The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers

This interview is about making better use of our time as product managers and it is with John Cutler, Product Evangelist at Amplitude. For the sake of time, let's get right to the interview.

I'm someone who enjoys learning from books. I often find great tips I can apply from a good book, and that is just what I have for you. We are discussing a valuable new book titled Testing Business Ideas. It is full of practical experiments we can do as product managers to help us with problem-solution fit. These are experiments to find evidence for the hypotheses we have made and help us think more deeply about the assumptions surrounding a product concept. The book describes 44 different experiments along with why each is used and how to use it. It will be a very important book to be on your bookshelf and refer to when you need an experiment. The lead author is David Bland. He helps companies all over the world find problem-solution fit using lean startup, design thinking, and business model innovation.

Mixing innovation and process to go to market more quickly. Many of the product leaders in companies creating integrated hardware/software products I’ve talked with this year are looking at ways to speed up their development process and add agility. So, I asked around who has the best experience with this and was referred to our guest and author of the book Scrum for Hardware, the first authoritative book on this emerging movement by the same name. His name is Paolo Sammicheli. He’s a licensed NLP Business Coach specialized in Scrum, Kanban, Design Thinking and Lean Startup, helping organizations uncover better ways of building products. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:15] What are the factors that are leading people to incorporate Scrum into hardware projects? The post-industrial revolution is causing a lot of changes in the industry and in society. The time to market is decreasing and innovation is a competitive advantage. If companies don’t innovate, they might not survive. As a result, user expectations are increasing and hardware needs to be developed more quickly. [6:34] What are the key components of Scrum for hardware? I like to think of it like an iceberg. On top, or the things you can see, are processes for scrum at scale. If you want to start doing Scrum for hardware, you need cross-team coordination and processes. You also see engineering practices and extreme manufacturing. This is a set of common practices that work well across a variety of manufacturing sectors. Under the water of the iceberg are the principles behind these practices that are more tailored to an organization’s culture and more difficult to copy from one organization to another. [12:52] What steps does a team need to take to implement Scrum for hardware? The steps are similar if you do hardware or software. It starts with a discussion about the company’s value streams. What are the cash cows, what are the rising stars, and what are the end-of-life products? It’s best to start Scrum on a rising star product, something that’s important but not critical to the bottom line right away. Then, you need to identify the value stream and the skills needed to produce value at each step in the stream. Once you know the value stream, you can start to build your team and train them to understand how Scrum works. It can be expensive to implement, and that might require buy-in from the top. At that point, you’re ready for lift off with the Scrum team. You might need a special space for the team to collaborate and share ideas. The team should develop working prototypes at the end of every sprint, which means that it needs to include different skillsets. [22:21] Can you give us an example of this process in action? There is a company in Sweden that builds jet fighters and use Scrum across their organization. They use an accessible modularity in the products that defines modules and interfaces bigger than what you need one day 1. This allows teams to work independently on each module, which speeds up the time to market. Each module fulfills one or more business needs, but there is one user story per module. Scrum allows the business and technical team to work together on these modules to solve problems and make things grow faster. The Scrum teams should be less than 9 members, and ideally 5-7 people. There should also be less than 9 modules per product. Useful links: * Scrum for Hardware book on Leanpub or paperbook on Amazon * Paolo’s website, Agile Business Coach

Rewire your brain to focus on value and success, not failure and imperfection — excel in product management. Our discussions here all about helping product managers become product masters and being a product master means we also need mastery over our minds — what many people call our mindset. That is why I asked a mindset master, and my personal mindset coach for the last year, to be our guest today. His name is Dr. Nima. When I started mindset work, I thought it was a complete waste of time. It did not resonate with my mental wiring as an engineer. But, I started seeing value, which is what we talk about. Dr. Nima has had a busy schedule and he stopped into a coffee shop for us to talk. Consequently, there is background noise, but the discussion is worth putting up with it. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:40] How can we get out of our own way and be our best selves? Everyone wants to have the ability to show up unperturbed by external factors, or being trigger proof. It’s about having a sense of regulation and control that’s not dependent on approval from others. Many of us spend our lives trying to earn admiration and praise and seeking to avoid criticism, which means we’re not in control of our own mindset and are constantly subject to triggers. To change your mindset, you need to commit to showing up as your best self and create an outline of what it actually looks like. It starts by asking good questions and taking the time to control where you’re putting your thoughts and attentions. Think about who you are serving, what their values are, what they need, and what do you want them to be left with. These questions get you out of your unconscious past, which is where we spend 95%  of our days. Innovation comes from being present and conscious and acting with intention. [16:55] How do you deal with people who are skeptics of your work and your approach? My father’s an engineer so I’m used to the skeptical brain. I’ve had to prove myself to him all my life. He came to one of my talks earlier this week and registered into one of my workshops because they were so blown away. This work is about questions of the soul, which is challenging for an engineer to talk about. I  recommend that people write a list of 100 benefits the work that you do and the problems you solve. It’s a great way to overcome impostor syndrome. [23:03] How can addressing limiting beliefs exercise help rewire our brains? I call this the “FU” strategy. Whenever I feel stuck, I start to examine what I’m stuck about. What are the stories that are running through my mind? We’ll never run out of limiting beliefs, but sometimes they have more of an influence than others. I’ll write down things like “I’m not effective as a coach,” “my marketing funnel is a complete waste of time.” I bring unconscious thoughts into focus and write down the stories I’m making up. Then I’ll cross each one out and put “FU” next to it. Then I’ll replace it with a more affirming thought toward the direction of the outcome I want. Then, I’ll look for evidence that the new belief is true. Over time, you’ll begin to see transformations that occur as a result of this thinking. [30:04] What happens after you do that? Log and find evidence of incremental progress every day. You get to experience a feeling of pride when you make incremental progress and your confidence starts to go up. You’ll then start to look for and find more evidence of your awesomeness. This is a conscious effort to rewire your brain to focus on your attention and what you do well, rather than what’s wrong in your life. You become what you think about —it’s a conscious choice that requires reprogramming. Useful links:

The right way to interview customers. During the month of July, 2019, I have been sharing some of the most favorite and valuable discussions from the first 100 interviews. I’ve added one more for the first week of August that is not to be missed. It was originally episode 071. —- 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 ...

In this episode, I'm talking with the creator of an entire category of product innovation - one that significantly changed how I think about the process of innovation. Clayton Christensen said his approaches "bring discipline and predictability to the often random process of innovation.” The category of innovation is known as ODI, Outcome-Driven Innovation, now associated with Jobs-to-be-Done, and it was created by Tony Ulwick. When ODI was published in the Harvard Business Review, they declared it one of “the ideas that will profoundly affect business as we forge ahead in today’s complex times.” Tony also authored the best-selling book What Customers Want, explaining how the jobs-to-be-done framework is transformed into practice with ODI.

During the month of July, 2019, I’m sharing some of the most favorite and valuable discussions from the first 100 interviews. If you haven’t come across this one yet, it will make you a better communicator! It was originally episode 055. --- Rich Mironov is a legend in the world of product management. He is the founder of Product Camp, a collaborative unconference for product managers and marketers that has spread across the world. He also is the author of the book The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator. Today he provides full-time and short-term product management direction to technology companies. While our discussion is in the context of software product management, much of the insights apply to product managers in any industry.

Ash Maurya is the author of "Running Lean: How to Iterate from Plan A to a Plan that Works.” Educated as an electrical engineer, he worked in software development before founding his first company, WiredReach. He is now the founder and CEO of Spark59, which equips entrepreneurs to succeed by providing tools, content and coaching. I discovered his work when I was looking for additional information on the Business Model Canvas - a popular one-page approach to creating a business plan. I wanted a canvas to help me formulate a business model for a product and I discovered Ash’s Lean Canvas and Lean Stack tools that help entrepreneurs, startups, and product managers create products customers want.

The simple way product managers can clearly communicate anything and increase their influence. During the month of July, 2019, I’m sharing some of the most favorite and valuable discussions from the first 100 interviews. If you haven’t come across this one yet, it will make you a better communicator! It was originally episode 076. —– 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 storytelling, 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.

Work together on product projects, rather than throwing them over the wall. In this discussion, our guest, Jonathan Soares, shares his tips and tools for working with product teams. Jonathan is the CEO of Agency Labs, a group that creates custom software, apps, and websites. He has good experience applying tools to help product development teams work better, and we’ll find out more in just a minute. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:38] How do you get ready for a kickoff meeting with a virtual team? We’ll usually receive designs, technical documents, or a high-level scope of work ahead of time. Every organization and its documentation is different. We always start by reviewing the documentation and compiling a list of questions to understand the current state and where they want to go. Asking these helps clients understand how we think and makes them feel more comfortable with us. Once we have the answers we need, we’ll develop a proposal for how we can work with the client. [6:31] How early in the process do you like to get involved? I like to get involved as early as possible. If someone has an idea, it’s our job to extract the requirements to figure out how to make it happen. We need to get as much information as possible, regardless of whether an organization has done any internal planning or not. We encourage product managers to have their colleagues complete an internal questionnaire so the requirements are fully articulated before we start our development work. We try to put ourselves in the client’s shoes and empathize with their skill sets and backgrounds. [14:37] What can product managers do to be better partners with developers? Thinking through your requirements and documenting them is a great first step. We recently received an RFP that was filled with company philosophy but only had half a page of technical requirements. We ended up with a 40-page follow-up questionnaire and an RFP process that took 6 months instead of 6 weeks. [19:28] How do you approach the product development process? When we deal with minimum viable products or proofs of concept, I love rapid prototypes that you can beta test in the field. This happens more often with in-house teams. We’ll go through requirements gathering and formulate our own wireframes and go right into development. We’ll get the initial product in front of users and then do the additional design work after user testing. You can save time by having well-articulated requirements up front and then beautifying it at the end. [22:40] How do you keep a distributed team in sync? We’ve worked with organizations that are distributed around the world. Our team all works together out of one office, and that’s part of our selling point to clients. The tools and methodologies we use are geared toward a production environment and very thoughtful workflows. Setting expectations from day one is very important, as is understanding what schedule gaps might come up based on vacations, etc. We use SmartSheets, which is a Gantt chart type of tool that allows you to track milestones. We are big fans of Slack for internal communication and Basecamp for our files and task lists. We manage projects in JIRA and store documentation on Atlassian’s wiki. Every project is tied to a JIRA ticket that has a deadline and we can track time to. Useful links: * Connect with John via his LinkedIn profile * Agency Labs Innovation Quote “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” -attributed to Henry Ford Thanks! Thank you for being an Everyday Innovator and learning with me from the successes and f...

Trading and product management decision-making are more alike than you might think. Decision-making is part of every product manager’s toolkit. Think about what it would mean to have effective guidelines or laws for better decision-making. You could make simple decisions more quickly and decisively. You could have a more solid defense and reasoning for complicated decisions. You would also have less fatigue and stress related to making decisions. Those are important benefits of better decision-making. To help you create guidelines, our guest has learned the art and science of decision-making in a variety of high-stress and fast environments. He started as a design engineer and then moved to Wall Street to be a trader. He has placed his insights for decision-making into the book titled, The Laws of Trading, A Trader’s Guide to Better Decision-Making for Everyone.   His laws address issues in several categories, including: * Risk, * Edge, * Costs, * Technology, * Alignment, and * Adaptation. We discuss several of these. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:03]Risk: “Take only the risk you’re paid to take.” Let’s say your company is describing a new mobile phone case. Your success is defined by whether the case sells well in the market. The risk you’re being paid to take is understanding the market, but you’re also being exposed to risks like foreign exchange rates. By negotiating in U.S. dollars, you remove that risk from the equation. Once you start examining what risks you’re taking to create that value, you start to look for a way to mitigate those other risks. [8:05] Edge: “If you can’t explain it in five minutes, you don’t have a good one.” An edge is something you both know and can do that others in the market don’t know and cannot do. Lots of companies are confused about their edge. They get seduced into thinking that only they can execute the idea or the idea can’t be duplicated. As product managers, we’re so focused on the customer that we sometimes forget about the competition. The world is a competitive place and you need to look beyond the surface level to find the true edge. [11:55] Costs: “If your costs seem negligible relative to your edge, then you’re wrong about one of them.” This is another expression of the idea that the world is a competitive place. One of the things I see most often is underestimating costs, whether it’s development cost or cost of customer acquisition. The biggest one, however, is opportunity cost. You always have to be looking for the next big thing. Vision provides guidance in the gaps, but people need to be empowered to make decisions outside of a specified plan. [15:10] Technology: “If you don’t master technology and data, you’re losing to someone who does.” The use of data and analytics to drive product development is the biggest story of the past five years and will continue to be for the next five years. Data is not some magical pixie dust to sprinkle over everything. It’s something that should be used to drive decisions. A lot of companies run around gathering whatever data they can, but then don’t create processes to put it together and make use of it. Companies have also swing from respecting a leader’s decisions to doing whatever the data says. What’s become clear is that you need data, but you also need a human brain to analyze it. [19:00] Alignment: “Working to align everyone’s interests is time well spent.” This is a huge element for product managers. A big part of our jobs is getting everyone on the same page. Incentives play a huge role here. Are all the teams in your organization (marketing, engineering, etc.

The three dimensions of skills needed to move your ideas forward. When I started this podcast I created the Product Mastery Roadmap that describes the path from product manager to product master. I’ve used it as a guide to the topics we explore here. Recently I updated it to better reflect the journey I have seen many of you and your colleagues taking towards mastery, focusing more narrowly on what is most important so you can progress more quickly. A pivotal element of this journey is the influence you have in your organization — influence to get others to support your ideas. Recently a fellow listener expressed this well when I asked him about how this podcast has helped him. He told me that “I have helped create a monster” because he now gets everything he asks his company for — that he has virtually zero barriers and almost no questions asked. That is influence. My guest has a different term for it, which he calls Innovation Capital. It is a concept he deeply explores in the book he co-authored by the same title. Innovation Capital is what you can build up over time that makes it easy for others to support you when you want to do something new. It consists of three components: * Who you are, * Who you know, and * What you’ve done. In a sense, this is a personal brand building and is seen in the best innovators in all size organizations. My guest is Nathan Furr, who also co-authored two other very important books, The Innovator’s DNA and The Innovator’s Method. He is a professor of strategy and innovation at INSEAD, which is recognized as one of the top business schools in the world. His Ph.D. is from Stanford University. In addition to studying how companies innovate, he helps each year to create the Forbes’ list of the world’s most innovative leaders and companies. For Everyday Innovators on the path to being a product master, this is one of the most important discussions you need to hear. I hope you enjoy it. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:03] How did this book come about? A lot of my work has been about where ideas come from and what’s the process to test ideas. If you’re in an established organization, how do you change the culture to allow innovation to happen and create the support to do something new? If you look at Tesla and Edison, both were incredible idea generators but Edison was really good at getting backing for his ideas and Tesla struggled to do that. [7:02] What is innovation capital? It’s an intangible thing that you build up over time. It facilitates your winning support and backing for ideas and change. We synthesized the research and created a way to score people based on their innovation capital. It comes from who you are, what you know, what you’ve done, and how you’ve used those things to amplify support for your idea. It sounds simple, but has a deep basis in academic research and management theory. [11:45] How can someone build their innovation capital to win support for their ideas? We found four top things that were associated with people who had success in building human capital. One is that they’re forward-thinking and not afraid to promote ideas that seem unpopular at the time if they believe that’s where the future will be. Another is that they are proactive problem solvers and are always looking for ways to solve problems. Persuasion and influence skills also matter, as does creativity and the ability to generate new ideas. [16:47] How does who a person knows factor in? What are your connections to other leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs? These are all people who can help you build intellectual capital. We tend to focus on strong ties or people we know well, but weak ties matter too.

How product managers should combine flexibility and rigor in an agile stage-gate process. Just about every organization I have worked with this year wants more agility in their product management processes. They want to get new products to market faster and release enhanced versions in less time. Product managers and leaders are feeling the pressure. To discuss practical ways to add agility and flexibility, our guest from episode 177 is joining us again, Colin Palombo. Previously, he shared how to create a hybrid agile stage-gate process. This time we get into even more specifics. Most organizations have some form of a stage-gate or phase-age approach to developing products, and for good reasons. After listening to this discussion, you’ll have ideas for adapting and improving your process. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers: [5:04] What does a traditional stage-gate process look like? Breaking down projects into stages helps companies make sure that the right information is gathered at the right time. Stage-gate introduces rigor to the process and makes sure that information about customers is gathered before product development begins. The gate component breaks down a project into a series of smaller stages, each with a smaller financial decision that can be stopped at any time. Cross-functional teams are also essential to the stage-methodology. Several sets of eyes looking at the same thing will bring different knowledge and expertise to the project. [12:02] What types of products work best with the stage-gate? It’s rare now that you have a purely digital or physical product. Every good has a bit of software, content, and physical product. The stage-gate process is evolving to bring together these different work streams. We’re also seeing the digital industry wanting to introduce stage gates to their agile project management. They lack the control to direct their teams to deliver valuable products, so they want to apply stage-gate to their agile processes. [16:22] How do you add agility to a stage-gate process? You first need to define what “agile” means. The essence is that you are planning, executing, evaluating, and adjusting in a short timeframe, known as a sprint or an iteration. You can break each stage of a stage-gate process into a number of sprints that are defined by time. Agile also relies on evidence-based work and focuses on experiments over documents. Rather than doing scoping exercises in PowerPoint and Word, companies are going out into the field and doing experiments. Mock ups, simulations, and 3D printing are making these experiments possible. We’re also seeing iterative development in the build stage and evaluation between prototype, alpha, and beta builds. Iteration happens at each stage in the process and you’re breaking the work into smaller chunks or sprints. [24:15] How do you get past the notion that you need a large scale? Full-scale market research is expensive and useful for understanding overall market dynamics, but not for a specific project. You can run small experiments in the early stages of a project to get feedback from a handful of customers, which will be enough to determine whether to move to the next stage and what might need to change before you do that. These types of experiments also get you out of the office and in front of customers. You need to have a specific question to answer or a hypothesis you’re trying to prove, such as finding out what outcomes the customer is trying to accomplish. [28:33] What goes wrong when organizations try to implement this process? We lack the discipline to get to a finishing point and we just keep iterating. The agile methodology allows you to limit the number of sprints...

How product managers can extend product roadmaps to portfolio management. Got to Part 1 of Product Roadmaps. Got to Part 2 of Product Roadmaps. Part 3… Product roadmaps are one of the best-known tools and also the most misused by product managers. We have talked twice before with Bruce McCarthy, co-author of the book, Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty, to learn how to make roadmaps work for us instead of against us. The first time was in episode 169, which was right after he wrote the book. Then we talked a year later, to see what he had learned since writing the book, which was episode 226 . This time we talk about the role of roadmaps in portfolio management. In the process, we discuss what a portfolio is, how portfolios can be created and managed, and how to construct a roadmap for a portfolio. Also, I want to share some stories of how listeners are putting this podcast to good use. I’ll start with a friend who was considering moving from her marketing role in a non-profit organization to a larger product role in a for-profit organization. That was a really big shift in her mind — non-profit to for-profit, and a marketing role to product role. After I read the job description she was applying for, I gave her about a dozen specific episodes to listen to. After listening to them, she realized the work she was doing at the non-profit was very similar to the new product role. She just needed to switch her terminology from managing programs to managing products and put her experience in the right context for the new company. Long story short, this was an extremely competitive position with a lengthy multi-interview process, and she got the job. In the process, she about doubled her salary. Awesome! And she credits the discussions from this podcast that helped her do well in the interviews. Wow, isn’t that a great use of this podcast! I’m am so excited the topics we discuss are really helping people and I’m working to make it even better. If you have a story of how listening to The Everyday Innovator has helped you, I want to hear it. Please email directly at chad@TheEverydayInnovator.com. Keep reading for insights on properly applying product roadmaps and extending them to portfolio management. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers: [4:28] What is a product portfolio and how does it differ from a program? It is a set of products, also called a product line, that a company builds and sells. Hopefully, the products and the portfolio are complementary to each other. Each one should add to profitability and the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts. From a product point of view, I think of how to create a go-to-market package that’s complete. A portfolio should also include products at various points in the lifecycle. [8:25] How should a portfolio be structured? You can think of it from an internal or investment point of view and apply McKinsey’s Three Horizons framework. Horizon 1 is the products that are cash cows and delivering right now. Horizon 2 products are in the growth stage and will eventually become major revenue generators. Horizon 3 products are the experiments and the things that might be next. The other way to organize a portfolio is market-based. Retailers want to know that you have a broad array of products you can sell and th...

Short stories, big ideas about innovation and product management. I love innovation stories of how a product came into being or was made more valuable. Our guest, Giles Lury, loves them too. So much, that he has written books with innovation stories, including his most recent one titled Inspiring Innovation: 75 Marketing Tales to Help You Find the Next Big Thing. Giles has worked on numerous innovation projects, leading to some major successes and, not surprisingly, the occasional failure. He has some good stories to tell. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers: [3:16] Xerox is a familiar brand to many listeners. Tell us about their innovation with copiers. Xerox copying came out of the science of xenography, which allowed people to use a mixture of heat and ink to reproduce things. In the 1940s, there was a machine that could make 7 copies per minute, but it had a high flame risk. Xerox got around this by selling a fire extinguisher with its machines. It was a gamble, but it paid off. It was a good example of getting something to market, then making it better. [5:45] Tell us about E-Leather. E-Leather is a young company based in the UK. Pinned to the wall in their office is a poem about the founder, who never gives up and who hates waste. He found that up to 50% of leather ends up in landfills. He developed a process for taking rough leather and recompressing it into products that are more appealing to customers. The products are more comfortable and more economical. They just signed a deal with Nike, who is looking to be more environmentally friendly. This is a good example of how something you hate can drive innovation.  [13:42] From your experience, where do ideas come from? I often tell companies to look to their own industry. For example, the first mobile phone call was made in 1973. At the time, the only way you could make mobile calls was in the car. A Motorola employee was watching James T. Kirk on Star Trek  flip open his Communicator and had the idea to create a personal phone. That idea would go on to become the first cell phone. The first call he made was to AT&T to tell them that Motorola was ahead of them. Science fiction is a great source of innovation and ideas. [19:30] What is Chewy’s story? Chewy’s founders had a previous online retail business that didn’t work. They took a step back and realized they were passionate about their dogs. That passion is where the company started. They said they wanted to be “Zappos on steroids” in terms of customer service, and they’ve been able to do that. There’s one story of a woman who called saying her pet died and asking for a refund on a product she’d ordered. She ended up talking for a long time with the customer service representative and received flowers from the company the next morning. This was not a one-off; Chewy does these things all the time and it’s made them distinctive in the marketplace. [23:37] What’s the relationship between brand and product? If you have a good brand, you probably have a good product. But having a good product does not always necessarily equal a good brand. To do that, you can look back to the history of Lever and Watson in the soap business. Watson made the product, but Lever identified a gap in the market. He made sure that the product was consistent and developed customer loyalty back in 1884. It’s about consistency and building trust with your customers. Tetley and Heinz did something similar by changing their products to meet customer needs. Tetley made a round tea bag that could fit into a mug, and Heinz turned the ketchup bottle upside down so it was easier to squeeze. [28:25] What’s one of your favorite stories from the book? Would you bet your life on your new product? One innovator did that at the World’s Fair in New York.