The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers

Becoming a product leader is simpler than you might think. If you have ever had to explain what you do as a product manager to people you work with, you are in good company. Most product managers find this necessary. Further, the role means different things in different organizations. The leaders of your organization may have a perspective of the role that is not really accurate, or as I have seen more often, they don’t understand the leverage the role provides them. In this discussion, we explore what organizational leaders need to understand about the role of product manager. But, we don’t stop there as product managers also need to have a clear understanding of the needs of the organization. This discussion will help you better talk to the leaders of your company about your role and to understand your very important role more deeply. To discuss the topic, I invited Kirsten Butzow to join us. She is a product veteran, serving as VP Product Management at Person and Blackboard and has held other product roles. Now she is a product coach for Pragmatic Marketing. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:09] What are some of the pain points you encounter most frequently when working with organizations? One of the primary challenges we hear is that people have too many things to get done — too many features and too many products we’re trying to put into the marketplace. There are not clearly defined allocations of responsibility and accountability. It’s a byproduct of the fact that product management is still in its infancy. We are still trying to figure out the right formula and how to prioritize all the things that need to be done. [12:19] Have you seen changes in the role of product manager? When I started my career, technology product mangers were very focused on technology, then they became more business focused. Now we’re seeing more of a focus on user experience and user interface and product managers are getting pulled back into technology a little more deeply. People are expecting them to have a perspective on design. Over time, product managers became product owners too, as organizers adopted agile. I would like to see product managers come back into true leadership positions. [17:09] What do you want organizational leaders to know about product management? Organizational leaders need to rationalize all the work that needs to be done. Someone needs to be responsible for understanding the problem that needs to be solved and the people who have that problem. The product leader should be setting the strategy and direction for understanding the what and the who of the problem; the rest of the organization should deal with the how of the design, building, and validation. However, that only works if we give the product leader the clarity and the resources to do it. [22:40] What should product managers understand about the needs of their organizations? Product leaders should be business leaders, which means they should have basic financial acumen. As product managers move into engineering roles, they don’t know how to calculate a gross margin or know the difference between fixed and variable expenses. It’s difficult to run a product line with financial goals if you don’t know how to track and analyze those goals. I always encourage MBA students who want to go into product management to take a finance class. [25:26] Can product managers be effective in cross-functional roles? There are 37 activities that need to be completed in the Pragmatic Marketing framework. The product manager’s role is to make sure all of them are getting done, but not to personally perform all of them. They should partner with the appropriate people in the organization to get things done efficiently. Product leaders should be leading cross-functional teams that include stakeholders from every ...

Don’t let your calendar get in the way of doing what’s important as a product manager. Experienced product managers benefit from what they learned from previous successes and failures. That experience is valuable. However, they can also pick up some bad habits along the way. Some bad habits may be from a lack of knowing better but others come from routine and a “this is how we do it”-sort of mentality that too often develops over time in many organizations. The first step to correcting bad habits is recognizing them and my guest is helping us with that. She is Alicia Dixon, senior product manager at Hilton. Alicia is involved with mobile and digital product innovation. Further, she volunteers for ProductCamp DC and shared aspects of our topic at recently at ProductCamp Silicon Valley. Also, both Alicia and I have found value in product management training and certification. I began the interview asking her about this, as she currently has five product management certifications, which is more than anyone else I know. We both share the value we have found in earning certifications and why we encourage others to earn them as well. It has something to do with “ah ha” moments. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:15] How did you become a product manager? My background is in marketing and brand management. I joined the product group at Dell supporting desktop sales. I went to graduate school, but it didn’t work out and I found my way into product management for mobile apps. I currently work for Hilton on digital payments. [6:50] What value do you find in certifications? I had to do a lot of self learning when I first became a product manager, so the certifications provided a lot of validation that I was on the right path and course correction when I wasn’t.  I was working on very small teams so it was like the blind leading the blind; getting the certifications helped me feel secure that I was doing the right thing. [11:03] How did you begin working with bad habits? I referred about a dozen people to a job opening that a friend of mine sent me. I heard back from her that she didn’t want to hire them because they had developed bad habits. I was on my way to ProductCamp Silicon Valley at the time and thought I should pitch product management bad habits as a session. We ended up having a very engaging discussion. [13:25] What are some of those bad habits product managers develop? One is not talking to customers. As a seasoned product manager, you have a laundry list of things you want and you become so tied to it that you lose sight of keeping in touch with your customers. Another bad habit is building exactly what leadership asks for, which leads to becoming a feature factory instead of delivering what the customer wants. In a similar vein, don’t listen solely to sales and build what they are asking for. Salespeople are an important constituent group for product managers, but they should not be the only voices you are listening to. The last bad habit I see is a resistance to use new tools. I used Visio when I got into the field, but there are way better tools available now. I would miss all that if I stuck with Visio. [19:55] How can people avoid forming those bad habits? It comes back to time management. If you don’t plan the time into your schedule to meet with customers and learn new tools, you are never going to do it. The other thing that works well is peer groups, whether it’s an internal meet up or an external conference like ProductCamp. These groups help keep your skills sharp and provide an opportunity for you to receive feedback from others. [26:37] Do managers and other senior product mangers still need to talk to customers and keep their skills sharp? I’ve heard that people are split on this.

Putting sales and product managers on the same team to create better products. Product management is a highly cross-functional role. Product managers work with product teams, R&D, engineering, marketing, finance, and others, but the one group that is most often discussed, especially in B2B organizations, is sales. You’ll hear about it at product management meetups, such as how a salesperson keeps asking a product manager to do product demos for customers or how the sales team won’t sell the existing product but some feature that hasn’t even been discussed yet. This creates tension between sales and product managers, but it can also be a very positive relationship. Salespeople can get product managers access to companies for customer site visits and other customer research. They can be a source of earlier indications of a new trend forming or an old trend changing. To understand how product management and sales can work better together, Ian Moyse is here to discuss the topic with us. Ian has a technical background with a product mindset and a passion for sales. He is currently the Sales Director for Natterbox, a UK-based Cloud Telphony company. He also received the UK Sales Director of Year award from Institute Sales & Marketing. He shares what sales wants from product management and how the two functions can work well together. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [7:22] What do salespeople want from product managers? Sales is often a mix of people who might not understand technology or the role of a product manager. They may need more help from a product manager to understand the customer’s need and how the product can fulfill it. A product manager defines the why, what, and when of the product and serves as the bridge between the customer side of the product and the engineering side. From a sales perspective, we always want everything in the product and we want it yesterday. Product managers and marketers can also take the insights that salespeople bring back from the field and use it to inform future iterations of the product. [12:13] How can product managers gain meaningful insights from sales? Sales needs to understand what value the product manager brings and how they can help achieve that value, and getting buy-in from sales leadership is essential to making that happen. Once everyone is on the same page, both teams can work toward shared goals. Product managers should have input in loss reports in terms of what data is collected and use the data as a catalyst to go back to the customers through the sales team. The sales team serves as the bridge between product managers in the customers. [19:04] How can product mangers and salespeople work better together? It all comes down to relationships and earning credibility among the sales team. You can ask the sales team how they view success and what that looks like 6 months or a year from now. This sets a product manager down a path where they have shared goals and expectations with sales. You can then go back to sales and tout the results that you were able to deliver with their help. Building relationships is an important element, too. Don’t just go to salespeople to request data; take them out for coffee and get to know who they are as people and what drives them. Breaking down silos between the two will lead to better products that provide more value to the customer. [25:04] How can product managers help sales meet its goals? Product managers should work with sales leadership to manage the team’s expectations. Every salesperson is going to have a different idea about a new feature that would help them with a customer; those expectations need to be managed and put into context with what the customer needs. Most salespeople and even sales leaders don’t understand the development process; product managers can help explain it a...

In this discussion, we bring some mature thinking to the topic of maturity. The product life cycle consists of five phases -- introduction, growth, maturity, decline, and retire. Successful products make it to maturity, and if properly managed, can generate profit for your organization for a long time. However, managing maturity comes with many challenges that are not present in the earlier stages of the product life cycle. My guest helps us understand the issues and how to avoid them. She is Janna Bastow, co-founder of ProdPad,  and co-founder of Mind the Product including MindTheProduct.com, ProductTank, and ProductCamp London. ProdPad creates tools for product managers for road mapping, backlog management, and customer feedback.

A different type of product, but traditional product management still applies. Today’s topic is the product management of APIs — application program interfaces that enable software systems to share information and interact. In the past I have thought of APIs as a part of a software system. It’s another activity on a project schedule to complete in the process of creating a software system that needs or provides an API. Our guest convinced me to think differently about APIs–to think of them as a product and to manage them as such. He has been involved in a few API projects, currently working for Ford and creating an API for Lyft (and others) that will be used by autonomous vehicles. Our guest is Bryan Hicks, senior product manager at Ford Motor Company. He has also worked at SAP, AT&T, and has been an innovation consultant. Even if you are not a software product manager, I expect you’ll find the discussion valuable, particularly in examining the different categories of customers for a product. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:16] Tell us about the work you are doing with Ford and Lyft on autonomous vehicles The plan is that Ford will own a fleet of autonomous vehicles. We could try to build our own applications and customer networks, but Lyft already has both of those. We’re using APIs to connect to Lyft’s network and fulfill their rider requests with our vehicles. We’re also leveraging partnerships with Postmates and Domino’s. [4:02] What are APIs and why are they important? APIs allow different pieces of software to talk to each other. It’s a contract between two applications for information sharing. [6:09] When you treat APIs as a product to be managed, who are the customers? There are three distinct customers: The developers who code with it, the person who pays for the developers to use API, and the end users of the applications using the API. Product managers need to think about all three customers or else the integration will not be successful. The developers need be interested in using it, the people paying for it need to see the value, and it needs to be valuable to the customer. In the case of Lyft, they want a self-driving vehicle and the API is how they get it. [9:40] How do you respond to change requests in a way that works for you developers? You have to think of an API like a contract and avoid changing it as much as possible. Machines don’t readjust when you change the API. Instead, we focus in incremental capability and adding new features that don’t require additional coding. The more versions you have out, the more you have to support. If you do create a new version, you need to communicate that the new version is not being supported so people aren’t caught off guard when their app doesn’t work. [13:50] How do you balance solving your customer’s needs while encouraging open innovation? There are internal APIs, private APIs, and public APIs. You typically start internal, then move to private, then move to public. This allows you to understand what your customer wants without breaking that contract. For example, Twitter’s API was public but they saw people were using it to build better apps to access the platform, which drove people away from Twitter’s website. This lead them to pull back the API and they received a lot of criticism for it. [18:45] What are the advantages of thinking about APIs as products? APIs allow each of the companies involved to focus on their core competencies. For example, Lyft is not a vehicle manufacturer and Ford is not a ride-hailing company. APIs allow us to connect our individual strengths to achieve a shared goal. They’re the SaaS equivalent for people who are building applications. [20:45] How do you distribute an API? My boss,

How product managers scale the pyramid to product success Product management and innovation is about creating value for customers by solving a problem they have. We accomplish this through a tangible product or an intangible service. Done correctly, we have a proper product-market fit — a product that satisfies the needs of a specific market. Finding the correct product-market fit is the tricky part. It is also the topic of my guest’s book, titled The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback. The other is Dan Olsen, an entrepreneur, consultant, and Lean product expert. Dan has worked with a range of businesses, from small, early-stage startups to large public companies, on a wide variety of web and mobile products. Prior to consulting, Dan worked at Intuit, where he led the Quicken product team to record sales and profit.   Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:05] Can you give us an overview of the process of achieving product/market fit? It’s a five-layer pyramid that all starts with the market. First, you decide who your target customer is and how your product is going to solve a problem they have. The top three layers are product layers: value proposition, feature set, and user experience. Once you make it to the top of the pyramid, there’s a sixth step that involves testing prototypes or actual products with customers. There’s room in the pyramid for iterations along the way by creating, designing, testing, and revising hypotheses. [7:38] How do you find your target customer? I’ll share an example from one of my clients. I was working with a company that wanted to launch a new product but didn’t have any development resources. It centered around the idea of direct mail, or junk mail and providing transparency about why someone was receiving a particular piece of junk mail — similar to a credit report. The target customer was people in the U.S. who receive junk mail. [10:22] How did you find the underserved needs? When it comes to needs you need to live in the problem space, not the solution space. Most people naturally live in the solution space and it’s a product manager’s job to get people out of it to focus on problems. From there, you can use divergent thinking to come up with all of the possible ways to improve the customer’s life. This will generate many ideas that need to be prioritized. In the junk mail example, the priority need was “Learn why I get the junk mail that I get.” Other ideas were “help me save money by getting relevant offers” and “help me compare my spending habits to others.” A secondary benefit was being environmentally friendly by reducing junk mail. We had six needs initially and chose two to focus on. [19:25] How do you determine the value proposition? We had six benefits, which is a lot to test, so we split them into two groups. Both had the core value proposition, which was learning why I received so much junk mail. One group paired that with the cost-saving angle, while the other paired it with the environmental angle. I like to use the Kano model for competitive analysis to determine must haves, nice to haves, and distractors. [22:07] How do you derive feature sets from the value propositions? We took the core value proposition, which was helping people realize why they are getting the junk mail they get and figured out how to help them see that information through a marketing report that’s similar to a credit report. It contained all of the consumer data that marketing companies had on someone, plus a marketing score to show how likely they were to be targeted for junk mail. We built it out enough to demonstrate a functionality on a simple website. That testing leads to the development of the MVP,

Going beyond brown bag lunches for next-level product manager professional development. This discussion is focused on another tool to help you become a product master and accelerate your career. It is a study group approach you can facilitate with a group of product people in your organization. My guest calls them Group Directed Learning experiences. He has been using them for years and found them to be a very effective way to learn and apply new concepts. It is also a tool I have been using for many years with groups. It results in personal ownership of what is being learned and real behavior change that increases performance.  It is actually how I met my guest. He participated in a public study group I facilitated for product managers and then brought the approach to his organization. He uses it each year as part of the training for new product managers. My guest is John Spero, a chemical engineer who has worked in research and development, operations, and business management for several companies and in several industries. He is now at Praxair. He is a certified New Product Development Professional (NPDP) from PDMA and a certified scrum master from Scrum Alliance. This discussion is very important because John shares simple things you can do to facilitate a study group, helping you and other product people improve your skills and making you stand out and get noticed by senior leadership for the value you create. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:55] What is a self-directed learning group? This is also known as group-directed learning or GDL. It’s a group of people who share a common interest and a desire to learn about it. Program organizers design their own learning tracks and the team has the final call about whether or not the learning track is appropriate. This approach encourages exploration rather than sticking to a set curriculum. [7:00] How are you using these groups? We start by sending out a survey to gauge what people want to learn about. We then try to create groups of 6-8 people based on like interests and identify a facilitator to co-develop the learning track. It’s important that the members of the group trust each other and trust the facilitator. The team should also be able to collaborate. We’ve used GDLs for innovation theory and product development, business acumen, and technical skills development. We had engineers go through a training to simulate what the operators at our plants do to help them gain that perspective. [14:22] Why do these groups work? This is not a lunch and learn, which are good for awareness but not for long-term learning. Rather, GDL is an extension of standard training methods. We found that our associates needed more training and gave them the opportunity to create it. In order to have good project work, you need to have associates who are fully involved in the process and can see how the training fits into their career development path. We have so many subject matter experts who are good at relating what they know to others. [17:55] How can someone start a self-directed learning group? Look at your employees and determine what topics they would like to cover. Select topics quickly once the surveys come back. A good time to start is around performance review time since that’s when people are setting their professional development plans for the year. Avoid holidays or other busy times. Make it part of the work day; don’t do it over lunch or after hours. Have a good system in place to bring in remote team members. Try to vary the level of experience in the group so that everyone can have their assumptions challenged. Senior leadership should also be involved so they can see what people are learning and to show the people in the group that it has buy-in from the top of the organization. There are many good free training options online,

How product managers can turn a marathon into a sprint. Many medium to large organizations are adopting agile practices, such as the use of Scrum. Some are having more success with the adoption than others. Most of these organizations are also using some form of stage-gate for the development of new products. When done right, stage-gate reduces risk, reduces time to market, and increases the return on innovation investment. For the more than 80 percent of U.S. companies using stage-gate, the idea of replacing it with agile is often not warmly embraced. Instead, a hybrid agile stage-gate process is a more reasonable place to start. My guest, Colin Palombo, has been helping organizations using stage-gate to move to a hybrid agile stage-gate process and enjoying many benefits for doing so while keeping the framework they are familiar with. It’s a win-win. Colin is a managing partner and co-founder of two innovation consulting firms — Innovation Framework Technologies and Bizmotion. I met Colin at the annual PDMA conference and enjoyed his insights for making stage-gate more agile. I hope you do as well. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:34] What is agile and what is stage-gate? Stage-gate is an approach for developing new products across industries. It involves breaking down development into stages that are marked by gated decision points. It is designed to eliminate weak products along the way and decrease time to market. Agile is a project management approach for dealing with projects that have high degrees of uncertainty. Stage-gate products can be managed using agile, or using other project management methodologies. [5:42] Why are organizations taking a hybrid approach? Traditional stage-gate is managed like a waterfall process, which doesn’t work well when markets and technologies are changing quickly. The process has become too slow and out of date. By applying agile, companies are hoping to create products that keep pace with customer needs. Agile allows product teams to course correct throughout the development process. while reducing time to market up to 20 percent. Agile also leads to higher team morale and better aligns with digital products and physical/digital product hybrids. [11:00] How do you set up a hybrid process? Most companies who have physical products want to implement agile processes but don’t know how to do it. We’ve created 10 steps based on our work over the past year — a mix of organizational and tactical aspects. On the tactical side, you still have stages but each stage has a sprint or a number of sprints. A sprint is a fixed period of time in which you seek to accomplish a set of tasks. You can determine how many sprints each stage will have, which creates a fixed timeline using an agile methodology. Agile also eliminates the paperwork associated with stage gate meetings; work is demonstrated by outcomes instead of words written in a document. Teams spend time gathering stories and data about the deliverables rather than creating PowerPoint presentations and filling out forms. [17:19] What do the stages of product development look like in an agile approach? Agile requires a shift in thinking to minimum viable product and an accelerated timeline. If a sprint is 10 days long, you have 26 sprints in a calendar year. The first stage becomes concept instead of scoping; think of what you can do within three sprints. What can you deliver to show people the product you want to make? Stage two becomes simulation instead of a business case. It could be 3D printing or CAD; anything to show your product without physically producing a prototype. The third stage becomes pilot instead of development. This gives you a physical product to begin understanding things like fulfillment and intellectual property. The fourth stage becomes scale up instead of validation.

Product Managers can create a shared sense of purpose to empower high-performing teams. This is where you make your move from product manager to product master. That is the move to being a product leader in your organization or the organization you want to work with. Being a leader involves creating vision and providing meaning to those you work with. It is the topic of Fred Kofman’s new book, The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership. Fred is a leadership development adviser at Google and former vice president of executive development and leadership philosopher at LinkedIn. He earned his Ph.D. in advanced economic theory at U.C. Berkeley and taught management accounting and control systems at MIT for six years before forming his own consulting company and teaching leadership workshops for major corporations and 15,000 executives. Sheryl Sandberg writes about him in her book Lean In, claiming Kofman “will transform the way you live and work.” We discuss: * Why organizations lose * How organizations can win * The 3-part framework for creating a meaningful culture, and * How product managers can deal with conflict. If you are on the path to being a product master, you’ll appreciate Fred’s genuine approach to becoming a leader. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:10] Why do organizations lose? Organizations lose because they’re not set up to win. Most people do not set up what their jobs are and the organization distracts them from doing what their real job should be. On a sports team, the job of every person on the team is to help the team win. But, if you ask the players, they’ll tell you something specific based on their role. The same thing applies to businesses. The goal of every job is to help the organization win but most people would tell you their job is to sell or to design or something like that. This is how silos form. Everyone in the business should be aligned toward the same organizational goal, but that is usually not the case. [13:08] What is the Meaning Revolution? It’s based on the book The History of Scientific Revolutions, which says that science operates within a paradigm and that paradigm changes when exceptions arise. For example, Einstein found that Newton’s equations didn’t apply to gravity when you get closer to the speed of light so he needed a new theory. The anomalies move science forward. The anomaly in business is the difference between global and local performance. Organizations are being asked to measure individual performance and organizational performance. The solution is to infuse the organization with something new, which I’m calling meaning. It’s a combination of collaboration, pride, and excitement — a shared purpose and a sense that everyone is playing a part in a larger goal. [21:52] How do you communicate to employees that they are part of something larger than themselves? This is the difference between camaraderie and friendship. You don’t need friends in a performance-driven field, you need people who will challenge you and hold you accountable — things that friends might not do. If you’re not pulling your weight on your team, you need people who will tell you that. Doing so will create a high performing team and a sense of camaraderie that’s much deeper than friendship. [24:08] How do you create a culture of camaraderie and performance? It has to cascade from the leadership. You have to define the standard/mission, demonstrate the standard so you don’t create cynicism, and then demand that others in the organization also follow that standard. People in the organization should also know what they can demand of a leader; they should feel empowered to call out things that they don’t feel are in line with the mission.

How product managers make the most of large teams and high-value customer relationships A new book by O’Reilly Press discusses product management for B2B software applications. It’s titled Building for Business. Much has been written about product management and the development of software products, but little that specifically addresses the characteristics of the B2B environment. The authors join this episode to discuss how product management is different for enterprise software products, including: * Differences in consumers from B2B and B2C * The impact a direct sales team has * How the scale of enterprise customers impacts product work * The need for effective collaboration * Using organizational knowledge The authors are Blair Reeves and Ben Gaines. Blair is a Principal Product Manager at SAS Software and has previously held senior roles at Demandware (now a Salesforce company) and IBM. Ben is a Group Product Manager for Adobe Analytics and previously managed digital analytics at ESPN. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:50] Why did you write this book? The idea came about over dinner. We realized that none of the writing about product management was focused on building products for businesses and the challenges that come with it.  As soon as we said the idea out loud, we knew that we had to do it. We had been sharing articles for a while and joking about how they didn’t apply at all to what we did in the B2B space.  [6:19] How do you define the enterprise when it comes to product management? We definite it as software that businesses buy to meet a need that they have. It’s not an internal tool, but more of a B2B mindset — things like CRMs, ERPs, HR, and finance systems. [8:15] What are the differences between B2B and B2C product management? In consumer software, you have lots of different business models — advertising, affiliate, direct sales, etc. They tend to have a lot of customers, whereas enterprise products have a much smaller customer base. The sales cycles are longer and the investment per customer is much higher. As product managers, the planning and maintenance timelines are very different. Your customers may never log into the product but are tasked with buying or procurement and providing IT support. The concerns those people have are very different than the traditional customer or user and the stakes are much higher. In the traditional software industry, the user is king. In the enterprise world, the user might not matter at all. It’s all about ROI as opposed to customer enjoyment. [18:24] Another difference you identify is effective collaboration. What do you mean by that? Product managers in the enterprise world tend to have more collaborators than those in the consumer world. We work very closely with marketing and sales at all levels and have a lot of different stakeholders to collaborate with. Learning how to work with those stakeholders is one of the big challenges for an enterprise product manager. Having that organizational knowledge is essential. [20:26] How does the small number of customers impact product management? With a smaller number of customers, you can go spend a week with a company and really learn how they are using the software and figure out the problems you are trying to solve. It can be more difficult to settle on what you’re to do when you have tens or hundreds of thousands of customers. On the consumer side, there’s an anthropologic element that doesn’t exist as much on the enterprise side. There are also a lot more people involved in making the sale — account managers, sales engineers, consultants, and many others. The relationships are bigger and require more people to make them successful. [27:22] How should enterprise product managers gain organizational knowledge?

How product managers observe and listen to users to gain valuable insights. How do you know what products you should build? What products will delight customers? The answer isn’t a mystery and has been expressed by numerous past guests. One that stands out is Ben Brenton, Chief Innovation Officer at Snap-on Tools, who shared that he takes their product teams to meet with customers four days a week. That is the recurring theme–time with customers to understand what will delight them. It is often expressed as voice of the customer, or VoC, research. My guest has put VOC into practice with great results. She is the Senior Director of Product Management for TeamMate and an award-winning product manager. We discuss VoC tools and the specifics for how product managers can use them, including: * Contextual interviews * Budget-minded usability testing.   Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:30] What is your product and who is it for? The product is called TeamMate. It’s a tool to help teams with transparency, consistency, and efficiency in their internal audit process. It’s used by large and small public and private organizations around the world. Internal audit is an independent and objective evaluation of the business organization. [4:50] What tools do you use for Voice of the Customer research? We get feedback from our professional services team when they are implementing the product to new clients, from the sales team when they are doing demos, and from trade shows. We also do surveys and usability testing and hold user conferences around the world. Our biggest conference draws 700-800 customers and includes a usability lab where customers can evaluate prototypes of things we’re thinking about doing. We also run focus groups and are able to get a lot of meaningful feedback in a short amount of time. [7:38] How do you apply contextual inquiry to your work? This is a tool we use when a concept can be open to multiple interpretations. At first, we’re trying to nail down a pain point and we’ll use surveys to do that. From those survey results, we’ll choose customers to go on site and visit. We always send two-person teams, one person who is an active interviewer and someone else who takes notes, pictures, and videos. We want the customer to walk us through the process or pain point, not just tell us. What we find is that what people tell you doesn’t always match with what they actually do. [10:58] What do you do with all of the information you collect on those site visits? Our teams write up their notes but keep the language that the clients used in the interview. We set up an affinity wall that informs the problems we’re trying to solve in the new release or feature. Sometimes those pain points are things that are never spoken aloud. One example of this was a client who had built a knowledge base that she was convinced would transform her team’s process. We got about halfway through and she forgot where she was in the process after she was interrupted by a coworker. We learned that it wasn’t easy to cancel the process and start over again and that led to adding contextual awareness to the next version of the knowledge base. It wasn’t a problem that was identified up front, but something we identified through the contextual inquiry process. [16:11] Do you ever utilize phone calls or web meetings? We do occasionally, but we’ve found that it’s invaluable to sit in front of someone and watch how they work. It’s difficult to replicate over a phone call or web meeting. You can’t really get a sense of someone’s environment and without ...

Matt wrote the book he wishes he would have had starting out as a product manager. To be a successful product manager you need several competencies. We tend to be "T-Shaped" people with capabilities in several areas and much more depth in one area, such as development, design, research, etc. Product managers early in their career focus on learning the skills to get the job done -- the technical skills of product management. Only later you might realize those skills are not enough and that the so-called "soft skills" are what really make the difference. Learning those skills sooner results in faster career growth, which is why I invited product manager and author Matt LeMay to join us. He recently wrote the book, Product Management in Practice: A Real-World Guide to the Key Connective Role of the 21st Century. Matt has helped build and scale product management practices at companies ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 50 enterprises. In the interview, he explains the CORE connectivity skills successful product managers need. CORE is an acronym for: Communication, Organization, Research Execution

One of the things I enjoy doing is teaching product and innovation management university courses. My students often are in a leadership role in their organization and I'm helping them with product innovation. When we discuss examples of innovative organizations, Apple is a popular choice. It's also a good choice. They provide many lessons, such as the power of trends, why focusing on fewer products is better than scattering your efforts, the advantages of controlling an ecosystem, and the benefits of the fast-follower strategy. So, when I was at a product conference and met the person who helped orchestrate Apple's original product process that is still used today, you can understand why I was excited. This was my opportunity to learn first-hand what Apple was struggling with and how the new adopted product process helped them. That person is John Carter. In addition to Apple, he has been a valued advisor to Cisco, Dolby, HP, IBM, Xerox and others. In addition to innovation, he has a strong background in engineering and was the co-inventor of the BOSE Noise Cancelling Headphones. I could share a lot more about John's accomplishments, but the recommendations from employees and clients on his LinkedIn profile are more insightful. One shares… "John Carter has one of fastest and best minds you will ever encounter. At the same time, he is careful to listen to and integrate the ideas and insights of others. He's open-minded and ethical and knows what risks to take and when. If 'cool-hand' John Carter is in your corner, be prepared to win!" In the little time I have known John, I agree -- he is one to learn from, which is why I asked him to join us and discuss the creation of the Apple product process.

Understand the uniqueness of your organization's culture to drive innovation. Organizations are striving to get better at innovation. They know their competitors are doing the same. However, not everyone is having success with their efforts. One more recent popular approach is using Design Thinking, but like any innovation approach, it has to be properly integrated into the organization or it won't have the desired impact. A new book addresses this, titled Innovation by Design: How Any Organization Can Leverage Design Thinking to Produce Change, Drive New Ideas, and Deliver Meaningful Solutions. I interviewed both authors to find out more. Thomas Lockwood has a Ph.D. in design management and is a thought leader at integrating design and innovation into business. Edgar Papke is a leadership psychologist, author and recognized expert in business alignment, leadership and organizational culture. They decided to find out what highly innovative companies that were significantly utilizing design thinking were up to, and if what they were doing would provide valuable insight into how any organization can use design thinking to produce change, drive new ideas, deliver meaningful solutions, and influence their culture to be more innovative.

How product managers can challenge ideas to achieve long-term success. We can learn a lot from examining the journey of a product and this interview looks at the product story of Badger Maps, the marketing leading route planning app for field salespeople. I spoke with Jimmy Hooker, the Head of Product at Badger Maps, to get the story. He’s been with Badger since the beginning, where his initial responsibilities were designing and implementing the web app front-end along with designing the mobile apps. Since then, he’s taken on product management, managing the marketing website, SEO strategy, and analytics. He’s passionate about product and obsessed with making useful easy-to-use tools. From the discussion you'll learn: Sources for product ideas, How to validate your plans for solving the customers' problem, and Ways to form the vision for a product.