The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers

Product managers have unique experiences and competencies that equip them for senior leadership roles. Many CEOs come from a product management background, including the last 8 CEOs of Proctor & Gamble. But, what should the product manager turned senior leader (or one who is planning on being a leader in the future) do to help his or her organization be more successful, and just as importantly, be the type of organization where people are motivated and want to work? Well, that is the topic of this episode. My guest is John Latham who is sharing insights from his latest book, [Re]Create the Organization You Really Want. This is a book I have been encouraging John to write for several years, and I am delighted he has. You see, John has a rare combination of having performed research with leaders of world-renown organizations that moved from being good organizations to being the very best in their industry. He also has decades of experience helping organizations reach higher levels of performance. In the discussion, you’ll hear why product managers are suited to be organizational designers — treating the organization as a product to improve. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of some questions discussed: * What led to the creation of [Re]Create the Organization You Really Want? The book presents a definition of what it means to be a great organization and provides the framework for creating a great organization. Great organizations create financial results while creating value for all stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, workforce, community, and the natural environment. Being great means creating financial results in a way that also creates value for these stakeholders, resulting in a sustainable organization. The book is a culmination of 30 years of professional practice helping organizations be great and research into such organizations. The catalyst for the book was research of CEOs who had successfully recreated their organizations to win the Baldrige Award. This research, combined with other research and professional experience, led to the frameworks presented in the book, providing a roadmap for leaders to create great organizations.   * Why are organization design and leading transformation an important topic now? The short answer is we have tried everything else, and we are still struggling to make organizations that perform at their full potential. Organization design is the alignment of four cornerstones: (1) stakeholders, (2) strategy, (3) systems, and (4) scorecard. These cornerstones are held together by a supporting organizational culture. It’s an important topic today because the pace of change is increasing along with the increasing complexity of business environments.   * What challenges do product managers face in becoming organization designers? Product managers are ideally suited to take on the challenge of designing the organization. They understand the organizational system better than those working in isolated functional silos. Also, they are accustomed to working with products that create value for customers and thinking about how to design in a value-creation manner.  Yet, they face three big challenges. First, is taking a dynamic system’s perspective to the overall organization. It is not something that is taught in business schools. Second, is a product manager’s ego. Collaboration is essential to organization design, and collaboration is something that product managers tend to have experience with, but it is all-to-easy for the ego to get in the way and we all need to be aware of this. The third is curiosity. While product managers may be curious about meeting customers’ needs and wants, they need to develop curiosity for improving the organization also – such as conducting experiments to see what works and what doesn’t.

The role of product management is encompassing more design and the need to integrate design capabilities into the product team. It is a topic that Latif Nanji is passionate about, along with designing products customers love. Latif is the CEO of Roadmunk, which creates road mapping software for the enterprise. Roadmunk was built out of Latif’s frustration to create well-designed roadmaps quickly for stakeholders. Latif shares that product managers’ ever changing roles now involve understanding and leveraging UX and UI. The challenge is how product managers properly align design principles into their work and what values product management needs to champion. In this interview you will learn a 5 element framework for communicating design in product management: - empathy in product management and design, - language of design, - data around design, - executive buy-in, and - designing the MSP.

I'm very interested in how innovation can be made better and one category of tools is related to team performance - higher performing teams can create products that produce higher value. One particular tool is Group Flow, which was the topic of a paper published by The International Council on Systems Engineering titled “Group Flow: the Genesis of Innovation.” Its author is Laurie Buss, who I interviewed to learn how teams can create group flow. When I discovered Laurie's work, I felt like I found a kindred spirit based on how she describes innovation, which is, that … Innovation is key to the continued growth of established economies, not only for the creation of new designs, products, services, and markets but also for the development and retention of top-performing employees. She has a degree from UCLA in Aerospace Engineering and is highly regarded in the international satellite industry, working with numerous large organizations in spacecraft design and test, launch, operations, and many other aspects that require innovative thinking. She also has a new book coming out in the second quarter of 2017 with a working title of "Brainpower Redemption." In this interview Laurie shares concrete steps to facilitate group flow, which includes 4 elements that are easily remembered using FLOW as an acronym: -Focus, -Location, -O (for round table), and -Work tools.

I have a returning guest, Tony Ulwick, who is sharing 6 tools from his new book, Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice. Tony is well known for the creation of Outcome Driven Innovation and as the founder of Strategyn. When ODI was published in the Harvard Business Review, they declared it one of “the ideas that will profoundly affect business as we forge ahead in today’s complex times.” From the discussion, product managers and innovators will know how to apply Jobs to Be Done by applying 6 steps: - Define the customer’s “job-to-be-done” - Uncover the customer’s needs - Quantify the degree to which each outcome is underserved - Discover hidden segments of opportunity - Align existing products with market opportunities - Conceptualize new products to address unmet needs

Welcome to the second year anniversary of the Everyday Innovator -- another 52 episodes of discussions with skilled product managers and savvy insiders. In this year in review I share highlights from several of the discussions – emphasizing concepts and tools product managers and innovators should know. Just like my 2015 Year in review, there a lot of key concepts shared in these episodes. The review of interviews below is organized into 6 topics: why product managers should become leaders of organizations, the skills that correlate to 25% higher pay for product managers, examples of product management in action at companies, Design Thinking and its applications, tips for interviewing for a product management role, and specific innovation approaches & tools. And, the review concludes with a few of my favorite quotes from guests.

My guest today discusses another valuable topic related to the skills that all product managers need and that, according to a 2016 study, results in a 25% increase in pay. If you want to see the full list of topics, go to www.TheEverydayInnovator.com/podcast. The topic is how to use storytelling to share ideas and persuade others to join you. My guest is Michael Margolis. He is the CEO and founder of Get Storied, which serves leaders, innovators, and trailblazers who have a world-changing agenda. He helps those who are inventing the future and need to get their story straight, because ideas don’t sell themselves. He has helped Google, NASA, Greenpeace, Deloitte, and Facebook, among others. His work has been featured in Fast Company, TIME, and Wired. In our discussion, product managers will learn about the three principles for effective storytelling: * context, * emotion, and * evidence.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of some questions discussed: * Our topic for this discussion is pitching and presenting disruptive innovation through storytelling. Let’s start by framing the nature of storytelling — what is storytelling about? It’s narrative strategy. It’s the process of how you take anything that is an idea — a product, a service, any business transformation — and get others to see what you see. Storytelling is how you convey that idea in a way they can identify with it, that they can relate to it, and they want to be a part of it. It’s in many ways the holy grail of what every innovator and human-centered designer is trying to solve. * What are the principles to crafting a story that influences others? The principles are Context, Emotion, and Evidence. * What is Context? This is a really important principle as it relates to idea adoption. Most of us lead with data. If you start your story with the data, the story is dead on arrival because you haven’t provided any context. You might get people nodding their heads, but they’re not really on board. They’re not leaning in. They’re not accepting your story as their story. Context is when you start a story you start with the where. What I mean by that is, where am I? When you start a story, what your audience is trying to figure out is where the story takes place. What world are you asking them to step into? What’s that ecosystem, universe, or more simply, context? Paint that picture for them and then quickly capture their imagination. If you can’t get them curious and leaning in, you’re going to have a hard time carrying that attention through the rest of your presentation. * What about Emotion? This is where you  need to show and get people to feel how much you care about who’s at the heart of this story. Who’s at the heart of the story is usually a customer or a key internal stakeholder. You’re telling a story in a way that shows that you get what they’re going through. You’re showing the emotional impact this has on people’s lives. * How does Evidence fit in? This is where you bring in the data. You demonstrate that you have a right to tell the story and that this story is real. The evidence is the proof. A caution is to not answer all the questions your audience would have. You want to let the story continue.   Useful links: * Get Storied website. * How to tell a world-changing story video series. * Undeniable Story online course that teaches storytelling for innovation and change. * Follow Michael on Twitter   Innovation Quote

Listen to the Interview This interview is a great discussion about a product story — from how the product concept was developed all the way through launch, including industry awards the product has received. My guest is Bill Ott, Executive Vice President of the product development organization at Kärcher. They are the world’s leading manufacturer of cleaning equipment. Bill is a hands-on executive with global experience in private, Fortune 500 and start-up environments within the consumer, commercial and industrial sectors. Bill started his career as a design engineer and progressed from an individual contributor to management roles while working for IBM, Thomson Consumer Electronics and Philips Electronics. In our discussion, product managers will learn about: * identifying customer needs, * using Voice of the Customer research to uncover and prioritize needs, * navigating the Lean cycle of Build, Measure, and Learn, and * launching successfully.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of some questions discussed: * Where does this product story start? Karcher North America is the market leader in carpet extraction cleaning. The core product line was 15 years old and in need of innovation.   * How did you identify what the customer needed? Our goal for improving the product line was to decrease the time it took to clean carpet by 30%. That formed the basis of our fundamental requirements and resulted in what we call a concept definition package. We added objectives of reducing work effort that causes fatigue and adding agility so the carpet cleaning machine could work in small spaces like hotel rooms. Our Concept Team takes it from there. The Concept Team consists of the product manager, an industrial designer, an engineer and a project manager. They have the responsibility of developing the concept that ultimately goes to development. Next is voice of the customer (VOC) research.   * How was the VOC research conducted? We have a skilled group of ethnographic researchers. We do interviews as well, but a lot of the time we actual watch the operators use the equipment and visually observe reactions, how they go about doing their job, where the pain points are, and ultimately creating a map of the processes they use. We conducted VOC research with existing customers that matched our target market for the new product: universities, schools, hotels, airports, office buildings, and casinos – anywhere with large amounts of carpet.   * What happened after the VOC research? We accumulated a long list of needs from VOC research. We apply the Build, Measure, Learn cycle from the lean startup methodology. Our designers conduct brainstorming and use affinity diagramming to organize ideas for solving the needs. Those ideas are narrowed, focusing on the highest potential, and then prototyping of the ideas begins. We invite some customers to our lab to provide feedback, helping with the “measure” part of the lean cycle. Then we learn from the feedback and conduct another round of Build, Measure, Learn. Another tool we rely on is Value Stream Mapping. We have a lean master who facilitates a meeting with the Concept Team to map out the complete process from the point in time that the operator shows up to clean carpet to putting the machine back in the closet, including when the space with the carpet can be used again. This helps us identify areas of waste to eliminate.   * What is the finished product?   For more, listen to the interview or read the transcript below.   Useful links: * Bill’s LinkedIn profile *

I've been fortunate to have excellent mentors at different times during my career. I've seen an interesting trend in the last few years - the rise of the personal coach. This is a type of mentor. A personal coach can help you in many ways, all of which are generally related to improving performance and success -- identifying objectives, holding you accountable for taking action, providing unbiased feedback, and at times just helping you get out of your own way by identifying how you're limiting your success. Recently I was talking with the head of product for a global company and he mentioned he had been meeting with a coach. I was curious about this because I noticed a change in him and I asked how the coach helped. His response made me more curious and I wanted to talk with his coach myself, which I do in this interview. My guest is Evan Roth, a certified executive coach that works with both individual executives and as well as their teams. Evan has 30+ years' real-world corporate experience in leadership and organizational development, accounting and finance, business strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and international operations. He happens to be based in Denver, Colorado, near my home, but thanks to Skype, he works with clients across the globe. In our discussion, you will learn about: - limiting beliefs, - assumptions and interpretations, - my personal example of being in quicksand, and - how to have more energy.

Listen to the Interview I’m a big believer in people playing to their strengths, and this includes product team members and others involved in innovation. Not everyone has the same strengths – if we did, that would be a bit boring. Realizing how people approach innovation and their strengths is something Tamara Kleinberg accomplishes. Tamara has spent more years than she’ll admit brimming with ideas and launching and running entrepreneurial businesses. She is known for her ability to innovate from ideation to implementation and has brought to market products for very large brands. For the past 18 years she has advised companies such as Disney, Procter & Gamble, General Mills and Otterbox on fostering innovative ideas and people. She has run multi-million dollar businesses and launched a few of her own, including Launch Street, which provides resources for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. In the interview, we discuss nine traits of innovators and how to identify the trait(s) that is your strength. The traits are: * Collaborative * Experiential * Futuristic * Fluid * Imaginative * Inquisitive * Instinctual * Risk Taker * Tweaker   Also, you will learn the two most important things to say after you present a new idea.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of some questions discussed: * What is the backstory on your Innovation Quotient Edge? The Innovation Quotient Edge (IQE) is the culmination of 20+ years of work and experience. I started my career in brand strategy and innovation in New York City in a big firm and in advertising on Madison Avenue. Then I branched off, with most of my work being in new product development for Fortune 500 consumer goods companies—Procter and Gamble, General Mills, Clorox, etc. Time and again I would hand innovative ideas to these brilliant people in these great companies. Yet a lot of them wouldn’t make it to market. Their ability to be innovative and drive change they needed to get the results was suffering. So I stepped back and thought about what was occurring. I always believed that if we did one or two things, we’d all be innovative. But in my work and research, what I actually discovered blew my assumptions out the door, about how innovation works. What I discovered is that we’re all innovative, but how we innovate is unique to each of us. In fact, there are nine human triggers of innovation and the combination of your top two triggers make your unique innovator profile.   * What are the nine traits? The image  below provides a good summary of the nine traits. Listen to the interview to hear details about each.   What is the language of innovation? When we present ideas we often force people into a yes or no vote. We share the idea and ask “What do you think?” Most people hate ideas that are new. We are programmed to poke holes in them. Instead, when presenting a new idea, ask: * “What would you do to strengthen this idea?” and then * “What holes do you see and how would you fill them?”   Useful links: * Special resources from Tamara just for listeners, diving deeper into the Language of Innovation. * Tamara’s website * How entrepreneurs elevate communities and change the world: Tamara G. Kleinberg at TEDxCSU * Connect with Tamara on LinkedIn   Innovation Quote “The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be s...

Welcome to the 100th episode of The Everyday Innovator podcast. I have a little something different for this episode, being this is kind of a big milestone, the 100th episode. I don’t have a guest today, and I’ll tell you more about that in the episode recording. For the 100th episode, I cover four topics: - An opportunity to get The Everyday Innovator coffee cup. - Learning from self-reflection to increase your empathy and influence, using my self-reflection as an example. - Why the podcast and blog is named The Everyday Innovator. - Answers to product manager questions: advice for new product managers, where product management is heading, and why launches go bad.

Have you ever wondered why some people earn attention and respect when they speak and others don't? According to my guest, the secret to their success can be summed up in one word: gravitas. With gravitas, you can express yourself clearly and with the passion and confidence to persuade, influence and engage listeners. And that is exactly a capability product managers and innovators need. My guest is Caroline Goyder, who has worked for many years as a voice teacher at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She spent the last decade developing a system to help her non-acting clients perform with poise, presence and power. She has been named one of Britain’s top coaches. And, her passion is helping people from all walks of life sound, and feel their best. From the interview, you will learn: - What it means to speak with gravitas. - Why anyone can learn to speak more persuasively. - How to speak truth to power – in a way that influences senior managers and leaders.

I have a great guest for us to learn from – the author of a new book, The Agenda Mover: When Your Good Idea Is Not Enough. Doesn’t that sum up the challenge of being a product manager – when your good idea is not enough. My guest, Professor Samuel B. Bacharach, argues that in order to implement any innovation — no matter how great your idea — that you must be an “agenda mover.”  He’s analyzed how leaders such as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Martin Luther King, Jr. have been able to turn their ideas into action.  He has also spent years teaching the skills that enable people to move agendas. Today he helps leaders of Fortune 500 companies apply the steps to move their ideas forward. He is also an organizational behavior professor at Cornell University and the co-founder of the Bacharach Leadership Group. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of some questions discussed: * In your latest book you shared “If you cannot move your agenda, you are not a leader.” What do you mean by that?  We tend to over-dramatize what we mean by leaders and what it takes to innovate. We live in a culture where we tend to see leadership as a heroic quality, the charismatic person like the Lone Ranger who is coming to save you. That’s total nonsense. We should begin with the assumption that all leaders are individuals trying to get some action taken, to move something forward. This being the case, the litmus test in leadership is what you get done.  How many leaders do you remember for ideas they had or simply for their charisma? What gets remembered is their capacity to move the ideas forward. Thomas Edison once said, “A good idea without execution is hallucination.” Well, that’s my notion. Can you move the idea? Can you execute? There is no leadership without it. * The challenge with innovation is it means change – and change brings fear. How do leaders address the fear of change — of something new? This is the $64,000 question. If you begin with the assumption, which is a premier assumption, that people will resist change, the issue quickly becomes more complicated than initially suspected.  I’ll elaborate on that — you see, opposing innovation and opposing change is like opposing apple pie, even when there’s not a lot of sugar in it! No one ever comes and tells you, “This is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. Forget it.” And no one tells you in the corporate world, “We’re against change, forget it.” It’s a lot subtler than that. People resist by playing a game of, “Yes, but did you think about this…” Given that there’s room to play this game, it demands from you, as someone trying to move change and innovation, that you seriously anticipate the possible resistance. That means you need to methodically understand arguments of resistance. There are not many arguments people can make against you. Further, you can develop the skills to justify and move your agenda. You must begin to really work on getting the buy-in. And you can’t drop the ball – you must take action to sustain the momentum. * What are the skills for moving your agenda? When I talk about skills, I’m talking about the capacity to anticipate, mobilize, negotiate, and sustain momentum. These are things you can actually learn. We’ve trained people all around the world in these skills, and some of them were the least charismatic people you could think of. You examine what are you really trying to do in any setting. What are we really trying to do? You are trying to get someone to shift their priorities to align them, at least in some capacity, with your priorities. You’re trying to get someone to shift their resources to support what you’re trying to do. It’s going to happen because you were methodical and deeply understood the perspectives and needs of those you want to influence.

The topic of this episode is another in a series of interviews I’m doing focused on the four skills that enable a 25% higher income for product managers and increasing their influence. The 4 skills were discussed back in episode 073 and include: * Pitch artist – the ability to present and sell your ideas and conclusions. * Exec debater — being the president of the product and standing up for what is needed and challenging executive teams. * Inspire others — great products are built by great teams but these aren’t necessarily teams that product managers personally manage. Instead, product managers need to inspire them and share the vision of the product. * Truth to power – being good at raising inconvenient truths and not running away from an unpopular message. This interview focuses on being a pitch artist and my guest, Chris Westfall, is a world-class pitch artist – having won the US National Elevator Pitch Championship. He is also the official “pitch coach” at the fifth-largest university in the United States, where his strategies have helped raise millions of dollars for student start-ups, launching over 50 businesses and creating hundreds of jobs. He’s coached clients onto Shark Tank, Shark Tank Australia and Dragon’s Den, and successfully re-branded products and services around the globe. His message to product managers and organizations to understand the new rules of engagement is simple: use authentic persuasion that’s not pushy, “sales-y” or fake. In this interview, you’ll learn about: * when pitches are important, * why product managers must be good pitch artists, and * how to give a good pitch. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * How did winning the US National Elevator Pitch Championship impact you? I was surprised and thrilled. The recognition really started me on a path to share the skills that I’ve developed over the course of my career and the knowledge I gained based on a great deal of research. I wanted to help others engineer persuasive conversations. That’s really what my work has been about since receiving the honor. * When are pitches important? Anytime you want to persuade someone is the time to prepare a pitch. Someone could mean your boss, the people on your team, a person that you’re meeting for the first time who could have an impact on your business or your life. It also means influencing the people and the relationships that matter most to you. Maybe that’s your wife, your boyfriend,  or your kids. The idea that a pitch just happens in an elevator or that it’s 30 seconds long is a myth. It’s an artificial construct. What’s real and what happens every day, is there are people looking at you and they’re wondering, what is it that we might be able to do together? What are your ideas, and if you have great ideas, those ideas deserve to be heard properly. Having a pitch is really nothing more than understanding how to have a persuasive conversation. * How can product managers construct an effective pitch? All pitches are about change. If a product manager is pitching an idea, that is about change too. Constructing and delivering an effective pitch follows these steps: * Start with your listener or audience – understand what is in their best interest. The context always trumps content. * Consider what they haven’t heard before – what would be surprising or unexpected to them. People listen more closely to the unexpected and are more likely to give you a “tell me more” response. * Contemplate the questions that you hope you get asked and those you hope you don’t get asked.

This episode is about market research - what's in your toolbox for conducting consumer and market research? Does it include Conjoint Analysis? Well, if not, it will after you listen to this episode. To explore the topic and walk through an example of using Conjoint Analysis, I tracked down a previous guest, way back in episode 008. In that episode we discussed quantitative and qualitative research tools but didn't go into details about applying Conjoint. My guest is Brian Ottum, a market research specialist with 30 years experience in new product development. He started as a chemical engineer and joined Procter Gamble, contributing to Charmin, Pampers, and other products you know. He went on to earn a PhD in Market Research. Today, he helps companies with product development. He has also developed a new online course called “Tools for Early Innovation.” It’s a little over an hour of videos, case studies and downloadable materials. The usual price is $30 but he is making it available to listeners of this podcast for just $10 for a limited time – until the end of January, 2017. See the link section below to get the discount. In this interview, you’ll learn about: - the types of information Conjoint Analysis can provide, such as pricing specifics, - when to use Conjoint, and - the specific steps for using Conjoint.

The last episode was on the topic of product roadmaps and today we extend that topic by considering product line roadmaps - roadmaps for product lines and product families. The person who has turned that topic into his professional career is Paul O’Connor. He is the founder and managing director of The Adept Group and he has had significant impact on the field of new product development over the past thirty years. During this time, he has developed and implemented a number of innovative approaches to creativity, innovation, and productivity in NPD. He is truly one of the savvy insiders that can go both board and deep on many topics related to new product development. In this interview, you’ll learn about: What is a product line and a product line strategy, How are platforms related to product lines, How product line roadmaps differ from product roadmaps, and Why product line roadmapping is important.