The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers

What product managers can do when you launch a product at the wrong time Times change, trends start, and trends die. Remember those friendship bracelets made of rubber brands? They were so popular with students that many schools prohibited them because they became a source of distraction. A few months later the trend was dead. Sometimes a smart product concept is created but the market is not ready for it — the timing is off. The trick is recognizing when market conditions change and the product concept should be dusted off and tried again. It is easy to miss the changes. Our guest, Jerry Abiog, had a new opportunity for an old product because of how COVID-19 has impacted restaurants, but he almost missed it until a chance encounter with a restaurant owner while walking his dogs. Jerry has led growth and strategy for various startups and co-founded Standard Insights where he also serves as CMO. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:31] How do you help companies improve their customer experience? We look at data first because data drives everything. Our winning formula combines these three principles: * Improving customer experience * Preventing customer indecision * Telling the customer what to do next. Companies that can synthesize data and act on it are going to win. [7:55] Let’s dive into your product story. I’m the co-founder of Standard Insights. We help companies drive repeat buyers using AI. We’re a 2-year-old company, and our market was originally eCommerce, but we had the vision of expanding to other markets such as restaurants. Last year, we developed an AI-driven digital menu, because we saw the start of a trend as McDonald’s began to use digital menus that can make recommendations. I took the idea to my buddy who owns a restaurant, and he thought it was a great idea, but just not the right time because to use it he would have to lay off 60% of his wait staff. We put the digital menu idea on the shelf and moved on. When COVID came along, we tweaked the platform and launched it. Now we’re getting an average of a call a day from restaurants. It’s a lot more appealing in the current environment. A lot of companies are racing into the market with digital menus, but we’re taking it a step further by making it AI-driven. In addition to the contactless menu and contactless pay options, our menu can make AI-driven recommendations about customers’ favorite foods, seasonal foods, or drink pairings. We also provide AI-driven customer outreach through texts, social media, or email to encourage customers to order again. [19:35] What was the customer validation process like? When we originally developed the AI-driven platform two years ago, we allowed our sales and marketing outreach and our current customers to dictate product development. Our current customers and others who didn’t become customers gave us insights on how to pitch. When we expanded to include restaurants, we didn’t do a validation because it all happened so quickly and we already had the main engine, but now we are tweaking our digital menu based on feedback from customers. Life doesn’t go in a straight line. It’s all these turns and ups and downs. When the opportunity presents itself, you just have to go after it. Otherwise, someone else will. Action Guide: Put the information Jerry shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide.   Useful links: Jerry’s company, Standard Insights

How product managers can boost innovation in companies large and small In 2012 I read a book titled, Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company. It’s a book that spoke to me. It tied together many of my experiences and I helped me put them into a framework. It shared the need to get out of the office and learn from actual customers – something I had found vital but that I did not always practice on projects. Finding this book also made me aware of Steve Blank, its author. Later, like many of us, I learned about Lean Startup thinking from Eric Ries and found threads to adjacent thinking that was in the Startup Owner’s Manual. It made sense to me later when I read Steve Blank saying that Eric Ries is his best student. Consequently, I think of Eric Ries as the create of Lean Startup and Steve Blank as its father. Steve is someone I have wanted to discuss innovation with for a long time and this interview fulfills that dream. I hope you enjoy it! Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:13] What is the purpose of your book The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company? As I reflected on my life as an entrepreneur, I recognized a pattern in my experiences with eight startups that I had been a part of over 21 years. Investors told startups to act like smaller versions of large companies—coming up with a business plan on paper without talking to customers or testing prototypes. Successful startups ignored that advice. I wrote The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which kicked off the Lean Startup movement. I articulated Customer Development methodology, which says: * There are no facts inside your building, so you need to get outside. * While large companies execute business models, startups search for business model, so startups need their own tools. My student Eric Ries became the first adopter of Customer Development and recognized that in the 21st century, people were starting to adopt Agile Engineering, where you build products incrementally and iteratively. Alex Osterwalder then popularized the Business Model Canvas, which describes on a single piece of paper the key things a founder needs to know. Customer Development, Agile Engineering, and the Business Model Canvas became the Lean Startup. After the startup world rapidly adopted the Lean methodologies, I wrote The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company as a handbook for how to use those methodologies. [19:48] How have you seen the startup environment change since you published The Startup Owner’s Manual in 2012? The Lean Startup and Customer Development came out of the rubble of the crash of the dot com bubble at the turn of the century. After the crash, investors became risk adverse and were looking for product market fit. It was a mass extinction of startups and investors. The Lean methodology emerged as a way to build startups iteratively and incrementally without wasting a lot of resources. With Lean, you can pivot quickly; incremental changes are much cheaper and faster than failures later. I think we’ll see a similar effect in 2020 as Lean is used and we develop new methodologies to take advantage of a changed environment. [23:51] Why do larger, established organizations need to apply ideas from The Startup Owner’s Manual? The last decade has been pretty tough on established organizations. They’ve seen a lot of disruption because everything is changing around them. Large companies started looking at startup tools to deal with high-speed changes and disruptions in their business models. In 2013, Harvard Business Review published my article “Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything.” Corporate CEOs realized that they could use the toolset that startups were using. In the 21st century,

Learn the qualities of a successful product manager and leader. Part of the path to becoming a product master is developing as a leader. Leaders of product management need agility, influence, trust, empathy, and motivating vision. And, those are the topics our guest, Roman Pichler, explores with us in this episode. Roman is a product management expert specializing in digital products. He is the author of several books, including his latest, titled, How to Lead in Product Management. His popular blog is also available as a podcast and both are simply named Roman Pichler. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:00] What is agile product management? Agile product management is product management infused or enriched by agile practices and principles. It’s interactive, iterative, incremental, and collaborative. [6:15] You recently published How to Lead in Product Management: Practices to Align Stakeholders, Guide Development Teams, and Create Value Together. Why did you write this book to help product leaders? Over the last 15 years, the product community has changed for the better, benefiting from tools like scrum and agile, but the soft skills have received less attention. Hard skills like market research or roadmapping are important, but they’re not enough. Product leaders can’t succeed if they neglect people skills and leadership skills. I wanted to offer practical help for product people and draw attention to the importance of soft skills in product management. As a product manager told me recently, product management is 80% people and 20% technology. [10:18] As product managers, how do we approach having responsibility but no authority? We don’t have any positional authority or transactional power. We can’t make people do things, but we rely on people’s work. To encourage stakeholders and development team members to move in the same direction, we have to influence them and get them to listen to us and follow our guidance. That’s only possible if people trust us. [12:09] What are ways to facilitate trust? Empathize—develop a kind and warm-hearted attitude; take a genuine, respectful interest in them; and be concerned for their well-being. Empathy is not about approval or agreement; it’s about accepting. By empathizing, we can discover their underlying needs, interests, and goals, and build trust. Listen deeply and actively. Don’t be overly critical or judgmental; be present for them. Speak and act with integrity. Saying what we believe and acting accordingly is easier said than done. Get to know people personally. This could be as simple as having coffee together, or it could be sharing failure stories, which shows vulnerability and builds trust. Strengthen product management expertise. [17:30] Tell us about product vision. Product vision is an inspirational goal that describes the positive change that the product will bring about. The vision is the foundation, and it’s important that stakeholders and the development team buy into it. A collaborative workshop with key stakeholders is a great way to kick off a new product development effort and create the initial vision. When you make a major change to an existing product, revisit the vision and adjust if necessary. The collaborative workshop gets people’s buy-in, leverages collective wisdom, and ensures there is a shared understanding. To avoid a few people dominating the workshop, it’s valuable to prepare the workshop and have a skilled facilitator. [28:22] What are other important qualities that are key to being an effective product leader? Again, empathy is important to train ourselves in. Also, mindfulness is very helpful. Bring awareness to what is going on and increase your ability to stay present and be aware of yourself. This gives you more choices and makes you less likely to...

The recipe for rapid product design for product managers A Design Sprint is how you can solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days. That is also the subtitle of the groundbreaking book called Sprint. The Design Sprint became popular at Google a few years ago, which is also when Sprint was published. More recently, I am seeing product managers using Design Sprints in organizations to create new product concepts, resulting in realistic prototypes in five days. One of the original contributors to the Design Sprint methodology is my guest, John Zeratksy, who co-authored the Sprint book. He was also a guest two years ago, sharing how product managers can make better use of their time, in episode 210. Not just as a practitioner, but as an original creator of the Design Sprint, John takes us through the 5 phases of a sprint: * Map, * Sketch, * Decide, * Prototype, and * Test. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:28] How did the Design Sprint come about? While working as a designer at Google Ventures, I was looking for a systematic, structured process to help companies achieve their goals. Around this time I met Jake Knapp, who had been experimenting with a new process for team collaboration called a Design Sprint. We soon decided that the Design Sprint was the repeatable process we needed to bring a team together and help them focus on their problems and opportunities. Jake joined the team at Google Ventures in 2012, and we started running Design Sprints. After a year of tweaking, we arrived at a repeatable recipe based around the five-day structure that is still used today. Like a startup incubator, we wanted to help startups prove the validity of their business model quickly. Like everyone else, startups struggle to focus their time. Design Sprints help them focus on the core work that makes the product valuable. The Design Sprint is a recipe that gives teams very clear, specific, proven steps to follow when they’re getting started. [14:01] What is the result of a Design Sprint? The Design Sprint is all about creating a realistic prototype and testing it with real customers at the end of the week. The prototype is not actually functional, but it looks real. If the prototype is realistic, reactions from customers are very high quality. [15:42] Can you run a Design Sprint in less than five days? You can run a great Sprint in four days, but don’t go shorter than that. You can run a similar collaborative working session in less than four days, but it’s not really a Design Sprint. If you’ve never done a Design Sprint before, start with the five-day process because it’s outlined in the book and includes a bit of buffer time. Many companies who are experienced with Design Sprints use the four-day option. If you do the four-day process, you can allow an extra day before the Sprint to allow people to clear their schedules so they can focus for the next four days. [22:46] How do we prepare for the Design Sprint? Most important, you must have a big problem or opportunity. Sprints work best when they’re focused on something really important. Gather a team that reflects the real team that’s responsible for solving the problem. Set aside time; in the five-day process, this is a five-day workweek with one big goal per day. Let’s walk through the Design Sprint recipe: [24:13] Monday: Map This is all about problem framing. You create a shared map to get the team on the same page. We start at the end by considering our longterm goal for the project. We also write down questions, unknowns, assumptions, and things that could trip us up. We interview members of the sprint team or extended team to bring as many perspectives as possible. We use the pattern Note and Vote throughout the Sprint. On Monday,

What product managers can learn from the story of a beauty product There is much to learn from a good product story; how an insight leads to an idea, which becomes a product concept and grows into a business case resulting in developing a new product that is launched and grows through the product lifecycle. Personally, I also enjoy learning from industries I’m unfamiliar with. So, when I discovered a new beauty brand that is in the formation process, I was excited to talk with its founder, Ginger King. She is a chemist with previous senior management roles at several large cosmetic companies. Her first product under her own brand, FanLoveBeauty, is a lip balm. There is a lot you can learn from this interview beyond elements of the product journey. This includes how to speak with passion about your own product — something Ginger does well. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers  [5:14] How did you create your first product for FanLoveBeauty? My first product is a vegan lip balm designed for speakers or others who talk a lot. I got the idea because I wanted to create a healthier lip balm for my friend mentor Daymond John. My lip balm differentiates itself because it does not contain petrol or lanolin, two common but unhealthy lip balm ingredients. [10:17] Once you had the idea, what happened next? Almost all other natural lip balms use beeswax, but I wanted mine to protect bees and be vegan, so I decided to not use beeswax. Through competitive studies I found that most natural lip balms also don’t contain active ingredients. I added superfoods like flaxseed oil, mango, almond, and sea asparagus. The lip balm I now sell is my tenth formulation. A board of beauty experts and Daymond John gave me feedback on each formulation to help me arrive at the final product. [20:07] What did you do to validate the need for the product?  I did a pre-launch and received feedback from users. Some people bought the product during the pre-launch, and others I provided it to because I knew they were influencers who could give me valuable feedback and help with marketing. [21:55] What is your target market? I was originally inspired to make a lip balm for speakers, but my lip balm is for anyone who talks lot—podcasters, salespeople, teachers, and anyone else who uses their lips a lot. I know that if professional speakers like it, then a broader audience of aspiring speakers will also want it. [25:07] How are you continuing to grow your marketplace? My company is called FanLoveBeauty because I create products for people who inspire, educate, or entertain. Those people contribute a lot to society, but there aren’t any beauty products dedicated to them. I encourage people to work with me to give me product ideas. If you tell me about a specific artist or educator who has contributed to society, I will create a beauty product for them. [27:06] How do you implement the brand concept of creating products for people with specific needs? I call it FanLoveBeauty because fan love is very passionate—I want to create the very best products for celebrities whom people love. My social cause is donating to a suicide prevention foundation because some celebrities we love have committed suicide because of depression. Along the same line, I include mango butter in my products because mango helps people feel better. Bonus Question: What is it like to have Daymond John as your mentor? What key insight has he shared with you? I have followed Daymond John for ten years. Before asking him to be my mentor, I did my homework—reading all his books and watching his videos. We’re friends because I never asked him for an investment. We focus on relationships, not transactions. Don’t approach people asking what they can do for you. A key insight I learned from Daymond John is,

How product managers can lead innovation and help transform their organization My guest is changing how companies innovate and he is doing it with a 5-step process. You’ll hear the details in the discussion, but the five steps are called: * sourcing, * curation, * discovery, * incubation, and * transition. He created this process as an Army Colonel and former director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, where he deployed a record 170 new products. He was leading innovation in the challenging environments of Iraq and Afghanistan battlefields. Now he is improving innovation effectiveness in companies. He is also working with Steve Blank on a book to capture and share the innovation process. But, you can get the key insights now, long before the book is published. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:59] How do you define innovation? Innovation is the delivery of something that either changes people’s lives or significantly changes business. Nothing is an innovation until it delivers something to somebody that changes behavior or solves a problem. And innovation must be scalable. [4:35] Can you walk us through your 5-stage innovation process outlined in the Harvard Business Review article you wrote with Steve Blank (see link below)? The innovation process has five stages and an operating system that allows all the different methodologies, decision points, and data to connect to ensure an adequate throughput. [5:40] Sourcing This stage is about sourcing people, ideas, problems, and technologies—finding what’s out there. Hackathons are useful for sourcing people. My company created a problem-sourcing seminar where we trained teams to go into the organization and vigilantly discover problems. Tech scouting—visiting conventions and talking to people working on problems— is another great way to source problems. [15:55] Curation Dis-aggregate complex problems into smaller issues, then prioritize the issues and build teams around them. Begin to prioritize based on risk and impact and determine which team would be best for each problem. Prioritization tells you why you’re working on what. Look at the quality of the team and the problem, and the pathways that you have to follow to the next step. In order to ensure throughput in your innovation pipeline, make sure you have the best, most ready things moving to the next step. Those things might not necessarily be the highest priorities in the long-run, but they are what create the most value that you can accomplish right now. [23:45] Discovery Answer the questions, “Do we have the right problem? Can we define what success in solving it looks like? Do we know whom we’re solving it for?” Next prove that you have a viable solution and a way of deploying that solution to the customer. Finally, consider whether the cost ratio is feasible. We run multiple ideas at once in Discovery, but only about 1/4 of curated ideas make it to Discovery. [9:10] Incubation We determine readiness in three levels: Technology readiness—do we understand the technology involved in solving this problem? Investment readiness—do I have the right team or do I need to add someone to the team? Adoption readiness—have I identified the first customers, am I ready to scale, and do I have the team to get the innovation to users? [10:30] Transition Transition the innovation back into the business. It must scale appropriately with the right people. It must be sustainable, meaning that we can train people to work on it and can keep updating it. You don’t have an innovation until you’ve transitioned it into the real environment. Everything prior to that is learning about the problem. Bonus Question [35:35] How does the innovation process work in times of crisis?

How video directors think about creating effective videos can help product managers create better products Some of the best product management lessons come from unexpected places, and I enjoy finding them. This interview is a perfect example. Current Resident is the name of a creative video production group in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I think of them as video storytellers. Effective product managers are also storytellers. So, I wondered how much of their video creation process would be similar to product management processes and what new insights they might provide product managers. To explore that, I found Patrick Shelton, a partner and director at Current Resident. He has a deep love for both narrative and entrepreneurship — who better to discuss his craft from a product management perspective. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:48] What work do you do? I am one of the owners of Current Resident, a production company and content studio based in Minneapolis, MN. Our mission is finding what makes you or your organization special and understanding that differentiation doesn’t necessarily come through features and benefits, but can come through values and stories. [6:37] What’s an example of a video project you’ve done? One project was for a company called Staff Book, which created an app that expedites the nurse staffing process for traveling nurses. We created a launch video and helped Staff Book articulate their process. What are the steps you take in making a video project? [11:08] Explore and Identify We dive into the industry, researching and doing competitive analysis to become a category expert. We collaborate with the client to understand what differentiates them and go back to the goal of the piece of content. Every decision has to be built to achieve that goal. [17:12] Prepare and Assemble We ask, What’s our differentiating piece? How are we going to tell the story? For Staff Book, we decided to do an animated video and create different content for each of their customers—nurses, CEOs, etc. We knew that we had to talk to each customer with the right content. We told a story rather than just explaining. [23:57] Produce This is where we put everything together by collaborating with our animators and client to build scripts and design elements. [24:21] Solve and Celebrate This is post-production and editing, which is intertwined with production when doing animation. Then we celebrate! Throughout the entire process, we’re very adamant about client collaboration. No one person can create a great piece of content that achieves great business results. It’s important to have the client be part of the entire process so that we stay on track with the story they want to tell. [27:29] What kind of prototypes do you use? We use storyboards and animatics. An animatic is an inexpensive or free video to show the concept. It can be shot with a phone or inexpensive camera, with whoever is nearby. Then it’s edited and a music track or other creative element is added. Seeing an actual video helps people buy into the idea. [29:56] What’s the difference between a good video and a great video? We always come to every project with a point of view. A video is useless unless you have something to say with a point of view. It can be difficult for customers to understand why our point of view gives our products value, so it’s important to over-communicate. Providing excellent customer service also helps us make great videos because it increases collaboration. The customer has some pull in the product, but they’re hiring you as the expert, so you have to know when to stand up for the idea and not say yes to everything. Bonus Question: What are your insights for making collaboration work better? Be ego-less.

The strategies the Disney Head of Innovation used to bring products customers love to life Last year I was at a product management conference in Orlando and the keynote speaker discussed leadership at Disney. It got me interested in how Disney innovates. A few months later I found out about Duncan Wardle, who was the Head of Innovation and Creativity at Disney for many years. He led the team that helped Imagineering, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar and Disney Parks to innovate, creating magical new storylines and experiences for consumers around the globe. Now he is a keynote speaker and also deliverers workshops and ideation forums to companies around the globe. We discuss a lot of topics about creating an innovation capability in a company and creating products customers love. I most enjoyed the customer research examples he shared for getting insights that lead to more valuable products. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:52] How did your thinking about innovation change over the time you were Head of Innovation and Creativity at Disney? When I was first given the role, I panicked because I didn’t know what innovation was. First we surveyed 5,000 people at film companies and asked about their barriers to innovation. The top five barriers we heard about were: * I don’t have time to think, and I don’t give my organization time to think. * We’re risk-averse. * Consumer insights are underused by the organization. * Ideas get stuck or killed. * We all have different definitions of innovation. We considered three different models to create a culture of innovation: * Hire an outside consultant. * Create an innovation team as a catalyst for change. * Bring in young tech startups as an accelerator program. But none of these models had ever evolved our culture to become more innovative because they don’t touch the whole culture. Many C-suite leaders tell their employees to innovate but don’t teach them how. I now create a toolkit to make innovation easier, creativity more tangible, and the process fun. [8:53] How do we get customer insights? Go spend a day with them. Stop looking at your data. If you only look where you’ve always looked, you’ll only get what you’ve always got. Real insight doesn’t come from focus groups. It comes from spending time with customers in their living rooms. Use your intuition, not just the data. Often the insight comes from asking why four or five times. [20:01] What strategies can we use to find customer insights? First, if you have never spent a day with your consumer, do it. Second, look in new and unusual places where your competition isn’t looking. We spend a day with three types of people: * Weird—someone who has a tangential relationship to your challenge but doesn’t work for you. * Deep—someone who works in your industry but doesn’t work for you. * Normal—your own consumer. For example, to get insights on Hispanic customers at Disney, we spent a day with a Hispanic car salesman selling to Hispanic families, a travel agent who sells packages to Hispanic American families, and one of our own consumers who is Hispanic. Write down everything you hear, see, and experience. Then the team comes together and shares all the clues they found. You can then cluster the clues, and if many are telling you the same thing, you’re onto something. We validate possible insights by going back through data, serving consumers, or hot-shopping, which is co-creating with the consumer. It’s the responsibility of the entire organization, not just the consumer insights team, to care about the consumer. Bonus Question: How do we make looking for customer insights part of the culture of our organizations?

Lessons Learned from launching The Everyday Innovator Virtual Summit After hosting the 2020 virtual summit for product managers and product VPs, I’ve been asked many times for my lessons learned: what made it great, what would I do differently, what advice I have, what I learned about launching a product, etc. Consequently, after answering several of these questions individually, I realized others would find value in the lessons learned as well. That is what this podcast episode is about. It’s not my usual discussion format. Instead, I review the lessons learned from myself and my team that created and launched the summit. By the way, if you still want to benefit from the incredible strategies and tips the summit speakers shared, along with the exclusive materials my team created, click here for 24+ expert masterclasses from top-of-their-field experts. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:38] Summit Lessons Learned Meeting Just like after a product launch, I conducted a lessons-learned meeting with the Summit team to discuss: * What worked (best practices) * What to do differently (mistakes and insights) * Building trust and empowerment in the team [2:30] Context of the Summit [2:36] Objectives: * Build awareness for The Everyday Innovator podcast * Grow my email list in order to reach more people * Prepare for a membership group for product managers and VPs [3:11] Target Market: product managers and product leaders [3:59] Why a virtual summit? I know people who have done virtual summits with similar objectives, and I already knew how to do interviews. It also provided learning experiences for me to prepare for a membership offering including video interviews and written materials. [4:53] Preparation * Followed the programs of mentors Navid Moazzez at Virtual Summit Mastery and Matt DeMeritt at Digital Summit Pros * Assembled a team * Developed a schedule [5:58] Basic Flow of the Summit * 25 sessions over 3 days * Motivational keynote on first day * New session published every hour * Two tracks: product managers and product VPs * Live chat-based discussion with me and many speakers all three days [6:36] What worked? [6:41] Vision: Anytime we’re thinking about a product, vision is a very important aspect of planning to get the team on the same page. After a lot of thought and interaction with others, I wrote a vision for the Summit that focused on professional development and learning for product managers and leaders. [8:16] High quality speakers: Our speakers are experts in: * Business innovation * Lean * Customer research * Communication * Product leadership * And more [9:30] Logo: We updated The Everyday Innovator logo for the Summit and created an animated version. [9:51] Key Features * Playbook: PDF of each speaker session including speaker bio, personal insight, innovation quote, and links to additional resources * Written Speed Summaries of each session * Action Guides for each session including discussion questions and actions to take * Transcripts * MP3 files * Interactive discussion for participants during the live Summit * Speaker sessions: some presentations, some interviews [11:24] Business model: When you’re developing a new product, you need to explore the business model, which is how you’re going to generate revenue. * Free Summit: playbook, speaker sessions during the Summit, interactive discussion * All-Access Pass: generated revenue; includes lifetime acces...

The beliefs that enable innovation for product managers Are you an innovator? Not every product manager is, but I think the good ones need to be. Innovation is most frequently described as a process that brings something new into existence, creating value for others, such as customers. Our guest shares that innovation is really about people and those who are good at it have a different mindset. While process is important, innovation needs the right people involved. The discussion covers a lot of ground as Chuck Swoboda, retired Chairman and CEO of Cree and a pioneer in the LED lighting industry, shares his 30 years of experience with us. We discuss the mindset he wrote about in The Innovator’s Spirit that people use to make the seemingly impossible a reality, examples of innovation at Cree, how to find and hire innovators, using Brutal Truths to improve anything, and why Steve Jobs was right when he said customers don’t know what they want. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:05] What problem does your book The Innovator’s Spirit solve? Most writing on innovation is about process or recipe. I wrote The Innovator’s Spirit to share the missing piece of people and mindset. My book helps anyone who’s interested in innovation to unlock the mindset that lets us innovate. [4:05] How do you define innovation? Innovation is something new that solves a customer problem and creates real value. [7:42] What is the innovator’s mindset? The innovator’s mindset is the beliefs that enable behaviors that make innovation possible. Our life experiences have created a set of beliefs that get in the way of innovation. The innovator’s mindset flips those beliefs around–risk is good, there’s always a better way, crisis is an opportunity. We need to create experiences to form new beliefs. For example, put yourself in a situation where you’re likely to fail. You’ll realize that the idea that you can’t do something is in your head. You learn resiliency by surviving failure. When you have the innovator’s mindset, you’ll realize that missed opportunity is the biggest risk. [14:20] What’s an example of trying something new with the innovator’s mindset? At Cree, an LED company, we tried to convince lighting companies to make LED lightbulbs, but after several years, none of them had. We decided to make LED lightbulbs ourselves. Five people developed the Cree LED bulb in secret in a year, and we convinced Home Depot to buy it. We got into the consumer products business we had never been in before. We risked losing some R&D dollars, but the bigger risk was not turning on the market for LED lighting. People who like innovation view failure as learning. In innovation, you’re trying to get an answer that may or may not really exist. [17:53] What were the characteristics of the five innovators who developed the LED lightbulb? We picked people who were rule breakers. They were unafraid of failure, yet they were unwilling to fail. They were motivated because their pride as innovators was on the line. [21:22] How did you identify those characteristics? I found out how they deal with uncertainty. I want people who will figure out how to solve problems. I asked them to describe their biggest failure and what they learned. I want people who are unwilling to fail and who empower themselves. I also make sure their title isn’t important to them, because we need people who are flexible enough to tackle whatever problems are in front of them. [24:51] What are the brutal truths and why do we need them? If you’re going to innovate, you have to be focused on the unvarnished facts—the brutal truths. We need to care more more about constructiveness than collegiality,

How to make experimentation work for product managers If you work in a medium to large company, your CEO wants the organization to be more innovative. All the surveys about such things tell us this is the case. If you are in a smaller organization or on your own, you still care about innovation. But, how can you bring about more innovation, or let’s face it, in some cases, anything that looks like innovation? In some form, this is what company leaders have talked with me about the most in the last year — incorporating more innovation into their work. It is something we especially need now. I believe a key paving stone on the path to better innovation – aka, more products customers love — is adopting an experimentation mindset and conducting fast low-cost experiments. And that is what our guest, Dr. Stefan Thomke, Harvard Business School professor and researcher, is discussing with us. He is an authority on the management of innovation and the use of experimentation. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:29] Why is it important for innovative organizations to run experiments? One of the big challenges in innovation is uncertainty. When we rely on our experience, we’re wrong 9 out of 10 times. Big data only shows correlations and not causations. The answer to uncertainty is experiments. Experimentation is the engine of innovation. [6:53] How should experimentation be used in innovation? It’s not experimentation versus data or experimentation versus experience. It’s experience plus data plus experiments. Companies that experiment still do normal research activities, but they don’t run to market with the research before it’s tested. Instead, they use research to generate hypotheses which they then test with experiments. [10:53] What is the structure of a good experiment? In an experiment, the tester wants to separate an independent variable from a dependent variable while holding everything else constant. The independent variable is the presumed costs, such as a bonus for the sales team, and the dependent variable is the observed effect, such as the revenue of the sales team. You change the independent variable, observe changes in the dependent variable, and make a conclusion about cause and effect. To minimize bias, ideally an experiment should be blind and randomized. A blind experiment in which the person doesn’t know they’re being experimented on ensures that their knowledge of the experiment doesn’t change their behavior. Randomization distributes random variables among all the people so that bias is evened out. [14:21] What’s an example of using experimentation? Imagine you have a restaurant and want to find out if a new menu will increase your revenue. The wrong way to set up an experiment is to run the normal menu for a month and then the new menu for a month and compare your revenue. There are too many variables that could have changed from one month to the other. The right way is to create a randomized experiment by running both menus at the same time. As customers come into your restaurant, they’re randomly assigned to one menu or the other. Other variables, such as the chefs in the kitchen, are also randomized. [18:55] How do we identify the hypotheses that need to be tested? Hypotheses can come from many places, such as qualitative research, customer insights, or data mining, or even intuition. Good hypotheses should be grounded in facts, identify possible causes and effects through clearly measurable variables, and be able to be falsified. [23:04] How does experimentation give us confidence? Experimentation gives us confidence to be bold. Without experiment, you’re just gambling. Many times your intuition can get in the way. For example, Ron Johnson, who created the Apple store,

Three phases of pricing for product managers This episode is about pricing. A lot of product managers are not very involved in pricing decisions. If you are one of them, you should change that. Our guest, Ben Malakoff, learned how to price products and in this interview he shares what you’ll need to know to be part of pricing decisions, increasing your influence. Ben has held several product management roles and is now the senior director for sales operations at FiscalNote. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:51] Let’s imagine we’re pricing a voice-controlled kitchen faucet. What are the elements of pricing a product? Pricing is very much an art and a science. Three methodologies of pricing are value-based, market level, and cost-plus. For the voice-controlled faucet, there are elements of value-based because it’s a new, exciting product that you might be able to charge a premium for, and elements of cost-plus because it’s a hardware product connected to consumer goods and services. [4:12] What are the three phases of pricing? [4:45] Data Analysis One of my mentors, John Damgaard, said, “In God we trust. All others bring facts.” To make your pricing opinion count, you’ll have to bring data. An important piece of data is unit sales—how many units and in what segments are you selling? Also, consider how much you need to discount to move a certain amount of product and whether people buy more with the discount. Identify the market size and trajectory. Faucet sales are significantly impacted by new home construction and remodeling, so if few homes are built, faucet sales may decrease. A couple of other types of data analysis are attach rates of other products and the cost of developing the product. [6:39] Market Research Market research is finding out what you can charge based on what you’re offering. You want to find out whether you can charge a premium for your voice-activated faucet. Find out what your competitors are doing. The most important activity is talking to your customers. Ask them how much they would pay for the faucet. [8:08] Pricing Recommendation The first two steps are the science. This one is the art. You have to somewhat take a leap of faith, because you won’t know the exact right price until you’re in the marketplace, but you have enough information to make a very educated guess. Use your data, market research, and team to assign a price. [8:40] Why is pricing work important? This is a very basic pricing process, but it’s very successful. I often see organizations not doing any pricing work. Just doing the level of work I’ve outlined often results in a 10x-20x ROI. Pricing work is a low-investment, high-return activity. [10:39] Why are attach rates important? Attach rates are a calculation of which products are selling together. For example, sinks or dishwashers might be sold with the faucet. This gives you insight into packaging. What could you bundle with your faucet and what promotions could you have? Nailing the price alone is only 1/5 or 1/6 of what you have to do for successful pricing. Packaging analysis is another important piece. [13:09] How does SaaS pricing work? SaaS pricing is primarily value-based. The SaaS companies I’ve worked with typically try to get a 3x-10x ROI, which is typically way above the cost. Cost is more of a factor in SaaS businesses that have certain suppliers or other major expenses. [15:42] What market research tools do you recommend? Know your competitors cold. Your price-to-value ratio is largely set by your competitors. When you interview your customers, always ask their willingness to pay. Conjoint analysis is a great way to do that in a survey. A less advanced option is doing a large number of customer interviews.

The future back strategy for product managers Innosight is an innovation management consultancy founded by Clayton Christensen and Mark Johnson. Mark has a new toolkit for visionary thinking that leads to breakthrough growth, which he writes about in his book, Lead from the Future. The foundation of the toolkit is “future back” thinking, which we talk about. Mark is also the author of the previous books Dual Transformation and Reinvent Your Business Model and the McKinsey award-winning Harvard Business Review article “Reinventing Your Business Model.”   Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:07] What are the limitations of traditional strategic planning? Traditional strategy drives core business but doesn’t create breakthrough products or new business models. Traditional strategic planning is too anchored in extrapolating present-day norms into the future. As Alfred Chandler said, “Don’t let structure dictate strategy.” In many organizations, the core organization is insufficient to sustain long-term growth. You have to be able to think about white space beyond the core and plan from the future back as well as performing traditional annual strategic planning. [9:56] How does your future back approach to strategy work? Future back is a process and a way of thinking. As a process, it’s just like it sounds—planning from the future back. It’s about envisioning the future of a portfolio of businesses. You define the future of the core, adjacent, and new growth businesses and increment backward to determine what initiatives need to start today. It’s also a way of thinking that allows you to take the past and the present out of the equation. It’s clean sheet, systematic thinking that allows you to envision what could be as opposed to what is and to get out of being stuck in an existing paradigm. To use the future back approach, you must put in place both the thinking and the process. It’s an iterative, learning loop approach involving exploration, experimentation, and discovery. You frequently revisit the vision and initiatives and adjust along the way. It’s especially important that the leadership team carve out 10% or 20% of their time to explore the vision and discover at an enterprise level to plan for the future. [16:15] How do we define the time horizon? The time horizon is how far into the future to envision. You want to be in a place that’s uncomfortable and that captures the convergence of a set of trends that may cause the world to work in a whole different way. Discussing how many years away that place might be is an important way to gain understanding. Your growth aspiration can also define the time horizon. Determine your goal and discuss how viable it is for the core business to attain that growth over several years. Discussing this growth gap can be very galvanizing to the organization as people realize that merely incrementing off the base isn’t going to fill the gap. You need to think beyond and find new and different ways to fill the gap. [20:16] What do you look at to identify the forces that are shaping your industry? Trends play a big role. Study trends to answer, “Where is the customer going?” Use trends to determine the job that the customer will be trying to get done and what will be most important and least satisfying. We tend to do the most experimentation around new growth. In these experiments, we spend a little to learn a lot and plant a few seeds that incubate over time, because new growth is the area of greatest uncertainty. We do fewer experiments in the adjacent area and the least in the core. [26:19] What are some examples of organizations using the future back approach? In the late ’90s, Steve Jobs led Apple in a process similar to future back stra...

How anyone can persevere and reach their goals even in difficult times The Everyday Innovator Online Summit recently ended. It was April 8-10, 2020. The speakers were absolutely incredible! Twenty-five top experts shared their strategies, practices, and tips to help product managers and product VPs gain higher performance and get more success. You can still get the wisdom they provided. Ruben Gonzalez was our motivational keynote for the Summit. He was so good, I wanted to share the discussion with you as well, The Everyday Innovator podcast listener. I won’t be sharing other sessions from the Summit, but I think you’ll find this one inspiring. Even though we recorded it before concerns of COVID-19 dominated the news, it’s a message you need to hear now. Ruben is the only man alive who has been in four Winter Olympics across four decades and he is working to make the 2022 games his fifth. He describes himself as a common man who achieved extraordinary things. He wasn’t a gifted athlete. In school he was always the last kid picked to play sports. He didn’t take up the sport of luge until he was 21, which is considered ancient to start preparing for the Olympics. Four years and a few broken bones later, Ruben was competing in the Calgary Winter Olympics. His incredible story takes people’s excuses away and fills them with the belief and inspiration to face their challenges and fight for their goals and dreams. People buy into what Ruben teaches because they can relate to him. In this discussion, Ruben will inspire and equip you to win. Whether achieving victory in the Olympics, in business, or in life, the same success principles apply: focus, discipline, integrity, teamwork, leadership, overcoming your fears, and committing to excellence. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:50] How did you end up in the Winter Olympics? The Olympics has been my dream ever since I first watched the games on TV when I was 10. But it was a pipe dream because I was always the last kid picked for PE. I had a lot of heart, but my body didn’t go with it. When I was 21, watching the figure skater Scott Hamilton win the gold medal gave me hope. I thought, if that little guy can win, I can at least play. I decided that I would be in the next games no matter what. I just had to find a sport. You must have two types of courage to reach your goals: first, the courage to get started, which comes from your belief that your goal is possible, and second the courage to endure, which comes from your desire. I always had the desire, and after seeing Scott Hamilton, I had the belief. In high school, my nickname was Bulldog because I was always very tenacious and persevering. I decided to pick a tough sport, with a lot of broken bones, because hopefully a lot of people would quit, and I wouldn’t. I picked the luge. After four years and a few broken bones, I made it to the Calgary Olympics. [4:59] What kept driving you to get to the Olympics? After I got excited about the Olympics, my dad encouraged me to read books about the lives of great people. I realized that perseverance is the common denominator to reaching your goals. It’s not a guarantee, but quitting is definitely the end of your dream. Success is a decision–committing to figuring it out no matter what. My dad also encouraged me to hang around winners. The people you’re with and the books you read determine where you end up. When people who have already done big things start believing in you, you start believing in yourself. The mentors I started spending time with asked me questions like, Why not now? Why not me? I made it onto an NCAA Division 1 soccer team, but a few weeks later the coach told me that I was a threat to my own team. I was too slow.

Get the strategies, insights, tools, practices, and tips you need for success now and in the future. Instead of a normal weekly interview I’m sharing with you 24+ brand new video interviews with world-class experts. They will share their strategies, experience, and secrets to help you excel in product management. I’m calling it The Everyday Innovator Summit and it is entirely online. You only need your computer, smartphone, or tablet and an internet connection. The Everyday Innovator Summit is FREE to attend, but you must register. Also, it is soon — April 8-10. You won’t want to miss it. FREE Online Summit for Your Product Management Success Register at… >>> www.theeverydayinnovator.com/summit My team and I have worked on this Summit since late last year. Given our current circumstances, many online workshops and events have popped up in recent days. This is not one of them. The Summit is something I have been anxious to bring to listeners of the podcast and it takes time to create a valuable experience for you. If you like the podcast, you'll love the Summit. The format is similar, but even more action-oriented so you can start putting the strategies into effect, improving your performance in product management. Also, all the interviews are in video format, not just audio. We have two tracks, one for product managers and another for product VPs. Who Is Speaking? * Alex Osterwalder, Business Model Canvas Pioneer * Andrew Warner, Mixergy Founder * Ash Maurya, Lean Canvas Creator * Ben Brenton, Chief Innovation Officer * Bruce McCarthy, Product VP & Coach * Christina Stefan, Researcher & Designer * Colin Palombo, Innovation Execution Expert * Dan Olsen, Lean Product Coach * Eric Boduch, Pendo CEO * Jane Boutelle, $1B+ Product Manager * Janna Bastow, Co-founder ProdPad & Mind the Product * Keith Hawk, SVP Sales * Lewis C. Lin, CEO viaMaven * Mark Stiving, Chief Pricing Educator * Nancy Duarte, Communication Expert * Rich Mironov, CPO & Coach * Rowan Gibson, Innovation Adviser * Ruben Gonzalez, 4-Decade Olympian * Sachin Rekhi, Founder Notejoy * Scott Propp, Product Executive * Steve Johnson, CPO & Coach * Tom Henschel, Executive Coach * Tony Ulwick, Jobs-to-be-Done Pioneer * Wayne Baker, Professor & Researcher Some of these names may be new to you, but each of these experts has a lifetime of experience and knowledge to help propel product professionals to higher performance, or what I call, product mastery. Don’t miss it while it is FREE. Register now… >>> www.theeverydayinnovator.com/summit   Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.