The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers

Listen to the Interview I’ve had some requests from listeners to explore product roadmaps, so I had a discussion with Jim Semick. He is co-founder of ProductPlan, which creates roadmap software for product teams. Jim has helped launch new products generating hundreds of millions in revenue, including being part of the founding team at AppFolio for property management, responsible for the requirements and launch of GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting (acquired by Citrix), as well as spending time at Microsoft. In the interview we discuss: * The purpose of a product roadmap, * Various ways roadmaps look, * How roadmaps help product teams and organizations, and * The best practices for constructing product roadmaps.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What is the purpose of a roadmap? A product roadmap is used by most companies to communicate what they’ll be building over the near term and possibly over the longer term. It is also a tool for showing the product strategy, the why behind what they’re building. A lot of companies feel that the product roadmap is simply the backlog, but that’s not the best way to communicate the strategy. A feature list isn’t a product roadmap. The product roadmap needs to tie back to the strategy. A product roadmap is usually a visual document and communicates the why behind what you’re doing.   * What do roadmaps look like? They can take on different forms. It depends on the company, the type of product, and where it is in its lifecycle. Examples can be found here. Some startups, for example, use a Kanban-style roadmap, which is simply putting what you’re going to be building into certain buckets: what is planned, what is approved, what’s in development, and what’s been delivered. That’s a typical style for a smaller organization or maybe a new product. The more traditional product roadmap looks something like a Gantt chart, which is a timeline-style. It communicates what you’re going to build and the expected start and end date for each part of the work. Twelve months is a typical time-frame for showing what you’re going to build. But there are some caveats. For example, organizations moving to an agile development process may have greater uncertainty over a longer period. From a product manager’s perspective, showing a 12-month roadmap is a double-edged sword. On one hand, you want to communicate where you’re headed and inform executive stakeholders. But on the other hand, things tend to change. Competitors come on the scene and release different features, the market and the underlying technologies used can evolve, and of course, customer tends and priorities change over time. You need to communicate to executives what is likely to change the farther the plans are in the future.   * How do roadmaps help product teams? A couple of areas are creating collaboration and setting priorities. Most product teams use some sort of mechanism to score and prioritize features. Some of them do it ad hoc — having a conversation about customer value, and maybe T-shirt sizing level-of-effort. The benefit of having a product roadmap and then also a mechanism to prioritize what goes on the roadmap is that you’re having the conversation to begin with. The roadmap becomes an important collaboration tool.   * How much detail should go into a product roadmap? If you’re an agile organization and you’re working in epics and stories,the roadmap should be at that epic level. Otherwise, if you’re at the story level, that is a product roadmap that is like a project plan. A good product roadmap brings it up a level where it’s no...

According to my guest, "Marketing at its heart is starting a conversation with someone who could be an ideal customer." Of course, then my first question is how do we find the ideal customer for a product or service. Thankfully, my guest, Tom Schwab, had some ideas. Tom is the founder of Interview Valet and his previous background is in medical device products. In this interview you will learn: - Why marketing should start with the customer, - How to identify the ideal customer, and - What we can learn from the ideal customer for a product.

Research and development is tightly coupled with product management and innovation. To learn how an R&D person thinks about innovation, I talked with Dana A. Oliver, who has 30 impressive years of experience in R&D groups. He now focuses on writing and coaching, after leaving Medtronic, the medical device company, where he was the Senior Director of R&D. He has also written two books. His first is Mantra Leadership and his second and most recent is Mantra Design. In Mantra Design he shares 14 principles, or mantras, for innovation and developing premium priced, patent protected, and market share leading products. We discuss a few of his mantras and then explore the future of R&D. The mantras discussed include: -Innovate, Buy or Die -Learn Your Customer’s World! -Innovation begins with the Eye -It Takes a Long Tim to Get to Simple

Listen to the Interview This episode is about virtual teams. Many of us are part of virtual teams and we have felt the pain of virtual teams that don’t work well. Virtual teams are becoming more common in organizations and especially product management and innovation where the product team is often scattered across multiple time zones. I found someone who has worked with and learned from hundreds of virtual teams. He is currently the PMO manager at Cisco Systems, where he leads virtual teams all around the world. He is also the author of two Amazon best-selling books. The first one is Influencing Virtual Teams: 17 Tactics That Get Things Done with Your Remote Employees. His most recent book is Don’t Reply All: 18 Email Tactics That Help You Write Better Emails and Improve Communication with Your Team. His name is Hassan Osman. In the interview we focus on: * the nature of virtual teams, * building trust, and * what you need to do to run an effective virtual team meeting.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What are virtual teams? A virtual team is simply a team that is spread across either time or physical location, or both. It would have been a lot easier to recognize a virtual team 15-20 years ago, when email and internet was starting out. However, today, I could argue that every single team is a virtual team. Let me give you an example. I have a friend who is the CEO of a startup company in Cambridge. They have an office in Harvard Square. One room is a big open floor space where everyone is sitting facing the wall. I said to him, “It must be really cool if you need to ask one of your team members to do something for you. You just swivel in your chair and yell it out.” And he said, “Well actually, no.” He sends them an email. I found that a little bit intriguing and asked why. He shared that it is easier to track what information was exchanged than relying on the verbal interactions and that it avoided interruptions. Even though the team members sit next to each other, they are interacting as a virtual team.   * What are some of the common issues encountered managing virtual teams? Simple issues for some virtual teams are dealing with different time zones and speaking accents. Another can be the lack of facial expressions and body language cues. Obviously when you’re dealing with either asynchronous communication, such as IM or email, you’re not getting that flavor of the nonverbal communication. That can result in miscommunication or misinterpretation of intent, which could create conflict. Using webcams, for example, can help. Another thing that really affects virtual teams is that lack of cohesion. We as human beings are very social in nature, and with virtual teams, you may be working alone much of the time. You don’t have the same level of interaction that you have with co-located physical teams.   * What are your experiences building trust in virtual teams? Trust is a very nebulous concept. It’s not like an on-off switch where you either have trust or you don’t have trust. It’s more of a spectrum where there’s varying degrees of trust among the team and among managers and their direct employees. So it becomes this very tough thing to manage, right? Because it’s very tough to manage, it’s very hard to kind of nail down. How do you define it? Trust is equal to reliability plus likeability. Meaning, if you want to increase trust among your team, you either have to increase reliability, or increase likeability, or both. Reliability is the simple concept that judges if a person who has been given a job can actually do that job. Do they have the proper skill set to actually accomplish what they need to accomplish? But the other factor, the likeability factor,

We have explored the topic of product portfolio management in previous episodes, but not from an Agile perspective. That is the topic for this episode – Agile portfolio management. Each week I talk with a savvy insider to help us understand an aspect of product management and innovation. This time my guest is one of the very first Certified Scrum Trainers, who has been implementing Scrum in organizations for more than a decade and has another decade of experience in software technology. He is also a Principle at SolutionsIQ, a firm that helps organizations adopt Agile practices. In this episode, product managers and innovators will learn: * the difference between product portfolio management and Agile portfolio management, * how to create Agile portfolios, * how to navigate some of the common issues encountered with Agile portfolio management, * and the importance of keeping high-performing teams intact.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What is Agile portfolio management? We need to start by defining business agility, which is leveraging iterative delivery capability and actively managing organization investments. Long term investments often get the focus but we need to be able to more quickly adjust short-term investments. As the business environment is changing more quickly, we need to be able to respond more quickly. We need to recognize that a few mistakes will be made along the way. We need to be able to adjust our shorter term commitments more quickly. That helps us think about Agile portfolio management, where we still have longer-term investments but also the need to adjust more quickly in the shorter term.   * How do you apply an Agile mindset to portfolio management? Agile emphasizes small intact teams. Teams that stay together out-perform teams that are broken apart when a project ends and then rebuilt for another project. This is an important influence of Agile on portfolio management and how project resources are used. Also, technologists need to be involved in portfolio management decisions or you can expect bad decisions to be made. The implication of technology-related decisions need to be incorporated into portfolio decisions. Further, portfolios need to be smaller to move the decision making closer to those best equipped to be involved in the decisions. This suggests that a portfolio of portfolios is needed in organizations so we can move authority and accountability down into the organization.   * How can an Agile portfolio be constructed? Start with considering the right size for a portfolio, which can lead organizations to realize they need a portfolio of portfolios. Portfolios are better managed if they are not too large. At the other extreme, not every organization needs a portfolio and portfolio management should be resisted until it is actually needed. An example would be an organization that only has one product. They should enjoy being able to focus on product management without adding complexities by incorporating portfolio management. A portfolio reflects a supply and demand balance and the supply-side constrains the portfolios, which is the capacity of knowledge workers. These employees cannot be easily exchanged and their availability provides the opportunities and constraints. Portfolios should be constructed around value streams. To determine the right size for portfolios and how Agile portfolios should be constructed, use these 5 simple rules (see related blog post below in the Useful Links section): * All work is forced ranked. * Operate on “good enough” data. * Near-term capacity is fixed. * Each unique value-based delivery capability has a portfolio * Each portfolio has one “intake system.”  

Are there times that product managers need to be disobedient – not do what they were asked to do? To explore the topic I spoke with Bob McGannon who has great experience with this through the lens of project management. As the purpose of a project is to develop a product or service, product managers and innovators have much they can learn from the field of project management. Bob is vice-president of Mindavation, a company that focuses on helping businesses increase their capabilities in portfolio, program, and project management. Bob has set up project management programs on three continents. He has 25 years of IT, project management, and project analysis experience, 18 of those years with IBM. In the discussion you’ll learn: - the value of project management, - three key project management skills product managers must have, - what intelligent disobedience is, and - how product managers can exercise intelligent disobedience.

My son got to meet his heroes. Not sport players, astronauts, or Marvel comics’ characters. He met the people behind Youth Digital, his favorite source for online tech courses. We traveled to their headquarters in Chapel Hills, North Carolina. What they are all about is creating the next generation of creators, focused on kids ages 8 to 14. My son discovered their courses when he was 10 and he is devouring them as fast as he can, learning about Java programming, 3D graphics and animation, computer game design, and more - and frequently laughing in the process. While at their office we had the opportunity to talk with Justin Richards, the CEO and founder of Youth Digital, and Aaron Sharp, the head of Product Development. The interview serves two purposes. We explore the product management aspects of the company and I expect product managers and innovators will find the topics useful. We also discuss another topic I love - preparing the next generation to be leaders in technology and innovation - which is something their products are all about. Most of us have kids in our lives, whether they be nephews and nieces, our own children, or other children we influence and because of this, I want you to know about the work Youth Digital is doing.

I enjoyed a wonderful conversation with Saeed Khan. He started the On Product Management blog and has been a career product manager, working in Toronto, Canada and Silicon Valley. He is also a frequent speaker at product management events, including ProductCamps. I saw a presentation Saeed did on the topic of successfully using product management metrics. I wanted to explore this topic with him along with what else it takes to be a good product manager, which is what we did in this discussion. In the interview Saeed shares four categories of metrics and his 6-stage product model: - Build It, - Nail It, - Scale It, - Extend It, - Milk It, and - End It.

You’ve likely heard of the curse of knowledge or sometimes it is called the curse of the expert. It occurs when our knowledge leads us down predictable paths, likely not considering other possible solutions to problems but only those that are familiar to us. This is cognitive bias and is the topic I asked my guest about, which lead to discussing open innovation and how to manufacture serendipity. His name is Kevin Stark and he is the VP of Technology Solutions at NineSigma, a global innovation firm. They have helped Kraft, NFL, NASA, L’Oréal, Unilever, PepsiCo, Pfizer and other companies create an open innovation workplace, leading to breakthrough products. As you will hear towards the end of the interview, many of these companies share their stories using open innovation on the NineSights website - a great resource for learning what they did. The link is below. In this discussion, product managers can learn: - how to identify and avoid cognitive bias, - how to create an open innovation workplace, - problems to anticipate and avoid.

Product managers often work in diverse teams and need good team management skills to be successful. To explore managing teams, I invited a frequent keynote speaker and coach who companies invite to teach them about improving teams and their work. He is Dr. Todd Dewett, a best-selling author, popular trainer on Lynda.com, a TEDx speaker, and an Inc. Top 100 leadership speaker. His latest book is Show Your Ink: Stories About Leadership and Life. He is also a former award-winning professor who has since spoken to and advised hundreds of thousands of professionals around the world. When you listen to the interview you will no doubt hear that he has huge enthusiasm for helping people. In this discussion, product managers can learn: -the value of feedback, -leading when you have no actual authority, -conflict management, and -two actions for being a better team leader.

Product portfolio management is concerned with selecting the right products to develop, making trade-off decisions, and generally maximizing the value of the product portfolio. It is an important activity in organizations that have more than one product, but it is also an activity that is difficult to learn about. I sought to find an expert who could discuss what is really involved. That expert is Carrie Nauyalis, the NPD Solution Evangelist for Planview. Carrie began her career at Planview implementing portfolio management solutions and training clients around the world. She has the experience and knowledge to know what is involved in product portfolio management. She is also well-versed on many other new product development topics and is an active blogger, public speaker, and guest lecturer. In this interview, you will learn… * What portfolio management is, * the goals of portfolio management, * constructing and managing portfolios, and * common mistakes you can avoid. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What is product portfolio management? It is  the discipline and framework for applying the two most precious organizational resources—your people and your money—to get the greatest value out of your investment. If you think about portfolio management like you do with your 401K, it’s the same concept, but you’re applying it to innovation. It’s about making tradeoff decisions and balance decisions to achieve your corporate or innovation strategies. * What are the goals of portfolio management? The primary goal is value maximization. Dr. Cooper and Dr. Edgett of Stage-Gate fame use that phrase — value maximization.  We have don’t a ton of research and the biggest pain point is too much work for resources (people). That’s actually a portfolio management problem. You could be looking at one single project or product myopically and saying it is a good idea without the context of a larger or broader portfolio. So you’re missing that perspective of how that one idea fits in the greater good – the portfolio of projects. Some things to consider – do we already have multiple products in that space, will it cannibalize something else, are we hitting one market too hard and having a gap in another one? Many of these questions deal with the need to have balance in a portfolio, for example, reasonable percentages of resources on breakthrough projects vs customer satisfaction projects. * What are the ways to construct a portfolio? This is one of those questions where it depends. There’s no one right answer and it really does vary pretty widely. Automotive or pharma, which have really long cycle times, versus a CPG company that has extremely short cycle times, will have portfolios constructed differently. In most cases, the portfolio is a mix of things. And, you can have multiple portfolios with a project showing up in different ways so that different people in the organization can see it the way that they want and how they think about it. There are top-down portfolios with goals set by senior leadership. As an example, a goal may be to deliver existing products to a new market- to enter the new market and grow revenue by X percent. It’s a conscious decision at the executive level. On the flipside is the bottom-up approach. That might be a situation where product features are driving a particular product, and customer requests are driving features. There are also dozens of other portfolio types. You might have a portfolio by region, by brand, by product line, etc. * How are portfolios managed and controlled? It depends again on the business and the frequency, but a trend is establishing some kind of a project and portfolio management office. They call them Centers of Excellence. Having a place for the discipline, for the people, process,

Trends can be a product manager's best friend. They can propel products, increasing adoption by customers, or if misread, they may have costly consequences of wasted resources, too much inventory, and lost opportunities. Product managers know about the importance of trends, but are often already overwhelmed and don’t make time to study trends. Are there ways to make trend identification easier? To find out and learn about identifying and using trends, I contacted Max Luthy. He is the Director of Trends & Insights at TrendWatching, a company that scans the globe identifying emerging consumer trends and changes in trends. He is also the co-author of the book Trend-Driven Innovation. In the interview, you will learn the steps to apply trend-driven innovation... Scan, Focus, Generate, Execute, and Culture.

Listen to the Interview Product management is about change – the change that creating new products involves. Along the way, product managers need to learn about customers and their needs, consider problems from different perspectives, and collaborate with others. A person with deep experience in doing these things and helping groups and organizations identify and push through barriers of innovation is Chuck Appleby. He is a leadership and organization development consultant with over 30 years of management, consulting, and coaching experience in government, industry, and non-profits. In the interview we discuss two valuable tools for product managers and organizations wishing to solve problems for themselves and customers: * Action Learning, and * Design Thinking.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Tell us about the work you were doing that created the need to study Design Thinking. For years and years I had been helping companies solve tough problems using Action Learning. This is a method developed at the Cavendish Physics Lab in Cambridge University by professor Reg Revans, who had gotten very concerned that the world was changing so fast that we would never achieve the kind of speed of innovation that was needed to keep up with change. Action Learning helps people think about problems from new perspectives that lead to better solutions. However, Action Learning is a bit analytical and didn’t have that creative spark that I was looking for. This led me to Design Thinking. Today I use a framework that leverages Action Learning and Design Thinking that is simply Discover, Design, Deploy, and Sustain.   * What are the steps to applying Action Learning? There are  five steps, which are generally completed in one group session that is two to three hours long. The steps are: * First: The problem-owner describes the challenge or problem in 3-5 minutes. * Second: This is the framing step and is the most challenging of all the steps. The objective is to get people focused on the desired future state. Consider what is going on in today’s reality, what the external forces are, what underlying assumptions are being made, and what is the core challenge to address. * Third: Next is solutioning, which is a problem-solving step. With the problem now clearly understood, solutioning usually comes naturally. * Fourth: Then we commit to action based on the solution chosen. * Fifth: The final step is reflection on the entire process and assessing how the group did and what could be done better next time.   * What is an example of applying Design Thinking? A recent example was with the Department of Human Services in Arlington and the Arlington County Public Library, specifically.  The central challenge, which is seen in all businesses, was not engaging with certain groups of customers. In the case of the library, they were not seeing teenagers, 30-somethings, or recent immigrants using the library. To consider the situation, we created three teams to interview those three cohorts (see link to video below that explores this). The groups didn’t ask about the library. In fact, the questions they developed had nothing to do with the library, except it focused on the library’s mission, which is a love of reading, access to information, and building community. So those were the questions that were asked. The insight that came out was, “We like to meet new people doing fun things.” So the library came up with a couple of great ideas, one of which, designed to reach 30-somethings,  was an annual ball to raise money for literacy. 30-somethings piled in and began to make a connection with the library.   * What do you need to have to make Design Thinking successful?

Listen to the Interview How can product managers help their organizations become more innovative? That is the topic of this discussion with the author of Innovation Wars: Driving Successful Corporate Innovation Programs. The author is Scott Bale, a technology & innovation evangelist. Scott has been a serial entrepreneur, speaker at TEDx, and now runs Innovation Labs Asia, based in Singapore. In the interview, Scott shares a model for helping organizations be more innovative that consists of 4 C’s: * Context * Culture development * Capability, and * Collaboration   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Your book Innovation Wars is a guide book for product managers to help their organizations become more innovative. It addresses several tools for taking the guess work out of creating and launching successful products. Let’s start by talking about how you get your customers to innovate for you. Can you tell us about that? Innovation is a very creative process. The reason to co-create with customers is to ensure you are building products that customers need and want. There are many examples of companies that have done this but that are not well-known for it, including Apple, Tesla, and Facebook. Also, look at the related problems or jobs customers need to solve. For example, when someone gets a mortgage, they likely will be moving and moving is painful. A bank that provided a mortgage that also helped you move would create a competitive advantage. * How can we start with co-creating? I use a framework inspired from the world of Design Thinking that I call the 4 C model: Context, Culture development, Capability, and Collaboration. Co-creating is part of Capability. Start with what facts you know about your customer. Then identify their aspirations and goals – the job they need done. Knowing that, identify the obstacle or challenge in achieving the goal. Uncover what they have already tried to solve the problem and what their existing behaviors are. These are the early adopters who want to solve the problem but have not found a satisfactory solution yet and represents a persona to find early adopters. * Can you take us through rest of the 4 C model? The first C is context – how do you structure yourself and create an environment for innovation. Next is Culture development, which is developing a culture of curiosity, experimentation, and the role of failure. Capability is the third C. This involves quantifying the value of an idea and the elements we discussed previously. Lean Startup practices can be used here. The final C is Collaboration – look for partners and others in the supply chain of a product to add value. * What else do we need to know? We need to apply Assumption Exploration. This is where hypotheses are created and tested to better understand the customer problem. You need to examine what you are assuming about the customer problem and solution. Focus first on the assumptions with the deepest impact and risk and design an experiment to test these assumptions. Steve Blank’s work to test hypotheses is the basis of this exploration. Interviews with people representing the persona you created can be used to test hypotheses. If an assumption is wrong, refocus the persona or the problem to solve and test again. When conducting the assumption tests, look for patterns that invalidate or validate an assumption.   Useful links: * Innovation Wars, Scott’s newest book * Scott’s website * Scott’s LinkedIn Profile   Innovation Quote

When established companies decide they need to be more innovative, they often talk in terms of acting more like a startup. But acting like a startup is much more challenging in reality, especially for larger organizations. Instead, established companies can partner with startups. Doing so is the topic of the book, Collective Disruption: How Corporations and Startups Can Co-Create Transformative New Businesses.  This interview is with the author of the book, Michael Docherty. He is a leading innovation expert and entrepreneur with a variety of broad-based experiences from senior-level corporate roles, start-ups, consulting and venture capital. I expect you’ll find value in the discussion if you have interests in innovation from either the startup perspective or the larger organization perspective. In this interview you will learn what Collective Disruption is and the 4-stage framework for applying it: * Discover, * Define, * Incubate, and * Integrate.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Your book, Collective Disruption, is about transformative innovation. Let’s start with a definition of transformative innovation. Innovation is bringing new value to market. Let’s call core innovation all those things you need to do to keep your current business healthy and growing at least at a moderate rate. Transformative innovation involves disruptive opportunities, those things that are new business models and whole new sources of growth.   * How can startups help larger companies with transformative innovation? You first have to start with the question why do the large companies need help.  Consumers and customers expect more, there’s more competition and options, and product lifecycles are shrinking every year. One statistic talks about 75% of the current S&P 500 being off that list within the next 7 years. What we used to call permanent isn’t permanent anymore, and that’s why the old approach to innovation doesn’t work anymore – core innovation is not enough. Companies need to make transformative innovation a bigger part of their growth strategy. Here’s where startups come in. What makes established companies great are all of the systems and engines of growth they have around optimizing their brands and distribution and business models. But when it comes to starting something new, all of those things that help you optimize a big company, are the exact same things that get in your way in building new business models. That’s really why companies are looking to startups as a way to fuel growth.   * What are the benefits to the startup that gets involved with a larger company? First is to have a built-in exit partner. Next is to have a partner that can help you reverse engineer your startup in a way that in the end gives you a better result [examples are in the interview]. Another is that, especially for early-stage startups, the VC market is a very different than it was 10 years ago. Strategic investments from corporates can be a great alternative to that.   * You call this ability for startups to help larger companies with innovation “collective disruption”. You define a 4 stage framework for applying collective disruption. How does this work? It starts with Discover. The Discover phase is really around leveraging startups and the innovation ecosystem generally, as a way to fuel your strategy.  Companies should be  saying, “Let’s look at, based on the areas where we want to play, who are the key players in those spaces, and what relationships can we build in order to bring new competencies to the table?” So you start to think about developing an innovation strategy that isn’t just about what you can do well, but also about what other companies that you have relationships with or...