:58] What are your responsibilities as a Chief Product Officer? My primary responsibility is defining the product strategy for the company. Increasingly, CPOs are also thinking about the user experience strategy. It’s becoming important for CPOs and product managers to dig into data and make decisions based on data rather than pure intuition. In my company, I help with hiring great people across the company and explaining why the company is going to win using its great product vision. Product advocacy, internally and externally, is important for CPOs. [5:42] How do you use roadmaps? I use PowerPoint or Google slides for my roadmaps. I structure these roadmaps very clearly. We start with the company’s high level goal. Then we identify two or three themes that we’re trying to build through the product or portfolio; it’s important to communicate these themes internally and externally. Next, we create individual product ideas. We identify two or three big goals and create a slide for each one. Then we create more detailed slides under each goal, answering the questions, What is the business problem? What is the solution? What is the benefit? The roadmap will be slightly different for a new product than for a product that’s already in the market. When you’re launching a new product, the important questions are, What is the problem you’re trying to solve? Who is the persona that’s going to benefit? What is the core of the problem? When you’re creating a roadmap for a product that’s been in the market for a few years, you need to focus on four different types of problems: How do we generate new sales? How are we helping with renewables? Technology infrastructure as your underlying frameworks change over time. Support tickets that existing customers are logging. Put badges on your slides to show which features address each of these problems. This helps you be clear about why you’re creating each new capability and how it will benefit both your organization and your customer. [14:44] Do you use roadmaps at different levels? As a CPO, I like to have one roadmap slide that gives a high-level picture. I use a 12-18 month roadmap and break it down by quarter. This provides a strong foundation to build a great product. You must have a strong platform to have a successful long-term product strategy. As a CPO, I create a 4-5 page roadmap that highlights two or three goals to accomplish for each quarter. Then each director of a product line develops a more detailed roadmap, about 15 pages. All our roadmaps are available to everyone in our company. We’ve found that the 4-page, high-level roadmap is best to share with customers; once we have a commission, we can share the 15-page, detailed roadmap. [18:00] What metrics do you find useful? Adoption: If no one is going to use the product, what is the point of building it? While you’re building a new feature or product, have in mind four or five customers who would use it right away. Make sure that those customers will pick it up in its first phase. A month or two after the product is out, it should be used by at least 10% of the existing customer base. Every product, feature, and button should be instrumented. We need to know which pages and buttons are being used. If people aren’t using a certain feature, we can find out why. Net Promoter Score (NPS): There are two parts to this: First, we survey the satisfaction of product sponsors who purchase our product, typically just one or two people. Second—and more exciting—we ask end users to rate their experience on each of our pages. We get hundreds of responses every day with specific information, and we connect the responses to a Slack channel that the entire company sees. User feedback can be pretty tough on product managers, but good product managers don’t shy away from it; they want feedback and work to fix problems. Revenue: At the end of the day, people have to purchase your product. You need to be

How product managers can take an idea to a market-ready product This is fourth in the series on a product management body of knowledge I’m doing every-other-week. We are exploring the Product Development and Management Association’s (PDMA) guide to the body of knowledge for product managers and innovators. If you are unfamiliar with PDMA, they are the longest running volunteer-led professional association for product managers, existing since 1976. We started in episode 307 with an introduction to the body of knowledge, explored strategy in episode 309, portfolio management in 311, development process in 313, and now we are discussing Design & Development Tools. These are tools that are used in a product process to move from idea to market-ready product. Our guest is Carlos Rodriguez, who is an associate professor of marketing and quantitative methods and also the director of the Center for the Study of Innovation Management (CSIM) in the College of Business at Delaware State University. He recently published a book, Product Design and Innovation: Analytics for Decision Making. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:36] You contributed to the “Product Design and Development Tools” chapter of the PDMA Body of Knowledge Guide. What is the purpose of that chapter? The purpose is to guide product designers, product developers, marketing managers, and other innovation managers toward selecting the most relevant tools and techniques to take them from the ideation process to getting ready to launch the product. [4:06] What are some Ideation tools you’d like to highlight? Ideation tools are used to generate ideas for products. Storyboarding: Focuses on the development of a story about the consumers’ experience with the product or service. This technique allows us to understand the problems the consumers face in trying to connect with the product. Day in the Life of a Customer: Focuses on the routines, behaviors, and circumstances of users interacting with the product. This allows us to observe consumers’ behavior in natural settings. Journey Maps: Allow us to understand the customers’ process before, during, and after a sale. Recent data show that measuring the journey at the end of the cycle may not be a good indicator of the consumers’ experience. Ethnography: Allows us to find insights we might otherwise miss by observing customers in their environment. [8:41] What are some of your favorite Concept Design tools? Concept design helps us to better understand the value proposition that is meaningful to the consumer. Concept Engineering: Translates the voice of the customers into customer requirements—what exactly is the customer asking us? This technique avoids the mistake of trying to find a solution during the development process. Kano Method: Helps us clarify which attributes of a product are important and which are not, so we don’t waste resources or distract by including features the customer doesn’t value. [16:32] What are your favorite Embodiment Design tools? Embodiment design moves from the basic concept definition to more technical and economic criteria. Functional Analysis: Allows us to draw a map of all the functions that define a product. It’s a useful tool for communicating across cross-functional teams as the designers correct and improve functions. Function Analysis System Technique (FAST) Diagrams: Allow us to set the boundaries of the product. [19:31] What are some of the Initial Design Specification tools? In Initial Design Specification, we move into quantification of all the specific requirements consumers are looking for. These tools ensure the product satisfies the dictates of the design. Let’s be very clear that the design doesn’t belong to the designer; it belongs to the team supporting the new product development process. Design for Functionality Design for Production: Helps us be sure all the elements can be appropriately manipulated in production. Design for Maintenance: Allows us to market to consumers who often want to maintain their own products. Design for Recycling and Reusability: Reminds us to be aware that consumers are increasingly selecting products that are more environmentally-conscious. [21:59] What are some tools for Detailed Design Specification? Detailed DesignSpecification takes us to the details, particular features, and specifications that are important. During design, we need to communicate with other colleagues, and detailed design allows us to connect with engineering. Quality Function Deployment: Allows us to bring in the customer requirements from the Kano method and connect with the technical requirements. It helps us translate the voice of the customer into the language of the technical and engineering team. It allows a comparative analysis of competing products and allows us to define the cost of making modifications. Emotional Design: Helps us think caref

Insights for product managers from an R&D Engineering Director How does an R&D Product Line Director lead the development of products and help to mentor product managers? That’s what I wanted to know when I talked with our guest, Shankar Achanta. He has had a number of engineering product roles at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, which designs and manufactures products for the power industry. Shankar shares several tools for getting ideas for new products along with practical tips for how product managers can frame their ideas and gain support from colleagues as well as leaders. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:30] What are your responsibilities as an R&D Engineering Director? I’m responsible for a large portfolio serving the global energy industry. My role includes vision and strategy for my portfolio projects, as well as executing the strategy by introducing the right products at the right time. I’m also involved in portfolio management. I lead product development teams and product management teams. [2:51] Where do you see ideas for new products coming from? Great ideas come from anywhere in the organization—sales, talking to customers, product development, etc. Recently, my team and I experimented with a three-month Innovation Framework. We brought together product managers and product development leaders to solve difficult problems our customers are having. We let them create self-forming teams, with a maximum of five people per team. After we provided the problem domains, we asked the product managers and product development leaders to read the problem domains and ask us questions in the first one to two weeks and then provide a one-page abstract with all the solutions each team came up with. We saw a lot of participation, and many teams came up with the one-page abstracts. [6:05] How did the product managers and product development managers come to have good insights into the problems that customers encounter? These insights are key for the Innovation Framework to work. The product managers and product development leaders engage with customers at conferences and in one-on-one meetings and get input from the sales organization. Once we have the ideas from this variety of avenues, we compile a list of problems for a particular segment of customers or enhancements to an existing product line. [6:52] What’s an example of the Innovation Framework in action? We had a couple of challenges with our sensors for power lines: They communicate wirelessly, so they need to have a line of sight between the transmitter and receiver, and they need to last for 20+ years. Using the Innovation Framework, one of our engineers solved these problems with a device that repeats the signals and doesn’t need batteries. Once the teams created their abstracts, we selected a few and allowed the team members to use 20% of their time every week to explore those ideas. We found that they spent additional time on their own to come up with solutions, and one team put together a prototype of the sensor. [10:37] How do you select which solutions to pursue? First, we consider how practical the solution is to commercialize. Second, we consider how it fits within the company’s strategy. Third, we consider the effort, technology, and time to create the solution. [15:19] Do you get customer feedback on the solutions being created? Once we have the early prototype, we engage with customers who give us feedback about the solutions. We didn’t engage with a large number of customers because the Innovation Framework was limited to three months, but we got early customer feedback on the ideas, and we had upfront research that we’d already done on the problem domain. [17:06] How can product managers share ideas and draw attention to them? I ask my product managers to think like scientists. You have a hypothesis that your idea solves Problem A by creating Solution B for the Customer Persona C. Fill in the blanks and write down your hypothesis. Then understand and document your assumptions. Answer questions: Is the problem I identified really a problem? Does my proposed solution solve the problem? Does the customer persona want this problem to be solved? If so, are they willing to pay for it? More importantly, are they willing to switch from their existing solution and pay any switching costs? Once you have the answers to these questions documented, show the strategic fit of your problem statement, which is extremely important to get the stakeholder buy-in from the executive level. [20:07] How do product managers frame their ideas to show strategic fit so they can draw attention to their ideas and get resources? We already have a pipeline of existing projects, so when a new idea comes up, we have to choose to either displace or slow down what we’re doing or put the new idea in the backlog. We compare new ideas to the company strategy and to a document that

What product managers need to know about the journey from idea to product This is another episode in the series on the product management body of knowledge I’m doing every other week. We are exploring the Product Development and Management Association’s (PDMA) guide to the body of knowledge for product managers and innovators. If you are unfamiliar with PDMA, they are the longest running volunteer-led professional association for product managers, existing since 1976. We started in episode 307 with an introduction to the body of knowledge, explored strategy in episode 309, portfolio management in 311, and today we are discussing Product Innovation Process. These are the processes and tools for making a product real. Our guest is Jean-Jacques Verhaeghe, who authored the new chapter on process in the PDMA body of knowledge book. He has many years of experience in a variety of senior product roles and is now serving as the Research, Development, and Innovation Program Manager for the Minerals Council in South Africa, with a focus on Digitalization, IoT, AI, and Technology Research. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:24] What is the purpose of product innovation process? Product innovation process takes us on the journey from an idea to putting the product in the customers’ hands. The purpose of process is aligning our organization and team around a common goal. It creates a baseline of consistency and repeatability while allowing for change, and it allows us to balance reward and risk when developing products. [5:22] What is the Product Innovation Charter (PIC)? The front end of product design is uncertain or fuzzy, and the PIC allows us to get what’s in people’s minds into a structured format on paper. It causes the team to think about key elements like the goals and metrics they want to achieve, sustainability factors, the rationale for doing the work, and assumptions that need to be tested. The PIC validates what’s in scope and what’s not and explores the environment. It shows the direction we’re heading. It also elaborates on day-to-day management of the product. Let’s walk through a few product innovation processes. [9:18] Stage Gate The idea behind Stage Gate is managing uncertainty along the journey. Typically, the first stage is about discovering and exploring. Then we reach a gate, which is a decision-making event. The team uses criteria to determine what they need to get out of each stage and how to proceed going forward. The focus of Stage Gate is quality decision making. Stage Gate is very transparent and adaptable. Recently, a methodology has been created combining Agile and Stage Gate; in this methodology, the team always thinks in terms of customer needs. Stage Gate increases team morale and improves communication. People know what to expect; quality decisions can be made and focus is maintained. [14:34] Lean Product Innovation Lean Product Innovation originated in companies like Toyota where eradicating waste in production and innovation is of primary importance. Lean Product Innovation is about gathering information and knowledge as early as possible. It’s unique in that it includes gathering knowledge all the time and incorporating it back into the process of eradicating waste and improving. In this process, the team develops a sense of ownership, so it doesn’t require heavy governance. It does take time for the team to buy into it, but it’s a fantastic way of managing risk, quality, and performance in the long run. It’s also easy to scale. [18:36] Agile Agile is an iterative approach, a quick way of achieving milestones and iteratively checking what’s working and what’s not throughout the life of the product. Agile was made to be done by self-organizing teams who collaborate, share ideas, and develop solutions that fail fast and fix fast. Working in small stages allows you to change plans quickly, so it’s especially useful in an unpredictable environment. You can’t spend too much time on any one phase, so you work in sprints. Agile is underpinned by pillars. One pillar is the interactions of individuals—the team players work in specific roles. Another pillar is the heavy customer involvement in product development. [25:02] What do you tell organizations that want to improve their innovation process? First, evaluate the problem with the existing methodology. Remember that culture is key; it is people who create, ideate, and innovate. Include all the stakeholders on the journey to improving the innovation process, and don’t bring in anyone who would disrupt the process. Be clear about the roles, accountabilities, and responsibilities that everyone has in the process. Be clear about the product—remember that any process is a means to an end. Give the new process time and check it again. Action Guide: Put the information Jean-Jacques shared into action now. Click he

How product managers can empathize with customers and colleagues in five steps You’ve heard it before, product managers need empathy. One way we talk about empathy in our role is “walking in the customers’ shoes,” meaning that we understand the customer, the problem they need solved, or the job they want done. Indeed, product managers who use empathy wisely are more likely to gain customer insights that others miss, leading to products that create more value than competitors and products that customers love. Clearly, empathy is important, but not all product managers have gained this skill, and others are not using it correctly. Our guest, Rob Volpe, will help us use empathy better. He is the CEO of Ignite 360, a consumer insight firm, and a self-proclaimed Empathy Activist. He uses his years of experience in marketing research and promotions to help organizations launch and position better products, including at Kraft Foods, Wild Planet Toys, Pepsi, Sprint, Target, Pinkberry, and many others. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:37] What does empathy mean and why is it important to product managers? Empathy is the ability to see the point of view of another person. That’s important for product managers because if you’re creating a product, you need to understand your customers, how your customers view the world, and how your product is going to solve a problem or do a job for them. Some people are afraid of empathy because it’s an “E” word like emotion, and they’re afraid of their emotions. It’s important to know that there are different types of empathy. The type that’s relevant for innovation and product management is cognitive empathy, which means seeing another person’s point of view. It’s not about feeling their feelings; it stays in the head. Cognitive empathy doesn’t mean sacrificing your belief; it’s just recognizing another way of seeing the world. Affective empathy means having deep emotion, and that can be harder for people to control. Cognitive empathy still includes an emotional component—it’s still below the surface—but affective empathy is deeper. The trick is to marry cognitive empathy and affective empathy. This combination of the head and the heart can create conviction. Empathy helps us understand a problem so we can solve it. [9:07] Tell us about your system, Ignite 360, with five steps to empathy. We created the five steps because we were seeing empathetic failure in our work. Everyone wants empathy, and everyone is born with the trait of empathy, but empathy is in decline, like a muscle that’s atrophied. We need to exercise and focus our empathy. The five steps explain what it takes to get empathy. [12:47] Step 1: Dismantling Judgement Judgement is made up of our biases, stereotypes, and limited experiences. Passing judgement on others is a brick wall you’ll keep running into until you’re aware that you have it. Just recognizing that you have judgement helps. Example of dismantling judgement: I working with a client to talk with customers about food products in convenience stores. One respondent talked about how his brother would take home a pizza from the convenience store and get a second pizza to eat on the way home. Later, my client told me that he felt judgement and was having trouble listening because that seemed crazy to him, but he decided to drop his judgement and then was able to listen and understand. [16:52] Step 2: Asking Good Questions Good questions are exploratory and open rather than closed. Good questions are important in innovation because you don’t know the story someone will tell you; you need to be open and hear what they’re saying. Example of asking good questions: I was interviewing people about soup, and one respondent kept referencing his nephew who had recently passed away. I asked the open question, “Tell me about your nephew,” and we spent 45 minutes having a conversation much richer than we would have just talking about soup. [19:45] Step 3: Active Listening Active listening is not just what you hear with your ears; it’s what you experience with all your senses, including your sixth sense of intuition. It means paying attention and being present in the moment with somebody else. Example of active listening: When I was talking to the man about his nephew, I could feel the nephew’s presence in the room because my intuition was at work. When you’re doing an in-home interview, observe everything in the room. In a conversation, even over Zoom, notice body language and nonverbal cues. Bringing a second person with you to take notes helps you catch all the nonverbal observations. Debrief with that person afterward and talk about what you each noticed. [27:33] Step 4: Integrating into Understanding Integrating into understanding means reconciling others’ beliefs to your belief

What product managers need to know about selecting and managing projects This is the next episode in the series on a product management body of knowledge I’m doing every-other-week. We are exploring the Product Development and Management Association’s (PDMA) guide to the body of knowledge for product managers and innovators. If you are unfamiliar with PDMA, they are the longest running volunteer led professional association for product managers, existing since 1976. We’ve had an introduction to the body of knowledge in episode 307, explored strategy in episode 309, and today we explore portfolio management. Our guest, who also authored the portfolio management chapter of the PDMA BoK book, is Steve Atherton. Steve has over twenty years of professional experience in product management and related roles for some of the world’s largest industrial technology companies. He currently serves as the senior product manager for Fujifilm’s inkjet technology integration group, which designs and produces Nano-technology products for industrial applications. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:23] What is a product portfolio? A product portfolio is a set of products an organization is investing in that have certain trade-offs. Like an investment portfolio, a product portfolio should be balanced and diversified. [3:19] What is the purpose of portfolio management? Choosing the right group of products to achieve balance. Aligning with your business strategy. [4:51] What’s an example of a portfolio that reflects the strategic objectives? All the techniques for developing a portfolio involve metrics that reflect the strategy. For example, if you’ve been working on cash cow products, and you want to be more innovative, you need a metric that captures innovation. That could be a simple pass-fail scoring or a more complex system. [8:21] Who is involved in portfolio management? Cross-functional involvement in portfolio management is very valuable, in order to… Capitalize on the organizational knowledge, allowing business leaders to make decisions by tapping into the knowledge and experience of everyone in the organization. Keep everyone informed and motivated, because they can see how their contribution fits into the big picture. The level of complexity of the portfolio management system needs to line up with the decision-making pace of the organization. In some cases, a simpler system is better than a complex system. Portfolio management includes choosing projects to put into the portfolio and managing projects while we’re working on them. We might slow down a project and use resources for something more important, or we might even kill a project in order to focus on better projects. A facilitator is important to remind people of the context of portfolio management and understand that their individual projects fit together to move the organization forward in the direction aligned with the strategy. We can get protective of our work, so the facilitator helps us be objective and make good business decisions. [16:59] How are portfolios created to reflect the strategy of the organization? One approach is the three horizons. We might put 70% of our money toward making current products better, 20% to adjacent but new areas, and 10% to work that’s really outside the box. A top-down method would be deciding that 80% of any new products must be strongly innovative, or 80% of new product development dollars need to go toward innovative projects. A bottom-up method starts with setting goals. Then your innovation mechanisms come up with ideas, which are reviewed against the goals, and some projects may be cut to align with the goals. If you’re focusing on innovation but have a lot of cash cow projects, you might cut one. Ideally, have a mix of top-down and bottom-up. Allocate portions of your spending to finding projects and opportunities; then have review on top of that. This starts people off the right way and confirms that what’s produced aligns with strategy. It’s all about prioritizing limited resources and deciding how much you can give to each project. [20:57] What are some tools for selecting projects for the portfolio? One of the arts of portfolio management is selecting the right metrics that line up with the goals you’re trying to achieve. There are two broad categories of doing this. To use judgement-based criteria, choose a criteria that aligns with your strategy, and assess projects based on a simple high/medium/low or pass/fail test. If you’re trying to do more innovative projects, judge whether a proposed project stretches you to be more innovative. The other option is more sophisticated metrics like engineering economics, financial metrics, or return on investment. You must pick the right metric that aligns with your strategy and has the appropriate level of complexity for your organization. If you’re starting a portfo

Lessons on innovation and product management from the pandemic Dr. Joseph Michelli is a returning guest, having previously brought us insights for creating incredible customer experiences with products and services in episodes 147 and 251. Much has changed in 2020. It is not the year we expected. The adversity has created a need for resilience. Some product managers have responded to the challenge, making pivots and finding value where it had not previously existed. Many organizational leaders have learned on the fly how to navigate the challenges. We can learn from the leaders who have been successful and that is what Joseph will help us with. He talked with over 140 global business leaders, includes leaders at Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Feeding America, United Way, Verizon, Southwest Airlines, and many more. He compiled the timely lessons-learned in a new book, Stronger Through Adversity. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:47] Tell us about the product journey of your newest book, Stronger Through Adversity. In the beginning of 2020, I was scheduled to write a book about the success of the chocolate company Godiva, but COVID put that project on pause. Meanwhile, I was working with other clients on positioning their products for survival through the pandemic, and I asked leaders, “How are you even trying to approach this?” I realized a lot of people are struggling and doing their best, and maybe we can learn something from them. I decided to create a new book about how leaders are coping with adversity. We needed the book to come out in 2020 to be relevant, so I interviewed 140 leaders and expedited my process to write in six weeks what I would normally write in six months. [8:58] What have you learned about managing uncertainty? A lot of C-suite leaders weren’t used to dealing with uncertainty. For example, Marriott was trying to figure out how to deal with an environment in which no one was staying in hotels. Microsoft Teams had to figure out how to scale and service their product when its application was far greater than they had anticipated. Leaders tried to grab on to something they could rely on. Sometimes that was consumer data, which is part of the iterative design process product managers are already familiar with, but now they had to do it on warp speed. They were agile beyond agile, and for a lot of brands that’s just not part of their DNA. These leaders had to follow the terrain. They had a roadmap they were used to following, but suddenly their roadmap and the terrain diverged. The changing environment made it so that they could no longer act on the timelines that the roadmap specified. When the roadmap and terrain diverge, you must watch the terrain vigilantly. We saw companies doing more sampling of teammates and consumers. They were very focused on the data in front of them and responded to the environment rather than thinking about the roadmap. [14:53] What have you learned about rapid innovation? Many organizations became myopic, just trying to hold on and not looking for opportunities. A few organizations invested in the opportunities they saw in adversity. In the book, I talk about the leadership style in a wild horse herd, which has an alpha mare leading in the front, an alpha sire in the back, and some horses within the herd that shape its behavior. Sometimes leaders have to be out front; they have to be visionaries, lay out the strategy, and go beyond the boundaries. Other leaders stay in the back, encouraging and moving the pace of the pack; they don’t lead their team through the struggle, but they know their team can innovate solutions. Often the leaders in the middle of the herd make it happen; they roll up their sleeves and become part of the action teams, thinking through problems together. [18:54] What’s an example of a personal transformation of a leader? The CEO of Farmer’s Insurance, Jeff Dailey, shared with me that he has become more vulnerable and humble than he had ever been before COVID. He apologized to his entire organization for not listening to his team about an opportunity for innovation they could have taken. He would not have imagined publicly apologizing before COVID. His engagement scores among employees went up meteorically. People don’t like to follow perfect people. If you’re authentic and vulnerable, admit your mistakes, and show that you use reasonable judgement, most people will follow you because they know that you’ll permit them to be imperfect as well. Similarly, the FTD Flowers CEO was appointed during COVID, and his message to his team was “No hiding bad news.” He was concerned that people didn’t know him well enough to know that it was okay to tell the truth about the good, the bad, and the ugly. How can we make things better if we don’t recognize where the problems are? [25:21] How do we take care of ourselves when “normal” is r

The importance of an organizational game plan for product managers I started a new series to explore the Product Development and Management Body of Knowledge. While it has since been updated many times, this is the body of knowledge I discovered in 2007 that led to many ah-ha moments for me as a product manager. It gave me a framework for integrating what a product manager does, and I have since taught it to many other product managers. Every-other-week we are exploring one of the 7 knowledge areas. Today we are discussing strategy. This is the foundation for product managers as organizational strategy impacts product strategy. By aligning the two, we create more value for the organization and accelerate our careers in the process. Our guest is Dr. Allan Anderson, past chairman of PDMA and the person who led the development of the first and second editions of the Body of Knowledge. He has had a long career in product management, primarily in food products, and is professor emeritus at Massey University New Zealand. He also joined us two weeks ago, providing an overview of the entire Body of Knowledge. Today, we focus on strategy. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:28] What is strategy? Strategy is an organization’s game plan for achieving its long term objectives in light of its industry position, opportunities, and resources. Strategy defines and communicates an organization’s unique position and says how organizational resources, skills, and competencies should be combined to achieve competitive advantage. Strategy positions the company in a way that it can use its resources and competitive advantage to achieve its specific goals as defined by the company. [14:16] What is organizational identity? Organizational identity is a statement of what the organization stands for and why it exists. It’s important to communicate this identity to the whole company. Organizational identity is a key element in creating the environment and underpinning, long-term culture of a company. You must develop organizational identity from a personal perspective within your company. Don’t just copy a vision statement from someone else; make it real for your company and the people involved in your company. [19:33] What is innovation strategy? Innovation strategy is embedded in overall business strategy. Innovation strategy is achieving the goals of the company using your resources to achieve competitive advantage, focused around product innovation. [20:46] What are some innovation strategy frameworks? Porter framework Miles & Snow Landscape model Business canvas None of these frameworks does the job on its own, so you can use them in combination. Innovation strategy provides the basis for selecting the right portfolio. [24:37] What is Open Innovation, and why do you include it in the Strategy section of the Body of Knowledge (BoK)? The definition from the book—Open Innovation is the strategy adopted by an organization whereby it actively seeks knowledge from external sources through alliances, partnerships, and contractual arrangements to complement and enhance its internal capability in pursuit of improved innovation outcomes. In other words, seeking knowledge outside the walls of the organization to meet the business goals. In my opinion, Open Innovation is a strategy because it’s something an organization employs to achieve its goals. [27:16] What is Sustainability, and how is it addressed in the Strategy section? Sustainability means doing innovation that is profitable and environmentally responsible and takes care of employees and the community. The first edition of the BoK covered Sustainability under lifecycle management. In the second edition, we decided to distribute Sustainability topics across the book. Sustainability is part of strategy because it should be part of your mission and vision, but we also cover Sustainability in other sections. We’re highlighting the importance of Sustainability by showing that it’s part of the innovation process all the way from strategy to delivering products. Action Guide: Put the information Allan shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Connect with Allan on LinkedIn Catch up on the first episode of the PDMA BoK series, TEI 307 Innovation Quotes “Product innovation is the lifeblood of companies.” – Unknown “We haven’t got the money, so we’ve got to think.” – Lord Ernest Rutherford 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

Tips on driving innovation within organizations for product managers and leaders Our guest says that organizations need pirates. These are the people who make entrepreneurship a legitimate part of the business. They are the innovators and transformers. Pirates design value propositions and business models that scale. Our guest’s name is Dr. Tendayi Viki, Associate Partner at Strategyzer, helping companies innovate for the future while managing their core business. He has written three books, and his latest book is Pirates In The Navy: How Innovators Drive Transformation. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:46] Tell us about the title of your book, Pirates in the Navy. Steve Jobs said it’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy. The idea was that large companies are slower than startups, and he compared the team that built the Macintosh computer to pirates because they were working on a breakthrough technology. However, today, innovation has become really important in large organizations. It’s no longer better to be a pirate than to join the navy. Instead, it’s time for organizations to think about how they can create pirates in the navy. [3:01] Who are the pirates? If pirates get found, they walk the plank, so you don’t want to be a pirate like Steve Jobs, who was antagonistic to his own company and eventually had to leave Apple. Instead, make innovation a legitimate part of your company. Bring in aspects of entrepreneurs like innovation, confidence, testing assumptions, focusing on the market, and making sure you generate revenue, but don’t bring in aspects like ego, brashness, vanity, or overconfidence. Good pirates are a mixture of great innovator and great political acumen. Another analogy is privateers. Privateers were pirates who were paid by a country to complete a task. Many of them became explorers. You want to be a privateer or an explorer because someone sent you and is invested in your success. [ 8:18] Your book discusses innovation labs. What’s an example of a successful innovation lab? In innovation, we care about combining great ideas with sustainably profitable, scalable business models that create value. In an innovation lab, you need to be engaged in innovation, not innovation theater that looks like innovation but isn’t really creating value. One of my favorite examples of a successful innovation lab is at Intuit. Their lab is connected to their global organization, allowing people to be privateers within their company. Their program Design for Delight provides corporate coaches and allows employees to spend 15-20% of their time in the lab working on ideas. Intuit has been successful with their innovations because they’ve been focused on creating value. [13:49] What do we need to do to be more innovative? We need authenticity. The biggest challenge we have with innovation is that there are a lot of myths and behaviors that aren’t really productive. People blame their organizations, but that’s only 50% of why innovation doesn’t succeed. The other 50% is that innovators are much more interested in looking innovative rather than working on things that create value. [15:41] What should we do to be good pirates? First, care about creating real value. Think about the value you’re creating for customers, the value proposition, and the business model you’re going to use to take that value proposition to scale. There’s no chance an innovator can ever work on a product and launch it without collaborating with other key functions in the business. The question is, As an innovator, what agreements can you make as you’re working on your project that will allow you to succeed in the future? Many innovation teams try to avoid communicating with other teams as much as possible until they feel they’re ready, but then when they reveal their product no one else cares because they never knew it was happening. While you’re doing your work, you must also build bridges back to the core. Make connections with sponsors, legal and compliance, finance, etc. [18:25] What do you think about innovating in secret? Some teams innovate in secret because otherwise their innovation would be seen as too risky and be killed. However, successful teams always have a leader in on the secret—the CEO, CFO, head of marketing, etc. The leader helps protect the idea and navigate across hurdles. Another way to innovate, which I prefer, is to create a methodology, teams, and leaders for innovation management before ideas come up. Some people say that companies shouldn’t have an innovation department because innovation should be everywhere, but we need expertise to manage a systematic methodology that’s driven throughout the organization. The challenge for companies in the 21st century is to have an entrepreneurial function inside the organization whose job is to build the infrastructure and

Discover the smorgasbord of tools for product managers and innovators This is a little longer introduction than normal and there is a good reason for it, so bear with me for a moment. In 2007 I sat in a small conference room with 12 other people. We were there to prepare for the New Product Development Professional certification from PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. I wanted to learn what PDMA, the longest running professional association for product managers and innovators, said about product management. Studying for the NPDP certification was my way to accomplish this. Seeing how they organized the many aspects of product management and made connections between them was a huge ah-ha moment for me. It connected the work I had been doing for many years and filled in holes in my knowledge and experience. I saw my work more clearly and even more holistically. Needless to say, it had a huge impact on me. I found it so helpful, that after earning the NPDP certification, I created a virtual training program to help others learn the body of knowledge as well and earn the certification. Coupled with a PhD in Innovation, that is what got me started teaching product and innovation management. PDMA’s body of knowledge is updated every three years now. It reflects relevant practices, tools, processes, and concepts that the best organizations use based on the most credible research and the deep knowledge of expert practitioners. It has only been in the last few years that we’ve had the body of knowledge represented in a single book. Previously, the Body of Knowledge was expressed as a collection of many books and numerous articles. Now, the key elements of the knowledge are published in Product Development and Management Body of Knowledge: A Guidebook for Training and Certification. The second edition was published this summer, and I had the pleasure of reviewing it and providing editorial feedback; previously, I helped write portions of the first edition. This is the start of an 8-part series to explore the Body of Knowledge. I’m publishing the series every-other week, with interviews on other topics in between. Each part of the series is with one of the 7 authors who contributed to the second edition. Today we are joined by Dr. Allan Anderson, past chairman of PDMA and the person who led the development of the first and second editions of the Body of Knowledge. He has had a long career in product management, primarily in food products, and is professor emeritus at Massey University New Zealand. I hope you enjoy exploring the PDMA Body of Knowledge and find it as helpful to your career growth as I did. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:07] Chad’s story of his lightbulb moment with PDMA. While I was earning my PhD in innovation and working as a software project manager, I needed help with product management, and I stumbled across PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. PDMA is a non-profit that has curated the body of knowledge for product managers and innovators since 1976. PDMA gave me a network of others doing product management and allowed me to gain insights from people across industries. I studied for the New Product Development Professional (NPDP) certification, and that was such a lightbulb moment for me that I now train others to earn the certification. At that time, the body of knowledge was a collection of books and articles, but now, thanks to Allan’s efforts, it has been codified into a book, allowing people to get their hands around the material much more easily. [7:05] Alan’s story of his involvement with PDMA. I’ve been in product management my entire career, in many roles, but I didn’t even know much about PDMA until around 2007. I got involved when a colleague and I set up a PDMA chapter here in New Zealand. Since then I’ve been to every international conference since 2008, and I’ve been in nearly every role in PDMA, including president. When I first got involved in PDMA, I thought I knew everything about product development and didn’t need a certification, but I took the exam anyway, mostly to encourage my colleagues to do it. Two problems I encountered led to creating the book. First, many of the books and articles that contained the body of knowledge at the time were written in the U.S. and included American terms that were confusing to a global audience. Second, several of those books and articles were out of print, difficult to find, or challenging to read. I created the book as a single, 350-page reference book, making it much easier for people around the world to take the NPDP exam. [10:37] What is PDMA? PDMA is the only professionally-based product innovation organization globally. It’s made up of people from all areas of product innovation, across 17 countries, with difference experiences, ideas, and backgrounds in product innovation. For me, after 40 yea

Simple steps product managers can take to become Time Rich Would you like to get more done? Product managers are pulled in many directions, and if you are like others, you struggle to get the most important things done, let along everything you are asked to do. Our guest knows a lot about this. He was an intrapreneur in large organizations. He got tired of being “busy” all day and having little to show for it. When he started his own company, he needed to learn how to actually work, and what he learned was how to get twice as much done in half the time. That is something I want, and I bet you do, too. He is still involved in innovation, as he co-founded Collective Campus, a corporate innovation accelerator. His name is Steve Glaveski and we discuss his system for getting more accomplished in less time. He also has written about the system in his recent book, Time Rich. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:17] How did you create your system to get twice as much done in half the time? When I worked for large corporations, I and my coworkers had little incentive for greater efficiency, but when I started my own company, I became intentional about creating an organization where people walk away from their work fulfilled. I found that I was fulfilled on days when I got high-value work done. We ran an experiment to try to double our output or at least keep it consistent while having only a six-hour work day. The time it takes to complete a task expands or contracts in proportion to the time we are given to do it. Having a six-hour work day forces us to focus on high-value tasks and figuring out how to outsource or automate low-value tasks. [6:10] How does your Time Rich system contrast with The 4-Hour Work Week? The 4-Hour Work Week had a significant impact on my life, but Time Rich is different. The 4-Hour Work Week focuses on making the leap from employee to entrepreneur, but my system is for individuals working either for themselves or as part of a team, and for leaders of organizations looking to build Time Rich cultures. A lot has changed since The 4-Hour Work Week was published in 2007. We have more distractions; today the average person spends four hours a day, or eight weeks a year, looking at their smartphone. Picking up the phone every few minutes gets us out of the flow state, where we’re up to five times more productive than when we’re doing shallow work. [9:59] In order to become Time Rich, what behaviors should we avoid? Saying yes to too much: Some people say they’re time-poor, but they’re really decision-poor—they are saying “yes” to things they should be saying “no” to. Saying “yes” to every opportunity means saying “no” to your goals. Distractions: Even a distraction of one tenth of a second can lead to a 40% productivity loss over the course of the day. Glancing at a notification on your phone takes you out of flow, and your intense focus fades away. The average person spends three hours per day checking email; we are efficient at responding to other people’s demands on our time but not at prioritizing our time. Residual work: We might spend a day putting together a proposal but then spend two days tweaking the wording and formatting. We’ve created 95% of the value the first day, but it’s much easier to spend two more days tweaking than to move on to the next difficult thing that requires thinking and focus. The best way to get started on difficult work is to take the smallest possible step. Commit to reading one page; then it’s easier to read the whole chapter. [17:40] What behaviors should we start doing? Follow my acronym P-COATS. Prioritize: Focus on the highest value tasks. The 80/20 Principle says that the top 20% of your tasks create 80% of the value. If you have ten tasks to complete, chances are the top two or three are way more valuable than the other seven. If you only get those top tasks done, you have won the day. Prioritize tasks by determining the value on a scale of one to ten and dividing by the cost in time. If you find a task that is not aligned with your strengths, you might want to outsource it to free yourself to do tasks that you enjoy and are good at. Cut: Eliminate tasks that aren’t worth doing. Every quarter, my team and I draw four quadrants labelled “start,” “stop,” “more,” and “less.” We reflect on tasks, customer segments, product features, etc., and write down what’s working and what’s not. Writing this down on a quarterly basis will help you avoid getting stuck in the habit of doing the same old things. Outsource: Use external contractors to do work. Nowadays, organizations can achieve more with fewer full-time permanent employees because the cost of finding, onboarding, and working with quality resources for complex work has gone way down. You can outsource not only rud

How product managers can create product names that make people smile Not many product managers get involved in naming products, and that is a mistake. If you were involved during the initial idea work and problem solving—creating a product concept that fulfills customers’ unmet needs—then you have valuable insights for the product name. You can be a great brainstorming resource to help Marketing or a naming consulting. That is, if you know the attributes of a great name, how to avoid naming mistakes, how to use a creative brief, and how to effectively brainstorm. Those topics and more are in a new book titled Hello, My Name Is Awesome: How to Create Brand Names That Stick. The author is Alexandra Watkins and she joins us to discuss many of these topics so you can become a product naming champ. Alexandra has created names or renamed many brands and products you would recognize, including the Wendy’s Baconator. She has many great tips for us that take the mystery out of naming. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:59] What are the SMILE elements of a good name? SIMLE is an acronym for the five qualities that make a name great. Suggestive—your name suggests what your product is; the name doesn’t have to be descriptive, just suggestive of a positive brand experience. Memorable—a name is memorable if it is based in the familiar; for example, the bike lock Kryptonite is based on the familiar kryptonite from Superman. Imagery—when someone sees your product name, they have something to picture in their head; for example, the energy drink Bloom gives you a picture to imagine. Legs—your name lends itself to a theme, which is great for brand extensions; for example the Scrub Daddy sponge expanded to Scrub Mommy and Caddy Daddy. Emotional—your name makes an emotional connection, which can help you command a premium price; for example, you might buy a bottle of wine you’ve never tried before because you connect emotionally with the name. [9:50] What are some examples of product names that deliver all the qualities of SMILE? Silk Almond Milk—it suggests that it’s rich, creamy, silky smooth; it’s memorable because we’re familiar with silk; we can picture something silky; the connection between milk and silk gives it legs; and it makes an emotional connection with something luxurious. Retriever GPS for dogs Wendy’s Baconator The Church of Cupcakes Suppose Anne is a product manager trying to come up a with a great name for a new pool cleaner. What advice would you give her? [13:00] Creative Brief First, we would fill out a creative brief. This includes: Background information on the product, target audience, and desired brand experiences. Styles of names that Anne and her team like and styles they don’t like. Tone and personality of the name—is it a pool cleaner for millionaires or for families with kids? The creative brief is your brand name roadmap that helps you keep on strategy while you’re going through the naming process and helps you know at the end whether your name meets all your needs. [14:57] Kickoff Meeting Next, we’ll do a kickoff meeting with the team. We discuss words that Anne and her team might like to have in the name, perhaps clear, sweep, or speed. We also explore themes like less energy or quiet. [16:11] Brainstorming We brainstorm name ideas. I look for metaphors, parallels, and things that are unexpected. Let’s say we’re focusing on speed. I would look up lists of things that are fast, maybe names of power boats. I use the internet to search and dig deep. As another example, I was naming an athleisure clothing brand for a client who like mixed martial arts, so I looked for lists of movie fight scenes. I skimmed the lists and saw the name “stunt double,” and that was the name. [21:32] What do you think of making names by mashing together foreign words? I’m not a fan. It’s the go-to for a lot of people—using a word from another language that relates to their product. Foreign names are foreign to customers, and you want your name to be approachable, friendly, and easily pronounceable. [24:20] This podcast is named The Everyday Innovator, because it’s for people who think about innovation all the time. However, my core audience is product managers. How could I come up with a better name? The Everyday Innovator is approachable and aspirational, but if you wanted to focus more on product managers, put the word product in your name. My first go-to with any naming assignment is alliteration. I would look up words that start with P. You could be the Product People Podcast. You want to include interesting words, although not too many. Product by itself isn’t very interesting, but Product People is. We all want to find our people. Product People Podcast fits all the qualities of SMILE. Action Guide: Put the information Alexandra shared into action now. Click here to download the

How product managers can discover customer needs and build the right product I’m often asked by product managers on their journey to product master what books they should read. I have a new one to recommend. It covers a broad perspective helpful to less experienced product managers all the way to those who are leading other product managers. It covers: How to think like a product manager, How to have influence in an organization, Several specific tactics that extend from idea through product launch, and A plan for structuring your career growth. The book is The Influential Product Manager and it was written by our guest, Ken Sandy. Ken has over 20 years of experience in technology product management. He served as VP of Product Management at online education companies, MasterClass and lynda.com, and is currently an advisor for startup and scale-up companies. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [8:07] How can we discover customer needs? It’s so important for product managers to not outsource the most important part of their job—engaging with customers. The product manager’s job is not to build the product right. It’s to build the right product. How are you going to know what the right product is unless you spend time with your customers and understand their problems? Value both qualitative and quantitative research. Quantitative helps you find market opportunities, spot trends, and know what customers are doing with your product. Qualitative gives you nuggets of insight about the underlying root needs. Don’t overlook qualitative research. Discovery is long-term process of both getting into the data and going out into the market. Don’t make customer discovery harder than it needs to be. If you think you need a time-consuming, expensive process, you’re going to do it less often. Instead, incrementally learn new things, using what you have. Do customer discovery early, often, and inexpensively. Focus on a few hypotheses at a time and meet many customers over a long period of time. All the little things add up to really big things. [17:07] How have you seen organizations change after developing a more customer-focused culture? In one organization, product managers were emboldened by having data about customers, and they built the confidence to tell the founder when he was wrong. He gained confidence in them because they had the context to make better decisions. I’ve seen a lot of success with exposing people throughout the organization, not just product managers, to customer discovery. Share the experience throughout the organization so that you all have empathy. It creates common language, a sense of purpose, commonality. There may be resistance, but it’s very impactful. [20:18] How do we move from customer insights to developing the right product (specification)? There’s a big gap between understanding your customers’ needs and encapsulating that into something useful your team can build into a solution. Discovery and specification are parallel processes that should both be happening constantly. First, you must immerse yourself in the problem space. Devel0p a shared understanding of the problem and your constraints. Agree on what success will look like. It’s challenging to not jump to solutions. If you think you have an understanding of the problem, you probably don’t. You might be working on the wrong problem. Zoom out and understand the true problem. If you don’t spend time creating shared context with your team, you risk de-motivating your team. You don’t want them questioning why the product is valuable or why they’re putting time into it. Without agreement at the beginning about what success looks like, you could roll out a product you think is really successful and find your stakeholders completely unhappy with it. If you are clear with your goals, you’re setting yourself up to inspire and empower your team. [26:50] How do we communicate the criteria for success? There are different ways to communicate success requirements (one template is in my book), but all templates should include five critical elements: Written hypothesis: Articulate your goal as a learning outcome. Even if you’re wrong, it’s okay because you’ll still learn. Measurable outcome: Identify the metric in the business or customer-centric metric you’re trying to drive forward. If that metric is lagging or hard to measure, develop some leading indicators that you can measure more quickly. I often write these measures as success criteria. Be clear on constraints in a useful way: Start with solving a smaller problem. You might want to eventually apply your solution broadly, but start with a small audience or one product. Be clear on your jobs to be done and user stories for the target customer. Share only potential solution approaches. Leave it open for the team to collaboratively come up with the a

How product managers can increase team performance by understanding Team Dimensions The only thing better than hearing about how an organization improved their product management and innovation capability is sharing it with The Everyday Innovators! I was talking with Teresa Jurgens-Kowal about innovation culture and she shared some work she recently did with an organization that is building their ability to innovate products. The company is a B2B software developer. She took them through exercises to explore their work styles and better align their styles to the execution needed using the Innovation Z model. We discussed the tools to do this. Teresa is the President of Global NP Solutions. She has a PhD in Chemical Engineering and has advised several organizations, helping them grow by improving their new product development capabilities. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:35] Take us through your case study of helping an organization apply the Team Dimensions Model. I worked with the eight-person innovation group of a company that develops software for scheduling at hair salons and yoga studios. The company has grown rapidly, the team has an open culture, and they love their customers, but they were at the point in their growth where they needed to learn how to manage conflict, increase communication, and do more than templates, procedures, and processes. Successful companies dig deep into teams and leadership. I help them with functional team building, starting with the Team Dimensions Model. We begin with a short assessment of the behaviors of team members. We identify four categories of work styles based on combinations of spontaneous, normative, methodical, and conceptual behaviors: Creators are spontaneous and conceptual. They’re good at creating new ideas. Advancers are spontaneous and normative. They focus on interactions and transform ideas into procedures and processes. Refiners are conceptual and methodical. They turn ideas into plans. Executors are normative and methodical. They like data and getting work done. [7:02] Why is it important in innovation to have the right mix of people doing the right things? Understanding the culture of the company and how teams interact is transformative in creating a high-functioning team. Digging into teams and leadership transforms teams from creating one successful innovation to creating ten or twelve or fifty successful innovations. When you can match people’s preferred work styles to the different steps in your innovation process, you have a higher level of success. There are many innovation processes, but they all have the same four steps, each of which corresponds to one of the four work styles: Generate ideas—creators focusing on possibilities Build support—advancers focusing on interactions Plan a project—refiners focusing on analysis Execute the work—executors focusing on realities This plan is called the Z Model because it can be sketched like the letter Z. [12:22] What are some examples of why identifying team members’ work styles is useful? I was on a volunteer team with a tight deadline, and we discovered that everyone was a creator. We had only two months to get ready for an event, but everyone kept going backwards and presenting new ideas. We had to realize that while we preferred creating, the team had to execute, so we needed to put on our execution hats and focus on that. That mindset shift helped us move toward the deadline. On the software development team of the case study, we plotted a graph of the eight team members’ work styles and realized that we didn’t have a person who worked between creator and advancer. However, we realized that they were filling that gap through talking with customers in customer focus groups. Generally, you want to have a distribution of creators, advancers, refiners, and executors. If you don’t, you need to figure out how to get the missing input into the team. [14:37] How did the Team Dimensions model help the company in your case study? The team shared their work styles with each other, and using that information we discussed which person should be in each role. They were using Scrum, so we identified which person would be best for each step of Scrum. We found that some people were already in great roles, and there were some mismatches, so by swapping roles were were able to get the team better aligned. [20:26] What were some of the reflections of the team members? “I have begun to talk and respond to my coworkers differently.” “[I] make use of the different work styles to more effectively communicate with my coworkers.” “Good job of helping us find ways to tie into our existing process and encapsulate people or steps in the process.” “I know who I can leverage for help when I find myself struggling with a task.” “Not only does this help me understand my coworkers, but when I went home, I understoo

What product managers need to know to build a product into a successful company When I’m working with a group of product managers to help them move towards product mastery, I always ask them to introduce themselves by sharing what they love about product management. Among the numerous answers, in the last year the most frequent response is to create value for customers. Many product managers also aspire to create their own group to accomplish this, whether it is as an intrapreneur inside an organization or as an entrepreneur founding their own company. Product managers make the best founders. To explore what being a founder involves, I had a discussion with Ryan Frederick. He is a product manager and founder and now helps software companies build great products. He has put his lifetime of experience into a book titled The Founder’s Manual, and we discuss the key strategies. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:46] Tell us about your book, The Founder’s Manual. I wrote the book to increase awareness about what it’s like to become a founder of your own company. There are a lot of similarities between building a product inside a company and starting your own company. I structured the book in three sections, Founder Flow, Startup Flow, and Product Flow. I address the human aspect of being a founder; I discuss building a successful product; and I talk about how to commercialize that product into a successful company. Flow is a state of higher productivity achieved by understanding the principles that allow you to perform at your best. [6:17] Let’s walk through a scenario. Suppose Lisa is a product manager who has an idea that her company isn’t interested in, so she decides to strike out on her own. Where should she start? The first thing I would say to Lisa is that she needs to look at herself as a problem solver. Entrepreneurs are problems solvers. They start with the hypothesis that they can solve the problem they’ve identified. The entrepreneurial life is a series of unending problems and obstacles. We aren’t wired to run to problems, but we need to learn to run to the fire. Lisa needs to get in the mental and emotional state not only to create her product as a solution to her customer’s problem, but also to solve the problems of getting her enterprise up and running. [9:39] Let’s talk about Founder Flow. What are some of the ways Lisa can embrace the entrepreneurial mindset to face problems? When deciding to become an entrepreneur, Lisa needs to understand her risk tolerance financially, emotionally, physically, and mentally. She’s coming out of a successful career, so she needs to ask herself, If my enterprise doesn’t work, am I okay with that? You can figure out your risk tolerance by taking incrementally riskier chances and tracking how you react. An easy way to start is by doing something physically challenging and uncomfortable, like taking rock climbing lessons, and tracking your progress over time. A lot of people take the entrepreneurial step without having ever assessed their relationship to risk, and then they’re in uncharted territory when they face risk as an entrepreneur. Instead, understand your risk tolerance first. It’s also important that Lisa’s personal life is ordered. If she starts a company while she’s experiencing personal stress, it’s super challenging to make it work. No one is an entrepreneur on their own, but it’s often a lonely journey. You have team members, partners, friends, and family who are going through it with you, but being an entrepreneur is consuming, and others may not understand what you’re doing and why. At the beginning you’ll feel like it’s you against the world, so it’s important to find a community of other founders you can relate to so you can support and guide each other. [20:50] Let’s talk about Startup Flow. What should Lisa be expecting and working on next? When they’re trying to commercialize a company, people often start looking for crutches. They struggle to get funding from investors, and they don’t realize that the best funding is customer funding because it proves that customers value what you’re doing. Because customers can be complicated, founders often don’t pursue customer funding as much as they could. There’s no better way to get other investors to pay attention than to have customers already paying you to solve their problem. Consider converting an early customer into a strategic investor. Find a customer who is paying for your product and ask if they are interested in becoming a strategic investor and taking a royalty or equity in exchange. It might be hard for Lisa to ask a customer to become an investor because she might be afraid of losing them as a customer, but customers make good investors because they already value your product. [25:25] What do you thi

Five behaviors of great product managers and innovators In this discussion we visit two topics—one to help you be more successful personally and another to help your organization be more successful. The first examines five behaviors to be a better innovator. The second is breaking through barriers in your organization that limit innovation and the effectiveness of product managers. Our guest for this discussion is Scott Anthony, a Senior Partner at Innosight, based in the firm’s Singapore office. If you are unfamiliar with Innosight, this is the innovation consultancy created by Clayton Christensen, the father of disruptive innovation and Harvard Business School professor. The insights that Scott shares with us are from a new book he co-authored with a title that is perfect for this podcast—Eat, Sleep, Innovate. As Everyday Innovators, we see innovation opportunities each day, and that notion is conveyed well in the Eat, Sleep, Innovate title too! Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:28] How do you define innovation? Innovation is something different that creates value. It’s purposely a broad definition. “Something” can be more than just new products or technology; it can also be new ways to market, new ways to organize meetings, etc. “Different” reminds us that while big leaps forward are great, you can also make something different by simplifying or making it more accessible. “Creates value” means that innovation isn’t just the idea; you have to do something with it to increase revenue, profits, engagement, etc. [5:04] What are the five basic behaviors of innovators? Curious—questioning status quo Collaborative—if you want a great idea, you need to work at the intersections Customer-obsessed—so you can find problems worth solving Adapted to ambiguity—because every idea is partially right and partially wrong Empowered—you can’t innovate until you go and do something [5:35] What are some hacks for being better innovators? [5:47] Hacks for being curious: Make it a regular habit to ask prompting questions that can open up avenues for innovation. Stay positive. Reframe worries as opportunities. [8:37] Hacks for being collaborative: When you’re solving a problem, find someone who’s already solved it. You might find a source related to a different context, but once you have inspiration you can bring it to your context. [10:53] Hacks for being customer-focused: Increase the amount of time you spend with customers. If you don’t understand what your customer values, you run the risk of innovating for innovation’s sake; you’ll come up with something cool that no one cares about. Great innovators have an empathetic understanding for the person they’re trying to serve. Understand the job they’re trying to get done or the problem they’re having. Use the many available tools to help you understand the problems you’re solving. [13:25] Hacks for being adapted to ambiguity: Follow an emergent strategy, meaning you discover truth through controlled experimentation. Early in innovation, your idea will be a little bit right and a little bit wrong, and you won’t know which part is which. The tendency is to solve this analytically, but you’ll make assumptions and miss something. Instead, recognize the few things you know and the many assumptions you’re making, and find the most effective and efficient way to experiment. Experiments don’t have to be complicated. Look for low-risk ways to test your idea. Create models or simulations. [18:11] Hacks for being empowered: Ask forgiveness, not permission. Figure out how to do stuff in a scrappy way in a constrained environment. Get other people behind you by telling the story of why your idea is compelling. [22:06] What are tools for overcoming barriers to innovation? Defeat the shadow strategy with BEANs. The shadow strategy comes from institutionalized inertia, which is the enemy of innovation. Innovation is doing something different that creates value, but organizations aren’t wired to do something different; they’re wired to do what they are currently doing better. They perpetuate today rather than create tomorrow. Even if your intended strategy is to do completely different things, the shadow strategy is causing you to make decisions to keep doing the same thing. Defeat the shadow strategy by planting a BEAN—a behavior enabler, artifact, and nudge. A behavior enabler is a tool that helps you consciously think about changing your behavior—it could be a ritual, checklist, or community. Artifacts and nudges remind you to change behaviors that you do without thinking. In our book, we have 101 different BEANs that encourage innovative behaviors. Some of my favorite BEANs are: [25:28] Adobe Kickbox: Participants in the Kickbox program get a physical box with behavior enablers like checklists, and artifacts and nudges like

A conversation of insights for product managers This is our 300th episode. The podcast started in January 2015, and we have not missed a week. Thank you so much for listening and for sharing it with others! The purpose of the podcast has not changed—to better equip product managers and leaders for more success. Some Everyday Innovators have shared how listening has helped them—doubling their salary, finding a new job after not interviewing for many years, moving to a different industry, gaining a better appreciation of customers, and more. To mark the 300th episode, I asked past guest Steve Johnson to join me for a completely unscripted, off-the-cuff discussion. We had no specific topic or questions in mind, and the result is a free-flowing discussion about changes with product management we are seeing and changes we want to make. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we did making it. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers Why product managers are important This has been an interesting year for business. Companies are re-thinking product management. Throughout the challenges, organizations have realized a couple of things: They really need product managers. They’re embracing product management as a repeatable, sustainable function to keep their products going. They need to optimize their team. There has been a lot of chaos, caused by confusion about the role of product management. Prioritizing ideas Companies should prioritize projects or new features based on… value for the customer. value for the business. Sometimes a new feature will not provide good value to customers and may even distract them. We might like to polish our products, but we shouldn’t waste resources or create distractions. Creating value for the customer will return value to the organization. Assuming all possible features are valuable to the customer, a feature that creates more business and increases profitability is a better outcome. The Lean Canvas is a tool to help product managers prioritize projects. It’s focused on creating a product and identifying the customer, the customer’s problem, and the solution you could provide. It helps you compare projects and choose one or two to accomplish with the resources you have. Customer discovery and the role of product managers Many organizations have too many ideas. Before describing possible solutions, spend time doing discovery, personally talking with possible customers. Before prioritizing, get commitment from leadership. Only then, flesh out the canvas and begin development. If product managers are involved in development, they must also be preparing for launch and market. Release is the end of development, but launch is the beginning of marketing. Companies must be judicious about selecting projects—they may have many good ideas, but must figure out which one or two they need to get to first to create the most value for the customer and the business. Product ideas should be: supported by evidence, not just someone’s pet project. something customers are willing to pay for. feasible for the business. The product manager generates ideas by talking to customers. Then the company needs to prioritize what they’re going to do, get the ideas to the developers, and then to the salespeople and ultimately the customer. The magic wand If you had a magic wand that could change an organization, what key thing would you do to improve product management? Steve’s answer: I wish product management were recognized as a profession. People aren’t clear about what product managers are supposed to be. Scrum and Agile say that product managers are sitting next to developers all day, but somehow also have to be aware of what’s going on in the market. We need a product management degree and a professional definition of product management. Chad’s answer: We need to spend more time with customers. You can’t do product management if you don’t spend time with customers. Based on research, 30% of a product manager’s time spent with customers is ideal. I know very few product managers who spend that much time with customers. But spending time with customers is where ideas come from. It’s how we understand the customer problem, how we drive innovation. It’s the deeper understanding that sets really great companies apart. Action Guide: Put the information Steve shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Visit Steve’s website Past TEI episodes with Steve: TEI 115, TEI 168, TEI 265 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

Why product managers need to understand introverts and extroverts If you work with other people, and I think that is just about all of us, you are going to love this episode. People are either extroverts or introverts. For everyone leading a team or working in a team, you can improve the team performance by improving how introverts and extroverts interact. To help us improve team performance, I went to the person who has spent her professional life researching, writing about, and speaking on introverts. That is Dr. Jennifer Kahnweiler. She helps organizations harness the power of introverts. Her recent book is Creating Introvert-Friendly Workplaces: How to Unleash Everyone’s Talent and Performance. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:30] What are the definitions of introverts and extroverts? The identifying factor is where they get their energy. After being with people all day, introverts need to recharge during quiet time. Extroverts get charged up by being with people. There is some misunderstanding about introverts. Many introverts are labeled as shy, which is seen as a problem. Shyness has to do with anxiety, and it can be overcome. Introversion is a natural way people are wired. [9:49] How can we identify introverts and extroverts by their characteristics? Introverts tend to be calm, take time to think, embrace silence, and be humble. Extroverts can get people to talk and like to be in a large room where they’re having multiple conversations. Usually, someone can determine whether they’re an extrovert or introvert by their characteristics. There are also ambiverts, people who identify with both extroverts and introverts. There’s a myth that introverts aren’t in people-facing roles. That’s absolutely not true. A study a few years ago showed that introverts make the best leaders for extroverts because they’re very good listeners. [14:20] How can introverts better relate to the people around them? Introverts will do well to prepare for their interactions with others and to connect one-on-one. Consider some questions you would like to ask and schedule a meeting or phone call with someone for an intentional reason, such as hoping to learn from them or serving as a mentor. Having deep relationships is an introvert’s strength, and they like to get into deep conversations, but it’s also important to learn to use small talk to build relationships and then move to substance. [19:53] How can extroverts better relate to introverts? An important principle is “Accept the alien.” Realizing that somebody is different from you and you cannot change them takes away stress because instead of spending time trying to change them you’re learning how to work with them. Extroverts need to listen. When introverts pause in a conversation, they may be reflecting and have more to say. Extroverts can tend toward “loudership,” meaning the loudest voice gets to lead. If you do this, you’re excluding others’ ideas that you and your team need to hear. Extroverts can discipline themselves to listen, such as waiting for three people to talk before offering their opinion, or asking someone to email them ideas after a meeting. It’s also helpful to tell people the agenda for a meeting ahead of time so they have time to prepare their thoughts. Another tool is giving everyone a few minutes to write down their ideas before anyone shares. [24:44] As an introvert, after seeing myself on video at a professional development event, I realized that even though I was engaged, my voice and body language weren’t showing that. I’ve learned to speak louder and use my eye contact and body language to show my engagement. What are your thoughts? We want to choose behaviors that narrow the perception gap, which is the difference between what we’re intending to show and what people are seeing. Being self-aware is important for all of us. Watching yourself on video can be very helpful. Even if there’s not a real camera, imagining you’re being videoed can cause you to focus on the attitude you’re projecting. Another useful strategy for introverts is to have an advocate in the meeting. When everyone ignores your idea only to accept it when someone else brings it up, your advocate can point out that you just brought it up and ask you to share more. [30:17] How does remote working affect introverts? Some pros of remote working for introverts are solitude, the ability to arrange your day to work at your peak, and others’ openness to having deep conversations. The loss of connection is a challenge. We all need to be intentional about having conversations with others. There is a lot of stress in people’s lives right now, so we need to be deliberate about checking in and seeing how people are doing. Action Guide: Put the information Jennifer shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guid

The five languages of appreciation for product managers Dr. Paul White is a psychologist, author, speaker, and leadership trainer who “makes work relationships work.” For the past 20 years, he’s improved numerous businesses, schools, government agencies, and non-profit organizations by helping them: Create positive workplace relationships and improve staff morale. Eliminate the cynicism, sarcasm, and lack of trust that often are associated with traditional employee recognition programs. Overcome the obstacles to help staff communicate authentic appreciation to one another. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:03] You recently wrote The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace. What is appreciation and why is it important? Appreciation is feeling valued for what you do or who you are. Stephen Covey said that appreciation is the highest need beyond physical survival. As opposed to employee recognition, which motivates toward specific goals, appreciation helps people feel valued for who they are. [6:37] What are the benefits of appreciating our colleagues? Appreciation does much more than just make people feel good. We have over fifty citations of research that shows the return-on-investment of appreciation. When team members feel valued, absenteeism and staff turnover go down and productivity and profitability go up. Appreciation is the oil in the machine that helps things running smoothly with less friction and less sparks. Let’s talk about the five languages of appreciation. [10:39] #1 Words of Affirmation (preferred by 46% of employees) When using words that affirm a person’s value, be specific. Don’t just say “good job.” Use the person’s name. Specify what they’ve done that you value. Tell why their action is important to you. [11:56] #2 Quality Time (preferred by 26% of employees) Quality time doesn’t have to take long. Just a few minutes can mean a lot. Quality time can take two forms… Focused attention—some people like to meet one-on-one to share and listen. It’s important you are not distracted. Peer interactions—others people, especially younger employees, prefer time with several colleagues, e.g., going to lunch together. [13:02] #3 Acts of Service (preferred by 22% of employees) Acts of service isn’t rescuing a low-performing colleague. Instead, consider serving a colleague working on a time-limited project. For example… Doing some work they delegate. Running interference with their email or phone calls. Bringing in meals so they can keep working. [14:00] #4 Tangible Gifts (preferred by 6% of employees) Tangible gifts does not mean raises and bonuses. It’s small things that show you’re getting to know your team members. For example… Their favorite cup of coffee. A gift card, especially for something you know they enjoy. Magazines related to their hobby. Pair tangible gifts with another appreciation language to make it more impactful. [16:06] #5 Physical Touch (preferred by 1% of employees) We struggled with whether to keep this in, but we did because… We don’t want to advocate a touchless society. Appropriate physical touch can be meaningful in an appropriate setting. Physical touch does happen in the workplace, usually as spontaneous celebration such as a high-five. [18:15] How can we identify which language of appreciation someone prefers? You can ask someone how you can show them appreciation, although that can be an awkward conversation, and you may not learn much. It works better to ask people how they are encouraged since this is similar to appreciation, but we tend to be more in touch with what encourages us. You can also observe how they show appreciation, although we found that 25% of the time people communicate appreciation using a different language from how they prefer to receive appreciation. We have an inventory that identifies people’s preferred appreciation languages along with specific actions they’d like and from whom they want that action. You can take this inventory and our training with your team. Our training helps the whole team become involved in communicating appreciation. [21:22] What happens if you use the wrong appreciation language with someone? This can be a problem. For example, in the general workforce, 40% of people do not want to be recognized in front of a large group. They know you mean well, but for these people employee recognition wouldn’t effectively show appreciation. A person’s preferred language of appreciation is also the way they’re most easily offended.Don’t fake it. You need to be sincere and real. Learn to actually appreciate people. You can value them as people even if you don’t value their performance. Build trust and loyalty by communicating your appreciation for something not associated with their work. Point out their cheerful personality, discipline in training for a marathon, o

Five steps to securing success in product management in an uncertain world Are you taking steps to make yourself more valuable to your organization or the next organization you want to work with? Arguably, all the topics we address on this podcast are about career development, helping you improve in product management and innovation. However, occasionally we focus on the topic head-on, and with the impact of the pandemic on organizations, creating opportunities in some cases and hardship in others, now is an important time to discuss making yourself highly employable, or as our guest says, forever employable. What is interesting is that our guest is now offering career advice after becoming known as the Agile Product guy who helps organizations build better products. You may know him from his past books, including Lean UX, Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking, and Sense & Respond. His name is Jeff Gothelf and, as a product guy, he will give you the 5 activities for being forever employable. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:37] You recently wrote the book Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You. Who did you write this book for and what does it mean to be forever employable? My target audience is mid-career knowledge workers, but the concepts apply to others too. Traditionally, job hunting is a push process, meaning we push our resumes and experiences into job listings. If we have to keep pushing for the rest of our careers, we’ll lose more and more often because as we rise on the corporate ladder there are fewer positions, and our skills will never be as good as when we were younger. Forever Employable changes the dynamic from pushing ourselves into jobs to pulling opportunities toward us. As you build a platform of recognized expertise around your unique experience and as you share generously and give back to your community, you create the environment for jobs to find you. Take us through the steps to become Forever Employable. [10:40] Plant a flag. Decide which slice of your expertise you’re going to build a platform on. For example, product management is a huge field, so you might decide to plant a flag in product management for the real estate industry or product leadership. [11:33] Tell your story. Share your expertise. Participate in the conversation; have a presence in the industry; and give your knowledge back to your community. There are many ways to tell stories, so experiment to find one that works for you. Tell your story with persistence and consistency. As Jeff Weiner said, right about the time you’re tired of saying it is when they start hearing it. Persistence means continuing to tell your story even if it feels like you’re shouting into the void because initially no one’s ever heard of you. Consistency means you’re on topic, wherever you planted the flag. [16:44] Follow the new path. Take the new opportunities that telling your story generates. That could be talking at a meet-up, attending a conference, or writing a book. Following the new path may stretch you in new directions, and you won’t be doing exactly what you used to do, but the whole reason you’re following the new path is to attract new audiences and reach people in different ways, driving even more opportunities toward you. Not everything you try will work out 100%, but the nature of becoming forever employable is experimenting and learning, then following the paths that generate bigger and better opportunities. [21:16] Teach. Teach what you know. Everything I do is teaching—conversations like this, workshops, coaching, speeches. Teaching is how you get better at your practice, because the better you can teach it, the better you can do it. Teaching is also how you get better at storytelling. [23:27] Give it all away. Share your expertise for free. This is hard because your expertise is valuable and you want to be paid for it. But I’ve learned that every time I give stuff away, stuff comes back in. When I give away free content, people see it and offer me new opportunities. The more you make your content available and easily accessible, the more traffic you drive to yourself and the bigger platform you’ll have. It’s tough to give your hard-earned experience and knowledge away for free, so start small. Write one article about something that worked well for you in the last month. Post one comment on an online discussion in your area of expertise. Then do it again and again and again. [29:24] In the midst of uncertainty, how can we future-proof our careers? Future-proofing your career is putting in the investment of doing the steps I’ve just described. By becoming known and valuable to your community, you’ll begin to develop a steady stream of opportunities. During a financial crisis, whether a pandemic or stock-market crash, the people who survive and thrive are those who are known in their

What product managers need to know about customer validation and alpha, beta, and delta testing Product testing is about more than determining if a product functions properly or not. A larger perspective, and one that our guests shares is Customer Validation. We discuss how to use the various types of product tests, including alpha, beta, and delta tests, to judge product performance, customer satisfaction, and areas for improvement. Our guest is Luke Freiler, CEO and co-founder of Centercode. Luke has spent most of his career improving product testing. Centercode is a Customer Validation solutions provider that helps tech companies bring products to market. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:46] How did you become a testing expert? Early in my career in software, I became very passionate about the new field of usability—making technology easy to use. I was asked to run a beta test for one of my company’s products, and although we were a large, established company, we had no process for running testing. As I looked for solutions, I realized I’d found a hole—everyone had the problem of testing but nobody had solved it. I realized that testing with customers aligned with my passion for usability; customers can help you make technology more accessible. At age 21, I started a company to do tests, and I’ve learned a lot and have been doing it ever since. [6:55] How do you relate customer validation to testing? We realized that there is no single standard term that people use to refer to testing. We wanted to establish a better vocabulary and methodology that could scale and be adaptable to any company. We chose customer validation as an umbrella term for the various ways we engage with customers to develop a product. Customer validation includes three forms of testing: Alpha testing looks for quality. Beta testing looks for satisfaction. Delta testing, where we’re seeing a lot of innovation, is a continuous test throughout the life of the product to gather feedback about specific details. [15:49] Tell us more about alpha testing. The goal of alpha testing is to make sure the product works. We focus on technographics—the technology that surrounds people and products. Alpha testing is about targeting diverse ecosystems rather than your target market. Alpha testers can be internal employees or strangers. [23:50] Tell us more about beta testing. A beta tester should be someone who matches the target market, is enthusiastic enough to provide feedback, and is a stranger rather than an employee. The goal is measuring satisfaction. We start a beta test with a test plan, which is a list of features we want tested. Each feature has a basic description. Using a 1-5 scale, we rate the effort or time we want to put in and the value of the feedback to us. Then we design activities that tell the tester where the features are but are not overly directive. We use these activities to take testers on a tour of the product and engage them over a period of time. We want the beta testers to collaborate and communicate with each other about the product as they complete activities to explore features. We look for actionable, prioritized feedback. Out of each test, you want to discover: issues—what needs to be fixed ideas—what needs to be improved praise—what needs to be promoted We ask testers to rate their satisfaction with each feature on a 1-5 scale. Then we ask why they gave that rating. We prioritize and act on the results. [31:27] What is the timeline of alpha and beta tests? Our average alpha test takes two weeks, and our average beta test takes three weeks. This is not very time-consuming. [33:57] Tell us more about delta testing. Delta testing is concerned with the next version of the product. We want to maximize small data to find quality issues. Delta testing is a continuous process as the product changes, and we believe it is the wave of the future. Action Guide: Put the information Luke shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.   Useful links: Find out more about Luke and customer validation at Centercode.com Innovation Quote “Technology is a word for something that doesn’t work yet.” – Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) 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

Five factors of successful product managers Do you and your product teams have the characteristics required for success? The Product Team Performance study has been identifying the characteristics of high-performing teams since 2012. Of the 31 factors found through the studies, I discuss five of the most significant ones with Greg Geracie, principal researcher. Greg is 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, through his work on the ProdBOK book, which is the The Guide to the Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge, as well as our mutual involvement in PDMA and AIPMM professional associations for product managers. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:50] Tell us about the survey of product managers you’ve done since 2012. It’s a performance study comparing factors of product teams that excel versus those that struggle. We use an independent statistician who conducts regression analysis on the survey data. [3:15] What’s new this year, in your sixth study? Approximately 40% of the questions are new, derived from our consulting, Q&A with live audiences, and our sponsor Planbox, who submitted five questions related to innovation. The rest are questions that we’ve been tracking on a longitudinal basis and demographic questions that help us better understand our respondents. Another important change is that when we started the study, it was very difficult to find hard data on the topics that our consultants were interested in; now, after years of research, anyone interested in answers to questions about product management and innovation topics can easily find information from our studies. [7:37] Who are your survey respondents? We’re interested in hearing from anyone actively involved in product development. Ninety-seven percent of survey respondents have an active role in creating or enhancing products or services in their organizations, so targeting has been very good. Some additional demographics about our respondents this year: 54% are product managers or product owners (higher than the norm from past years) other 46% are from a wide variety of roles including development managers, engineers, project managers, UX professionals, and more slightly more than half report to a C-level executive or VP 51% are in hardware software technology vertical 45% are from companies with revenue $50 million to $2 billion, with a strong response in the two other segments we identified [11:21] The study identified 31 significant factors that successful product teams exhibit, including five factors that are new this year. Let’s talk about one of those five new factors, connecting activities to business strategy. The study shows that a product team’s ability to connect their daily activities back to the company’s overarching business strategy is highly correlated with financial success. However, only 27% of survey respondents indicated that their product team is able to connect their daily activities directly to the company’s business strategy. Most respondents indicate that their organizations either fail to effectively communicate the company strategy or don’t have an overarching business strategy at all. Sadly, the number of product teams that can connect their daily activities with their company’s business strategy has decreased from 37% seven years ago. To improve their product and financial performance, companies need to shore up communication and transparency about their company strategy and how product teams connect to it. This will give product teams the context to make better short- and longterm decisions, and it will clarify the organization’s strategic priorities. This will also increase product team members’ commitment to their work efforts as they understand the value of their work. [17:58] Tell us more about the next factor, accountability for customer satisfaction objectives. Customer satisfaction is becoming increasingly important to product teams. In 2015, there was no dominant metric that teams were accountable to, but now customer satisfaction is the dominant metric, used by 51% of organizations. Being accountable to customer satisfaction is highly correlated with improved performance. [21:28] Another factor is stories in the backlog. What did you discover? Product teams that size the entire backlog of user stories demonstrate higher levels of performance. However, only 17% of respondents size the entire backlog. [24:11] What did you find out about the next factor, time that product managers spend in the field with customers? Product managers who spend at least 30% of their time in the field with customers improve the performance of their teams and organizations. Unfortunately, only 11% of organizations enable their product managers to spend that much time in the field with customers. One problem is lack o

What product managers need to know to create powerful customer experiences The experience that customers of our products encounter impacts the value they find in our products. The customer experience is intertwined with customers’ perceptions of value. To explore customer experience, I talked with two people who design the customer experience for theme parks, zoos, museums, and other venues. Part of the conversation is about a recent book they wrote, The CEO’s Time Machine, which uses historical innovations and a story about careful listening to create new innovations for a fictional company. We share useful insights to help innovators in a more personal context in this interview. That is because my guests include the Chief Creative Officer at Creative Principals, Geoff Thatcher, and Designer, Zoe Thatcher, who is his daughter. Consequently, it was fitting for my daughter, Kaitlin, to join me as co-host for this episode. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:55] What work do you do? We have a design firm called Creative Principles, and we work on experiences including corporate brand experiences, museum exhibits, and theme parks. As designers, we get to visit a lot of fun places to do research, because you can’t innovate unless you have a stimulus. [10:41] What makes a good customer experience? All great innovation begins with a powerful story. To create an experience, you have to translate the story. We use this formula: Attract people with an iconic element Build trust Provide the information to move forward (e.g., a pre-show) Internalize the story (e.g., the main experience, like a theme park ride) Exit through retail—this isn’t just about making money; you’re challenging people to act and become part of the story [18:27] Let’s talk about your book, The CEO’s Time Machine. The premise of the book is that there is a CEO who is ahead of the game, making his company super successful, and nobody knows how he does it. He has a secret R&D garage, and it’s rumored there is a time machine inside. As the story begins, the CEO is about to retire, and he allows his young protege into the garage to show her the time machine. Part of being a leader is creating the branding and mystique that the CEO creates with his secret garage. [22:01] What was Zoe’s work as illustrator like? In October 2019, Zoe participated in an Instagram challenge to post an inked picture every day. Zoe drew a girl in a red scarf in a futuristic woodblock ink style, and we thought it would be perfect for the story, which we had already written. When our business slowed down during the pandemic, we decided to get the book out before the lockdown ended. Zoe did forty-three illustrations in three weeks, and we got the book published. The great thing about being young, when it comes to innovation, is that young people don’t know something isn’t possible. A more experienced illustrator might not have attempted all those illustrations, but Zoe thought, Why not? [29:10] What lessons can product managers and innovators learn from the book? History is important to innovation. As Bruce Weindruch says in our foreword, in innovation you have to start with the future and look back. You want to invent the future, but you have to look back to examples from history to inspire you. [30:45] What are some innovation insights from history? I am fascinated by the Wright brothers because they invented the airplane. However, within a decade or two, they were completely out of business. After their amazing innovation of flight, they spent all their time litigating and arguing. It’s an important lesson for innovators to not lose focus on innovation. Charles Kettering, the head of R&D for General Motors, was trying to convince manufacturing that they could paint a car in an hour instead of several days. Kettering invited the head of manufacturing out to lunch. After lunch, the man couldn’t find his car because Kettering had his engineers paint it while they were at lunch. Having that personal experience convinced the head of manufacturing to embrace this new innovation. Action Guide: Put the information Geoff and Zoe shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links: Check out The CEO’s Time Machine on Amazon The CEO’s Time Machine on the Creative Principles website The Experience Model from Creative Principles Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi promotional video with Creative Principles Innovation Quote “Research is turning dollars into ideas. Innovation is turning ideas into dollars.”– Steve Hoover, CEO of Palo Alto Research Center 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