The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers

I read Crossing the Chasm when it was published in 1991. The third edition was released last year, with updated examples of how companies successfully increased the market for their new products. The book introduced me to the “target market model,” which had a significant impact on how I thought about the relationship between product growth and market segments. To explore this model, I asked Michael Eckhardt to tell us about it and what it means to cross the chasm. He is a Managing Director & Senior Workshop Leader at Chasm Institute, a consultancy to tech companies.  He joined Chasm after careers at Price Waterhouse, Harbridge Consulting, HP and PepsiCo, and has since worked with over 90 tech-based businesses, spanning 500+ client engagements, over the past 15 years. In this interview you will learn: * the Chasm Institute market development model, *  how to determine the specific stage of the product category your new product is competing in, and * what is required to successfully move from one stage to the next in the target market model.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What is the relationship between the Crossing the Chasm book by Geoffrey Moore and the Chasm Institute? Both have existed for more than 15 years. Moore is chairman of the Chasm Institute and I am the managing director. The latest edition of the Chasm book has 25 all new examples of recognizable companies that have crossed the chasm – taking technology and disruptive products to market and getting them into mainstream markets. The Chasm Institute helps high-tech teams learn, apply, and implement best practices in market development strategy. * How does the Product Life Cycle model differ from Target Market model? The diagrams below are helpful to compare the models. Product Life Cycle (PLC) Model The PLC is in place in most companies. It is used by product managers and others in organizations to make decisions about launching a product, managing it, and obsoleting it.   Target Market Model The Target Market model is about the product category stage the product is in and how mature that category is.  The stages of the model convey how customers’ buying behavior changes depending on product category maturity. The stages are (the interview includes product examples for the stages): * Early market – when the product category is new. 80% of the total customers’ requirements need to be fulfilled in the product. This is where a minimum viable product (MVP) is used to understand the needs of the customers. * Chasm – to cross the chasm, the 80% whole product from the Early Market must now develop into a 100% whole product. Not a perfect product, but 100% of what the pragmatist customer in the Bowling Alley needs to satisfy their compelling reason to buy (CRTB). This 100% whole product can be best thought of as: “Everything the pragmatist customer needs – and nothing they don’t need – to get their compelling reason to buy fulfilled, so they can confidently buy and use.” * Bowling Alley – the first pin or niche that the product can be a whole product for, then identifying adjacent niches that would also buy the product, knocking down niches (market segments) to create rapid growth. * Tornado – this is the stage of hyper growth that is characterized by not only offering a whole product but a friction-free product. This is one that is easy to buy, understand, and use.

Listen to the Interview Project management is an important tool for product managers and an area where we have choices. I often hear Agile practitioners talk about the evils of more planned methodologies, like Waterfall and Stage-Gate. Like most things, these areas are not so black and white and the nuances are important. My guest, Chuck Cobb, is the perfect person to address these topics. He is the author of the best-selling book “The Project Manager’s Guide to Mastering Agile” as well as four other books on Agile Project Management and Business Excellence. He has also developed a very successful online training curriculum on Agile Project Management, including a free course he is offering to listeners. In this interview you will learn: * how to compare waterfall and agile approaches, * the problems agile project management strives to solve, * why both planned and adaptive approaches need to be used, and * common issues encountered when adopting agile project management.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Let’s start by describing the two big general concepts we are discussing – traditional vs agile project management. To start with, waterfall and agile are widely misused terms. In a strict sense, waterfall was developed by Winston Royce in the 1970s. It means a phase-gate approach with approvals between phases. In today’s world when people say waterfall, the word is used loosely and generally it means anything that’s plan-driven and not agile. The term agile also has many different meanings to different people. Many people talk about agile as if it were a specific methodology. Scrum is very widely used and when people say agile they typically mean Scrum. So the word agile has some broad meanings as well. Many people see the choice between plan-driven and agile as mutually exclusive and that’s not accurate. It’s more like a continuous spectrum of alternatives from heavily plan-driven at one extreme to heavily adaptive at the other extreme. It’s more a matter of fitting the methodology to the project and to the business rather than force-fitting a project and a business to one of those extremes. * When should a plan-driven approach be used? A plan-driven approach works in situations that have low levels of uncertainty, like building a bridge across a river. If you have a situation that is relatively straight-forward, it’s well-defined, it’s repeatable, a plan-driven approach is a good choice as you can take the lessons you’ve learned on one project and do better on the next project because it’s similar and follows the same model. * When should agile be used? Agile works best in environments with high levels of uncertainty. An example is finding a cure for cancer. If you were to develop a project plan for finding a cure for cancer, it would be ridiculous to try to develop a detailed plan with schedule and cost information. There’s just too much uncertainty. It’s a wasted effort to try to develop a detailed plan. In that kind of situation, people are more concerned about the goal of finding a cure for cancer than they are about having a detailed cost and schedule breakdown of what it’s going to take to get there. It’s based on an empirical process control model. The word empirical means based on observation, meaning that as you go through the project, you’re continuously adjusting both the product and the process to complete the product. * Often when waterfall and agile approaches are discussed, the conversation quickly becomes one of “waterfall is bad” and “agile is good.” Is it that simple? No, it’s not. Saying agile is better than waterfall is like saying a car is better than a boat. They are two different things, and each has advantages or disadvantages based on the env...

Listen to the Interview I’m bringing back an incredible guest who I first interviewed way back in episode 10 – one of the first interviews I did. He wrote the step-by-step guide for implementing Lean startup practices, titled Running Lean, created the Lean Canvas tool, and blogs regularly about these topics at www.leanstack.com. His name is Ash Maurya. Now he has a new book about applying Lean Startup principles to go from new product concept to a product that is achieving predictable success with customers. The book is titled Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth. And while it is written in the context of startup growth, the concepts apply to any product management effort that involves creating a new product or improving an existing one – from startups to large enterprises. You will learn three aspects of scaling lean: * Using metrics * Prioritizing waste * Practices to achieve success   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What have you discovered applying Lean practices that led to your new book, Scaling Lean? The last book came out of me struggling with the starting stages of a product: how do you go and deal with the market uncertainties that arise. A lot of it is based in firsthand experiential learning. Since it came out, I continued writing, I continued speaking, and then even went into teaching workshops. In doing so, there were a number of questions that repeatedly surfaced. Many of them were about what comes next. We know how to start with Lean canvases, how to describe a business model, how to build the minimum viable product, but as the team begins to grow, how do we practice Lean both as a methodology and as a process? As we start adding customers, we actually start getting pulled in many different directions. The questions I began to hear, and my own process of looking for answers, is how this second book came about.   * What examples do you cover in the book and which one can we focus on for our discussion? The examples in the book draw from case studies, retrospectively at times, looking at companies like Facebook, Tesla, AirBnB, Dropbox,  and HubSpot. I use them to illustrate a lot of the concepts. However, I always feel that it is a lot more tangible and practical for me to speak from firsthand experience, and in the book I address a product that I built using the techniques of Scaling Lean, called User Cycle. The domain is irrelevant. The point is I had built a home-grown system, I began socializing with a handful of potential customers, and then I went through the Scaling Lean process very rigorously.   * Running Lean shared metrics to monitor product/market fit. What are the Scaling Lean metrics? In the business plan [using the Lean Canvas] there’s both the business model story and the forecasting section where we do some Excel magic wizardry. I kind of joke because we go too far there like we do with the business plan and we start working with thousands of numbers when we don’t really need to. I was looking for a better way to estimate whether a business model is worth pursuing in the first place, beyond the story. Any useful metric must measure customer behavior. The metrics that I dive into in the book is what I call the Customer Factory Blueprint, heavily influenced by Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics [AARRR]. These are the acquisition, activation, referral, revenue and retention. Those are the five anchors of macrometrics that make sense. The more important thing is that with these five basic metrics, and sometimes even fewer, you can estimate a business model.   * What aspects of waste are important to recognize? A definition would be helpful. Waste is any human activity that consumes resources ...

The 2016 Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey identified four skills that are responsible for a significant increase in personal income. Product managers that excel in these four areas earn 25% more than product managers who don’t. One of these skills is called “pitch artist” and is defined as, “the ability to stand up to peers, managers and executives and sell them your ideas and conclusions.” When it comes to being a pitch artist — effectively communicating ideas and influencing others — there is no better expert than Nancy Duarte of the Durate design firm in Silicon Valley. Nancy is a communication expert who’s been featured in several publications including Fortune, Forbes, and Fast Company. Her firm has created thousands of presentations for the world’s top institutions, including Apple, Cisco, Facebook, GE, Google, TED, and the World Bank and has taught many more people how to create effective presentations. She’s also the author of Resonate, Slide:ology, the HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations, and co-author of Illuminate: Ignite Change Through Speeches, Stories, Ceremonies, and Symbols. There was so much to cover that the interview is in two parts with each addressing a different topic. In Part 1,  Nancy shares how product managers can effectively communicate ideas and influence others to support their ideas. She takes us on a journey through story telling, movies, and tribal traditions, sharing what it means to be an idea Torchbearer through five stages: * dream, * leap, * fight, * climb, and * arrive. I had a special co-host, Dr. John Latham, guide the discussion in Part 2.  Nancy shared her experience taking a small innovative company and scaling it without losing what makes it innovative.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Part 1: How Product Managers can Effectively Communicate * How has your thinking on effectively communicating ideas evolved over time? My first writing on communicating dealt with the micro view – how to create effective and compelling slides. Over time I have examined the bigger picture. Illuminate zooms out beyond the presentation and connects with the purpose of the presentation, such as driving change and transforming a group or organization. * You call innovators Torchbearers – why? [In Illuminate I shared…”Leaders aren’t just the people at the top of the org chart—a leader is anyone who can see a better future and rally people to reach it. Whether you’re an executive, entrepreneur, or individual contributor, you have the potential to motivate people through your words and actions.” Anyone involved with product management and innovation is certainly included in that list.] In fact, Illuminate is written for innovators and how they can influence others to join their plans. If we called them leaders, it wouldn’t really capture what we were trying to convey. We landed on torchbearers and travelers. We were actually inspired by Frodo [in Lord of the Rings] in the sense that he was the bearer of a ring and it came with a burden. You have to be called to be a leader but then you have to accept it, almost like a mantle, but so many people just pass it by. We really liked the concept of bearing a torch, because in situations where you need a torch, usually it’s dark and damp and scary and not well-lit and unknown. You don’t know where you’re going and you need a torch. A torch basically illuminates enough right in front of you to make the next few steps bearable and understandable. That’s what communication does. It casts just enough light for people to join you and say, “I could go there, that’s not that scary.” That’s why we really like this concept of torchbearer and travelers, because it’s a journey and the leader should be on the journey with the team and und...

Listen to the Interview This episode is about the product lifecycle and developing products customers want. As the pressure to get products to market faster increases, little room is left for learning through mistakes. My guest knows this well and has helped numerous companies improve their processes and results developing products. She has worked all over the US, Europe and Asia, including traveling to Japan more than 100 times to help Japanese companies globalize. Her superpower is bringing people with diverse backgrounds and cultures together, across borders and boundaries of every kind, to achieve what none could do alone. Her name is Kimberly Wiefling and she shares the three elements needed for product excellence: * executive sponsorship, * cross-functional core teams, and * the customer. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * We need a common understanding of what a product lifecycle is before we can begin understanding product lifecycle excellence. How do you define a product lifecycle?  A product lifecycle is some kind of system or process that helps you take an idea to a product or service, build it, test it, ship it and support it routinely in the hands of the customer. [Unlike the Product Life Cycle, which explains the life of a product in the market place from launch/introduction through decline and discontinuation.] * What is the state of product lifecycle in most companies – what problems exist / what are the results? It’s really changed over the years. Back when I first started doing product development program leadership, there was a lack of process discipline, and there were people who felt that this was creativity and we couldn’t put boundaries on their creativity by having some kind of methodology. Then it swung to the other extreme with processes, phases, milestones and deliverables. Then we got agile and iterations and process discipline around it. So it’s gone the spectrum from no process to a whole lot of process which may or may not be adding value and is not always used correctly. * What are the elements needed for PLC excellence? The three big areas you have are the executive sponsorship, the cross-functional core teams, and the customer. * Why are executive sponsors important? They remove barriers, provide resources, and keep what is important to the organization reflected in the product. Executive sponsors also provide direction for the seemingly impossible. There’s a famous example of that where the head of Toyota at one point said we’re going to have a hybrid car. His engineers didn’t quite get that, and he came back again and again and said, no, we will have a car like this, I don’t care if it makes engineering sense, or even economic sense, or even if it makes ecological sense. We are going to be the thought leader in this area. * The next element is cross-functional core teams. Tell us about that. You can’t just put together a product or a service like a Frankenstein, just stitched together. It will just be a monster. You need a cross-functional core team that is involved with the product concept at the beginning and stays together throughout the process, not handing the project off to others between stages of work. The core team provides continuity. * What about the third element, the customer? You need to create something that, in the whole, has the qualities that are being looked for by the customer and the market. One tool to use to create what customers want is prototyping. I’ve worked with a lot of companies doing leadership development programs. Part of this is to form teams of four or five people that work on real projects. The projects that make the most progress are those that get something on paper, like a drawing, show it to the various stakeholders,

Listen to the Interview The topic for this episode is one I have wanted to explore for a long time – the connection between product management and content marketing. If you look at a recent marketing textbook, you’ll see sections that address product management and likely some coverage of content marketing as well. I have found similarities between the two and I went to the most authoritative source I know for content marketing – the folks at CopyBlogger, which is now Rainmaker Digital. They have been writing and teaching about content market for several years. My guest is VP of Marketing for Rainmaker Digital. He also creates educational content and digital products that help people develop and grow rewarding, profitable online businesses. The content he creates for Rainmaker Digital includes The Showrunner Podcast (with Jon Nastor) and The Digital Entrepreneur podcast (with Brian Clark). His name is Jerod Morris and I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did, learning: * what content marketing is, * how content marketing and product management are similar, and * applying content marketing to product management.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Let’s dive into an area that product managers and innovators need to know but few do – content marketing. Can you unpack that… what is content marketing? It’s free content to educate customers. It takes various forms, such as articles, videos, and podcasts that allow potential customers to get to know you or your product, then like you, then trust you.   * I would like to get your insights into a few of the fundamental concepts that cross content marketing and product management… namely, identifying a market that matters, understanding your customers’ problem, and validating a product concept. People can make a mistake with product development by first creating the product and then trying to fit it to a market after it is created. We teach the inverse of that, which is to identify a market, build an audience with participants in that market, and then use your relationship with that audience and the insights you gain from them to inform the development of your product. We can end up wasting time and money by developing something that people don’t want because we didn’t take the time to develop the relationship and listen to our audience.   * What are some ways content marketers learn about their customers/audience and problems they have that need solving? You begin with a notion of who your market is and over time learn more about them. Every single time you share a piece of content, it’s an opportunity for your target market, or your hypothesis of the target market, to interact with it and give you more information. You may realize that the people who are responding to this content are skewing in one direction or another. It can inform your choices and influence what you thought. It will give you much better insights into the market and their problems. Then with their responses you can adjust as you need to and figure out what you need to do differently, what you need to double-down on, and what may be missing that is an opportunity for you to create a product to fill that need. It’s all about getting feedback from the audience.   * Once we have a product concept that might solve a customer problem, how can we validate it really meets their needs? Once you have a minimum viable product, you need to get your audience to use it and provide feedback. The feedback mechanisms are straight forward and include emails, phone calls, forums, and social media (such as private Facebook groups).   Useful links: * Rainmaker Digital,

I have a great guest, Rebecca Kalogeris, to help us understand the pulse of product management. We discussed a number of factors, such as what department product management reports to in companies and what product managers say the future holds for the profession of product management, but I was most interested to learn the 4 skills that are correlated with product managers getting paid 25% more. Rebecca is the Vice President of Marketing for Pragmatic Marketing. Prior to joining Pragmatic Marketing, Rebecca managed product management and marketing teams at a variety of software companies. I invited Rebecca to discuss the findings from Pragmatic Marketing’s 16th Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What is the purpose of the Product Management and Marketing Survey? We run the survey every year to learn what’s changing, what’s staying the same, and where the problems are. The survey data gives us insights to the people we serve. * What’s the story behind this year’s theme – comic book super heroes? When you’re creating products, really great products that delight and sell, it’s a herculean effort. Behind that effort in most companies are the product teams, but they’re often the unsung heroes. A lot of our own family and friends don’t really understand what we do.  That hero image and their secret identity, that combination of things match up with what product management and product marketing people do and who they are – superheroes. * What do you know about the people who participated in the survey? We had 2549 people respond to the survey. They were from 57 countries and 45 states. Most have 10+ years of experience. 35% had been product owners before becoming a product manager while 21% joined product management from a sales role. 42% have a graduate degree and 71% hold at least one professional certification. * Where are they spending most of their time – on what tasks? About 75% of their time is on tactical tasks, which includes putting out fires. 20% of their time is supporting Sales – answering questions and conducting product demonstrations. Only 5 hours/month is spent interviewing customers. We also learned that less than 20% of respondents are doing win/loss analysis. With 75% of their time on tactical activities, 25% is spent on strategic activities – creating business plans, conducting market research identifying potential future partners, and the like. We asked how they would like to spend their time and they want a 50/50 split between strategic and tactical activities. * I saw a number of so-called soft skills in the findings, such as consensus building, empathy, and inspiring others. Which are most valued? We identified 7 skills that together we call the it factor. That’s when you know a person is going to go somewhere because they’ve got it. Four skills stand out in an important way – they were correlated with a 25% increase in earnings and those who had them were twice as likely to be an executive. The four skills are: * 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. * What did the participants say the future of product management looks like? Businesses need to be agile and the use of Agile methodologies is not just fo...

My guest, Tracy Hazzard, is known as the “Product Whisperer.” She is CEO of industrial design firm Hazz Design and the co-designer of many consumer products you buy at retail stores every day. Tracy is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and for more than 20 years she has been creating for companies of all sizes, pushing them to rethink their product lines in order to increase revenue and customer satisfaction. She also co-hosts the WTFFF 3D Printing Podcast and is a regular contributor to Inc. Magazine. Among the topics discussed is her 7P process to successfully designing and launching consumer products: * Prove It – concept has a market * Plan It – best plan for project * Price It – competitive products and margins * Prototype It – design and prototype * Protect It – provisional IP protection * Predict It – sales forecasting * Produce It – make it real   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * As an innovator and designer who has contributed to 250+ consumer products, what is a product category you especially enjoyed working on and why? I’ve done a lot of office chairs and got my start working at Herman Miller on the original mesh structural chair that became synonymous with the tech boom. I’ve also worked on a lot of products for kids as well as gaming accessories. * What has your experience taught you about “right-fitting” a product or service? The concept of the MVP – minimal viable product – places too much emphasis on minimal. It’s the least you can do for someone and I want to provide the most value that someone cares about. So I call it maximum valuable product. I don’t want to embed it with tons of bloat and tons of features just to be feature-heavy, but I really want to have it have the maximum impact value, the maximum design impact that my target consumer wants. That is what it means to “right-fit” a product. * Where do we get started – what are the steps to product right-fitting? There are 7 Ps to right-fitting. The first is Prove It. We’re proving that the concept has a market — that the right product and the right market have a match together. We start with a hypothesis with what we believe might be the key feature, or one or two of them, and we test each and see how they work and how they resonate. Prove It is market research, competitive research and social research. * Tell us about the next step – Plan It.  That’s where we really lay out the best plan for the process. We plan out on paper all of the launch process for that product. We spend a lot of time on this step making sure it’s dialed in and right. * Third is Price It. We haven’t made anything yet and we’re already figuring out the price, but that’s because if you can’t get the right price, then it’s not a right fit. Price makes choices for us in materials, it determines the key design criteria and key product criteria that we’re going to go forward with. It also influences what we keep and what we don’t in the other features. * Next is Prototype It. We try to work in almost any material that is necessary for the product. So if it’s got fabric on it, it’s got to be upholstered and we use an upholstery shop. We have built our own sort of resource team there, where we can have pretty much anything. So we can have glass made, we can have plastics made, we can see inside something, we can laser-cut something, we can bend metal. We can do whatever we need there, including paint it so it looks right. * Then comes Protect It. We don’t go for patenting unless we absolutely have to. We’ll file a provisional at this stage. With the retail cycles in product categories, you want to wait as long as possible before you start revealing details.

This discussion is about Voice of the Customer (VOC). When it comes to VOC experts, there are only a handful of people that match the experience of my guest today, helping hundreds of companies with VOC research and training many more practitioners. His name is Gerry Katz. He is also the author of several published papers on the topic, a contributor to professional books, guest lecturer at MIT, Harvard, and other top schools.   During the interview, you’ll hear us discuss: * what VOC is and is not, * the 4-step approach for using VOC, and * tips for conducting VOC interviews.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * What is VOC? In a nutshell, it is the process of gathering and understanding customer needs. While that sounds ridiculously simplistic, it actually isn’t. There are so many pitfalls, or so many rookie mistakes that people make in trying to understand customer needs, that an entire science has grown up around this area. * What is not VOC but is often mistaken for it? To start with, it’s not asking what customers want. If you ask Mr. or Mrs. Customer, tell me what you want, tell me what you need, the customer thinks they’re supposed to go into solution mode and start describing the exact features and the exact solutions they want. Now, unfortunately most customers aren’t all that creative, and so all they do is play back features and solutions that already exist in the marketplace. If you take that as your guidance, almost by definition, you will never do better than a me-too product. Instead, a much better approach is to ask about customer’s experiences. Another misunderstanding is thinking of VOC as any kind of market research. VOC is actually a subset of the entire field of market research. VOC also is treated as a means of measuring customer satisfaction, but that is not its purpose. Other tools, such as the Net Promoter Score, measure satisfaction. * What are the roots of VOC?  John Houser published a famous paper called The House of Quality, which was the first important English language description of a Japanese product development technique called QFD, or Quality Function Deployment. In order to do QFD, you have to start off with a detailed list of customer needs. Abby Griffin, a dissertation student of John’s, decided a good doctoral dissertation would be to study how companies understand customer needs in support of new product development and innovation. Her dissertation won the thesis prize at MIT and her and John turned it into the journal paper that essentially coined the term and created the field. The paper was published in 1993 in the journal titled Marketing Science. In the paper, they offered a four-part definition of Voice of the Customer. I won’t go into great detail, because we only have a half hour, but the parts are a (1) detailed list of customer wants and needs, (2) expressed in the customers’ own words, (3) organized into a hierarchy, and (4) prioritized by the customer. * How can a product manager conduct VOC research? It starts off with a series of one-on-one interviews. We conduct face-to-face interviews, and in some cases they have to be done by telephone. You will create 2-3 times as many needs if you record the interviews, transcribe them, and then analyze from a transcript, as opposed to the more usual process of note-taking, even if a colleague records needs while you interview. After conducting 30-40 interviews and transcribing them, it’s time to pull out the needs – perhaps around 100 unique needs — from the transcriptions and enter them into a database. Then create an affinity diagram of the needs by associating related needs into groupings called buckets. Abby’s research showed that customers are likely to affinitize differently from the way researchers...

I visited a few dozen Chick-fil-A restaurants across several states while I was on a year-long RV trip interviewing innovators. It was one of several restaurants I frequented. I was surprised and delighted with the consistently pleasant customer experience. That level of consistency is difficult for any chain of restaurants to achieve. It is one of many areas where Chick-fil-A applies innovation – customer experience in this case. To find out more about how Chick-fil-A innovates, I arranged an interview with Steve Nedvidek. He is a senior manager in Innovation for Chick-fil-A,  responsible for helping to build the innovation muscle within the organization. His primary duties are geared toward creating a culture of and competency for innovation at Chick-fil-A. At the end of the interview Steve shared that Chick-fil-A is a case study in Nancy Duarte’s new book, Illuminate, which shares the steps for effectively communicating your ideas and getting others to support them. Nancy will be a guest in a future interview. In this interview we discuss: * The relationship between improv acting and innovation * Three questions to increase organizational innovation * How “Hatch” – the Chick-fil-A innovation lab – is used * Design Thinking influences at Chick-fil-A   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Many people are interested in what it takes to be an innovation leader. What was your path to becoming responsible for building the innovation muscles at Chick-fil-A?  I started as an associate producer in the training video area, utilizing some of my background in theater and communications. I then moved to marketing for about 16 years in a variety of roles. In 2010 I started to focus on innovation as a discipline for Chick-fil-A and became part of a group that was committed to building the innovation muscle at Chick-fil-A. I’ve been a part of the innovation dialogue since then. My primary job right now is helping us learn how to coach, train, and socialize innovation in the organization so that we stimulate progress as well as preserve the core of the business. * How did your work in theater and improv influence your work and innovation? I have my master’s in theater and I always wanted to use my creativity either in an advertising agency or somehow in the arts world. When I joined Chick-fil-A, I didn’t know how I was going to make that work. But I have parlayed my theater experience into a very nice career of spreading creativity in every role that I have had at Chick-fil-A by just asking the questions of “what if” versus “what is.” That is a very powerful question for innovators – “what if.” * What actions have you taken to increase innovation at Chick-fil-A? We first had to understand the current state of innovation in the organization – how people thought about innovation. We surveyed employees and asked three very important questions: * What is innovation?  We learned there was no common definition or process in place. * Do we have a culture of innovation? Instead of a culture of innovation we had a culture of continuous improvement. * Why or why not? We had a culture that feared failure and was unsure what would happen if an employee failed. We created classes, that we still teach monthly, about the meaning of innovation to us and our processes for innovation. We went to d.school and learned about Design Thinking. We also created Hatch, a dedicated innovation environment. * Tell us about Hatch. We opened Hatch, an 80,000 square feet facility, on 12-12-2012 to be a place where we can try out new ideas, create prototypes, bring in customers for feedback, and safely innovate without the fear of failure. It is the place where we try new things, fail,

If you want your own BB-8 droid, you can buy one from Sphero, a company in Boulder, CO. BB-8 is the adorable droid in Star Wars, The Force Awakens. It is a round ball that rolls across the ground with a head that always stays on top of the ball. Sphero fuses robotic and digital technology into an immersive entertainment experience. They make other droids besides BB-8. The original product is named after the company – Sphero. It is basically a white sphere a little lager than a pool cue ball that you control with your smartphone to roll around the room and play games with. I bought one after seeing it in a Discovery store. In 2014 the company did something really smart – they started creating education curriculum that teaches kids how to code using a Sphero device. What started as a meetup for kids to learn about robtoics and coding is now an expanding library of free lessons for teachers and students. And, in the process of learning how to code, the lessons also teach about music, engineering, math, science, art, writing, and more. They have found a way to bring learning and playing together. This educational program is called SPRK (spark). The product manager for SPRK is Bill Cullen and I had the pleasure of talking with him about the SPRK program. In this interview, you will hear the benefits of incorporating an education market into your product plans, including… * expanding the overall market, * creating passionate customers, * increasing speed of innovation through community involvement, and * adding community-generated products.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Tell us about the SPRK program – how it got started and what its purpose is? SPRK stands for schools, parents, robots, kids. SPRK started as a meet-up for kids called Sphero Rangers. We noticed that as more kids participated, one of the things they always wanted to do was program the robot. Over time, as the product came to market, everyone spent extra time having meetups with interested kids or educators to program the robots. It developed over time to more people being interested and we created some really rudimentary mobile apps to program the robots. That was the beginning of the SPRK program. I added a community and a platform that we’re calling the Lightning Lab that we launched recently. It’s a place for people to share what they’ve programmed for the robot and projects that they’ve done. Educators can create and find structured content to bring into the classroom. * What are your responsibilities as the product manager for SPRK? I’m involved on both hardware and software aspects of our product lines. On the hardware side, I manage our current product in both the retail and educational channels and contribute to the design of the next version. We have a team of hardware and electrical engineers that I work with directly to do prototyping and refine the industrial design to get the product completed. On the software side there’s a huge amount of innovation in the last year and this coming year, too, because of the community we’ve built. On the software side we are building the tools to make programming for Sphero in a way that people are inspired to share what they have done and put it all in the same place so that it’s easily accessible for anyone. We’re on that journey right now with Lightning Lab. If you have a robot and you’re just a retail customer, and you bought it to go play with, you can have that experience, but you can also download the Lightning Lab app. And here’s the Easter Egg – the app lets you program any of our products, not just the Sphero SPRK edition. * Product managers are innovators and business people. From a business perspective, how has SPRK – entering the education market – impacted the overall comp...

Product managers must be effective communicators. We have ideas and product concepts to share, but the best idea will fall flat if not properly explained in terms our audience understands and appreciates. Further, if the idea is complicated, we have to find ways to make it easy to understand.   This is the world that my guest, Lee LeFever operates in. He is the author of The Art of Explanation – Making Your Ideas, Products and Services Easier to Understand.   In this interview, Lee shares the 3-step approach to explaining any product idea – the 3Ps of… * planning, * packaging, and * presenting.   Lee has also made a free eCourse available for learning how to share your ideas in ways that audiences fall in love with them. The free eCourse is called Explainer’s Secret Weapon.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Product managers always need to explain ideas clearly, but there are two times that are most challenging and most important – explaining a new product concept to stakeholders, especially those who fund projects, and explaining a new product to customers. Is your framework applicable to both situations? Absolutely because they both require you to think really hard about your audience and empathize with them. That’s what I mean by thinking hard about your audience – empathy is something that has to be part of your process because explanations live or die based on how they’re perceived by your audience. Put yourself in their shoes and think, how is this going to sound to them. The problem is, when we’re busy, when we’re under pressure, when we have deadlines, that sometimes falls by the wayside and we revert back to the language that worked for us in other settings. I think you’ve really got to get out of your head and into somebody else’s head to make communication effective. * Let’s discuss the three components of your framework – the 3 P’s: Plan, Package, Present. What steps do product managers take to plan for such a communication? Planning is thinking about a situation and asking questions about what you are communicating. Sure, you’ll consider if the information is factually correct, that it is the right information to communicate, this it is branded correctly, etc. But there’s a question that is THE question… is this understandable? Are you using familiar language that people are going to actually be able to understand? That’s the real message of the plan part of developing explanation is making understanding a priority and being very intentional about that. To plan correctly, consider these three guidelines: * Anticipate needs of the audience * Focus on the purpose you wish to achieve * Ask if your message is understandable to the audience * What is involved in the second P, Package? Packaging is the process of looking at the facts and the information you want to communicate and then figuring out a way or thinking through how to put that information into a world the audience will understand. An example that I use for this is superstitions and fables. Fables are a great example. Sometimes I say, “do you really think it’s bad luck to walk under a ladder, or is it really just not a good idea?” I think it’s really just not a good idea, but it doesn’t work just to tell someone they shouldn’t walk under a ladder. You have to repackage it and turn it into something that’s actually useful for them. I think there’s a lot of ways to repackage ideas, but the things that are most effective is to look at the facts you’re trying to communicate and ask what’s the context? Is there a story that you can tell or an anecdote that you can use to explain these f...

In this interview you are going to learn simple structures for answering product management interview questions. This is useful for anyone wanting to start a career in product management or making a move to another company as well as for product leaders who interview candidates. My guest, Charles Du (Do), is a UX Designer, SCRUM practitioner, and award-winning product manager and coach. He led the design of NASA’s first iPhone app, which received NASA’s software of the year award. Charles teaches product management in many venues and I tracked him down after I saw a course he recently launched on Udemy titled “Master the Product Manager Interview.” In this interview, you’ll learn: * what your first response should be to any scenario question, * how to respond to any general question, * three steps for the perfect answer to estimation questions, and * five steps for the perfect answer to product vision questions. Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * You have taught product management classes in the past and have now created training for doing well in interviews for a product management job. How did this new training come about? In addition to teaching online, I also teach in-person product management workshops. I found that students often asked about getting product management jobs. Questions like how they can ace an interview and what are common questions? I realized that there are many different types of questions that interviewers ask and that I could teach how to answer the questions in a really easy to consume course. * Who is the training for? It is valuable for anyone pursuing product management positions. The examples I use are from the software industry, but the structured responses I teach apply to product management, not to specific industries. * We don’t have time to go through all types of questions that may be asked in an interview – which one should product managers who are interviewing master first?  That is the MIQ – the Most Important Question. It is actually a question the candidate will ask during the interview. At the beginning of every interview, you’ll be asked some type of question like, tell me about your background, or walk me through your experience. This is where you fit in the MIQ. Reply with,  “I’d be happy to share my background, but before I start, can I ask, what are the top 3 qualities you look for in ideal candidates?” The MIQ is basically a question that the candidate asks, to flush out all the things that the interviewer cares about. The reason that this is really important is because the earlier you ask this question, the more contextual you can make all your answers during the rest of the interview. * What are the 3 qualities that employers typically look for? I have not found a lot of variety in how the interviewer responds to the MIQ question. They usually are looking for someone with product vision, execution ability, and leadership skills – these are the 3 big buckets. Knowing this, you can prepare examples from your past experiences that fit into each one of these buckets. * What is an estimation question and how do you structure a response to one? An example is, “how many golf balls can you fit into a bathroom?” The interviewer wants to see your thought process – they are not looking for a right answer to the question but are examining your analysis skills. The perfect response is structured in 3 steps: * Clarify the question. Ask details, such as what is in the bathroom, is it in a one-bedroom apartment or luxury house, etc. * Provide a rough estimate that is structured with variables and an equation. The variables would be the volume of the bathroom, the volume of everything in the bathroom,

Need a better customer research approach? This is the interview to listen to. My guest has an impressive background in product management, having served in product manager roles at Apple, Intuit, and other companies before co-founding a company that solves an important problem for product managers—getting the voice of the customer in a timely and money-saving manner. The company is Digsite and its co-founder and CMO is Jane Boutelle. In this interview Jane shares some of the problems product managers encounter when conducting and then sharing customer research data as well as how to improve these processes. In this interview, you’ll learn: * how customer research is often piecemeal * the need to have a 360 understanding of customers, and * ways to create an online customer community as an advisory board.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Since you co-founded a company dealing with the voice of the customer, let’s start with your experiences with market research and uncovering the voice of the customer. I was the first product manager at Intuit for Quickbooks. We used ethnography to better understand our customers in their own homes.  It was called “follow-me-home” and I learned a lot in the process. However, in many organizations the consumer research work comes in little bits and pieces that doesn’t provide a cohesive picture and takes too long. Often what the last customer says is what is most heard. Also, many people in organizations don’t have the opportunity to get as close to customers as they want to.  A window to accurately view the customer is needed. * Your company, Digsite, must address some of these customer research issues – what problem was Digsite created to solve? It’s all about understanding customers, differences in market segments, their actual needs, how they are responding to your offerings and those of competitors… what really makes customers tick.  We developed a custom system for creating online communities for consumer research that empowers companies to really know their customers. * What are product managers at a medium to large-size companies likely missing in their approach to customer research? We are seeing a few things. Companies doing good ethnographic research find that it tends to be expensive and time consuming. Usability testing is frequently encountered and companies are using good online platforms for that, but in the process, they are missing a 360 degree view of customer – what really makes them tick. They need to move beyond usability testing to really understand consumers. * What does customer research look like using Digsite? We create a community of customers for the product team and organization to learn from. We recruit customers for the community based on the product team’s objectives. It is essentially a little advisory team that the product team has access to throughout the product development project. Communities are typically 20-25 representative customers but can be up to 100 people. We conduct Digsite Sprints where a company can get critical feedback and insights in just a week. * Product managers are always learning and I expect you have learned a lot as Digsite has grown – what is an insight about customer research you have discovered while at Digsite? We really need to make sure that we’re thinking about research, not as an end, but as a real means to understand. It is important not to let the research process get in the way of  what you’re trying to accomplish. The thing that I’ve seen at Digsite is that we can give an organization a research capability that aligns with their business needs and answers the questions they need to ask about their customers.   Useful links:

Just about every CEO talks about innovation but making it happen in their organizations is not easy. My guest agrees – stating that innovation is not easy, but it is simple. And, to show us how simple innovation can be, he just released the book, “Keep Innovation Simple: Lead with Clarity and Focus in a World of Constant Change.” He is a speaker, writer, consultant, trainer, and coach for innovation and product management leaders. His new book is available on Amazon and the eBook version contains frequent links to videos, websites, research reports, and more. You can review portions of the book at no cost on his website at www.3point14innovation.com. In the following interview you will learn the 3 C’s to keep innovation simple: * Creation, * Conversion, and * Control.   Practices and Ideas for Product Managers and Innovators Summary of questions discussed: * Why did you write this book – Keep Innovation Simple? There were three reasons that really drove me to write it. From my experience with the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), I knew a lot of great thought leaders, great academics doing wonderful research, and it seemed to be hard to get the results of their research into the hands of innovators and companies. The second reason is when organizations try to do innovation projects they often over-complicate things. Lastly, I read a lot of business books and the vast majority of them take themselves way too seriously. I wanted to write a book that readers could have a little fun with. * How do you define innovation? I define innovation as the intersection of three overlapping areas – novelty, value, and execution. All three are needed for innovation to occur. Novelty means you’re offering something new. Value means it provides benefit to its users. Execution means it is created in a manner that mutually benefits both its users and its developers. * In the book you make a distinction between innovation best practices and evidence-based practices – tell us about the difference. The challenge that I found while developing the book was that there really is no such thing as a best practice. Because innovative organizations are always improving how they innovate, if something is a best practice today, it may be a second or third best practice tomorrow. Also, what works at my organization may not be what works at your organization. So it’s best practice for me, but not necessarily best practice for you. Finally, there’s a whole lot of things that people think they know but that really aren’t true. So I changed my approach from calling it a best practice to evidenced-based practices. What I’ve tried to deliver are the results of objective, peer-reviewed, rigorous research that has gone into what separates the people who really do well with innovation and those who don’t. * You address innovation in terms of 3 C’s – creation, conversion, and control. What do you mean by control? Together, I called the three C’s the innovation engine. The first C is control and it consists of four parts. You start with a mission, move on to culture, then to strategy, and then portfolio management. You have to do them in that order because they build on each other. Mission is really why your organization exists and what you’re trying to achieve. Culture is the operating system of how your organization functions. Strategy is the how of achieving the why in the mission. We know what we want to do, this is how we’re going to go about doing it. Portfolio management are the projects we’re actually going to be working on and how we’re going to apply resources to those projects. * Tell us about the next C, creation. Creation has three pieces.