The Everyday Innovator Podcast for Product Managers

Female product leaders on grit, grace, and everything in between There are several thousand product managers on LinkedIn and many of them are women. However, I noticed that few product VPs are women. About the same time, I attended a “Women in Product Management” panel at Rocky Mountain Product Camp, moderated by Shaughnessy Speirs. Afterward we discussed how few product VPs are women and how it would be valuable to have a panel discussion focused on women in senior product roles. Shaughnessy ran with the idea and organized another panel a few months later for a conference called Denver Startup Week and I had it recorded to share with you. Four leaders joined the panel. * Shawna Barnhart, Product Management Leader and Former VP of Product at Artifact Uprising * Holly Vezina, Director of Product at APR Consulting * Jenn Dearth, Product at Stedi * Ann Koerner, Adjunct Professor of Product Management at DU and Former VP of Product at GutCheck Our moderator, Shaughnessy Speirs, has been a product manager in several software organizations with depth in agile software development and business analysis. This is a longer discussion. The panel responds to Shaughnessy’s questions for the first 30 minutes and the remaining time they respond to audience questions. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:45] What core values are product managers missing? Curiosity — never taking something at face value and always looking for the answer behind it. Openness to being proven wrong. In fact, this is something you should welcome because you can learn from it. Curiosity and openness pair really well together when you can constantly question things and learn from your mistakes. You also need to be able to create value and articulate it to your customers and your users. Product managers need to have a product vision and be able to create a plan to get there. The final missing characteristic is grit. Do the jobs no one wants to do and don’t be afraid to apply for positions you don’t think you are qualified for. [7:30] What are opportunities you took that helped shape your career? Find the problems that no one else wants to solve and figure out a way to solve them. Don’t be afraid to take on the hard problems, even if they are scary. Realize that you aren’t going to build a mountain in a day and take things one step at a time and lean on data where you can to drive your work. Make sure that the company you are going into has a product culture. You can’t move a few hundred people on your own and you don’t want to feel like you are spinning your wheels. It’s also important to be patient and not ask for more until you really understand what you are doing and why you are doing it. [13:28] What are the skills required to be a successful product manager? The ability to turn ambiguity into a clear vision. You need to be comfortable in that ambiguous space in order to derive a clear vision from it. You are always in new industries and working with new clients so an open mind and a passion for lifelong learning is critical. An MBA gives a broad overview of a company, which is necessary for product management. You also need to be obsessed with your customers and make decisions that will be best for them, even if it’s not always best for internal stakeholders. [16:58] How did your personal identity shape your career? All of us are moms and there’s nothing like a child to teach you patience. Being a mom makes you a better product manager because it teaches you how to listen and deal with unexpected situations. The hardest experiences in your life are the ones that end up shaping you the most. What happens outside of work is just as important as what happens at work; sharing personal information helps build trust.

Having fun, making friends, and learning along the way. I have a special episode for you. I believe that as product managers and innovators, we have a responsibility to help prepare the next generation of innovators. I’ve explored this topic in a few past episodes and it is time to do it again. So, this episode is about encouraging you and providing you with ideas for helping future innovators. For this discussion, I traveled to a study room on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I met with a new student, 17-year-old Kyle Markland. While being accepted to MIT is a significant accomplishment itself, what Kyle is known for is his robotic video tutorials. He is a kid teaching kids. His story is an inspiration to Everyday Innovators, as we can also encourage an interest in robotics and other STEM topics, as well as innovation in general, by sharing our experiences.   Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:25] How did you become interested in robotics? It started in fifth grade when my school bought a LEGO NXT set. I saved up for a few years and bought my own kit to experiment with. One of the first things I made was a version of the shark robot that’s now featured on my YouTube channel. I tinkered with it over the years and eventually got it to the point where I could display it in public. At the same time, I was part of a robotics team at my school. [7:30] Why did you develop the YouTube channel? I aged out of competition and realized that I had a lot of lessons and insights to share. I didn’t want all of the knowledge I accumulated to go to waste. I started by making a video to document how I did line squaring. The video itself was rough, but the information was good and a few experts saw it and became enthusiastic about it. They encouraged me to make more tutorials and gave me tips to make the videos better. I think it’s important to show kids that it’s important to learn along the way and things are not always going to be perfect the first time you do something. [12:05] Can you share examples of how you’ve inspired other kids? I get emails from people around the world — little kids, college students, even older people. It makes me feel good to hear from the people I’ve inspired and it helps keep me going. Last year, I received an email from a mother and her 6-year-old son who were using my videos to learn about robotics. I recently had the opportunity to meet up with one of my viewers in person when he was on the MIT campus. I’ve also heard from college students who said the tutorials have helped them with their studies. I also heard from a kid in Norway who made improvements to my programs and I am going to be featuring those programs on my channel. [15:47] What did you learn during this process? I’ve learned a lot about video production and presenting information in a professional and easy-to-digest way. My first video was made using an old camcorder and built-in microphone. I spent money on a good microphone and an HD digital camera that could make the videos look nice. The video format also evolved over time. I made my introductions shorter and got to the actual demonstration more quickly. I’ve also learned how to communicate with people in a professional manner. This has helped me interact with my college professors. [20:50] How can Everyday Innovators help kids develop an interest in STEM? I just started reading Mitch Resnick’s book called Lifelong Kindergarten and have been very inspired by him. The most important point he makes in the book is that teaching kids about technology must be based in creativity. He emphasizes the kindergarten format, where kids have the chance to play and freestyle while learning along the way. That’s exactly how I got started. I played first and am now learning the calculus that goes...

Lessons from small businesses that apply to everyone. I’m still on my road trip of the northeast U.S. and made a stop in Bristol, Pennsylvania. What took me to this small town was a video series called The Small Business Revolution. This is a reality show where small businesses in small towns get help from business experts, and I have become a groupie, visiting each town where the series has been made. Season three was just launched and you can find it along with the previous seasons on Hulu or at www.smallbusinessrevolution.org. Product managers and innovators are the heroes of companies, creating products customers love, and in turn generating revenue that pushes the economy forward. That’s what being an Everyday Innovator is all about. And, small business owners are the heroes of small towns. I love the stories that this video show examines, and the story behind its creation also has good lessons for Everyday Innovators. The show is produced by Deluxe Corp and I caught up with their VP of Public Relations, Cam Potts, to discuss the making of the show. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:58] What is the Small Business Revolution? It’s a reality makeover show where Deluxe Corporation goes into a small town in America and gives the town a $500,000 makeover. The public votes on which town wins the contest. We capture the makeover of six businesses in the community from marketing to physical changes. It’s a great opportunity to see real business owners revitalize their organizations. Small businesses are the lifeblood of small towns where industry has moved away. [6:12] How does the Small Business Revolution relate to Deluxe Corp? I started here four years ago after my boss found me on LinkedIn. Deluxe wanted to tell the stories of small businesses. We started with telling 100 stories across the U.S. as part of our 100th anniversary. We’ve been known as a check printer, but we do anything a small business needs. The goal of 100 stories campaign was to make people aware that we provided these services to small businesses. From there, we decided to tell longer stories and that’s how the contest idea came about. [11:34] What are your favorite moments from season 1? We were immersed in the town of Wabash over the summer so we really made some connections and friendships there. We also helped a variety of businesses, including an art consignment store. We helped that business owner determine how to price her goods in order to make money without pricing items out of the community’s reach. Five of the six businesses we helped were owned by people who did something else before becoming entrepreneurs. They got advice from us on how to position themselves as business owners and how to live that lifestyle and occupy that mindset. We also enjoyed seeing the business owners connect with each other and with the head of the Wabash tourism bureau as the show unfolded. [19:32] What are the lessons you learned from season 2? One of the learnings we took from season 1 was to bring experts from each field into Bristol to work with each business owner. For example, we brought in an automotive industry expert to help a family-owned truck and auto repair business. She helped them present a more professional environment and see themselves in a new way. We helped another business owner find a new space after his rent was raised and he could no longer afford it.  It was amazing to see how people in the community stepped up to help him out. [27:08] What can we expect from season 3? Season 3 is a departure from the first two years in that Alton, Illinois, is larger than Wabash and Bristol. It has several areas that could be defined as “Main Street” and we opened up the process to all of them.

  Achieve your product goals without losing yourself along the way Creating a new product starts with excitement and the thrill of doing something different. The launch of the product is surrounded by cheers. For many product managers, it is the best part of their work. But between the project start and the launch is where the hard work occurs. It is the messy middle, full of rocky terrain that is woefully underestimated and misunderstood. The Messy Middle is also the name of a new book by my guest, Scott Belsky. Scott is the chief product officer of Adobe and founder of Behance, the leading creative network used by more than 12 million professionals. Scott has guided many teams through the messy middle of new product projects and ventures. In the interview, we’ll address a few of the topics from this book, including: * Build your narrative before your product, * Make one subtraction for every addition, * Do the work that needs to get done—even if it’s not your job, and * Identify what you’re willing to be bad at. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:00] Can you tell us about your role as Chief Product Officer at Adobe? My obsession is building products that enhance the customer experience. Adobe’s products serve a large portion of the creative world. I started in this role 9 months ago to help make sure Adobe is ready for the next generation of customers. Adobe acquired Behance, the company I founded. I helped Adobe move its tools into the cloud and make them easier to use for people once they got there. We’re also exploring new mediums like augmented reality. I was lucky to find a role that excited me in the short term and the long term. [4:17] Who is your book written for? The book is the outcome of years of writing down notes from meetings of boards that I’m on, as well as my own entrepreneur journey. I realized I had insight into what people were doing in the middle of projects that worked for them or worked against them. The book brings those insights together to navigate the volatility that people must endure when building a product or launching a new venture.  [7:25] What do you mean by building the narrative before you build the product? I encourage product teams to put together the mock-up of the splash page for the product before they even start building anything. This helps them narrow down the focus and determine what you want the customer to experience. This becomes a compass when it comes to prioritizing features. Uber did this when they were determining whether the company should be everyone’s private driver and more upscale or taxis on demand that were accessible to everyone. The decision about which type of message they were sending dictated how the rest of the product was developed. They chose “everyone’s private driver” and chose the branding accordingly. [11:50] How should product managers think about additions and subtractions? Simplicity is hard to achieve and even harder to sustain. We often deal with problems and difficult decisions by adding complexity. The product eventually becomes so complicated that customers flock to more simple alternatives. I recommend that whenever you are adding a new feature, ask if there is another feature you can remove. Do this knowing that the more complex a product becomes, the more likely some customers are to turn away from it. Behance used to have a tip exchange that we killed because it wasn’t part of the company’s core mission. When we killed it, we found an increase in the product’s core features. [17:03] How do you deal with people who say “that’s not my job”? In my experience, some of the greatest work is done by people doing work they don’t have to do. Those people are passionate enough about something to seek it out and ha...

Looking to the past to drive future innovation I am on a road trip through the northeast of the U.S., talking with innovators and product managers. At the encouragement of a friend, I took my two kids to visit The Henry Ford, a museum of innovation near Detroit. It was created by Henry Ford as a tribute to his friend Thomas Edison. It’s an amazing place to learn about things I love — inventions and innovations. I’m bringing you a small slice of it in this episode, discussing a few innovators with a focus on three: * Thomas Edison, * Steve Wozniak, and * Steve Jobs. My guest is Dr. Kristen Gallerneaux, Curator of Communications and Information Technology at The Henry Ford. Kristen is responsible for the development of collections and experiences relating to computing, sound, broadcast, graphic communication, office equipment, photography and motion images, and other such areas related to technology. She is also an artist, with her media being sound. She recently released a new book from MIT Press titled High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres and the Object Hereafter, which is a literary mix tape exploring boundaries in sound, culture, and belief. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:28] What can people expect when they visit The Henry Ford? You’ll see airplanes hanging from the ceiling and some of the oldest steam engines in the world. We also have small-scale things that affect people’s lives like computers and phones. We have a lot of things that people won’t expect to see, like agricultural equipment. Henry Ford founded this place as the Edison Institute as a tribute to his friend Thomas Edison and innovation remains a central theme of everything we do and display. [6:08] What is your role? I’m the curator of communications and information technology. I take care of computing collections and the backend process to things we use everyday. I also manage early print and broadcasting technology. I also manage collections from certain innovators like Thomas Edison, Steve Wozniak, and Buckminster Fuller. I’m interested in the minor players and the large historical players. [8:10] What is one of your favorite Thomas Edison inventions? One of my favorites is the electric pen, which Edison started working on in 1875. It was a motorized pen that operated like a stencil. It eventually lead to the mimeograph and the history of electric tattoo needles. The technology that was used in that pen hasn’t changed much — it’s a very modern way of looking at historic innovation. [10:50] What is one trait that you think helped Edison become a successful innovator? One trait that applies to a lot of successful innovators is learning from failure. Whenever Edison thought he had reached the end of a project, he pushed it just a little farther. When he was trying to find the filament for the light bulb, he tried so many things before finally figuring out what the right material would be.  It was essentially rapid prototyping. [15:03] Tell us about your experience studying Steve Wozniak. The Henry Ford has one of the few remaining Apple 1 computers and I was able to study its circuits and learn how to program Basic on it. Wozniak is also known as a bit of a prankster, which is a good reminder that you can be a groundbreaking innovator but also have fun, too. Many people don’t know that the first business Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built together was a phone hacking company that allowed people to make free long distance phone calls by emitting tones over the phone lines. We have one of those “blue box” devices at The Henry Ford. [20:06] How are these innovators similar? They all share a tireless work ethic, which is pretty common among innovators. You can also see similarities in the work environments between Menlo Park (E...

Product managers can move the wheel forward by reinventing it I’m currently on a tour through the northeast of the US, visiting product managers and innovators. On my way, I stopped in Minneapolis and found an incredible innovation case study at Deluxe Corporation. You’ll hear from Chris Clausen, Executive Director, how this company that is more than a century old is avoiding being disrupted by embracing innovation. He’ll share: * why they had to innovate, * how they discovered the new product and market opportunity, * how they decided what to build and what to buy to make the product a reality, * that the innovation was viewed by many in the organization as cannibalizing their main business, much in the same way as Kodak viewed work on digital cameras as cannibalizing their core business, and * how they used customer testimonies to sell the innovation internally. It’s a fabulous story with many lessons. The written summary of our discussion is at www.TheEverydayInnovator.com / 194. Also, I want to tell you about the fastest growing conference for software product management. It is coming up very soon, Oct 2-3, 2018 and you still have time to register. It’s called INDUSTRY and they have several product experts, many you will know from listening to this podcast, lined up to share their experience. Everyday Innovators can register for the conference for 30% off. Just use the code EverydayInnovator when you register. Find all the details at www.INDUSTRYconference.com. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:00] What is Deluxe’s core product and how have you innovated it? Our Deluxe checks is the answer to the changing face of payments in the United States. Technology has made it much easier to make a payment today than it was 20 years ago on the consumer side. On the business side, checks are still a cornerstone of how payments are made. We saw an opportunity to create an eCheck that would make it easier for businesses to send and receive payments. [7:16] What was happening in the marketplace that led to you to solve this problem? We saw what happened on the consumer side, with new payment methods overtaking checks. We wanted to be ahead of the curve on the business payment side. We were looking for the right combination of features to fit our customers’ needs while being innovative and allowing them to utilize technology. We did a lot of research about why business owners were continuing to write checks and found 10 criteria that were driving it. We realized that whatever we created would need to meet all of those requirements. [11:17] What were your strategies for gathering customer requirements? We started with quantitative research with large numbers of customers to zero in on some of the key elements of their behavior. We surveyed existing customers and non-customers. We also saw this as an opportunity to grow our market by finding out what the demand was among our prospective customers. We then did in-depth interviews with business owners. Those interviews helped solidify our requirements and put our strategy in place. We did phone interviews and hired a third party to facilitate panel sessions with 5-6 businesses. We are still getting asked to present that research at conferences because very few organizations in the financial services space are doing it. [19:30] How did you innovate without disrupting your own industry? We heard from our customers that they did not want to redesign their payment processes. It’s not a priority for them and not something they spent a lot of time worrying about. One of the rules we tried to follow was to innovate without change. We kept the changes minimal enough that they were palatable. The solutions we provide are minimal enough to move a business forward without changing any of their existing proces...

Insights for new product managers and people who want to be product managers. Being a good product manager requires a diverse set of skills, including communicating, influencing, design, technology, product process, and business acumen. New product managers and not-so new product managers have lots of opportunities to make mistakes. When you can, it is better to learn from the mistakes of others. That is why I invited Cole Mercer to join us and discuss common mistakes and how to avoid them. Cole has a very popular course on Udemy for people wanting to get into product management or who are brand new to it. He also is creating training on LinkedIn Learning for new product managers. I also want to tell you about the fastest growing conference for software product management. It is coming up soon, Oct 2-3, 2018 and you still have time to register. It’s called INDUSTRY and they have several product experts (many you will know from listening to this podcast) lined up to share their experience. Everyday Innovators can register for the conference for 30% off. Just use the code EverydayInnovator when you register. Find all the details at www.INDUSTRYconference.com. Now to the discussion for avoiding product management mistakes. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:35] How did your Udemy course come about and what does it cover? I taught product management part-time while working at General Assembly, but then moved to Berlin to work for Soundcloud and no longer had the opportunity to teach. I really missed it and at the same time, it was becoming a hot topic without a lot of information about the profession. I wanted to make a soup to nuts online course that included interviews with product managers. We’ve had about 43,000 students in two years — everyone from people who already are product managers to HR people who want to learn more about what product managers do. The course covers a day in the life of a product manager, how a resume should look, and what to do during your ramp-up time. [6:31] What should a product manager’s role be? For someone who is brand new to product management, there’s a much longer ramp-up time than other fields. You’re not going to jump in and be effective on your first day or even in your first week. You need to first build your social capital and get to know everyone on the team and what the pain points are. Once you have that backing, you can begin making improvements. New product managers often feel like they are not doing much in their first few weeks, but that’s okay. [8:55] How do you build that social capital? One easy way is to eat lunch with people from other departments to understand their roles. You will be building your social capital and understanding places where you can help others in the organization. [9:50] What misconceptions do people have about product managers? People often think that product management is a management position where you are managing people. Before I had the course, I used to get emails from people who just got their MBAs and thought they could get a job managing engineers or designers. The reality is that product managers don’t manage anyone in most cases. The whole point of the role is that you want to be able to pitch an idea to your team and have them tell you if it’s bad. They’re not going to feel comfortable doing that to their boss. The only exception is when you are managing other product managers. Social capital becomes even more important when you don’t have any authority on the organizational chart. [14:06] What mistakes do people make working with others in the organization? One of the biggest things is not taking input from others or not thinking that other people’s input is valid.

Get out of your own way to get better information from your users to make products they love. Creating products customers love. If you are like most product managers and innovators, that is your motivation to do great work — the work of product management. It is our common thread and a distinguishing characteristic of Everyday Innovators. Every day we are looking for problems we can solve in ways that create more value for customers. That means we have to understand customers’ problems, what they want to accomplish, what they want to avoid, and how they want to feel. When we are doing our job really well, we know our customers better than they know themselves. Part of that job is asking customers questions – the right questions that help us discover information that ultimately leads to products they will love. This is an area Rachel Wynn knows a good deal about. She is a product manager and communication expert I met at Rocky Mountain ProductCamp in Denver, Colorado. She joins us to share her guidelines for asking great questions, which are organized into a framework of three areas, which she calls: * Grace, * Bias, and * Pivot. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [7:26] How does having a sense of grace help when interviewing users? Grace is a pretty way of saying “get out of your own way.” We’re all really good at getting in our own ways. We often do this by bringing negative emotions into our conversations. I learned this in my work as a speech therapist; I was absorbing my patients’ emotions. Before I walked into a patient’s room, I would let the emotion from the last session wash away and walk into the next room with a clean slate. I do the same thing between customer calls now as a product manager. You should also resist the urge to fact check your customers as the interview is happening. In the end, their perception is what matters, not necessarily what’s accurate. [13:26] Where does bias come into play during interviews? Bias is about the art of asking questions. You should ask questions in a way that sets yourself up to listen well — questions that do not have bias. If you think you know what someone is going to say, you should not ask the question. Leading questions force people to answer in a specific way and double barrel questions ask people to answer two things at once. [15:10] How can someone ask good questions? The best tip for asking questions is to stop talking and be okay with a little silence. It’s a little awkward, but if you can embrace it, the person you’re talking to will want to fill the space so they’ll keep talking. They might need time to complete their cognitive processing and will benefit from a little extra time to share deeper insights and specific examples. [19:33] How can pivots make for better conversations? Pivot is about letting the user lead. If you are talking to a user, you want them to feel like it was a positive experience, regardless of whether or not it was directly useful to you. You never know when you might need to call on that user again, and they are much more likely to talk with you the next time if they felt like you valued their input. If you find that the user is taking the conversation in a different direction than you planned, make sure you acknowledge what they’re saying and then segue. Asking for advice is another way to get a conversation back on track. You can also keep the conversation going by utilizing “yes and” communication to build on what they say while shifting the discussion where you want it to go. [26:53] Do you have any go-to questions? I work for a data analytics company that allows people to manage their data and gain insights on it. At the start of every call, I ask people how long they have used the product and what problems they...

Use a simple product statement to align your team and meet your goals. Creating products customers love feels like juggling a whole lot of balls at one time. It can be chaotic. It’s also a good bet that people on your product team, and most certainly in your organization outside the core team, have different understandings of what the product is about. It’s a real challenge to keep everyone on the same page. The tool that brings order to the chaos is vision. The product vision is like the guiding northern light for the product team, keeping everyone moving in the same direction. It is the responsibility of the product manager to create and share the product vision. Yet, it is not easily done. Very few great product vision examples exist. Thankfully for us, my guest knows how to create product vision and has done so many times. He is Jon Hensley, CEO of Emerge Interactive. Jon’s expertise is from driving innovation through design thinking from his work designing hundreds of digital experiences with organizations in a variety of industries. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:03] What is product vision and why is it important? A great product vision is a tool to align a plan with your executives and your team. It helps avoid product drift and putting resources in the wrong areas. It’s often defined as inspirational but should go beyond that and answer the question of why the product exists and how it will benefit the organization and the customer. [3:27] Why is product vision often lacking in digital products? The idea of digital products is still pretty young, so that’s part of it. Vision is also looked at as something soft and intangible, and therefore unimportant. Some of the challenges a product faces when it’s in the market can be traced all the way back to a lack of product vision. A weak product is almost as dangerous as not having any product at all. The rules of creating a product vision for digital products have yet to be fully written; it’s not industry knowledge. [7:10] How do you create a product vision? There are five critical building blocks to a great vision: goal, action, problem, benefit, result. The goal might be at the organizational level or at the product level. It should be tangible and understood by everyone on the team. The second part is the action needed to achieve that goal. The third building block is understanding what problem you are trying to solve. Organizations tend to fall in love with the solution instead of the problem. Good product managers fall in love with the problem, not the solution. The fourth piece is the benefit to the organization, and the final element is the result, or the benefit to the customer. [11:34] How do product managers implement vision day-to-day? Product managers develop a lot of skill around understanding value. They have to take a big idea and create a product out of it that solves a problem for the customer while showing executives how it fits the company’s vision. At the same time, product management leads the effort to execute that vision. [16:14] What role does collaboration play in creating product vision? Creating a vision is really powerful as a collaborative exercise. Once you have a vision, it’s the first thing every new team member should see when they join the project. It should help those people see their role in solving the problem and understand the interdependencies among team members. Collaboration also helps create re-enforcement and help keep the team focused over long project timelines. A great product vision can help break down silos and give people across the organization something they can get behind. [19:37] What format works best for presenting product vision? Most often, it becomes the cover slide in a presentation. It can also work as a video that’s narrated and s...

Learn how product managers move from the middle of the pack to the front of the crowd. Product managers need to be high achievers and many are. They are the driving force that discover unmet needs customers have, creating value through their product work. The work is both demanding and fulfilling. To be a high achiever, you can learn from those who already are. High achievers have some things in common. Knowing how they think and what they do can help you. My guest, Arthur Carmazzi, wrote the book on high achievers, titled The Six Dimensions of a Top Achiever. Arthur is the founder of Directive Communication Psychology and is ranked among the top-10 leadership thought leaders by Global Gurus. In our discussion he shares six dimensions of top achievers: * Failure-proof * Discipline * Motivation * Persuasion * Visibility * Finances   Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [1:47] What does it take to become a top achiever? It depends on the individual; there’s no one recipe for everyone. However, there are guidelines that we can use to develop a path to greatness. There are six dimensions I’ve outline in that process after interviewing 50 top achievers. [3:09] First dimension: Being failure-proof This sounds counter-productive because failure is how people learn. Understanding the failure is the fundamental stepping stone to more success for high achievers. They don’t let failure bring them down or hold them back from continuing to innovate. We’ve developed the colored brain model for how people get clarity. Sometimes, people don’t get that clarity until after taking action. These types of people will fail more often, but it will happen so fast that they will recover quickly and keep moving forward. [5:25] Second dimension: Discipline This includes time management. Managing time is not the same as scheduling; it’s about figuring out how to not waste time. If a top achiever is on a plane, they’re doing something. For me, being fit is important to me, as is being with my kids. So, I do a fitness routine with my kids every morning to achieve both goals. Automations and other people can help with some of the things that are not as important to you. Discipline is about making sure you are constantly applying your skills to reduce the amount of time you waste and focus on things that will get you specific results. [11:03] Third dimension: Motivation One of the projects I’m working on right now is building a leadership school in Malaysia. It’s designed to create individuals who are passionate about achieving greatness.  This includes integrating subjects, much the way that different parts of a job are integrated in the real world. Rather than doing homework in specific subjects, we connect everything with a story connected to a specific objective. At the end of four years at this school, every student will have published four books. This is much more motivating for a 15 year old to say to people they’re an author and have books published on Amazon. These goals are achievable by breaking them into one-week milestones. You always have that sense of achievement when you finish something. [17:35] Fourth dimension: Persuasion This one is about being able to influence people. Understanding people’s needs and motivations can help you fill those needs in a brand, a product, or even a conversation. Understanding their colored brain process will help you create a product that will meet their needs. You can create specific pockets of persuasion that you can draw from as needed for each situation. [20:03] Fifth dimension: Visibility This means personal branding. I’ve met brilliant people who have accomplished nothing because they were working in the background and were invisible.

Breaking down myths and misconceptions about two popular — but sometimes opposing — roles. UX is a hot topic and for good reason. The right UX skills on a product team can make the product more successful. The wrong skills waste money and time. Many product managers and leaders make mistakes when adding UX roles to their product teams — but you won’t be one of them because of this discussion. My guest shares the common mistakes and how to avoid them. He organizes UX skills into three categories: research, interaction design, visual design. Using the right skill at the right time during the development of the product is important. Otherwise, you’ll encounter the square peg in the round hole problem and no one is happy with that. My guest has been a product manager and is a UX specialist with more than 15 years of experience. He has built UX teams from scratch and now helps organizations build and manage successful teams. His name is Sam Horodezky.   Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:33] How do you describe the roles of product manager and UX professional? Some product managers intersect more with technology, and others intersect more with design and have less technical capability. Some people have an equal balance between the two. User experience includes research to find latent needs based in ethnography or anthropology — going on site and watching someone use your product. This also includes usability testing. It also includes interaction design, which is 50% working with requirements and 50% working with the user interface. Interaction designers often get into micro interactions like drag and drop. The final stage of user experience is the visual designer, who takes the UX and makes it look attractive. There’s often overlap between interaction design and visual design. [13:50] How do the two roles overlap? I see conflict right now between product managers and user experience researchers. Both are trying to work with customers to obtain information and the skill sets are very much in common. UX is a hot field right now and there’s a lot of new blood coming in, with many people coming from design schools. There’s no standard accreditation for UX and it’s a source of tension in the field. You can’t just go look for a particular degree, you have to look a lot deeper. Hopefully we will get to a standard degree, but it might take a while. Not all UX designers are coming from the perspective of trying to understand how a user’s brain works like a product manager might be. [17:35] What are the steps for creating UX capability on a product team? People often think they need a UX person without understanding which of the three components (research, interaction, visual) they need. The common reaction is hire a junior initially, which is not enough to change how a product is built. A UX person will always be taking work away from someone else, so there will be ownership tension at the start. They need to figure out a way to interact with product management, engineering, marketing, and other parts of the organization. Anyone looking to hire a UX person should be looking for someone who can create a process that integrates all of those pieces, which a junior level person can’t do. The key is to get a more experienced person with room to grow — maybe someone with 5 or so years of experience. Teams looking to add UX also need to watch out for the “UX unicorn,” or the person who can do all three components of UX. Like the name suggests, that person does not exist. Startups in particular are always looking for unicorns. You have to decide what type of person you want based on what your need is. For example, if you have a relatively straightforward application, then you probably don’t need a visual designer. If you have a well-defined business plan,

How to hit the product management ground running and avoid spinning your wheels. Learning how to best work with a product team or organization requires taking the right action and avoiding mistakes. Your opportunities to make a good first impression are limited, so you need to make the most of them. Most product managers will work with a new team from time to time and many will change organizations. It turns out this advice will also help product managers who are not in transition. To explore transitioning well, Gavin Feuer joins us. He is now a senior product manager for T-Mobile, recently making the transition from Amazon. Gavin brings a strong entrepreneurial mindset to the role of product manager, which you’ll hear in the interview. His Amazon colleagues shared that his superpower is the ability to “think big.” He’s happy to help people who have a really big idea think more deeply about it. He also is a volunteer mentor to undergraduate students at the University of Washington, always willing to take on the right motivated mentee who is new to product management. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:48] What are some of your key takeaways from your time at Amazon? Amazon’s leadership principles enable anyone to have a conversation about anything. If you can utilize them in your ideas, you’ll have support to move them forward. Amazon also employs the Working Backwards Process of writing a news story and FAQs about a product before anyone starts working on it. This helps you to focus your ideas and the benefits to the customer. [7:55] What ideas or strategies from your transition have been successful? I tried to learn as much as I could about my product and how it got to the current state. I met with anyone who had a hand in it and read any documentation that existed. There was also a bit of unlearning Amazon’s way of doing things and replacing it with T-Mobile’s processes. However, I’m cognizant not to completely lose what I bring to the table from Amazon because it’s part of who I am as a product manager. [11:34] How do you build trust among new coworkers? Volunteer for the hard stuff. There was a small launch that happened on the Sunday after my first day. I ended up coming into the office for a few hours to be part of a war room. Going a little bit above and beyond is a great way to show that you are dedicated to the cause. I also put time on just about everyone’s calendar that I’ll be working with to get to know them one-on-one and learn more about what makes them tick. It lays a foundation on which to build future work. [15:38] How did you decide who to meet with when you started your new job? I wanted to meet with people on my direct team and sent them calendar invitations with notes about what I wanted to talk about. These were casual conversations over coffee to get to know people on a human level. I also met with people I’ll be working with from a product perspective. These are mostly people who are not on my team. These conversations were focused on how their team has historically worked with my team. [20:15] How do you move from those conversations into product work? I’m in the process of re-documenting everything related to the product and how we got here. Getting to know all of these people has helped me learn about work in progress and what still needs to be done. In the absence of up-to-date documentation, people are your main resource about where things are and what needs to be done. [25:00] What’s something you wish you would have done differently? Don’t be afraid to challenge the answers that you receive. It’s easy to just accept things at face value, but sometimes you need to dig deeper to get to the bottom of things. It can be tough to challenge things when you are new,

Develop a sense of curiosity to build trust and achieve your product goals. To be a great product manager, do you also need to be a great actor? No, but there are lessons from acting that will make you a better product manager. While I have no acting experience, not even school plays, I have talked with several actors who became business coaches. It was not an obvious career path until I learned from each of them how their acting skills transferred to skills others need off the stage. They apply practices from acting to help business professionals and leaders. So, when I saw an article in Mind the Product titled, “Oh the Drama! What Product Managers can Learn From Actors,” I eagerly read it. The author, Alison Kemp, shared seven areas where acting techniques can help product managers, which she called: * Thinking on Your Feet * High-Performance Teams * Creative Thinking and Innovation * Active Listening * Pausing * Storytelling, and * Identity I asked Alison to join us to discuss some of these techniques. It proved to be a fun and insightful discussion with important tips for product managers and innovators. Alison is the founder of Switchvision, which helps clients become more effective communicators, presenters, and interviewers by applying techniques from business, theatre, and psychology. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [7:20] What does it mean to think on your feet? Life does not go in line with a script, so thinking on your feet is a basic life skill. It’s trusting that the words will come when you need to give an impromptu speech and that you’ll have the confidence to deliver the speech. In a professional setting, I discourage people from scripting a presentation and instead have them focus on how they’ll interact with the audience. It also involves working with silence during one-on-one interactions. [11:27] How can you utilize these techniques in a meeting? It’s all about finding someone’s point of view, what’s underneath the things they are saying. Everyone reacts to things but they rarely say why they react that way. In order to really work through a difficult conversation, you need to show curiosity and a willingness to understand where someone is coming from. [16:05] What role does body language play in these interactions? There are many reasons for closed body language and it’s not always about the situation you are in, so you have to look at it in context. When someone is closed, it could mean that they are listening and thinking about what’s being said; that’s what an introvert often does. Active listening can help you show a closed person that you are willing to come along with them and creates buy-in needed to commit to an idea or proposal. Maintaining eye contact and matching body language, whether directly or indirectly, can also help build trust. [24:40] How do these techniques apply in email or other communication that’s not face to face? Email is the opposite of giving a presentation. You need to tell people what you want them to do first, then go into the rationale for why you want them to do it. Try to match your email style with the other person’s. If they write short emails, you should try to make your emails to them shorter. If they want more details, give them more details. It’s not always good to match when it comes to the time you send emails. If you have someone who emails you in the middle of the night and you respond, you are enabling that behavior and sacrificing your boundaries with them. [27:13] How can you develop curiosity? We all have unconscious biases that we need to make conscious in order to challenge them. Put your biases aside and become curious. You can buy yourself time by asking questions that get at someone’s story.

Have the right conversations with the right people to achieve your goals. We have a great topic for this discussion, addressing a question several Everyday Innovators have asked before, which is… “How do I get my manager to pay for product management training?” My guest will share the right and the wrong ways to get your manager and organization to support your professional development. He is Matt Burns, an HR executive and winner of Canada’s Most Innovative Use of HR Technology award. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [5:18] How common is it for organizations to reimburse for training? In my experience, it’s pretty common as long as the training has a direct correlation to the person’s current role. It’s also more common the shorter the training is. Many companies have a specific budget for each person. Longer training programs require more of a conversation between the employee and supervisor because it’s a bigger investment. I’ve also seen partial reimbursements for training that is not directly related to the employee’s job if the company values continuing education or professional development. [9:10] Where should someone start the process of finding and paying for training? The first thing would be to have a conversation with your immediate supervisor about your professional goals. This should be an ongoing conversation not just related to professional development. Your supervisor can let you know what the professional development budget is. Some employees might have a mentor or coach who can also provide input. HR can also weigh in about reimbursement and help you to connect with training opportunities. [12:52] How do you have this conversation with a manager? It comes down to the basic tactics of negotiation. You need to have a clear picture of what your career path is and how this training fits into it. This should happen before you request a specific training experience and be part of an ongoing relationship with your supervisor. The other thing to consider is ROI and what you will get out of the investment the company is making. You should be able to connect it to what you do currently and/or where you see your future at the organization. [16:41] How does the request for training relate to an annual performance review? This is a perfect time to bring up training. You are reflecting on past performance and your goals for the next year. You also have your manager’s attention and a captive audience. Asking for training should not come as a surprise to your manager. This is also the time when organizations are building their budgets for the next year so you can work training into it. [21:37] What if the answer is no? How can someone move past that? The first question I would have is “why not?” You want to understand some of the pressure around where the no is coming from so you can try to overcome them. If cost is a concern, you can tie it back to how the training will help you increase revenue for the organization. If the concern is timing, you can talk about training in off hours or postponing it until a more convenient time. Some people are afraid to ask the question because they are afraid they’ll hear that they are not valuable to the organization. Even if that’s the case, it’s something you should know as an employee and can serve as the start of a longer-term discussion about your future at the company. Useful links: * Connect with Matt via his LinkedIn profile * Matt’s documentary work in progress, TheIntersect Innovation Quote “Iteration is key to innovation.” -Sebastian Thrun Thanks!

Combining innovation and data to delight customers. What products do you use that you love? Think of a product that you are glad to tell other people about. You share how it helps you solve a problem or get a task done. Or, maybe how the product makes you feel. It might be your phone, a perfectly balanced and beautifully designed pen, a pocket knife that makes you feel just a little more self-reliant, or, in my case, the Paragon induction cooktop that allows me to make perfect omelets my wife and kids rave about. Great products are ones that we love. They create emotions in us that go beyond satisfaction, extending to true delight. Creating products that customers love is what product management is about, and also just happens to be the central theme for all of you who are Everyday Innovators. It is why this podcast exists and is the focus of this episode. I explore the topic with Todd Olson, co-founder of Pendo, a capability for creating product experiences customers can’t live without. Before starting Pendo, Todd was VP Products at Rally Software and has been a co-founder for two other companies. He was also recently announced as an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year finalist. Todd knows a lot about developing software, founding and building companies, and creating products customers love. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [4:10] What do you mean by product love? We’re no longer seeking products that just do the job; we want products that we can have an affinity for. Product love means people actually enjoy using the product you provide. Ultimately, it leads to referrals. It can apply to any type of product that makes you smile when you use it. [7:20] Product love is often cited as a reason people get into product management. Have you encountered that in your experience? Absolutely. Pain is a really good origin for amazing ideas and amazing products. If your product is not addressing an acute pain, you’re probably missing something. When I built the first version of Pendo, I built a product that would make me happy and assumed it would do the same for others. When you do that, it’s important to keep iterating so you don’t get too far inside an echo chamber but do continue bringing joy to your customers. [16:22] What else should product managers be doing to create products that customers love? Keep the notion of delight in mind. The Kano model takes this into account by classifying three types of features — table stakes, linear, and delight. Delight comes down to anticipating what customers want and then delivering it in very novel ways. For example, typing a tracking number into Google and having it return exactly where your package is without having to navigate to other websites. If you know what job your customers want your product to do and you can make that job seamless, it will generate love. Great products and great communities also go hand in hand, as does the ability for customers to make products their own. [21:30] How can product managers make better use of NPS information? Product teams should own NPS data, not customer success teams. Product teams fix root problems rather than focusing on unhappy customers. Once you have the data, slice and dice it by demographics and customer size. We’ve also mirrored NPS data with usage information to look at how people use the product and what aspects of the product might be leading to a bad experience. It can also impact follow up communication and determine who can provide referrals or be part of a usability study. [21:32] How does this tie back to product love? I was working with a company that provides software to the dental industry. By looking at NPS data, we learned that dental hygienists were not happy. We found that they were not using features of the product that were meant for them.